I don't know but I expected more Charley and talk of Steinbecks travels rather than random thoughts.. Found myself bored for half of it.

The United States is more divided than ever and I wonder how we will survive this national crisis. We are red or blue. Trump or Biden. Fox News or The New York Times. We tear down Confederate statues or wave the rebel flag.

Have we nothing in common? Do we share no hopes and dreams? Have talking points completely replaced dialogue? Do we even speak the same language?

Enter Rocinante. Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie has the three things all Americans love: freedom, the open road, and a dog. There is nothing more American than a road trip, nothing that revives us like that endless white line on the black asphalt, for we are all explorers, adventurers, pioneers in our star-spangled hearts.

Under the spacious skies of this great country, the American spirit awakens within us. On the road, we shed all that is extraneous to this spirit. Who among us does not long to see this land? There are many indeed who do not long for the hardship, the expense, the monotony of a road trip, but there are none whose eyes do not sparkle at the idea of a road trip.

And that’s just what I need right now: a road trip to restore my faith in America and my fellow Americans, a road trip to remind me what I really am, for I am so much more than a cog in the machine. But a road trip is the last thing any of us will be doing for some time.

There will be no strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand. No roadside diner breakfasts with hash browns instead of home fries. (I know I’m far from home when my potatoes are shredded instead of sliced.) No glimpses into the lives of people from different walks of life. No friendly conversations with the folks who voted for the other guy.

Are we still one nation under God? Or are we fractured into many babbling tribes? In our grocery stores we are all surgeons and bandits. We long for teeth: white teeth, yellow teeth, false teeth, crooked teeth. We want to smile, smile, smile. We need to tip our different colored hats to our neighbors. This land was not made for you or me. This land was made for you and me.

So here I sit with my pink slip and my U.S. Blues wondering if we will save this grand and noble political experiment that we call the United States of America. And I find myself wishing to see the country. To see it and hear it and smell it from a moving vehicle. To go from sea to shining sea and back.

I have barely even seen the east coast, so I wonder what life is like in Wisconsin and Nebraska and Kansas. Is it really very hot in Texas and New Mexico? I want to know. I love hot weather. I want to stop for a bit in Colorado. Then if I don’t forget where the car is parked, I want to go further west until I see a different ocean than the one we have here.

We all want the same thing. We’re just setting out from different starting points so our journeys don’t look quite the same. But we’re all travelling the same road and we meet on that road. We sleep in the same motels, eat in the same diners, pee at the same rest stops. We have a cigarette or a donut or a coffee and talk road talk to our fellow travelers.

Steinbeck says his camper evoked the same response from nearly everyone who saw it: a desire “to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something” (10). This is what we all have in common. It is a shared dream and when we talk about it we speak the same language.

If only all of America could hit the road right now, just drive and drive without any destination except the next farm stand or the world’s largest ball of string.

John Steinbeck sets off across America with his camper on top of his truck named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse. His French poodle, Charley, joins him on this cross-country tour.

This book was initially published in 1962 but the sense of adventure that calls to each of us is alive no matter which decade or century.

Steinbeck accurately notes that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. He shares his virus of restlessness and the common theme of the desire to move and explore with everyone he meets across the US.

As he casually meets people at each stop on his journey, he shares his insights. He noticed how one person can saturate a room with vitality and excitement while others drain a room of energy and joy.

Loved it. Maybe not every line is relevant today, but many are so entertaining and.. pondering in a good, non prentetious way. Observations are intruiging even if they are about his dog charley, even for nondoglovers. It s honest, personal, intellectual, relevant and much more.

n  In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.n

This little volume must rank as one of the great American travel books—though I am not quite sure what that means. Travel literature, by its nature, finds itself in a paradoxical position: to search for truth by becoming briefly acquainted with a wide and disconnected series of experiences. Steinbeck addresses this in his opening salvo: “So it was I decided to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land. Otherwise, in writing, I could not tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the large truth.” But the riddle is to figure out which truths are diagnostic and which distractions. Steinbeck seems later to have thrown up his hands in despair at the prospect, as he retreats into subjectivism: “I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.”

Yet if the cliché is true, and the journey is more important than the destination, then Steinbeck’s search for America is more important than what he finds. That sounds reassuring, at least. In any case, the search is a pleasure to read. Steinbeck presents himself as an aging everyman, puttering about with his poodle and his camper, making small-talk with locals, sampling diner breakfasts, and getting lost on country roads. Very little of consequence happens; nothing much is discovered that the fifty-eight year old author did not already know; and it is lovely to read about. True, Steinbeck could, and did, narrate a fly buzzing around a dirty kitchen and turn it into poetry; but his writerly skill is not the only virtue this book possesses.

