You know how in my reviews of LJ’s novel and FC’s novel both, I talked about how I feel like I owe people all the time? How I feel horrible when I don’t read a friend’s book? That goes double for books I’m gifted. That — I am delighted to say — was not the case for cross-country Steinbeck travels. 

They changed me.

These cross-country Steinbeck travels resulted in a book he wrote called Travels with Charley in Search of America.

If you’re just here to download the roadtrip map of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America because you want to go where he went, click here. It will show you how you can road trip like Steinbeck Travels with Charley… or with whatever pet you bring along.

The wonderful little title was given to me by my friend Jessie Weiss ages ago. And, much like novels published by acquaintances and book gifts given by relatives, I felt guilty leaving it unread for so long. It stared at me like so many others, judging me. “You know, Lance,” that log of Steinbeck travels would say, “you really still haven’t even opened me. It was years ago she gave me to you.”

“I know, book. That makes it all the more hard to open you. What if I start up a relationship with you and don’t like you, book? What will I say then? Isn’t easier if we just stay friends, book? Then I can just say — if asked — I haven’t started you yet.”

“But Lance: then you’ll have to answer their questions about me with you haven’t started me yet.”

“I know, I know, I know.” 

And there, stuck in that imaginary conversation loop, the book would fester on the shelf with all of the others. A literary abscess that might one day turn into a chest buster.  I generally need accountability and community reading the books I already have. I always do better reading in a group, studying deeply.

Even still, I’ve had some killer books I wouldn’t have discovered without the wise help of friends.

Here’s the thing, Jessie knows me pretty well.

Or at least it’s true enough to say that Jessie pays attention to key parts of me in a sincere way. That she weighs certain pieces of me rightly whereas many other folks — the types obsessed with the horoscopes for people who went to college entitled “personality tests,” for instance — miss what may be blatantly obvious after reading a few of my poems. As James B. Nicola always says after hearing me perform one of mine, “And now I know you.” I once dedicated a poetry book to Jessie because she, like Karl Mitchell and a couple of others, believed that to be my best mode as a writer. I have my doubts, but for her perhaps that’s absolutely true?

And I’ve been procrastinating this review because I wanted to thank Jessie publicly and tell all of you about this book. This month seemed a perfect time to write it — other than saying I dedicated a poetry book to her and some others awhile back, you really don’t need to know any more about her. Just a public thanks, that’s all.

But in talking about how well she seemed to know me in giving me this book, perhaps I can help you consider how you give book recommendations to others? 

And perhaps I can encourage her too?

I wanted to give what my buddy Dane Hunter called one of my prerambles because in this case, I never would have read Travels with Charley in Search of America, let alone gather the road trip map for y’all, and it takes knowing me and knowing a rather obscure book in order to really place it properly in my heart and soul. This book resonated for a few reasons. 

For starters, Steinbeck’s old and it’s a short book. Those are both, it seems, actually rare for the kinds of Steinbeck books most folks read. A lot of his popular stuff was written in his thirties and almost every title the majority of people who follow Steinbeck know about was written between his 32^nd and 50^th year. He was sixty when he wrote this book — would die eight years later. Perhaps the only thing more obscure than this book are his Vietnam dispatches, his journal about writing East of Eden, and his first two novels written at 27 — the first was a pirate fantasy entitled CUP OF GOLD. That’s right. John Friggin’ Steinbeck’s first novel was a historical fiction novel based on the life and death of the privateer Henry Morgan. 

Captain Morgan.

Yes, that Captain Morgan:

You’re welcome.

And thank you John.

Also, for you literary snobs, this is another great place to insert the quote by Pratchett about how all literature is fundamentally fantasy:

Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

— Terry Pratchett

Anyways. 

John Steinbeck’s first novel was a pirate fantasy. If you only read classics and “literary” works, you should read fantasy. To those who think fantasy is a ghettoized genre, (1) I personally like ghettos and find the phrase “ghettoized” offensive and (2) you’re also wrong: all literature is fundamentally fantasizing. If you think novels can be “autobiographical,” you’re missing the point of novels. Novels aren’t memoirs or journalism. They’re fantasies building the fundamental hypotheses that we later test and observe in all of the sciences from Theology through physics down to microbiology and quantum mechanics and out the other side in linguistic logic. Only autobiographies are autobiographical. And sometimes not even then.

I love that Steinbeck’s most obscure book is a pirate fantasy.

“Oh come on Lance, Captain Morgan was a privateer, not a pirate.”

Ah. Morgan was fighting for the other side. Fair enough.

You know what Steinbeck wrote the next year? 

Murder at Full Moon.

A frigging werewolf mystery.

It’s never been published. Oh and then there was The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. So yes, what I said stands. 

Steinbeck wrote fantasies first. And every novel of his reads, more or less, like a fantasy adventure novel. Certain critics have even cautioned us about believing the beat-for-beat moments of this book in particular because Steinbeck was, at heart, a fantasy novelist.

Have I sufficiently buried the lede? 

Good.

We’re here to have fun and I’m having a blast. 

So this obscure book is basically him saying at 60 years old (58 when he wrote it) how long since his 30^th year he’d been gone from most of America without actually interacting with the real American voices behind the characters who had built his career. It was the year of integration, of red scare elections, of immigration, of overproducing plastic and easy-to-make meals. And it’s interesting, because as much as he feels the need to travel in the book, he also seems to me to be a radical home body. I think that’s the first thing Jessie picked up on about me that connected me to this book: I travel in the manner that Bilbo travels. To protect home and bring things home again. Because of what’s behind me, not so much because of what’s before me. I don’t travel to run away, I only run away from bad travelers, and that’s something the personality test enthusiasts tend to miss about me. I’ve stayed in the same ten block radius for a decade now. Have I travelled to Alaska? Yes. Italy? Sure. London? Tunis? Of course. 

But I’ve also stayed put. I bring those experiences back to tell neighbors and friends and to populate my novels and stories and scripts, written in the comfort of my home, with characters I’ve met living out the very poem I’m always most trying to write. 

