PBS offers a pair of new travelogues
The sad, sudden departure of Anthony Bourdain from our lives and screens left a void. The chef and traveler had a great knack for taking viewers to places and finding residents ready to talk about the food, history and culture that made their regions unique.
The new PBS travelogue series “America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) has nothing to do with cooking or cuisine, but the host, a noted author and podcaster, challenges viewers to take a road trip filled with contemplative moments and thoughtful conversations with strangers.
His first visit is to Death Valley. Located hundreds of feet below sea level, it’s long been considered the hottest place on Earth. A forbidding wasteland, it’s been evoked in countless books, films and even cartoons as a good place to die. Who would want to visit, never mind move there?
Thurston sets off with few illusions and fortifies himself with a massive RV, “a refrigerator on wheels,” for protection.
But along the way, he meets a hermit transplant from Austin who bought an abandoned mining town and now lives there alone, creating YouTube clips about his life in the desert, his exploration of abandoned mines, his museum of 19th-century artifacts and his near-mystical addiction to solitude. His films reveal one of Death Valley’s best-kept secrets: It snows there — a lot.
Thurston then spends time with an athlete who has found a strange kind of peace by embarking on ultramarathons in Death Valley — in July. He’s got his reasons.
We then meet a hiker who has been to the area countless times for its beauty and surprising natural diversity. She takes Thurston to a secret Death Valley forest, where hidden springs create multiple waterfalls. While there, he meets other hikers — who sound vaguely German — who tell him that Death Valley reminds them of their visits to Iran.
The term “Death Valley” was invented by white settlers and travelers who found the place
inhospitable. It’s never been used by its first residents, the members of the Timbisha Shoshone tribe. Thurston listens to a tribal elder discuss traditional ways of living and surviving in triple-digit temperatures, as well as long struggles with the federal government, including tourism, displacement and the use of the desert as a place to test atomic bombs.
Thurston’s last conversation is with a Bosnian transplant who fell in love with the area because it’s one of the last places in America where you can enjoy the night sky and a full canopy of distant galaxies and stars.
Like many podcasters, Thurston is a little too comfortable with the
first-person singular, and he uses the word “journey” far too often. But he’s filled with curiosity and has an ability to listen and learn. And that’s a very good start.
Over the course of this summer series, he will invite us to visit Idaho, Los Angeles, Appalachia, the Tidewater Basin and Minnesota. “Outdoors” airs Tuesday nights through Aug. 9.
› “The Great American Muslim Road Trip” (10 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) follows a couple as they travel the vestiges of Rt. 66 and uncover aspects of Muslim culture woven into American history.