The book’s most consistent note is that of resigned obsolescence. Steinbeck looks upon the country—one which he once knew so deeply that he created its most representative novels—and finds it unfamiliar. He is past his prime, and knows it; and, more impressively, accepts it. He was writing in the wake of On the Road, another iconic travel book; and though Steinbeck’s work is far more mature and, I think, much better written, it nevertheless fails to capture the ethos of the time in the way Kerouac or, indeed, the younger Steinbeck was able to do. I am not saying this in criticism, but in admiration, since Steinbeck still managed to create a classic book. Like any great artist, he found the great universal in his tiny particular; and he transformed his sense of being out of touch into a great sighing comment on his changing country.

Now, of course much of this book isn’t true. All novelists are born and bred liars. But it sounds true enough, and that is all I want from a travel book.

Recently, I asked about if anyone had ever read Steinbeck before on Twitter.....I mean X. Wow! This post got more than 10,000 views! And Travels with Charley received many shoutouts as the favorite Steinbeck book! One user mentioned Gary Sinise as narrator (hint hint when I get around to trying to find the audiobook).

Crap! Bullshit Americana from a great writer.

Some of the travel stuff was good but good lord, NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS! I mean I was waiting for some peppy road novel happenstance and.......I waited.....and I waited.....and then the book was over.

In Travels with Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck provides an entertaining and wry account of his observations as he road trips with his poodle in what essentially becomes his house on wheels, Rocinante. I'm a big fan of Steinbeck's work (I really like what I see as his sympathetic treatment of quirky and damaged characters in novels like Cannery Row and Tortilla Flats). I also remember enjoying Travels with Charley (at least the few chapters of it which I read while I was in high school). That said, despite frequent protestations that he wasn't upset about changes/progress, I was irritated both by Steinbeck's defensiveness and by all the time he spent complaining about change.

I did like Steinbeck's assessment of Americans as a people on the move, but I didn't see him building toward anything in this travelogue. I know that's the nature of travel writing, but I wanted more from Steinbeck. When he climbs out of Rocinante and explores a new town, does he see characters from his novels? Does he see material for books? Or only this specific travelogue? I wasn't sure how he grew during this trip, just that he (and Charley) seemed to intuitively know when the journey was over. I guess I was looking for something that wasn't there.

John Steinbeck, age 58, decides to take an extensive road trip to rediscover his America. His companion on this trip is Charley, his French poodle, whom I fell in love with.
During his travels, he discovers the good- kind people, beautiful scenery; the bad- miserable people, poverty, racism, waste; and the ugly- the “cheer ladies” in New Orleans, the outright hatred towards the “Negroes”.
Does he go home renewed, refreshed and reinvigorated? He goes home happy to be back with his wife, his home, his bed.
This book gave me much to reflect on. I now admire John Steinbeck, the man, as much as I admire John Steinbeck, the author.

“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”

Published: 1961

“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any HERE. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.”

n  n
The steed...Rocinante!

John Steinbeck was not feeling very well before he decided to take a trip across country. It wasn’t only physical, but also a general malaise about the condition of the country and his own place in it. Early in the book he makes a statement that reveals exactly his state of mind. The words betray a clairvoyance of a near future that would catch up with him in 1968.

“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.”

Okay, that is the life philosophy that he has tried to live by, but it is what he says next that shows that he is feeling the tight grip of his impending demise.

”My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. I knew that ten or twelve thousand miles driving a truck, alone and unattended, over every kind of road, would be hard work, but to me it represented the antidote for the poison of the professional sick man. And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity. If this projected journey should prove too much then it was time to go anyway. I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It’s bad theater as well as bad living. I am very fortunate in having a wife who likes being a woman, which means that she likes men, not elderly babies. Although this last foundation for the journey was never discussed I am sure she understood it.”

n  n
Steinbeck lighting up the coffin nails that would eventually kill him with the wife he had a hard time leaving behind.

So he is on a heroic quest. He even found the loyal steed to carry him from place to place. He named her Rocinante after the horse in Don Quixote as if he’d already decided before starting that for most of the journey he was going to be tilting at windmills. Bill Steigerwald, former journalist, in 2010 decided to unravel the murky, twisting road of Steinbeck’s trip by following in his tire tracks. Instead of a GMC pickup, specially made with a deluxe cabin, Steigerwald took his Toyota Rav4 and slept in Walmart parking lots and used car lots. His goal was to try to part the curtain of pure mythology and actually determine where and what Steinbeck did.

There are discrepancies. There are holes in Steinbeck’s...lets call it a tale...so large that you could have driven Rocinante pulling the Empire State building through these gaps and still had clearance on both sides.

Bill Barich wrote in his book “Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America”.

“Steinbeck was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of the knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing ordinary people. He’d become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson.”

