Travels With Charley: In Search of America

by John Steinbeck

“[Americans] spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and Nature throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”

As he would, Steinbeck prepared carefully for the journey, outfitting this truck with a camper on its back as comfortably as possible. He christened his impressive new vehicle “Rocinante,” after the hero’s horse in Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

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.

We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

But New York is no more America than Paris is France or London is England.

I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir.

I wanted a three-quarter-ton pick-up truck, capable of going anywhere under possibly rigorous conditions, and on this truck I wanted a little house built like the cabin of a small boat.

A trailer is difficult to maneuver on mountain roads, is impossible and often illegal to park, and is subject to many restrictions.

And because my planned trip had aroused some satiric remarks among my friends, I named it Rocinante, which you will remember was the name of Don Quixote’s horse.

I was told that since my photograph was as widely distributed as my publisher could make it, I would find it impossible to move about without being recognized. Let me say in advance that in over ten thousand miles, in thirty-four states, I was not recognized even once. I believe that people identify things only in context.

I was advised that the name Rocinante painted on the side of my truck in sixteenth-century Spanish script would cause curiosity and inquiry in some places. I do not know how many people recognized the name, but surely no one ever asked about it.

“Anyway, I hated it. Wouldn’t live there if you paid me.”

He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down. He is a very big poodle, of a color called bleu, and he is blue when he is clean. Charley is a born diplomat. He prefers negotiation to fighting, and properly so, since he is very bad at fighting. Only once in his ten years has he been in trouble—when he met a dog who refused to negotiate. