Peter Zimmer

 There is a forgotten tale that needs to be told... and it lives in that old shed out back.

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  In 1957, Beat poet and itinerant travelogue novelist Jack Kerouac published what many would come to consider his magnum opus, "On the Road". It was well-received, with the New York Times proclaiming Kerouac "the voice of a new generation", and earning him the label of icon for the Beat Generation.

In his first travelogue collection of stories, assembled herein as "Barn Secrets", Pete Zimmer, like Kerouac before him, elicits the nostalgic reverie for a time which has now mostly drifted away into a rapidly-fading public consciousness, a waning "shared memory", if you believe in such things, of a golden age that perhaps never was. Or perhaps...it was a secret.

The premise is simple, and yet elegant. Firmly convinced that most of the interesting history of humanity is not found in textbooks or university lectures, but in the ordinary minds and memories of witnesses to remarkable events, Mr Zimmer sets out to discover these stories and, perhaps to make us smile, or perhaps to make a serious contribution to the preservation of the obscure and comical episodes which mark the lives of the uncelebrated, yet not uninformed or unthoughtful, provincial townspeople of the out-of-the-way places towards which pop culture briefly glances, and then moves along towards the flashier and more sparkly.

I have driven many times on long cross-country road trips. I used to feel as though these "drove all day and into the night to get here" days would become regrets of mine once I got to the end of my life. As my remaining days will eventually be numbered as fewer and fewer, every day spent in a car, just trying to get from here to there, I fear will be considered by me as a "wasted" day. But then I read "Barn Secrets".

I have seen those "old sheds visible from the highway" myself. I neither took much notice as to whether or not they were empty, nor as to whether or not whatever was contained within them mattered any longer.

What Pete Zimmer has done with "Barn Secrets" is to make the suggestion that every artifact, whether it be rusty old farming equipment which is no longer in use, or an almost perfectly preserved race car from the WWII era, has an origin story, just like the people who owned them also have stories. When the stories of fabulous-but-abandoned machines and non-mainstream people intersect, the result is a delightful series of reminiscences of the once vibrant sidekicks/onlookers to the fantastical or comical, but now living quietly and in solitude, bringing long hidden and unconsciously forgotten secrets back to light in friendly conversation with this author.

The genre into which "Barn Secrets" belongs is hard to label. I think of Kerouac, yes, but I also think of Mark Twain's non-fiction travel tales (e.g. "Innocents Abroad", "Roughing It"), and oddly it also provokes my love for Flannery O'Connor.

But it is distinctly an American book, not necessarily "Boomer-lit", but if that is a label which I didn't just invent, put "Barn Secrets" on that shelf. But be sure that you read it before leaving it to gather dust and be found by your heirs after your death...much like the secrets in the barns written about herein...because your ordinary life might just be more interesting than you realize.