So the thinking is, that instead of this solo trip where he has cut all ties to the comforts of his life and is out among the people pressing the flesh and writing down his observations of real America, that Travels with Charley is actually a tall tale. The truth is, for most of the trip, he was in luxury hotels, motels, and only camping in Rocinante occasionally. The writing, well crap, he is a novelist. He was not spinning most of it out of whole cloth, but pretty close. The original manuscript, I’m told, has his wife Elaine as a companion through much more of the trip than what he admits in the book. In the story he has her flying out to Chicago as an emergency care package dropping in to give solace to the weary traveler.

I do find it sweet how attached to his wife he is. He had a hard time leaving her and I’m sure at some point the decision was made that if this trip is going to be any kind of success at all that he needed the care and comfort of his wife along the way. The book doesn’t have the same ring to it as Travels with Charley and Elaine.

But let’s talk about Charley.

”...I took one companion on my journey--an old French gentleman poodle known as Charley. Actually his name is Charles le Chien. He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down. He is a very big poodle, of a color called bleu, and he is blue when he is clean. Charley is a born diplomat. He prefers negotiation to fighting, and properly so, since he is very bad at fighting.”

n  n
Charles le Chien and the author.

We learn that Charley has crooked front teeth that he makes a Ptth sound through whenever he requires Steinbeck’s attention or as a form of general commentary on the state of affairs. He mutters to himself when agitated and he does have a prostate issue on the trip that required emergency veterinarian help. Unexpected he turns into a demon dog when he catches a whiff of bear in Yellowstone. As Steinbeck refers to him as his suddenly ”Jekyll Headed Dog”. He proves to be a source of comfort to Steinbeck when the blues, which were never far away, would descend upon him.

“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”

The most depressing moment in the trip is when Steinbeck stops in New Orleans to go see “the cheerleaders” and to experience first hand the hatred that was blooming over desegregation of schools.

”These blowzy women with their little hats and their clippings hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heartbreaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.”

These were young, white working mothers who every day stood in front of the schools and screamed the most ”bestial and filthy and degenerate” words at little black girls trying to go to school.

n  n
Ruby Bridges, one of four little black girls that had to be escorted to school by U.S. Marshalls.

Most white parents pulled their kids out of the schools, but those brave souls that tried to take their kids to school were met with the same vile language and threats. Soon the black girls were the only ones in the two schools.

It makes me nauseous every time I see footage from this event.

One of my favorite parts of the book was Steinbeck’s time among the Redwoods.

“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.”

n  n

If you have never seen them make sure that on any trip to California that you take the time to go walk among giants. These trees are over a thousand years old and over 95% of the original old growth have been logged for their excellent timber. They are the oldest living things on the planet. How baffling it must be to entities, that are time capsules of the activities of the planet, to find themselves being destroyed by these ants on the surface of the earth who with bits of sharp steel can wipe out a 1,000 years of life within moments.

It shakes the soul to contemplate.

So let us believe that most of this book is fabrication, that Steinbeck poured himself a cup of coffee liberally laced with Applejack and typed up a series of events that never quite happened. He could throw in a few observations about an America that he didn’t have to stray far from home to determine.

“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”

He could disguise his guile with such pithy remarks as:

”...I cannot commend this account as an America that you will find. So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.”

I’ve taken trips with people that when we arrive back home you would think from comparing their memories to mine that we went to the same place, but possibly in a parallel universe. I feel the same way sometimes when I read a review of a person who read a book I liked. I feel as if we had read two different books.

It is because we did.

My view of life is different from everyone else’s and so is yours. We have different experiences. We bring those experiences to traveling, to reading, to conversations, and the whole kaleidoscope of it all colors our memories.

Regardless of the level of truth that this book represents I was able to spend 246 pages with the man John Steinbeck. No biographer can ignore the personal philosophies that sprinkle the pages of this book. This is a weary soul that still occasionally finds moments of brightness. He is not a note taker, because he confessed he generally loses them anyway. He lets what he sees percolate through the stratosphere to the core of his brain until the purest of thoughts lands on his tongue. Some of his “observations” were gems, some feel wooden and maybe needed the deft touch of a healthier man. I took his journey, maybe not the physical one he presents, but the journey of the mind of a writer trying to share a few last thoughts with the readers he felt destined to lose.

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That’s it. Goal Met. Challenge conquered. I do not need to read any other book this year. I am satiated.

You know how I have that groupie mentality? Yeah, well… Ilovejohnsteinbecksomuchit’skillingme.

“It happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi invalidism…. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.”

They should put that on a t-shirt. Girls would flock. Seriously, this guy is hot. What’s the opposite of cougar because that’s what I am. Or maybe I should just move to necrophilia since we’re going on 40 years since he met the daisies. Still, all through this book I was OMG THIS IS THE MAN OF MY DREAMS. He names his truck Rocinante! And Charley? My god… don’t even.