Every year the poem I most want to write, the poem that would in effect allow me to stop writing, changes shapes, changes directions. It refuses to come forward, to stand still while I move to meet it, embrace and coax it to sit on the porch with me and watch the lightning bugs steal behind the fog’s heavy veil, listen for the drag of johnboats through the orchestra of locusts and frogs…

— C. D. Wright (January 6, 1949 – January 12, 2016)

Steinbeck needed fodder. He needed to know how far he’d gotten from his experiences. He wanted to personally meet our country in its new stage of life because he made his living writing about her. His eldest son later said that his dad knew he was dying and wanted to see his country one last time. His youngest sounded shocked his stepmother “allowed” these Steinbeck travels to even happen, allowed Steinbeck to take the trip. Steinbeck probably could have been saved by a modern cardiac surgeon — he died with his arteries completely blocked. 

The man doesn’t deny the wanderlust that shaped his life and mind:

“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 that 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 ship’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, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.”

— Steinbeck Travels with Charley

And it had gotten worse living in New York City and traveling Europe for a couple decades. He was writing about a country he no longer knew and thought it criminal. I understand that — my own hometown moved on even in the time I interviewed my grandpas almost ten years ago and now. Consider what has transpired since 2014 and you’ll see what I mean. There are many people I no longer recognize, even in that short time, the monstrous beliefs that have slowly contorted and deformed their faces and bones. 

---

He ordered from GMC a brand new pickup truck and had them fit it with a custom made camper shell to care for him on his journey. It’s hard to overstate how radical this was because of how many folks have owned truck campers since. Hell, I don’t know many millennials who could conceive of a world without a truck camper owned by someone’s grandpa somewhere. But before Steinbeck, they simply didn’t. You had the Cree Coach by the Cree Trailer and boat company:

And the Sport King by Walter King:

Both of which are, quite obviously, junk for what this man needed. 

Behold the Steinbeck camper:

It’s a thunderclap in a pre-truck camper era. 

And it’s kind of funny to me. Partly because some of those same personality test advocates (again, such things are just horoscopes for people that had some college) seem to peg me as the kind of guy who’d love to live a “van life,” who wants to live on a pirate boat his whole life. Nothing could be further from the truth — and, frankly — I don’t think that’s the case for Steinbeck or these Steinbeck travels. Yes, I’ve camped on rock banks without a tent. Yes, I’m proud of roadtripping across America without any supervision when I was twenty. There’s a level of independence that comes with that which cannot be forged or forged elsewhere.

However, what Steinbeck describes as wanderlust is actually something more akin to gathering what he needs for the homeland, gathering what he needs for the wordfarm, the homestead. The last thing I want to be is on the move all the time. And I honestly don’t think he does either. He wouldn’t talk so long at the start about his docked boat if he really believed the rolling stone myth. Bob Dylan, after all, was critiquing Edie Sedgwick’s rejection of the society of artists in Manhattan:

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.

He was subverting the old lie that the rolling stone gathers no moss. I like to think Dylan had read Chesterton’s response to the Rudyard Kipling vision to travel, the opposite of which formed the basis of Chesterton’s own travelogue What I Saw in America. Chesterton writes:

In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, “Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?” But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

— GK Chesterton, Heretics

Jessie seemed to get this about me. That I travelled not to move away from the moss, but to bring home a bit of the moon for the moss I love. In her epigraph to the copy she gave me, she wrote: Know that wherever you travel, you are loved.

That’s a statement fit for a Bilbo, not a Jack Kerouac. Steinbeck’s more Bilbo. 

Something about this book and these Steinbeck travels possessed a nation full of baby boomers who were being born — including Steinbeck’s own kids. And they went out and all bought truck campers like this in the wake of his travelogue and Nobel prize. 

If you wish to download the roadtrip map so that you can follow Steinbeck’s travels, click this.

He decided to take his wife’s French poodle named Charley, thus the title. This dog was huge with a huge bark, yet would have rolled over and died at the slightest provocation from some antagonist. He also — and this was illuminating to me mainly for how he did journalism and narrative — bought some very expensive booze and filled up the cab with that. He took way too much water. Way too many hunting guns. Propane and all sorts of madness: burdened that shiny new nickel of a truck. 

Named it Rocinante. After Don Quixote’s horse. Like horse and rider, so truck camper and writer: awkward, past his prime, engaged in a task beyond his brittle capacity. It’s also an interesting double entendre because Rocin in Spanish means a “work horse” or a cheap horse, but it can also mean an illiterate man. For Steinbeck to imply illiteracy of himself the very year he would win the Nobel Prize seems astounding. It’s Cervantes who said, “a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.” I hate the very idea of Don Quixote, to be honest. 

And yet, mindful of the quote, I love the humility of a 60-year-old Steinbeck mocking his own illiteracy on such a tour. Indeed, as Jessie knows, most of the time I feel myself a fool who’s stumbling along trying to figure things out with prose. This wasn’t a teaching tour or a book tour for Steinbeck. It was fundamentally a learning tour.

He planned to leave on Labor Day out of Sag Harbor. I wouldn’t have known a thing about that place, would have thought it was in Connecticut or Canada growing up. Now I know it’s just north of the Hamptons, have driven there. It sits right across the water from Shelter Island — the northern tip of the southern fork of Long Island. You can pinpoint it on a globe, almost: find Long Island, find the smaller Shelter Island, pinprick the north coast of the southern fork and you’re there. He’s ready to go.

Then Hurricane Donna hits. 

And Steinbeck is crazy, the way he responds. Reckless and courageous both, a manful approach to the hurricane. He describes at one point the state of his wife’s mind:

“ During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had 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. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap.”

“Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. 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. 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.”

— Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

He takes that wild courage — something that seems a bit thin, a bit faux in Hemingway, but authentic in Steinbeck — and applies himself to the hurricane:

“Our bay is better protected than most, so that many small craft came cruising in for mooring. And I saw with fear that many of their owners didn’t know how to moor. Finally two boats, pretty things, came in, one towing the other. A light anchor went down and they were left, the bow of one tethered to the stern of the other and both within the swing of the Fayre Eleyne. I took a megaphone to the end of my pier and tried to protest against this foolishness, but the owners either did not hear or did not know or did not care.

