In search of America

John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley

Hey y’all,

It’s the 4th of July and peak travel season here in America. Inspired by our summer reading thread, I thought I’d tell you about one of my favorite road trip books: John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley: In Search of America.

The setup: in 1960, Steinbeck was 58, in ill-health, wealthy, and famous. He’d been living overseas for a while and felt like he was out of touch with America. He was also staring down the barrel of impending old age, and didn’t want to feel like some old geezer sitting around the house. He wanted to move, and he starts the book out with this urge, his wanderlust, echoing Ishmael in Moby-Dick: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul… I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable.

So he had a camper truck made and named it “Rocinante,” after Don Quixote’s horse. (“I was advised that the name Rocinante painted on the side of my truck in sixteenth-century Spanish script would cause curiosity and inquiry in some places. I do not know how many people recognized the name, but surely no one ever asked about it.”)

Here is Rocinante at the National Steinbeck Center, in Salinas, California: