Travels with Charley: In Search of America

by John Steinbeck

My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

I wish I could like submarines, for then I might find them beautiful, but they are designed for destruction, and while they may explore and chart the sea bottom, and draw new trade lines under the Arctic ice, their main purpose is threat. And I remember too well crossing the Atlantic on a troop ship and knowing that somewhere on the way the dark things lurked searching for us with their single-stalk eyes. Somehow the light goes bleak for me when I see them and remember burned men pulled from the oil-slicked sea. And now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.

Too much of our technology is used to kill.

“Well, then. You soon get used to it. Care to go below for a cup of coffee? There’s plenty of time.”

And that right there is the whole purpose of his trip. To meet other people and see other points of view.

“So long,” I said. “I hope you have a good—future.”

That is the third time we've paused before the word future. Did the subs make our lives more secure? Did they help provide a future? Do we face the same threats? Do we have a secure --- future?

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

I have several teacher friends who teach a lesson on how much trash each of us produces. It is astounding. My son works in a recycling plant, a futile endeavor. About the only thing we actually manage to properly recycle is cardboard. We are burying ourselves in trash. We are filling our oceans with trash. It is insane.

When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

“Maybe, or maybe they just don’t want to tell. I remember other elections when there would be pretty peppery arguments. I haven’t heard even one.”

The political problems we have now are nothing new.

Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

And now a force was in hand how much more strong, and we hadn’t had time to develop the means to think, for man has to have feelings and then words before he can come close to thought and, in the past at least, that has taken a long time.

And now we have AI and bio-tech and all kinds of other sci-fi reality. People can't keep up.

The best of learning came on the morning radio, which I learned to love. Every town of a few thousand people has its station, and it takes the place of the old local newspaper.

Be thankful if your local radio show still has local programming.

I like weather rather than climate.

For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

Joseph Addison

The Spectator—Thursday,

From Wikipedia: The Spectator was a daily publication founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England, lasting from 1711 to 1712. The Spectator was something that every middle-class household with aspirations to looking like its members took literature seriously would want to have. So basically it was a daily literary publication.

“Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem Cogitat, et speciosa dehinc miracula promat.” —Horace.

The quote is from The Odyssey. I'm not going to pretend that I knew that without looking it up. He does not lavish at a blaze his fire, Sudden to glare and in a smoke expire; But from a cloud of smoke he breaks to light, And pours his specious miracles to sight.

And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

a hunting coat with corduroy cuffs and collar and a game pocket in the rear big enough to smuggle an Indian princess into a Y.M.C.A.

Ok, I love the imagery, yes! But why would I want to do that?

bedizened woman

Decked out, dressed up.

But I guess the truth is that I simply like junk.

The next morning, I washed the plastic bucket, put in two shirts, underwear, and socks, added hot water and detergent, and hung it by its rubber rope to the clothes pole, where it jigged and danced crazily all day.

Imagine living in an America where you can't find a laundrymat.

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

Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid.

It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work.

And we hate and despise the people who work so hard for us. We can be a mean people.

I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.

I hope we learn to respect and appreciate them.

The rivers were full of logs, bank to bank for miles, waiting their turn at the abbattoir to give their woody hearts so that the bulwarks of our civilization such as Time magazine and the Daily News can survive, to defend us against ignorance.

Now all they give their hearts to is for toilet paper, to defend us against skid marks.

Joseph Alsop,

John Knox church

Presbyterian?

Elvis Presley,

Cole Porter,

Alan P. H...

I think that this one is a joke.

Red Lewis

Sinclair Lewis. Steinbeck can play around wih his fellow literary geniuses names. He assumes we've all read "Main Street".

Main Street.

Geoffrey of Monmouth

History of British Kings,

Dwight D. Eisenhower

If my home town wants me in horse-blanket pins, nothing I can do is likely to change it, particularly the truth.

I'd love to see his reaction to the Steinbeck Center in Salnas.

I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men. There’s nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists. I highly approve of vaccination, feel it should be compulsory; rabies is a dreadful thing. And yet I found myself hating the rule and all governments that made rules.

All kinds of people feel this way, but won't admit that the shot is necessary.

These great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders.

Written at a time when America was just learning how to build and drive on modern highways.

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

That's ok, because now everything looks the same anyway.

Consider then the small, unnoticed turning of the steering wheel, perhaps the exertion of only one pound for each motion, the varying pressure of foot on accelerator, not more than half a pound perhaps but an enormous total over a period of six hours. Then there are the muscles of shoulders and neck, constantly if unconsciously flexed for emergency, the eyes darting from road to rear-view mirror, the thousand decisions so deep that the conscious mind is not aware of them.

This in a day before power steering and power brakes.

It seemed to me that regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process.

I would love to hear Steinbecks opinion of the internet and what it is doing to world culture. We have had 100 years of radio, 80 years of television and 30 years of the internet to homogenize America and the world's culture. I had a friend who used to joke that we were all raised by the same television. He was right.

Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know.

Maybe understanding is possible only after.

Normally his tone would have sparked a tinder in me. I would have flared an ugliness of anger and he would then have been able to evict me with pleasure and good conscience. We might even have edged into a quarrel with passion and violence. That would be only normal, except that the beauty and the quiet made me slow to respond with resentment, and in my hesitation I lost it. I said, “I knew it must be private. I was about to look for someone to ask permission or maybe pay to rest here.”

Proverbs 15:1 -- “A soft word turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”

Hollanderized.

A process of having furs cleaned.

It is sad that I didn’t stop to sample Swiss Cheese Candy. Now I can’t persuade anyone that it exists, that I did not make it up.

Come on John, if you didn't eat it, it doesn't exist. You know that, it's like a rule.

Beside the road I saw a very large establishment, the greatest distributor of sea shells in the world—and this in Wisconsin, which hasn’t known a sea since pre-Cambrian times.

Seashells in Wisconsin was interesting to me as well, so I tried to google it. I found this interesting link from a man who disagreed with Mr. Steinbeck. https://fossilsandotherlivingthings.blogspot.com/2015/10/my-apologies-john-steinbeck-but-i-care.html

“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.”

You gotta love Americans.

If there had been room in Rocinante I would have packed the W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them. I have all of them, and some are very rare.

You can find these online, in eBook form. They are fantastic, describing an America that does not exist any more.

I would have looked up Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where I stopped, and would have known why it is called Detroit Lakes, who named it, when, and why. I stopped near there late at night and so did Charley, and I don’t know any more about it than he does.

Because in 1927 they changed it from Detroit to Detroit Lakes so that it would not get confused with Detroit, MI. All Hail Wikipedia!