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On the road with Charlie
I LAY IN BED this morning, reading. Not late. Just longer than usual. I indulged in this bout of laziness while reading John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley-In Search of America. Rereading it, I should say, for I first read the book back in the seventies, I think it was, back in my restless years. Then, I found it a good read, much as I was rediscovering it to be now.
Steinbeck’s book speaks of a different America, one now long gone. It is a travelog, a story of his journey in his truck-camper across the USA, a story of the places he drove through and the people he met in them.
The writing is a little different in style to what we find these days. Remember, Steinbeck was the man who wrote the classic, Grapes of Wrath, as well as other well-read and studied novels-with-a-basis-in-fact. He is one of those great figures of American literature.
Hemingway was another of those writers I read at the time I read Travels With Charlie. That is probably why I link him and Steinbeck. It was the time I discovered Jack Kerouac who also influenced me. Three restless American writers. How could I not be influenced? Like Hemingway, Steinbeck’s is a voice with an authoritative tone.
A reminder of my own journeys
When I first read it, Steinbeck’s book caught me at an opportune moment. Then, my partner of the time and I were looking for somewhere to live, a small rural allotment, perhaps, but one within reach of the city which for us, then, was Hobart, Tasmania. We sought a semi-rural lifestyle of the type imagined by the more socially adventurous of our generation. Steinbeck appealed to my restlessness.
Maybe you’re like me in that, when you read a book or reread it, images of your own journeys come unbidden to mind. Flashes, memories in colour that are seldom revisited spring from some part of the brain for just a second, and there you are again in that place at that time. The amount of detail in these images is surprising. Sometimes I actually feel being there again.
As I read Steinbeck’s book I was once again in some small, nameless town somewhere on the NSW North Coast, somewhere north of Kempsey and south of Byron Bay. I was travelling Highway One alone as I often did. I stopped and got out of my car by a river close to where it empties into the sea, for this was a town on the coast. It was a fine summer day of blue skies. I looked over the river, the dinghies and the motor boats tied up just off the shore. Close by was a short pier. There was nobody about and the thought came to me that this is a quiet sort of town, too quiet for me. Now, that quietness is what would attract refugees from their hectic lives in the city. I got back into my car and headed for the road south… or north, was it?
Like Steinbeck’s America, I guess that quiet seaside village has been transformed into something else. First come the motels, then the cafes, then the hordes. Real estate prices rise. Bushland is cleared for houses. The beaches are no longer empty. The place is transformed. This is such a common phenomenon it long ago became the norm along our east coast.
A book worth rereading
I’m sure you would find a changed landscape and people very different were you to retrace that journey made by John Steinbeck all those decades ago. That is what people do — retrace the journeys made by writers. It has been done with Jack Kerouac’s transcontinental wanderings.
Travels With Charley describes America as it once was. It is different now, the cities are bigger and sprawl further into the countryside, there are more people, more cars, wider highways. And the people—they are different, less accepting of difference, more suspicious, more polarised in their attitudes… but there are still good people out there.
Steinbeck’s made his journey before travel in vans and motor homes became a lifestyle. His home on the road was something like what today we call a slide-on camper, something he had specially made for his journey but that you can today buy off the shelf. There weren’t all that many of that type of vehicle on the hifghways when Steinbeck set out. Now there are.
I understand he set out on his travels partly as a reaction to the life he was living as a noted writer. Perhaps he felt that cognitive dislocation that comes with being content where you are and with what you are doing, yet you feel the pull of other places, other highways and they tug at you to get out there on the open road.
In making his journey Steinbeck closed the circle with his novel, Grapes of Wrath. That was one of those fictional books that were based on the lived reality of the time, the thirties, and the environmental refugees fleeing the dustbowl and flowing into a California they imagined to be full of promise, a place to start new lives. They travelled by vehicle too, but unlike Steinbeck’s they were farm jelopies, utilitarian vehicles.
I guess what makes rereading those books about journeys and places you read in the past worthwhile is that they do two things: they remind you how things were in places you might never have been; and they remind you of your own journeys. In doing that, rereading creates a sense of continuity in places that are constantly being rebuilt.
Oh, Charlie. The book is called Travels Wirth Charley-In Search of America. So, who was Charlie? It was John Steinbeck’s four-legged companion. Charlie was his dog.
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