My eighty year old neighbour lent me this book to read, and I have taken on a last minute, overdue trip to celebrate a belated 50 year birthday with high school classmates who all reached this milestone in the midst of the only pandemic we have ever lived through.
It’s a fun premise, fraught with the expected tropes of masculinity and racist ideas that were pervasive in a man of independent means in the 1960s. I know that John Steinbeck is renowned writer, but I honestly didn’t expect him to be such a vagabond American. Indeed, this is a account of a solo three month trip he took through thirty-four states over ten thousand miles, with his dog as his sole companion. There are a few clues early on, though, that this is not a gritty adventure story.
His dog is a blue poodle named Charley that was raised in France, so he responds much better to French commands.
Still, he recalls memories of WWII that he carries out with him across the river as he travels by ferry to his first landfall. In his favour, I hear a little of Bill Bryson, if I was going backwards in a Time Machine, if he was more tone deaf to his privilege, and less motivated to achieve “all of something”, like the Appalachian trail or Australia.
John Steinbeck is often very funny. About his dog, he writes, “ It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am but in other he is abysmally ignorant. He can’t read. He can’t drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics.”
I also identified with his literary habits, having compiled and piled and reduced a stack of books myself for this trip, leaving three “must-reads” for upcoming book clubs that I will likely be incompletely prepared for, and choosing instead two books that were unplanned and carry no social value, but for the pure pleasure of reading them. He says, “ I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless…I laid in a hundred and fifty pounds of those books one hasn’t got around to reading— and of course those are the books one isn’t ever going to get to reading.” (In this I hear my dear uncle echoing my dear grandmother’s dry humour).
RE: Florida “I’ve lived in good climate. It bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate…How can one know colour in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness??
I initially thought that this would be the first book I would read by Steinbeck, but the list in front, with Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden all books I wish I had read, reminded me that I had read the Pearl in high school, although I think I conflated it with the Old Man and the Sea, which I hated with a passion that remain hot coals today. Is it possible that it was about a deep sea free diver before that was a sport, but a necessary high risk life choice as occupation?
While the intro is strong, appealing to the “virus of restlessness” (Wanderluster in the colloquial) in me, in my 50s, there is much of his story that is of a privilege and exclusion that I cannot identify with. While apparently handy, he orders a camper van made-to-order instead of kitting it out himself, and starts off from his home in Sag Harbour, Long Island, leaving behind his wife and boat that he foolishly rescues in a hurricane for reasons that I can only describe as foolish and egotistical. He also contradicts himself in many circumstances, describing cities encircled by garbage, and then blithely describing aluminum dishes being “disposable” and throwing them into the water after cooking one dinner. To be fair, he also covers his hot dish with an asbestos cover when cooking, so it’s easy to judge things in hindsight that most people were blind to at the time.
I enjoyed the way he didn’t make me need to google something, kindly teaching me something I didn’t know without making me feeling like I should have known. Describing his “roulotte”, “…I named it Rocinante, which you will remember was the name of Don Quixote’s horse.” Since then, however, I have been struggling to remember the exact definition of many words, and since I am not connected to internet, I have to rely on the context and my distant memory of exactly what the descriptions mean: taciturn (written in the margin helpfully: temperamentally disinclined to talk), tawdry(efforts), laconic(speech), spangle (the autumn), yeomanry,
Some words evoked immediate images with certainty, but I suspect my daughter would have no idea what a gunny sack or a doodad even is, and would not even imaging what a whaling from a parent would be!)
Some of his truths are universal: “I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost.”
After the strange inclusion of the hurricane, he sets off and quite quickly gets himself into frost. He travels east through Maine and makes his way to Deer Isle, which he describes poorly, but, reading between the lines, it is likely another enclave of exclusivity, to visit a friend, parking outside and sleeping in the caravan for a brief visit. Nonetheless, there is perhaps an old time respect for the “reputation” of Miss Brace to have a male visitor (or maybe it was really just not to interfere with her cat George).
Despite being unable to describe the place, his comment “One doesn’t have to be sensitive to feel the strangeness of Deer Isle” is enough to make me want to go there myself! Note: the chief town is Stonington, which he compares to Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, and the open country like Dartmoor, with Maine speech like that in West County England, with double vowels pronounced as in Anglo-Saxon, and,like the coastal people below the Bristol Channel, they are “secret people, perhaps magic people…This Isle is like Avalon.” This is where coon cats live wild, larger than their tailless cousins of Manx origin. Also, he missed Baxter State Park, but maybe I shouldn’t. I have a little glimmer of recollection that in these places in Maine, Martha Stewart may live.
I don’t know why he can’t say the word Canadian unless he is talking about French Canadians, but he always calls us Canucks, which I never knew was a pejorative from the American lips that refer to other migrants as Hindus, Filipinos, Mexican “wetbacks”, “Okies”, and “negroes”
« Vacilando », a Spanish word that means to enjoy the act of wandering more than arriving at the final destination. He describes the idea while in his search of great potatoes in Aroostook county (One of three great US potato growing areas: Idaho, Suffolk County on Long Island, and Aroostook county, Maine)
Here is aurora borealis in his words: “I’ve seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveller upstage in an infinite theater. In colors of rose and lavender and purple it moved and pulsed against the night, and the frost-sharpened stars shone through it.
After a period low mood mimicking the grey weather “under the weeping night”, his mood changes with the weather. “The sun was up when I awakened and the world was remade and shining. There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I. The night fears and loneliness were so far gone that I could hardly remember them.”
Misogyny and misanthropy (not tipping the waitress because she complained that she didn’t get tipped), « lumberman doing their logging in the whorehouse and their sex in the woods », « Illinois » « Rather it was like a beautiful woman who requires the support and help of many faceless ones just to keep her going.But this fact does not make her less lovely-if you can afford her. »
“I have further established, at least to my own satisfaction, that those states with the shortest history and the least world-shaking events have the most historical markers.”
Nostalgia:
« Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local temp. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of poetry of time and place must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless. »
« Can I then say that the America I saw has put cleanliness first, at the expense of taste? »
Insightful
« In the pattern thinking of about roots I amend 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 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 forces here as slaves, are descended fro 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 shift view. What are root and how long have we had them? If our species has existed for a couple of million years, what is its history? Our remotes 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 domes. ticated 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. »
John Steinbeck
Sometimes he’s a real idiot. In the eye of a hurricane, he frees his boat from entanglement with other improperly moored boats.
He leaves his wife and kids as though he was a bachelor.
He uses toxic chemicals in his truck to kill insects and is surprised that his dog Charly has a reaction, calling it an allergy.
He’s entitled. He decides to go on a cross country trip and orders a custom built truck.
Most of the time he is in Long Island as a one-percentor or interrupting his trip in Chicago to reconnect with his wife, hiring a taxi to follow to the hotel when he gets lost, inventing a character after insisting on a room for a shower before his room is ready, and leaving his poodle at the groomers for the duration of his stay.