The wind struck on the moment we were told it would, and ripped the water like a black sheet. It hammered like a fist. The whole top of an oak tree crashed down, grazing the cottage where we watched. The next gust stove one of the big windows in. I forced it back and drove wedges in top and bottom with a hand ax. Electric power and telephones went out with the first blast, as we knew they must. And eight-foot tides were predicted. We watched the wind rip at earth and sea like a surging pack of terriers. The trees plunged and bent like grasses, and the whipped water raised a cream of foam. A boat broke loose and tobogganed up on the shore, and then another. Houses built in the benign spring and early summer took waves in their second-story windows. Our cottage is on a little hill thirty feet above sea level. But the rising tide washed over my high pier. As the wind changed direction I moved Rocinante to keep her always to leeward of our big oaks. The Fayre Eleyne rode gallantly, swinging like a weather vane away from the changing wind.

The boats which had been tethered one to the other had fouled up by now, the tow line under propeller and rudder and the two hulls bashing and scraping together. Another craft had dragged its anchor and gone ashore on a mud bank.

Charley dog has no nerves. Gunfire or thunder, explosions or high winds leave him utterly unconcerned. In the midst of the howling storm, he found a warm place under a table and went to sleep.

The wind stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and although the waves continued out of rhythm they were not wind-tattered, and the tide rose higher and higher. All the piers around our little bay had disappeared under water, and only their piles or hand rails showed. The silence was like a rushing sound. The radio told us we were in the eye of Donna, the still and frightening calm in the middle of the revolving storm. I don’t know how long the calm lasted. It seemed a long time of waiting. And then the other side struck us, the wind from the opposite direction. The Fayre Eleyne swung sweetly around and put her bow into the wind. But the two lashed boats dragged anchor, swarmed down on Fayre Eleyne, and bracketed her. She was dragged fighting and protesting downwind and forced against a neighboring pier, and we could hear her hull crying against the oaken piles. The wind registered over ninety-five miles now.

I found myself running, fighting the wind around the head of the bay toward the pier where the boats were breaking up. I think my wife, for whom the Fayre Eleyne is named, ran after me, shouting orders for me to stop. The floor of the pier was four feet under water, but piles stuck up and offered hand-holds. I worked my way out little by little up to my breast pockets, the shore-driven wind slapping water in my mouth. My boat cried and whined against the piles, and plunged like a frightened calf. Then I jumped and fumbled my way aboard her. For the first time in my life I had a knife when I needed it. The bracketing wayward boats were pushing Eleyne against the pier. I cut anchor line and tow line and kicked them free, and they blew ashore on the mudbank. But Eleyne’s anchor chain was intact, and that great old mud hook was still down, a hundred pounds of iron with spear-shaped flukes wide as a shovel.

Eleyne’s engine is not always obedient, but this day it started at a touch. I hung on, standing on the deck, reaching inboard for wheel and throttle and clutch with my left hand. And that boat tried to help—I suppose she was that scared. I edged her out and worked up the anchor chain with my right hand. Under ordinary conditions I can barely pull that anchor with both hands in a calm. But everything went right this time. I edged over the hook and it tipped up and freed its spades. Then I lifted it clear of the bottom and nosed into the wind and gave it throttle and we headed into that goddamn wind and gained on it. It was as though we pushed our way through thick porridge. A hundred yards offshore I let the hook go and it plunged down and grabbed bottom, and the Fayre Eleyne straightened and raised her bow and seemed to sigh with relief.

Well, there I was, a hundred yards offshore with Donna baying over me like a pack of white-whiskered hounds. No skiff could possibly weather it for a minute. I saw a piece of branch go skidding by and simply jumped in after it. There was no danger. If I could keep my head up I had to blow ashore, but I admit the half-Wellington rubber boots I wore got pretty heavy. It couldn’t have been more than three minutes before I grounded and that other Fayre Eleyne and a neighbor pulled me out. It was only then that I began to shake all over, but looking out and seeing our little boat riding well and safely was nice. I must have strained something pulling that anchor with one hand, because I needed a little help home; a tumbler of whisky on the kitchen table was some help too. I’ve tried since to raise that anchor with one hand and I can’t do it.”

— Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I’m not going to recite the entire book here, but those passages seem to me to tee up the shape of it enough to show you how it works in tone and on the man.

Once he finally left, post hurricane, he went north first. Long Island to Connecticut. He took the way I’ve always wanted to go — skipping the city entirely, skipping the temptation to visit friends all the way out of New York. Instead he took the ferry. He took three ferries: Shelter Island, Greenport, Orient Point. The Orient Point one, like the Port Jeff one I’ve always seen and never taken, goes all the way to the coast of Connecticut. That always seems so fun to me: a straight cut, you and your family and your car, across the Atlantic to entirely different state. Something visceral and wonderful in that, especially for someone who didn’t grow up on the East Coast — to someone that needs to drive six to ten hours to reach their state’s opposing border. Especially mindful of the hurricane having passed. 

Up there, he passed a submarine base. Tons of them docked and he compares them to angler fish — their single eye perched on a single stalk piercing waves. Bemoaned a future of rapid technological and political change in the face of a sailor who said otherwise. It caused him to think of how wasteful we remain as Americans. He set out — determined — to define an America, but found himself over and again littered with paradox. Someone to contradict everyone else. It seems to me to define America and it’s something Chesterton would have loved: we’re a nation of folks who are in the present state of having gathered all of the paradoxes of the world and asked them to remain United.

That paradox of America was and is as much geographic as cultural. His border crossing at Canada mirrored his time near the Mexican border towns, the northeasterners provided counterpoint both to the south and to the California leg. Chicago and Texas offered parallel feasts. “Orgies” he called them in the southern half. Montana and the Southwest also seemed very parallel in ways. And the racism of the south also seemed to dove tail with the northern listlessness. 

A New England farmer talked about how no one was talking, politically. This plus the submarines truly emphasized, over and again, the Cold War climate. How no one was talking about the election the way they had in the past — and this particular election was Richard Nixon V. John F. Kennedy. He learned by doing early breakfasts with farmers (who were frustratingly reticent) and by listening to local radio which had seemed to replace the market crier and even the newspaper in his view. Of course the same top 40 songs played across the country.

He travelled to Maine and lauded and critiqued both all of the roadside antique stores, speaking of how he was addicted to “junk” like may of his time — if there’s any starving artist that comes to mind as representative of the Great Depression, it’s Steinbeck who stole bacon with his wife to serve to the neighbors. He reminds me a ton of both my grandpa and father in this section. Outside Bangor, Maine, future home of Stephen King, he talked about how some of the people there with a sour attitude really dampened his own.

