CHASING ZORBA

In this debut memoir, a man achieves his dream of traversing America and gets a taste of the country’s history, as well as his own.

In 1972, recent University of Louisville graduate Steimel and his childhood friend Art, a seminary student, decided to take a cross-country road trip to California. They made down it to Alabama before Steimel’s 1966 Volkswagen Beetle broke down, and two young men soon gave up, as well. Several decades later, after retiring from a career in youth work, Steimel yearned to realize his “lifelong travel dream” of a road trip to the West Coast. He left his Boston home in the summer of 2017, this time in a more reliable 1973 VW bus, nicknamed “Zorba,” like his old Beetle. As he drove west, he saw signs of some of the grimmer aspects of U.S. history, including a statue celebrating Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the Donner Memorial State Park, named after the cannibalistic Donner Party. But Steimel’s journey was personal, too; in Kansas, he sought the family of a cousin who died in the Vietnam War; in Illinois, he connected with his older sister Mary Lee, with whom he was determined to find the spot of “the accident”—a serious automobile collision that occurred in Highland, Illinois, during a 1957 family trip. Steimel’s confident prose feels like a smooth car ride, effortlessly transitioning from accounts of road sights and people he met to historical facts about states he traveled through (including his native Kentucky). Although he writes relatively little about challenges he faced as a solo traveler, the VW bus’s periodic need for repairs recalls his first failed cross-country trip. The author rounds out this worthwhile memoir with introspective moments—as when he lacked a “sense of belonging” in a small Indiana bar—and humorous touches, as when he tells of stopping to see the world’s largest hairball. Steimel also includes many of his own black-and-white photos of his photogenic VW bus and the people he encountered along the way.

An absorbing true story of a bold and enlightening westward adventure.