Decades after the publication of two of his most celebrated novels, The Grape of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck, two years shy of his sixtieth birthday, embarked on a journey to rediscover America. With his black poodle, Charley, Steinbeck trekked across the country in a camper he dubbed Rocinante: a humorous nod to Don Quixote’s mount in the 1605 and 1615 book by Miguel de Cervantes. He packed plenty of paper, plenty of writing utensils, and plenty of booze only to run into the traffic snarl that is New York City and surrounding areas. Eventually, he broke free and headed first to New England and then west to Niagara Falls, Chicago, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Seattle, and then he turned south. California. His old stomping grounds, Salinas. And then east. The Mojave Desert. Texas. New Orleans. The deep South. And finally north. Virginia. New York. Long Island and his home in Sag Harbor. In 1960, the year he took this trip, America was in the midst of the Cold War. The Korean conflict had been put on pause, and the war in Vietnam had not yet broken out, at least for the Americans. Steinbeck wrote about his country his entire career, joking one time that he could not join the rest of the expatriates – Ernest Hemingway among them – in Paris because he could not afford the price of a ticket. His muses were his own people: salt of the earth types whose hands were always calloused, whose days were filled with toil under the sun, dawn till dusk. Steinbeck felt that he needed to reacquaint himself with these people, his countrymen: listen to the cadences in their voices, the words they use, the concerns they have. America was in a different place, politically speaking. The smoke from the second Red Scare, fomented by the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, still lingered, which meant that Americans were still acutely suspicious of anything even resembling communism. The Russians and the Chinese were our enemies. Nobody wanted to be called pinko. To be sure, the country was on edge. Atomic war remained a very real and sobering possibility. This was the charge in the air Steinbeck discovered everywhere he went.
How many Americans reacted to Russian “groupness” was to become hyper individualistic. If the Commies deferred to the government to do their thinking, then a good American thought for him or herself. They were shackled to mindless conformity. We were independent in every sense of the word. The way many Americans lived in the world was socio-politically inspired. This was the age of the Lone Ranger. Gunsmoke. Wagon Train. Bonanza. TV series that celebrated American ruggedness and individuality. Can-do, stand-up men who defeat their enemies with wit and wiles and, of course, rifles. It was nostalgia brought to life on these relatively new machines populating living rooms across the country: television sets. It was a reminder of our scrappy roots. Who we once were. Who we still are. Hi-ho Silver.
This was much different from the America Steinbeck had written about in the 1930s. The Great Depression was extremely rough, to say the least, but people stuck by each other. They helped when they could. Steinbeck calls it the family of man, but in other places, he calls it the phalanx. A Roman phalanx was a military unit composed of soldiers who held their shields and weapons in all directions as they moved from place to place. They worked as a team to accomplish the same goal. They were very effective and very lethal. Steinbeck’s America in 1960 did not resemble this way of being a community. People, he found, were anxious and distant. In retrospect, the protests and violence of the late 1960s makes sense. Steinbeck was merely observing the germination. His travelogue, therefore, becomes very helpful in tracking the trajectory that led to assassinations and the torching of cities. A man with a black dog told us something about ourselves. In less than a decade, the madness would peak.
My grandmother once told me a story about the time she was in a one-room school over on the back of the hill. Each day, each child would bring an ingredient. A potato. An onion. A few carrots. And the teacher would gather up the ingredients at the beginning of the day and toss them into a pot that sat on a woodstove in the middle of the classroom. Whatever was prepared would be lunch. And this was at the height of the Great Depression.
What Steinbeck’s book, Travels With Charley, tells us is that the country was becoming one where individuals kept their own potatoes, their own onions, their own carrots, refusing to contribute them to the pot. And this was over sixty years ago. Would Steinbeck dare strike out on the road today? It is yet again a different country. I, for one, can only speculate with my own black dog, Arrow, and carrots in the refrigerator, my truck in the driveway, the country, the world always at my fingertips.
https://www.amazon.com/Travels-Charley-Search-America-Steinbeck/dp/0140053204/ref=sr_1_1?crid=10R10TQ5H0F2U&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.agpreFfMvhgG2x7NrlleWw5LipRJenfbMzycgYjYuy0dhKjGjIRPiyN4CPDW57oHZ6bX9MVTxGYV6kL-mgCzPAxE_epcgUR1AYowFIrJNRJsldL-smaST-pF2uHs9_c1AXg3q6EduIXlG4Em2S1g91or-KeROoMWpQRererGDfWv0iUElvbrubHBiZSmqKUQCjw9t44kcCgT7B2ISsdgnyc0ZvN1EAsHsQtRw03NYqA.BWGX3QcFIgX6cUqygAtNRlL1aZXEWAwFyMD69EKP8MU&dib_tag=se&keywords=travels+with+charley&qid=1734230737&sprefix=travels+with+charley%2Caps%2C102&sr=8-1