He stopped off at Deer Island, Maine at the demand of his literary agent Elizabeth Otis, perhaps she was also the obscure poet who wrote a response to Kipling. Which explains why she wouldn’t stop praising Deer Island, but never really gave him any reason for why it was so wonderful.

En route, he asked for directions from a local Mainer who told him NEVER DO THIS. He asked why and the guy literally told him that Mainers hate tourists and so regularly give bad directions to them. That’s hilarious and cruel on a level of late stage Remmy, if you ask me.

Fresh lobster straight from the waters.

Then north.

He ended up camping next to French Canadians who had immigrated to farm potatoes. And this is where his brilliance in stocking up on all of that hyper-specific, super expensive liquor started to shine through. This is something a buddy of mine from high school who lives here was always good at and I never really quite understood until this book, but there’s a specificity to radical hospitality that, if you’re really good at it, you can anticipate.

John may not have known the current weather of the American mind, what had changed in the intervening years, but he knew enough about his motherland to know the kinds of people he’d come across. And frankly, I think he’d experienced enough of Europe at this point to really understand how that works better in Europe. Americans are more welcoming initially, Europeans more over the long haul. It’s one of the reasons Europeans are rather skeptical of that American saccharine welcome: it tends to be followed with bombs, which over the long haul, is indistinguishable from a snake oil scam or a traitorous con job.

But these Steinbeck travels proved him no fool. He’d prepared ahead with extremely fine French vintages and insisted upon sharing it with this French speaking crowd. The sharing of the hyper specific French vintage made for a brightening and Christening of his truck camper in a way that he might not have achieved so early otherwise. This required not only his camper and the preparation of the vintage. It required the chance meeting of French Canadian travelers.

He described them almost in a Wordsworthian register. With nimbuses on every finger.

Then west (which tends to mess with folks from Missouri) back into New York towards Niagara Falls. He went the Detroit route — originally had planned to cut across Ontario. But he had a weird run-in with American and not Canadian border patrol. It almost prevented him from reentering his own country. It’s a ridiculous moment that really shows the problems with the American security state: how the government makes people feel small.

Through to Chicago.

Not south. At all.

And here — and only here — will I gripe.

At this point, the man had sold me on the trip, on his storytelling capabilities remaining undiminished in his elder years. He’d sold me on the characters. His dog. His truck camper. Beat by beat I followed him.

But as you’ll see on the map:

He completely and utterly bypassed the midwest for the northern states. Steinbeck ignored basically every single town that I and Ray Bradbury and even the Hemingway Steinbeck idolized (I do not) and Mark Twain and Langston Hughs (I could list literary greats forever — the bulk of our culture at some point touched the Mississippi watershed) spent our most nostalgic years. He bypassed the Nashville that was pumping Top 40 songs like Johnny Cash into his radio, the Indy 500, the Gateway Arch, the bulk of the Mississippi, Kansas City of OKLAHOMA fame, the Iowa caucuses in an election year, the Ozark Mountains, the Appalachian Mountains, all Kentucky bourbon, Memphis blues, the Oklahoma of the Trial of Tears, the ENTIRE EASTERN HALF OF ROUTE 66, and — and this is greatest tragedy of all — the still blooming orchards of the land of milk and honey, Little Egypt.

Orchards that Monsanto later tilled up for corn and Texaco later drilled past for oil. Orchards eaten by Chronos.

Only Steinbeck with the rest of the book could dig himself out of so egregiously deep a hole. Any other writer — any other book — I would have thrown his coastal bias across the room and washed my hands and kicked the paginated dust off my sandals.

Anyways.

He did at least notice some of the culture shifts in the northern states as he moved west. Even though he turned flyover country into drive around country. Didn’t even stop by the Great Darke County Fair.

Chicago. Which I love, but which is decided not Illinois any more than New York City is New York State.

He had this fascinating moment in the hotel he stopped at — his wife was to meet him halfway on his journey.

At that fancy hotel, he was absolutely filthy in their lobby waiting for them to prep the room. As he was a paying customer, they didn’t want to piss him off, but as he was also filthy in their lobby, they didn’t want him sitting around. All he wanted was a shower and a place to rest his eyes while he waited. Finally they compromised by letting him go shower in a room that was filthy itself. He walks into this room and immediately turns detective. He notices dry cleaning slips and receipts and lipstick on pillows and leftover lingere and bits of bourbon and notes on pages and begins piecing together an affair of a married businessman. It was wild to watch his observation skills work and really motivated me to up my own game in description, poetry, and the like.

One of the things he noticed in this time was how the local strangers in these northern states openly and honestly interacted with him, yearning for a newness, for another place. Their everyday life had been shattered when someone new came to town. Through that person they imagined new places. Tolstoy said there’s only two stories: man goes on an adventure or stranger comes to town. This one had both.

Steinbeck, in an almost scifi kind of way, bemoaned the way the country had grown addicted to instant gratification. He talked about hot soup and hot coffee machines at roadside stops. And here he goes off on this mobile home tangent that I find strangely illuminating:

On these roads out of the manufacturing centers there moved many mobile homes, pulled by specially designed trucks, and since these mobile homes comprise one of my generalities, I may as well get to them now. Early in my travels I had become aware of these new things under the sun, of their great numbers, and since they occur in increasing numbers all over the nation, observation of them and perhaps some speculation is in order. They are not trailers to be pulled by one’s own car but shining cars long as pullmans. From the beginning of my travels I had noticed the sale lots where they were sold and traded, but then I began to be aware of the parks where they sit down in uneasy permanence. In Maine I took to stopping the night in these parks, talking to the managers and to the dwellers in this new kind of housing, for they gather in groups of like to like.

…

The owners were not only willing but glad and proud to show their homes to me. The rooms, while small, were well proportioned. Every conceivable unit was built in. Wide windows, some even called picture windows, destroyed any sense of being closed in; the bedrooms and beds were spacious and the storage space unbelievable. It seemed to me a revolution in living and on a rapid increase. Why did a family choose to live in such a home? Well, it was comfortable, compact, easy to keep clean, easy to heat.

