America, Lost and Found: Off the Map with John Steinbeck

Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck.

Penguin Books, 2012 (1962).  206 pages.

Travel and Biography

I did not know my own country.  I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir.  In September 1960, sixty-year-old John Steinbeck, troubled that he had lost touch with America—with the pulse, the people, and the landscape so brilliantly evoked in his literary lifework—begins a journey of roughly ten thousand miles, one that skirts the perimeter of the continental United States, one that he hopes will reconnect him with the psychic and physical topography of his native land.  He records encounters and experiences in a simultaneously nostalgic and contemporary travelogue, narrative refined by a mature pen and driven by the heart of an inveterate storyteller.  

Rocinante.

Steinbeck acquires a custom-made three-quarter ton camper truck for the trip.  Rocinante, named for Don Quixote's horse, conjures droll images of impossible dreams, windmill jousting, and chivalrous oil changes. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author steers his cleverly-monikered noble steed from Long Island to Maine, through the Midwest to Chicago, on to Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Yellowstone National Park, and Idaho.  From Seattle, he rambles south to San Francisco and returns to his birthplace in the Salinas Valley of California.  He crosses the Mojave Desert, passing through Arizona, New Mexico, and the hospitable heart of Texas, before venturing into the Deep South and the city of New Orleans.  Here, Steinbeck bears witness to the nation's struggle with racial prejudice, the uneasy spectacle of desegregation; and here, Travels with Charley achieves its most poignant, elegiac tone.  Physically exhausted, emotionally drained and wishing for home, the author rolls through Alabama... Virginia... Pennsylvania... New Jersey... back to New York.  Coast to coast and home again in just over two-hundred pages, all in the company of his distinguished Standard Poodle, the titular Charley. 

Before the heavy-duty tire rubber meets the road, Steinbeck describes the process of stocking Rocinante for the trip.  He zealously overpacks everything from canned goods to padded nylon sub-zero underwear to a spare tank of bottled gas.  Most germane to our purposes here, he loads one hundred and fifty pounds of those books that one hasn’t gotten around to reading—and of course those are the books one isn’t ever going to get around to reading.  As a rule, this is true.  Books that sink to the bottom of the stack or slink to the back of the shelf or settle into a custom-made three-quarter ton camper truck named Rocinante have probably done so with good reason.  Every so often, however, we rediscover an inexplicably deferred book and come to understand that the only reason we haven’t gotten around to reading it before is because we are so obviously meant to be reading it now.  Such is the case with Travels with Charley.  We pick up a copy this summer at the Valley Book Store in Jackson, Wyoming, an independent book seller with impressive selections of regional and natural history and impeccable taste in literary fiction.  The fiftieth-anniversary paperback printing of Travels with Charley is a pleasure to have and a pleasure to hold, with retro-cool first edition cover art.  The rich, deckle-edged pages are nice to touch and nice to turn.  

Steinbeck and Charley.

Ftt.  While we normally disparage the use of talking animals in literature, we confess that employment of an expressive Standard Poodle in an autobiographical travelogue is an effective and endearing contrivance.  Charley functions as a four-legged Sancho Panza to Steinbeck's Don Quixote: faithful squire, ironic sidekick, earnest cohort, often ready to offer a sympathetic (droopy) ear.  He doesn't speak, of course, but he transforms monologue into dialogue with an all-purpose and always timely, Ftt.  Steinbeck presumes that his canine companion's unique ability to pronounce consonants results from dental deficiency: a wealth of combed and clipped mustache gave... [Charley] the appearance and attitude of a French rake of the nineteenth century, and incidentally concealed his crooked front teeth.

Corduroy.

One of the many attractions of Travels with Charley is the charming route map on the endpapers, foldout artwork by the late author and illustrator Don Freeman (the guy who gave us Corduroy, also charming, and a long-cherished bedtime picture book).  Our appreciation of endpaper cartography challenges Steinbeck's stated opinion of maps and map aficionados:
  
There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by... Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed every moment, as though there were some sort of safety in black and red lines... It is not so with me.  I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found....

John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley.

Don't get us wrong.  We appreciate the multi-hued terrain rolling by.  We don't mind being lost now and then, and we often find what we're looking for when we deviate from the black and red pin-pointing lines.  But we believe that beyond Steinbeck's assertions of safety and security, maps memorialize history and provide context.  
Whether it's with magnet maps, push-pin maps, or retrospective blogging exercises, we like to record where we’ve been and imagine where we might go next.  And sometimes, cartographic imagery and nomenclature prove downright entertaining.... 

All over the Map: An Extraordinary Atlas of the United States Featuring Towns That Actually Exist by David Jouris.
Ten Speed Press, 1994.  96 pages. 
Nonfiction and Travel
This clever little (out-of-print) book downright entertains us with an imaginative collection of thirty-three black-and-white maps grouping towns, cities, municipalities, and metropolises thematically, rather than by traditional reference criteria.  We navigate a Literary Map, a Botanical Map, a Biblical Map, a Misspelled Map, a Sporting Map, an Egotistical Map, a Pessimistic Map and, equitably, an Optimistic Map. All the while, mapmaker David Jouris reminds us, Without geography, you're nowhere.  

Travel Magnets: Oh, the Places We'll Go.

Nowhere, always longing to be somewhere.  As he prepares for his journey, Steinbeck recognizes America's desire for motion, a restive yearning to be going somewhere: Neighbors came to visit... 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 Here.  They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. 

At some moment, then, in hearts and minds, with a thousand footsteps or with a thousand miles on the odometer, we've all gone to look for America. Sing it in Central Park, 1981 Simon and Garfunkel:

Nowhere, somewhere.  Lost and found.  Peripatetic author Russell Hoban (the guy who gave us Frances the Badger, somewhat peripatetic, and a long-cherished bedtime picture book) once observed, Everyone in the world is looking for something and by means of maps each thing that is found is never lost again.  Perhaps what Steinbeck finds on his search for America is something  he suspected all along.  The American Identity is ever-evolving, and change is

Frances the Badger.

the nation's constant.  Even as Travels with Charley delivers a requiem for America Lost, it celebrates America Found, with its magnificent contradictions of landscape and people: growth and decline, promise and despair, tranquility and restlessness, beauty and ugliness. All points become part of the travelogue, push pins of light and darkness on the map of the American story.