The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Finding America, Finding Myself.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: Book review

THE BEAR WENT OVER THE MOUNTAIN

Finding America, Finding Myself

BY CARLL TUCKER

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC., NEW ROCHELLE, NEW YORK

2008, 279 PAGES, $29.95

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At the age of 50, Carll Tucker drove his new 23-foot motor home (nicknamed Migrant) away from his "prestigious" neighborhood in Bedford, N.Y., to spend almost a year cruising the country in an attempt to "find his real self," Tucker, who had been "a small somebody" all his life, wanted to be a "nobody" until he could become "somebody else." He organized "getting away from it all" by planning to visit the final resting places of U.S. presidents and vice presidents and to write a book about what he found. Without preconditioning, he informed his wife of 26 years that he would be gone for nine months or more and "that was that" (Not surprisingly, he since has remarried.) Provisioned with boxes of books and classical music tapes and CDs, he put his RV in gear, and like the bear in the nursery rhyme, he "went over the mountain to see what he could see."

Tucker drove from New York to Pennsylvania and went across the Appalachians, zigzagged through the heartland to the Rockies, followed the Pacific from Los Angeles to Seattle, and returned home via the Great Lakes and New England. After a Christmas respite at home, in January he undertook the "winter leg" of his journey through the Southeast and west to Texas. Eventually he spanned 226 years of history as he visited 65 final resting places in 23 states. Only Nelson Rockefeller's grave site, private and guarded by a sentry, proved a challenge: not to be deterred, Tucker waited until dark, climbed a fence, and took a photograph. In his progress, Tucker visited "hundreds" of historical sites, the usual tourist haunts, residences of the rich and famous, presidential homes, libraries, and anyplace else that struck his fancy.

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An editor and publisher of a Bedford newspaper for 19 years, Tucker wrote a weekly column as a "cracker barrel pundit." He also had been the editor and publisher of Trader Publications, editor and publisher of Saturday Review magazine, and a staff writer and theater critic for The Village Voice. His usual routine had been to rise early and write until he was exhausted, and he did the same as he traveled.

As Tucker details information about presidents, vice presidents, their birthplaces, backgrounds, and their paths to office, readers gain fascinating, little-known insights into our nation...