In Maine: “I’m tired of living in a cold barn with the wind whistling through, tired of the torment of little taxes and payments for this and that. It’s warm and cozy and in the summer the air-conditioner keeps us cool.”

“What is the usual income bracket of the mobiles?”

“That is variable but a goodly number are in the ten-thousand to twenty-thousand-dollar class.”

“Has job uncertainty anything to do with the rapid increase of these units?”

“Well perhaps there may be some of that. Who knows what is in store tomorrow? Mechanics, plant engineers, architects, accountants, and even here and there a doctor or a dentist live in the mobile. If a plant or a factory closes down, you’re not trapped with property you can’t sell. Suppose the husband has a job and is buying a house and there’s a layoff. The value goes out of his house. But if he has a mobile home he rents a trucking service and moves on and he hasn’t lost anything. He may never have to do it, but the fact that he can is a comfort to him.”

“How are they purchased?”

“On time, just like an automobile. It’s like paying rent.”

And then I discovered the greatest selling appeal of all–one that crawls through nearly all American life. Improvements are made on these mobile homes every year. If you are doing well you turn yours in on a new model just as you do with an automobile if you can possibly afford to. There’s status to that. And the turn-in value is higher than that of automobiles because there’s a ready market for used homes. And after a few years the once expensive home may have a poorer family. They are easy to maintain, need no paint since they are usually of aluminum, and are not tied to fluctuating land values.

“How about schools?”

The school buses pick the children up right at the park and bring them back. The family car takes the head of the house to work and the family to a drive-in movie at night. It’s a healthy life out in the country air. The payments, even if high and festooned with interest, are no worse than renting an apartment and fighting the owner for heat. And where could you rent such a comfortable ground-floor apartment with a place for your car outside the door? Where else could the kids have a dog? Nearly every mobile home has a dog, as Charley discovered to his delight. Twice I was invited to dinner in a mobile home and several times watched a football game on television. A manager told me that one of the first considerations in his business was to find and buy a place where television reception is good. Since I did not require any facilities, sewer, water, or electricity, the price to me for stopping the night was one dollar.

The first impression forced on me was that permanence is neither achieved nor desired by mobile people. They do not buy for the generations, but only until a new model they can afford comes out. The mobile units are by no means limited to the park communities. Hundreds of them will be found sitting beside a farm house, and this was explained to me. There was a time when, on the occasion of a son’s marriage and the addition of a wife and later of children to the farm, it was customary to add a wing or at least a lean-to on the home place. Now in many cases a mobile unit takes the place of additional building. A farmer from whom I bought eggs and home-smoked bacon told me of the advantages. Each family has a privacy it never had before. The old folks are not irritated by crying babies. The mother-in-law problem is abated because the new daughter has a privacy she never had and a place of her own in which to build the structure of a family. When they move away, and nearly all Americans move away, or want to, they do not leave unused and therefore useless rooms. Relations between the generations are greatly improved. The son is a guest when he visits the parents’ house, and the parents are guests in the son’s house.

Then there are the loners, and I have talked with them also. Driving along, you see high on a hill a single mobile home placed to command a great view. Others nestle under trees fringing a river or a lake. These loners have rented a tiny piece of land from the owner. They need only enough for the unit and the right of passage to get to it. Sometimes the loner digs a well and a cesspool, and plants a small garden, but others transport their water in fifty-gallon oil drums. Enormous ingenuity is apparent with some of the loners in placing the water supply higher than the unit and connecting it with plastic pipe so that a gravity flow is insured.

One of the dinners that I shared in a mobile home was cooked in an immaculate kitchen, walled in plastic tile, with stainless-steel sinks and ovens and stoves flush with the wall. The fuel is butane or some other bottled gas which can be picked up anywhere. We ate in a dining alcove paneled in mahogany veneer. I’ve never had a better or a more comfortable dinner. I had brought a bottle of whisky as my contribution, and afterward we sat in deep comfortable chairs cushioned in foam rubber. This family liked the way they lived and wouldn’t think of going back to the old way. The husband worked as a garage mechanic about four miles away and made good pay. Two children walked to the highway every morning and were picked up by a yellow school bus.

Sipping a highball after dinner, hearing the rushing of water in the electric dishwasher in the kitchen, I brought up a question that had puzzled me. These were good, thoughtful, intelligent people. I said, “One of our most treasured feelings concerns roots, growing up rooted in some soil or some community.” How did they feel about raising their children without roots? Was it good or bad? Would they miss it or not?

The father, a good-looking, fair-skinned man with dark eyes, answered me. “How many people today have what you are talking about? What roots are there in an apartment twelve floors up? What roots are in a housing development of hundreds and thousands of small dwellings almost exactly alike? My father came from Italy,” he said. “He grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived maybe a thousand years. That’s roots for you, no running water, no toilet, and they cooked with charcoal or vine clippings. They had just two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom where everybody slept, grandpa, father and all the kids, no place to read, no place to be alone, and never had had. Was that better? I bet if you gave my old man the choice he’d cut his roots and live like this.” He waved his hands at the comfortable room. “Fact is, he cut his roots away and came to America. Then he lived in a tenement in New York–just one room, walk-up, cold water and no heat. That’s where I was born and I lived in the streets as a kid until my old man got a job upstate in New York in the grape country. You see, he knew about vines, that’s about all he knew. Now you take my wife. She’s Irish descent. Her people had roots too.”

“In a peat bog,” the wife said. “And lived on potatoes.” She gazed fondly through the door at her fine kitchen.

“Don’t you miss some kind of permanence?”

“Who’s got permanence? Factory closes down, you move on. Good times and things opening up, you move on where it’s better. You got roots you sit and starve. You take the pioneers in the history books. They were movers. Take up land, sell it, move on. I read in a book how Lincoln’s family came to Illinois on a raft. They had some barrels of whisky for a bank account. How many kids in America stay in the place where they were born, if they can get out?”

“You’ve thought about it a lot.”

“Don’t have to think about it. There it is. I’ve got a good trade. Long as there’s automobiles I can get work, but suppose the place I work goes broke. I got to move where there’s a job. I get to my job in three minutes. You want I should drive twenty miles because I got roots?”

Later they showed me magazines designed exclusively for mobile dwellers, stories and poems and hints for successful mobile living. How to stop a leak. How to choose a place for sun or coolness. And there were advertisements for gadgets, fascinating things, for cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, furniture and beds and cribs. Also there were full-page pictures of new models, each one grander and more shiny than the next.

