When I was in approximately third grade my parents had a miscommunication of some sort with the other family that we carpooled to school with. The other kid, Jessica, had volleyball practice or something, my folks thought hers were picking us up and hers thought mine were, the end result of which was me standing outside of my elementary school watching the parking lot slowly empty and having the gradual realization that something had gone wrong. Eventually it became quite clear that no one was coming. Also, as if God knew I would blog about it at some point, it began to rain.
At this point my options were several. I could have gone back to my classroom and asked my teacher for help. I could have gone to the office and asked to use the phone to call my parents. I could have gone to the gymnasium to find Jessica. All of these would have been reasonable solutions. Literally none of them occurred to me. You can chalk it up to stubbornness, panic, or (I prefer) inborn fortitude, but the only thought that entered my nine-year-old brain was "Well, guess I'd better get walking." A quick Googling reveals the distance between my school and my home at the time to be a little than one and a half miles.
I remember knowing it was a stupid idea but doing it anyway. This probably reveals something about the adult I would eventually become. I alternately walked and ran, to save time I guess. At one point I was running along and a car pulled out of an alley in front of me, blocking the sidewalk. By this time it was raining heavily and I was soaked. The driver was waiting for a chance to pull onto the street, but it wasn't coming. I waited, patiently, standing in the rain. It did not occur to me to walk behind the car. Eventually the driver noticed me standing there, looking pretty pathetic I'm sure, and backed up to unblock the sidewalk. I went on my merry way.
I didn't make it all the way home. At some point a family friend happened to pull up alongside me at a stoplight and very reasonably asked me what I was doing on the street, in the rain, by myself. She took me home and called my parents, of whose reaction I have no recollection but I'm sure was a mixture of astonishment, confusion, and bafflement at my lack of good sense (it would not be the last time).
All of which is essentially the plot of As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth. A teen named Ry is shipped off to a summer camp but becomes lost when he steps off of his train to make a phone call and it leaves without him (the summer camp had ceased to exist while he was en route anyway, for reasons I can't quite remember). He tries to contact his parents, but his parents are on a sailing tour of the Caribbean. He tries to contact his grandfather, but his grandfather has fallen in a sinkhole and hit his head. In other words, circumstances have conspired against him. Luckily, the first person he happens upon is a man named Del who is not only willing to drive him from Montana to his house in Wisconsin, but from Wisconsin to Florida, where they fly to the Caribbean, where they sail around looking for Ry's parents. (If only that dude blocking the sidewalk in Crawfordsville, Indiana had been so adventurous.)
Along the way, the pair of course have numerous adventures and become good friends. Ry gains confidence and gives Del advice from his innocent and therefore unsullied perspective, which helps Del reconcile with his ex-wife. The police find Ry's grandpa. Ry happens upon his parents in the vast Caribbean island chain just as they are casting off for the open sea. Oh, and the dogs, which I forgot to mention, make their way home via airplane somehow (this part of the book is illustrated, not written out, and seems pretty extraneous to me).
As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth is essentially On the Road without the amphetamines. The plot is straight as an arrow, which I'm sure is satisfying if you like that sort of thing. I had some of the same problems with this book that I did with Skin Hunger, which is to say that everything is the same at the end of the book as at the beginning. The resolution takes place in about 20 pages at the end, and up until that point all we do is follow Del and Ry on their road trip. As anyone who has even been in a car knows, road trips are fun for about the first two hours. After that you're sick of highway food, your back hurts, and whatever poor sap is in the car with you has become the focus of all your annoyance.
And while the author does her best to plug up the plot holes, it remains to me strikingly unclear why a 15-year-old boy is willing to drive cross-country with a complete stranger instead of, I don't know, calling the police. Calling his friends. Emailing someone. But hey, I guess I am walking proof that sometimes all you can think of is to get your self moving, so fair enough.
Readalongs are going to be tough for this one. The book doesn't stay in one place for very long at all. I honestly think On the Road is a pretty similar (and equally frustrating) title. In that vein, The Odyssey is the prototypical journey book. Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself is a book with a similar amount of wanderlust, and is written in a similarly jaunty, witty style (I always feel bad recommending Bill Bryson, which to me is like recommending The Beatles, but come on, The Beatles really are awesome).
I would recommend As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth, even though I didn't really love it. The writing is extremely accessible and personable. The characters are pretty well-developed and three-dimensional, if not excessively realistic. And while I had issues with the meandering plot, overall the book was a very good read. But who needs realism? We all get plenty of that every day.
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