I’ve never really had the itch to travel across America. I’m a northeaster, I can’t handle people who don’t talk as fast as me, don’t walk as fast as me, eat clam chowder that’s red, use the word ‘pop’, don’t have basements, have tornado warnings, you know… those people. I’ve tiptoed out of my comfort zone a few times but usually rush back to the elitist, bitter, hmphing bosom of my kind. John has given me a bit of a rash.

The first few parts of the book center on country that I am familiar with… he drives from Long Island to the tip of Maine and back down across New Hampshire and Vermont. He stops at roadside diners, encounters sad souls and men of few words. This is 1960, when plastic covered everything was in and politics was best left to the city folk. He absorbs so much. “ And the Aurora Borealis was out. I’ve seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveler upstage in an infinite theater. In color sof rose and lavender and purple it moved and pulsed against the night, and the frost sharpened stars shone through it. What a thing to see at a time when I need it so badly!" And to the sad soul who served him his plastic meal that night he says “ I wondered for a moment whether I should grab that waitress and kick her behind out to look at it, but I didn’t dare. She could make eternity and infinity melt and run out through your fingers.” Yes, I realize that’s an insult, but how freakin’ beautiful.

I want to breathe that air, to feel that rising, so glorious that words are not enough (except with him, they can be and that’s amazing). I want to sit by a fire with canucks passing as seasonal potato pickers; I want to sit in the Vermont church with him listening to the hellfire promising preacher damn us.

“Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn’t make some basic reorganizations for which he didn’t hold out much hope…. I began to feel good all over. For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me.”

My OTP. My BFF, the fly to my soup, the lox to my bagel, my everything. See, John is.. JOHN in this book, he says he’s not.. he says he doesn’t want anyone to recognize him, that he wants to know America, to understand but he comes across so vividly, full Technicolor, that I found myself responding to him. I felt the manic depressive moments like the hills and valley of a rollercoaster. He bares himself to strangers, tries to pry the life out of them. He studies voraciously—and this isn’t a newbie rambler---he’s been EVERYWHERE and you still feel lost with him on the shores of lakes in the back woods of Indiana.

“My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.” I would fish with you my friend. Even in Indiana.

If I were to step out of my comfort zone and travel this America, I know that I wouldn’t see the same way that John sees. I know that this is a different America from 1960 Steinbeck as much as it is to 1930 Steinbeck. Perhaps even more so… we are consumed with posthaste and irritated with impermanent. I would want to take the unknown but know that I would fall prey to the interstates and their humdrum. I am not a patient woman (I am a northeaster). I wonder how many have taken the travels with Charley route and what they discovered.

There are so many more scenes that I want to share with you. I want to follow you around and read this out loud with boisterous glee. I cannot however, dinner is due and laundry is waiting.

Please, PLEASE read this book. Scratch the itch. Tell me all about it.

I enjoyed my reread of "Travels with Charley" for a library book discussion. John Steinbeck took a road trip around the United States in the fall of 1960 "to try to rediscover this monster land." He bought a pick-up truck with a camper top, and named it Rocinante (after Don Quixote's horse). Charley, an older large French poodle, was Steinbeck's traveling companion. Charley served as an ice-breaker, making it easier for Steinbeck to meet strangers. Steinbeck had a chronic illness at the time of his trip, and Charley had his own set of veterinary problems, but they offered emotional support to each other. Charley also added some humor to the story, such as when he turned into a vicious barking beast when he spotted and smelled the bears in Yellowstone Park.

Steinbeck tried to talk to the "everyman" during his journey--farmers, migrant workers, and waitresses--to take the pulse of the country. Although Steinbeck has associated with many famous people, he has never forgotten his humble roots as a dock worker. As one who has lived through the 1960s, I felt that he gave a true sense of the era. He traveled through the Northeast, then took a northern route to the west coast, then headed home by taking a southern route eastward.

The most awe-inspiring stop on his journey was at a forest of majestic redwoods. The most upsetting incident was in New Orleans where a group of women (called the Cheerleaders) shouted racist comments at small black children walking to their recently integrated school. His visit to a bar in his hometown in California showed that you really can't go home again after an absence of many years--people change and the town changes.

Steinbeck got lost quite often during his trip. He seemed to suggest that America was also getting lost as the population moved from the country to the city to work in industry. He was concerned about damage to the environment as factories, garbage dumps, and interstate highways ringed the cities.

There has been some controversy about the accuracy of Steinbeck's tale, especially in journalist Bill Steigerwald's book, "Dogging Steinbeck". Steinbeck did not camp out as often as his book relates, his wife flew out to meet him quite often during the trip, and his conversations with people seem to often be composites of several people. That really did not bother me since I find that most travel books give the flavor of a location, and are not a day-to-day diary. I can also understand why Steinbeck would be spending many nights in motels, considering his poor health. The hours I spent with Steinbeck and Charley on the road were very entertaining.