Hit-and-Run

Where, precisely, the line between courage and cowardice resides, I do not know. But I do know that Peter Howell, alias Peter St. John, is not a brave man. For one thing, he spends a lot of time running away; first, in 1970, he flees the scene of his anti-war group's maiden-bombing-gone-awry (there's the expected caveat: "no one was supposed to get hurt," but dynamite is tricky business, and even the most careful of us occasionally sets an alarm clock to go off twelve hours too early). With several of his friends and an innocent bystander dead, Peter runs. He abandons his mother, leaves the anti-war movement behind, and goes underground, eventually reinventing himself as a successful entrepreneur and family man in suburban Kansas. Nearly thirty years later, his cover blown by a savvy high-school reporter, he leaves his wife and children to face a scandal-hungry media and lights out for the territories.

Peter's thirty-year odyssey, beginning with the call to oppose the Vietnam War, brings to mind the heroic journey: he encounters unfamiliar territory, leaving the safety of student life for protests and subversive attacks on institutions; he faces temptation in the arms of siren women; he makes perfect marriages with mother-goddess characters, first in his youth and then in his middle-aged suburban life; he performs labors and undergoes physical and mental trials; during his aimless cross-country journey, he rests with a holy man and a mountain woman. The archetype is relevant here because of those instances in which it does not apply. The would-be hero fails numerous tests. Peter does not resist the sirens, he abandons the mother-goddesses, and though he vaguely intends to bestow boons on his community by lifting the veil of ignorance about Vietnam, he appears to be just as motivated by self-importance as social justice.

The Circle (his wanna-be-beyond-SDS gang) uses methods that are often as cowardly as risky: for example, trashing the offices of the campus ROTC and setting bombs in corporation headquarters. Theirs is the kind of misdirected antagonism which attacks lieutenants, even unwilling or unknowing lieutenants, as poor substitutes for well-protected generals. It's hard to argue with The Circle's position, especially knowing what we know now about the war in Vietnam. But The Circle operates on the fallacy that the ends justify the means, the same kind of thinking that led to so much trouble for Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers.

So Where the Wind Blew is something unique: a heroic journey without a hero. It may have taken Odysseus ten years to get home, but at least he was trying. Peter thinks about returning to his family, turning himself in, but never seriously considers it. "He was going back...but not yet—in a day or two": this kind of sentence becomes a refrain. Peter drives from state to state wallowing in guilt but doing nothing about it. He makes excuses, and heroes don't make excuses.

Then again, Where the Wind Blew is not intended to be a story about a hero but a parable of regret, and those stories are truest when the protagonists are people like us, ordinary people who are neither excessively virtuous nor intrinsically evil. Hit-and-run drivers don't have an abnormal disregard for human life, but simply value self-preservation above honor. It's probably a lot easier to keep driving than to hit the brakes, attempt first aid, and admit to a crowd of angry people that you are a terrible driver. And so Peter drives on.

Most readers will see bits of themselves in Peter. He is smart but directionless, full of impotent disenchantment with a hawkish government. He is a follower, as most people are: he never proposes violent action (writing editorials is more his style), but he doesn't need much convincing before he goes along with his friends' ideas. Who among us (on, one hopes, a less militant scale) hasn...