On the Road

Sarah Tuff '95 has written the perfect guidebook for outdoor — and traveling — enthusiasts.

By Elisabeth Crean

Cubicle confinement is a fate shared by millions of American workers, even those who write about outdoor adventure for a living. So several years ago stir-crazy, skyscraper-bound colleagues Sarah Tuff ’95 and Greg Melville, who were working for Men’s Journal in New York City, hatched an alfresco escape. They rode their mountain bikes to an editorial staff photo shoot on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The exhilaration of navigating Manhattan’s canyons on two wheels turned into an epiphany. And that wild ride also put into motion the journey that led Tuff and Melville to coauthor the unique guidebook, !!! Best Outdoor Towns: Unspoiled Places to Visit, Live & Play (The Countryman Press, 2007). “Suddenly I knew I had to move to a place where riding a mountain bike—or taking a hike, going for a trail run, or skiing fresh snow—wouldn’t involve dodging cabs,” Tuff writes.

Both writers eventually fled Manhattan for outdoor-oriented communities, and focused on freelance careers so they could write about desirable destinations on location, not chained to a desktop. Coincidentally, the friends ended up as neighbors in Burlington, Vermont, a city that frequently lands on “Most Livable” lists. But as their travels took them to many smaller, off-the-beaten-track locales, they wondered: Are there any undiscovered havens in a country of 300 million people?

The search for greener pastures is as old as America itself. But the quest takes on new urgency in the era of coast-to-coast Wal-Marts and seeping suburban sprawl. Tuff and Melville set out to do more than create a travel guide for outdoor sports enthusiasts and armchair adventurers. They “cast a really wide net,” Tuff recalls in a phone interview—and crunched a surprising amount of data. It was a challenging process to “nail down truly unique towns, and weed out the ones that were becoming ‘cookie-cutters’—just like every other town in America.”

Best Outdoor Towns demonstrates that parts of the country remain blissfully free of excess pavement and population. The authors imposed an original and exacting set of criteria to assemble their eclectic set of locales. Three “nots” were key: not too big (ideally under 10,000); not too pricey (sorry, Aspen, Colorado, and other high-cost-of-living hamlets); and not too far from a major airport. Quirky coffee shops, bustling brew pubs, comfy lodgings, and decent local eats factored heavily in the decision-making.

“We didn’t want these to be completely inaccessible, remote spots where you weren’t going to have someplace to kick back at the end of the day,” Tuff says. “Because half the fun of the adventure is reliving it at the end of the day over a beer, or planning it out over a cup of coffee. There are tens of thousands of beautiful places in the country. But the key was to get beautiful places that had good people and good character and good culture, so you could connect back to civilization afterwards.”

Of course, along the way they’ve catalogued where to engage in every conceivable outdoor sport: from ice-climbing in East Burke, Vermont, to snorkeling off Lanai, Hawaii. In Maine alone, choose between Bethel’s Wife-Carrying Championship and Mount Desert’s combo triathlon/Oktoberfest. While the wealth of detail is astounding, the writing remains accessible and fun, overflowing with the coauthors’ edgy insights and boundless enthusiasm. For example, weekend warriors flock to Fayetteville, West Virginia, to “embrace their inner, nature-loving delinquents by escaping—at least for a while—the mature world of traffic jams, office cubicles, and, yup, mutual funds.” Not exactly dry, dusty guidebook language!

Tuff and Melville far surpass their goal of leading the reader to “undiscovered adventure capitals.” The rollicking prose conveys a vivid sense of being there—each chapter feels like trying a town on for size. The authors’ passion is contagious, and !!! Best Outdoor Towns may end up inspiring much more than a weekend jaunt. As Tuff says, “Life’s too short to toil away in a place you don’t love.”

You just never know when an offhand decision—a bike ride, a book read—will reveal a surprise fork in the road. And lead to an unexpected happy ending.

* * *

The path to becoming a superhero often begins in a moment of life-or-death peril. A radioactive arachnid bites the mild-mannered, high school science student who turns into Spiderman. Bruce Wayne witnesses his parents’ murders at age eight and grows into Gotham’s powerful crime-avenger, Batman. The crucible of danger forges superpowers, launching comic book legends and animating adolescent dreams.

In Falling Boy (Picador, 2007), the recent novel from Alison McGhee ’82, speculation swirls about 16-year-old Joseph’s superhero status. The teens and preteens who hang around a Minneapolis neighborhood bakery puzzle over the enigmatic upstate New York newcomer who works there. He seems to have a magical rapport with bees, calming and corralling them with tiny cups of lemonade. He lives almost as an adult—while he and his father share an apartment, they rarely cross paths, working different shifts at the bakery. And Joseph never asks for help performing any task, despite being in a wheelchair.

As the summer languidly unfolds, Joseph reveals little about himself. Rumors, however, abound, fueled especially by the pesky, persistent Enzo. The nine-year-old girl (who bears her father’s name, because he wanted a boy) relentlessly interrogates Joseph, furiously clicking a mechanical pencil at him like a combination microphone/recording device. In the absence of answers or evidence, Enzo spins out wild theories about Joseph’s past and possible superpowers, egged on by iconoclastic counter clerk Zap, 17, who enjoys stoking the lonely little girl’s imagination.

Zap christens Joseph “the beekeeper from the island of bees.” But did Joseph really risk “life and limb to rescue his mother from a fate worse than death?” Did he grab her from a precipice overlooking the sea and fly through the air?

Joseph responds cryptically to even simple questions, which reinforces the kids’ mythic theories. “The hero holds his cards close to his chest,” Zap notes. But the central issue they struggle with is the seeming disconnect between the strength required to accomplish daring deeds and the image of confinement that they associate with disability. Can a boy in a wheelchair really be a superhero? they wonder.

Like the children, the reader must wait a painfully long time for answers to two burning questions: how Joseph got hurt, and what really happened to his mother. The suspense sustains the narrative drive, but the urge to discover the answer might cause curious readers to rush through McGhee’s delicate insights into how adolescents interact. Nuanced scenes of conversation and behavior are refreshingly free of cell phones, text-messaging and mall-haunting: these contemporary teens still talk face-to-face and play outside.

What emerges from the bakery’s summer buzz is a portrait of true heroism much simpler than Enzo’s flights of fantasy. The children of Falling Boy are emotionally orphaned, even though their parents are still alive. They are forced to raise themselves, and sometimes become caretakers of younger siblings or unstable parents. By putting one foot in front of the other—or pushing two wheels with quiet determination—they take care of themselves, and each other, as best they can. The kids don’t know it yet, but this might make them all superheroes.

• The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse (HarperCollins, 2007) by Jonathan Selwood ’93
• Rumble Strip (Sunny Outside, 2007) by Jason Tandon ’97