“There’s thousands of them,” said the father, “and there’s going to be millions.”

“Joe’s quite a dreamer,” the wife said. “He’s always figuring something out. Tell him your ideas, Joe.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t be interested.”

“Sure I would.”

“Well, it’s not a dream like she said, it’s for real, and I’m going to do it pretty soon now. Take a little capital, but it would pay off. I been looking around the used lots for the unit I want at the price I want to pay. Going to rip out the guts and set it up for a repair shop. I got enough tools nearly already, and I’ll stock little things like windshield wipers and fan belts and cylinder rings and inner tubes, stuff like that. You take these courts are getting bigger and bigger. Some of the mobile people got two cars. I’ll rent me a hundred feet of ground right near and I’ll be in business. There’s one thing you can say about cars, there’s nearly always something wrong with them that’s got to be fixed. And I’ll have my house, this here one right beside my shop. That way I would have a bell and give twenty-four-hour service.”

“Sounds like a good deal,” I said. And it does.

“Best thing about it,” Joe went on, “if business fell off, why, I’d just move on where it was good.”

His wife said, “Joe’s got it all worked out on paper where everything’s going to go, every wrench and drill, even an electric welder. Joe’s a wonderful welder.”

I said, “I take back what I said, Joe. I guess you’ve got your roots in a grease pit.”

“You could do worse. I even worked that out. And you know, when the kids grow up, we could even work our way south in the winter and north in the summer.”

“Joe does good work,” said his wife. “He’s got his own steady customers where he works. Some men come fifty miles to get Joe to work on their cars because he does good work.”

“I’m a real good mechanic,” said Joe.

Driving the big highway near Toledo I had a conversation with Charley on the subject of roots. He listened but he didn’t reply. In the pattern-thinking about roots I and most other people have left two things out of consideration. Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forced here as slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home. Wouldn’t it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency? And the fact is that we have. But that’s the short view. What are roots and how long have we had them? If our species has existed for a couple of million years, what is its history? Our remote ancestors followed the game, moved with the food supply, and fled from evil weather, from ice and the changing seasons. Then after millennia beyond thinking they domesticated some animals so that they lived with their food supply. Then of necessity they followed the grass that fed their flocks in endless wanderings. Only when agriculture came into practice–and that’s not very long ago in terms of the whole history–did a place achieve meaning and value and permanence. But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands. Thus it was that one man wanted ownership of land and at the same time wanted servitude because someone had to work it. Roots were in ownership of land, in tangible and immovable possessions. In this view we are a restless species with a very short history of roots, and those not widely distributed. Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need. Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else.

Perhaps.

But of course, there’s also John Oliver’s take:

He goes through Wisconsin (which alone among the states he described sold me on it as a place I really need to visit). Wisconsin also happens to be where Jessie lives as well as the Worldbuilder nonprofit. And some of Tara’s family. So I have no more excuse:

Why then was I unprepared for the beauty of this region, for its variety of field and hill, forest, lake? I think now I must have considered it one big level cow pasture because of the state’s enormous yield of milk products. I never saw a country that changed so rapidly, and because I had not expected it everything I saw brought a delight. I don’t know how it is in other seasons, the summers may reek and rock with heat, the winters may groan with dismal cold, but when I saw it for the first and only time in early October, the air was rich with butter-colored sunlight, not fuzzy but crisp and clear so that every frost-gay tree was set off, the rising hills were not compounded, but alone and separate. There was a penetration of the light into solid substance so that I seemed to see into things, deep in, and I’ve seen that kind of light elsewhere only in Greece. I remembered now that I had been told Wisconsin is a lovely state, but the telling had not prepared me. It was a magic day. The land dripped with richness, the fat cows and pigs gleaming against green, and, in the smaller holdings, corn standing in little tents as corn should, and pumpkins all about.

Evacuation Route for these Steinbeck travels

He fled the region in an “Evacuation Route” designed by the country motivated by fear in case of nuclear war. That paranoia drove the country at the time.

He got to this diner and was trying to find the way to Sinclair Lewis’s birthplace:

“I wonder if you can help me?” I asked the young-ancient waitress.

“What’s your trouble?”

“I guess I’m a little lost.”

“How do you mean lost?” she said.

The cook leaned through his window and rested bare elbows on the serving counter.

“I want to go to Sauk Centre and I don’t seem to be getting there.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Minneapolis.”

“Then what you doing this side of the river?”

“Well, I seem to have got lost in Minneapolis, too.”

She looked at the cook. “He got lost in Minneapolis,” she said.

“Nobody can get lost in Minneapolis,” the cook said. “I was born there and I know.”

The waitress said, “I come from St. Cloud and I can’t get lost in Minneapolis.”

“I guess I brought some new talent to it. But I want to go to Sauk Centre.”

The cook said, “If he can stay on a road he can’t get lost. You’re on Fifty-two. Cross over at St. Cloud and stay on Fifty-two.”

“Is Sauk Centre on Fifty-two?”

“Ain’t no place else. You must be a stranger around here, getting lost in Minneapolis. I couldn’t get lost blindfolded.”

I said a little snappishly, “Could you get lost in Albany or San Francisco?”

“I never been there but I bet I wouldn’t get lost.”

“I been to Duluth,” the waitress said. “And Christmas I’m going to Sioux Falls. I got a aunt there.”

“Ain’t you got relatives in Sauk Centre?” the cook asked.

“Sure, but that’s not so far away–like he says San Francisco. My brother’s in the Navy. He’s in San Diego. You got relations in Sauk Centre?”

“No, I just want to see it. Sinclair Lewis came from there.”

“Oh! Yeah. They got a sign up. I guess quite a few folks come to see it. It does the town some good.”

“He’s the first man who told me about this part of the country.”

“Who is?”

“Sinclair Lewis.”

“Oh! Yeah. You know him?”

“No, I just read him.”

I’m sure she was going to say “Who?” but I stopped her. “You say I cross at St. Cloud and stay on Fifty-two?”

The cook said, “I don’t think what’s-his-name is there any more.”

“I know. He’s dead.”

“You don’t say.”

There was a sign in Sauk Centre all right: “Birthplace of Sinclair Lewis.”

