Bowling Across America

The recent cold snap has sent BowlingJoe into a downward spiral of the condition known as “cabin fever”. When it snows buckets in the Pacific Northwest it has a tendency to paralyze its unprepared and unfunded communities. It also makes it impossible to get a rear wheel drive Toyota Tacoma pickup truck out of the driveway.

This is not to say I haven’t been out of the house at all since Boeing started its annual winter hiatus a few days ago. We are fortunate enough to have an all-wheel drive vehicle. Still, it’s an adventure out there on the side streets. And there are only so many times that I can watch classic bowling movies such as “Kingpin” and “The Big Lebowski” from the comfort of my imitation La-Z-Boy chair.

A while back, I blogged about a group that I'm a part of and noted that it’s likely that I’m the only league bowler who also belongs to a regularly scheduled book discussion group. This of course debunks the myth that all bowlers are functionally illiterate. Most are. But not all.

With this in mind, I started reading a book that my university archivist friend Mike made me aware of a couple of months back. I ordered it from Amazon, waiting for the right time to dig into it. Well, the time is now.

A regular guy named Mike Walsh wrote a book that was released earlier this year called “Bowling Across America: 50 States in Rented Shoes”. The “rented shoes” part is a pretty good indicator that he’s not a league bowler and does not own his own equipment. And that would be correct. In fact, according to his website, on the trip he averaged between 123 and 154 pins per game depending on the quantity of alcohol he consumed (and if he's telling the truth, he consumed Hunter S. Thompson-esque quantities on his particular quest to find America's pulse). I have a “diminishing returns” theory pertaining to this but that’s another story for another time.

After Walsh’s father passed away a few years ago he quit his nine to five job at an advertising agency in Chicago, borrowed his mother’s car and set out to bowl in all fifty states. You see, his dad loved the sport of handball and had a goal to play the game in every state. He didn’t live long enough to see it through, but with that in mind, Walsh set out to do the same at the nation’s bowling alleys.

Why bowling alleys? He contends that they are microcosms of the communities they reside in, warts and all. And having been in way more of them than I should admit, he’s right. I’ve bowled with bank presidents and the perennially unemployed on the same pair of lanes. On any given day, you can see an elementary school bus and a senior citizen van sitting in the same parking lot in front of the building.

True, there is a lot of bowling-related content in the book, but that’s far from what has made it an entertaining and often insightful read after around 80 pages or so. One gets the sense of what a given community is about as he immerses himself into each bowling center. His stories are often humorous, filled with real people, the likes of which all of us have met on our varied journeys.

I’m now looking forward to reading about what happens to him in Massachusetts and beyond. It’s not rocket science but it’s sure been a lot of fun and a great way to take my mind off the fact that our street is more suited for a game of curling instead of driving on these days.

As for the author, I have no idea what he’s doing for a living these days (aside from book tours anyway) since he has gotten back from his journey. Maybe I’ll ask him.