Road Trip: 1 — Travels with Charley

Route: Travels with Charley (atlasobscura.com)

John Steinbeck was probably my first favorite author. One of my English teachers probably mentioned The Grapes Of Wrath with reading The Pearl and that sent me to the library for a copy. More specifically, she might have said it contained scenes not suitable for my age group. My mother did worry a bit about me reading it. After reading The Grapes Of Wrath I proceeded to read most of his work, Tortilla Flat (I pronounced the Ls) and Cannery Row being my favorites. Later they were supplanted by East of Eden. Travels with Charley came out when I was in high school, followed by The Winter of Our Discontent.

The year is 1960. Richard Nixon and John Kennedy are in a tight race for president. The US is growing and expanding and changing at a pace never dreamed of before and plastic everything is the rage. The Abercrombie and Fitch mentioned in the book is not a clothing store for mall rats, it’s the finest sporting goods retailer in the world in New York City. It has a pool on the roof where you can try fly rods. There are no cell phones or Internet.

Steinbeck sets out on a three-month circuit around America with his aging standard poodle, Charley, who is French by birth. He drives a pickup camper named Rocinante. If you don’t recognize the name, look it up.

The first third of the book is spent in New England. Once he crosses into New York, he seems to begin a headlong dash for Monterey and Carmel, with pauses in the journey for reminiscences and philosophizing. He discovers a few truths while visiting childhood friends. Then dashes home through the last bits of the book. Many of the passages in the book reflect on America even more today than they did fifty years ago:

But in the eating places along the roads the food has been clean, tasteless, colorless, and of a complete sameness. It is almost as though the customers had no interest in what they ate as long as it had no character to embarrass them
 Quite naturally, as we moved down the beautiful coast my method of travel was changed. Each evening I found a pleasant auto court to rest in, beautiful new places that have sprung up in recent years. Now I began to experience a tendency in the West that perhaps I am too old to accept. It is the principle of do it yourself. At breakfast a toaster is on your table. You make your own toast. When I drew into one of these gems of comfort and convenience, registered, and was shown to my comfortable room after paying in advance, of course, that was the end of any contact with the management. There were no waiters, no bell boys. The chambermaids crept in and out invisibly. If I wanted ice, there was a machine near the office. I got my own ice, my own papers. Everything was convenient, centrally located, and lonesome.

stucco schools where children are confirmed in their illiteracy

He has the same feeling for Redwoods as I do, I would say it is the only time I’ve feel awe in my life:

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect. Respect — that’s the word. One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns.

“I must confess to a laxness in the matter of National Parks. I haven’t visited many of them. Perhaps this is because they enclose the unique, the spectacular, the astounding — the greatest waterfall, the deepest canyon, the highest cliff, the most stupendous works of man or nature. And I would rather see a good Brady photograph than Mount Rushmore. For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and of our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.”

In 1960 the struggle for racial equality was just gathering momentum in the South and he comments on it at length.

“The Negroes want to be people. Are you against that?”
 “Bless you, no, sir. But to get to be people they must fight those who aren’t satisfied to be people.”

Somehow this snatch of conversation seems to reflect the current political feeling of part of our nation now.

When I first read the book, I was disappointed that it didn’t cover more about the country and less about thinking and stuff. I was particularly disappointed that he had so little to say about Virginia, the most interesting place on earth because I lived there. Now that I’m of that age, I care more about the thoughts and observations than I do about the actual travel. After all, the most important journey is the one we take through life.

In more recent times, researchers have come forward and debunked much of the book claiming it as a work of mostly fiction. He’d rarely spent the night in the camper and the conversations he had weren’t real. “Travels with Charley gets fact checked”. Steinbeck was a fiction writer and used fiction to bring out the truth in what he experienced, in life, if not on this trip. Perhaps Travels with Charley is as much a novel masquerading as non-fiction as On the Road is non-fiction masquerading as novel. Both are valid works of literature.