For some reason I went through there fast and turned north on 71 to Wadena and it got dark and I pounded on to Detroit Lakes. There was a face before me, a lean and shriveled face like an apple too long in the barrel, a lonely face and sick with loneliness.

I didn’t know him well, never knew him in the boisterous days when he was called Red. Toward the end of his life he called me several times in New York and we would have lunch at the Algonquin. I called him Mr. Lewis–still do in my mind. He didn’t drink any more and took no pleasure in his food, but now and then his eyes would glitter with steel.

I had read Main Street when I was in high school, and I remember the violent hatred it aroused in the countryside of his nativity.

Did he go back?

Just went through now and again. The only good writer was a dead writer. Then he couldn’t surprise anyone any more, couldn’t hurt anyone any more. And the last time I saw him he seemed to have shriveled even more. He said, “I’m cold. I seem to be always cold. I’m going to Italy.”

And he did, and he died there, and I don’t know whether or not it’s true but I’ve heard he died alone. And now he’s good for the town. Brings in some tourists. He’s a good writer now.

Felt that deep in my bones. I have more regular readers from Vienna Austria than I do in my own hometown.

Just for ducks, let’s try a little of what my boys would call this generality jazz. Under heads and subheads. Let’s take food as we have found it. It is more than possible that in the cities we have passed through, traffic-harried, there are good and distinguished restaurants with menus of delight. 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. This is true of all but the breakfasts, which are uniformly wonderful if you stick to bacon and eggs and pan-fried potatoes. At the roadsides I never had a really good dinner or a really bad breakfast. The bacon or sausage was good and packaged at the factory, the eggs fresh or kept fresh by refrigeration, and refrigeration was universal.” I might even say roadside America is the paradise of breakfast except for one thing. Now and then I would see a sign that said “home-made sausage” or “home-smoked bacons and hams” or “new-laid eggs” and I would stop and lay in supplies. Then, cooking my own breakfast and making my own coffee, I found that the difference was instantly apparent. A freshly laid egg does not taste remotely like the pale, battery-produced refrigerated egg. The sausage would be sweet and sharp and pungent with spices, and my coffee a wine-dark happiness. Can I then say that the America I saw has put cleanliness first, at the expense of taste? And–since all our perceptive nerve trunks including that of taste are not only perfectible but also capable of trauma–that the sense of taste tends to disappear and that strong, pungent, or exotic flavors arouse suspicion and dislike and so are eliminated?

Let’s go a little farther into other fields, Charley. Let’s take the books, magazines, and papers we have seen displayed where we have stopped. The dominant publication has been the comic book. There have been local papers and I’ve bought and read them. There have been racks of paperbacks with some great and good titles but overwhelmingly outnumbered by the volumes of sex, sadism, and homicide. The big-city papers cast their shadows over large areas around them, the New York Times as far as the Great Lakes, the Chicago Tribune all the way here to North Dakota. Here, Charley, I give you a warning, should you be drawn to generalities. If this people has so atrophied its taste buds as to find tasteless food not only acceptable but desirable, what of the emotional life of the nation? Do they find their emotional fare so bland that it must be spiced with sex and sadism through the medium of the paperback? And if this is so, why are there no condiments save ketchup and mustard to enhance their foods?

We have, in his view, become far too comfortable and travelled far too afield from our inborn risk taking spirit.

Fargo didn’t impress him. But it also didn’t distort his imaginary Fargo.

He crossed the Mississippi, noticing a shift in the smells, and fell in love with Montana. A place unaffected by television.

Finding Yellowstone to be the natural equivalent of Disneyland, he thought it to misrepresent the rest of America with its bounty. Charley, the dog, FREAKED OUT in this time and turned killer, ready to pick a fight with every single bear they passed. He’d never seen the dog do that before, but the poodle was spoiling for a fight at every turn.

Seattle really disturbed him with how radically it had changed from a small fishing village. How much had been gone or gutted or cannibalized for the sake of the suburbs.

Then his overloaded truck got caught in a rainstorm:

Rocinante responded to my kindness as she must, with purring motor and perfect performance. In only one thing was I thoughtless, or perhaps over-zealous. I carried too much of everything–too much food, too many books, tools enough to assemble a submarine. If I found sweet-tasting water I filled her tank, and thirty gallons of water weigh three hundred pounds. A spare container of butane gas for safety’s sake weighs seventy-five pounds. Her springs were deeply depressed but seemingly safe, and on hard-pitching roads I slowed and eased her through, and because of her ready goodness I treated her like the honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife: I ignored her. And in Oregon on a rainy Sunday, moving through an endless muddy puddle, a right rear tire blew out with a damp explosion. I have known and owned mean, ugly-natured cars which would have done this thing out of pure evil and malice, but not Rocinante.

All in the day’s work, I thought; that’s the way the ball bounces. Well, this ball had bounced in eight inches of muddy water, and the spare tire, under the cab, had been let down into the mud. The changing tools had been put away under the floor under the table, so that my total load had to be unpacked. The new jack, never used and bright with factory paint, was stiff and unruly, and it was not designed for the overhang of Rocinante. I lay on my stomach and edged my way, swam my way under the truck, holding my nostrils clear of the surface of the water. The jack handle was slippery with greasy mud. Mud balls formed in my beard. I lay panting like a wounded duck, quietly cursing as I inched the jack forward under an axle that I had to find by feel, since it was under water. Then, with superhuman gruntings and bubblings, my eyes starting from their sockets, I levered the great weight. I could feel my muscles tearing apart and separating from their anchoring bones. In actual time, not over an hour elapsed before I had the spare tire on. I was unrecognizable under many layers of yellow mud. My hands were cut and bleeding. I rolled the bad tire to a high place and inspected it. The whole side wall had blown out. Then I looked at the left rear tire, and to my horror saw a great rubber bubble on its side and, farther along, another. It was obvious that the other tire might go at any moment, and it was Sunday and it was raining and it was Oregon. If the other tire blew, there we were, on a wet and lonesome road, having no recourse except to burst into tears and wait for death. And perhaps some kind birds might cover us with leaves. I peeled off mud and clothes together and changed to new finery, which got muddy in the process.

