The Bookworm: Travels with Charley: In Search of America

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

It may not look like it, given my dearth of Bookworm posts, but I have been reading. I’ve been trying to read a lot, actually, because I’m taking a break from writing. I have what I like to call “writer’s fatigue.” It’s different than writer’s block, where you want to write but don’t have anything to write about. Writer’s fatigue is when I know what to write about but just can’t do it; my mind is too overworked and needs a rest. It couldn’t have come at a better time, either.


In July I reread The Grapes of Wrath and it piqued my interest in Steinbeck again, so I checked out Travels With Charley: In Search of America from the UCI library. It was included in a thick collection of his late novels (The Winter of Our Discontent and The Wayward Bus were also included), but I only read Travels.

Steinbeck began an epic journey across the country the day after Labor Day, 1960. (It’s fitting that I’m writing this on Labor Day. The day after Labor Day, in fact, was the day I left Iowa and started my move to California nearly two years ago.) I don’t remember the exact quote, but his reasoning was to see the country and interact with his countrymen. He felt a strong regret for having written about Americans despite not truly interacting with them for decades. He wanted to hop across the landscape and chat with the locals, get a feel for their lives and thoughts, get a feel for what America was. Accompanied by the family poodle, Charley, he set out from his home on Long Island in a truck and camper built specifically for the trip.

He took a wind-about way of getting across the country, but it worked. He first went to Maine, to “start” from the upper tip, then moved across New England and down along the belly of the great lakes to Chicago; through the Twin Cities, across the Dakotas and Montana to Seattle; south along the Pacific coast to visit his childhood home of Salinas; through the desert to Arizona and New Mexico; he ate Thanksgiving dinner on a Texas ranch before heading to New Orleans. After his visit to the Big Easy (I’m crossing my fingers, today), he lingers on the racism of the south before practically aborting his tale. He mentions nothing of the last leg through the Appalachians back to New York. He wrote that there was a place in West Virginia, I think, when he felt the trip had come to an end and there was no more to it except getting home.

Throughout the book he writes about the places he stopped and the people he talked to. The people in New England are stern and stoic while Midwesterners are friendly and chatty. He talked to French-Canadians in Maine who crossed the border to pick potatoes, a traveling actor west of Fargo, and three hitchhikers in the south (one a white redneck, another a black cotton picker, and the last a black college student). He got a well-rounded sample of America.

As you can probably tell from the opening quote, he stuck mainly to the little, rural roads. He didn’t think much of the budding Interstate Highway System and tried to bypass large cities and their manufactured feel. The book is ripe with excellent thoughts about America’s consumer dominated culture, and our curious ways in general, so I’ve transcribed a few here:

"The new American finds his challenge and his love in traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. And this, as I found, is true in Texas as in Maine. Clarendon yields to Amarillo just as surely as Stacyville, Maine, bleeds its substance into Millinocket, where the logs are ground up, the air smells of chemicals, the rivers are choked and poisoned, and the streets swarm with this happy, hurrying breed. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all the pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside. This prophecy is underwritten by the tendency of the rich to do this already. Where the rich lead, the poor will follow, or try to."

"I've seen many migrant crop-picking people about the country: Hindus, Filipinos, Mexicans, Okies away from their states. Here in Maine a great many were French Canadians who came over the border for the harvest season. It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by people not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat."

"Eventually I had to come out of the tree-hidden roads and do my best to bypass the cities. Hartford and Providence and such are big cities, bustling with manufacturing, lousy with traffic. It takes far longer to go through cities than to drive several hundred miles. And in the intricate traffic pattern, as you try to find your way through, there's no possibility of seeing anything. But now I have been through hundreds of towns and cities in every climate and against every kind of scenery, and of course they are all different, and the people have points of difference, but in some ways they are alike. American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness — chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move."

Not bad, huh? Despite having been written almost 50 years ago, the sights, sounds, and feel of the country is much the same. Perhaps the only difference, Steinbeck may argue, is that our landfills are fuller and our cities have gotten larger.