No car has ever had such obsequious treatment as did Rocinante as we moved slowly on. Every irregularity in the road hurt me clear through. We crawled along at not more than five miles an hour. And that ancient law went into effect which says that when you need towns they are very far apart. I needed more than a town. I needed two new heavy-duty rear tires. The men who had designed my truck had not anticipated the load I would carry.

After forty years in the painful wet desert with no cloud by day nor pillar of fire by night to guide us, we came to a damp little shut-up town whose name escapes me because I never learned it. Everything was closed–everything but one small service station. The owner was a giant with a scarred face and an evil white eye. If he were a horse I wouldn’t buy him. He was a mostly silent man. “You got trouble,” he said.

“You’re telling me. Don’t you sell tires?”

“Not your size. Have to send to Portland for those. Could phone tomorrow and get them maybe the next day.”

“Isn’t there any place in town that might have them?”

“There’s two. Both closed. I don’t think they got that size. You going to need bigger tires.” He scratched his beard, peered long at the bubbles on the left rear, and poked them with a forefinger like a file. Finally he went into his little office, pushed a litter of brake linings and fan belts and catalogues aside, and from underneath dug out a telephone. And if ever my faith in the essential saintliness of humans becomes tattered, I shall think of that evil-looking man.

After three calls he found a dealer who had one of the kind and size required, but this man was tied up with a wedding and couldn’t tear himself away. Three calls later, he turned up a rumor of another tire, but it was eight miles away. The rain continued to fall. The process was endless because between each call there was a line of cars waiting to be filled with gas and oil, and all this had to be done with a stately slowness.

A brother-in-law was finally aroused. He had a farm up the road a piece. He didn’t want to get out in the rain, but my evil saint exerted some kind of pressure on him. That brother-in-law drove to the two places far apart where the tires might be, found them, and brought them to me. In a little less than four hours I was equipped, riding on big heavy-duty tires of a kind that should have been there in the first place. I could have knelt in the mud and kissed the man’s hands, but I didn’t. I tipped him rather royally and he said, “You didn’t ought to do that. Jus’ remember one thing,” he said. “Them new tires is bigger. They’re gonna change your speedometer reading. You’ll be goin’ faster’n the needle says and you get some itchy cop, why, he might pick you up.”

I was so full of humble gratefulness, I could hardly speak. That happened on Sunday in Oregon in the rain, and I hope that evil-looking service-station man may live a thousand years and people the earth with his offspring.

He felt convicted to get the French poodle to piss on a redwood — the penultimate experience for a dog. That scene is worth the price of the book.

He returned to California and found “you can’t go home again” by Thomas Wolfe was true of him and everyone he knew. Through his meditation on not killing a couple of coyotes in the Mojave:

I opened a can of beer from my refrigerator and sat well inside the shade of Rocinante, looking out at the sun-pounded plain, dotted here and there with clumps of sagebrush.

About fifty yards away two coyotes stood watching me, their tawny coats blending with sand and sun. I knew that with any quick or suspicious movement of mine they could drift into invisibility. With the most casual slowness I reached down my new rifle from its sling over my bed–the .222 with its bitter little high-speed, long-range stings. Very slowly I brought the rifle up. Perhaps in the shade of my house I was half hidden by the blinding light outside. The little rifle has a beautiful telescope sight with a wide field. The coyotes had not moved.

I got both of them in the field of my telescope, and the glass brought them very close. Their tongues lolled out so that they seemed to smile mockingly. They were favored animals, not starved, but well furred, the golden hair tempered with black guard hairs. Their little lemon-yellow eyes were plainly visible in the glass. I moved the cross hairs to the breast of the right-hand animal, and pushed the safety. My elbows on the table steadied the gun. The cross hairs lay unmoving on the brisket. And then the coyote sat down like a dog and its right rear paw came up to scratch the right shoulder.

My finger was reluctant to touch the trigger. I must be getting very old and my ancient conditioning worn thin. Coyotes are vermin. They steal chickens. They thin the ranks of quail and all other game birds. They must be killed. They are the enemy. My first shot would drop the sitting beast, and the other would whirl to fade away. I might very well pull him down with a running shot because I am a good rifleman.

And I did not fire. My training said, “Shoot!” and my age replied, “There isn’t a chicken within thirty miles, and if there are any they aren’t my chickens. And this waterless place is not quail country. No, these boys are keeping their figures with kangaroo rats and jackrabbits, and that’s vermin eat vermin. Why should I interfere?”

“Kill them,” my training said. “Everyone kills them. It’s a public service.” My finger moved to the trigger. The cross was steady on the breast just below the panting tongue. I could imagine the splash and jar of angry steel, the leap and struggle until the torn heart failed, and then, not too long later, the shadow of a buzzard, and another. By that time I would be long gone–out of the desert and across the Colorado River. And beside the sagebrush there would be a naked, eyeless skull, a few picked bones, a spot of black dried blood and a few rags of golden fur.

I guess I’m too old and too lazy to be a good citizen. The second coyote stood sidewise to my rifle. I moved the cross hairs to his shoulder and held steady. There was no question of missing with that rifle at that range. I owned both animals. Their lives were mine. I put the safety on and laid the rifle on the table. Without the telescope they were not so intimately close. The hot blast of light tousled the air to shimmering.

Then I remembered something I heard long ago that I hope is true. It was unwritten law in China, so my informant told me, that when one man saved another’s life he became responsible for that life to the end of its existence. For, having interfered with a course of events, the savior could not escape his responsibility. And that has always made good sense to me.

Now I had a token responsibility for two live and healthy coyotes. In the delicate world of relationships, we are tied together for all time. I opened two cans of dog food and left them as a votive.

Texas, his wife met him again for a Texan “orgy” and I was stirred by his naming of Texas as a militant nation that robs from the poor of other states and gives to themselves. That seems true to me. And their mystical nationalism of that militant state that is little more than a worship of the place.

He ended up going and witnessing the “cheerleaders” of the racist New Orleans folk (and those against it) with some incredibly prophetic insights of race in America. This was during integration. He makes his way home.

And at home in New York City at last, he has to ask for directions.

He was lost in his own home. You’d have to be to bring back that many boons. And I’ve always felt most lost in the “stranger comes to town” situation more than I did out on the road. Lost in our own home?

That’s America.

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Photo by Dino Reichmuth on Unsplash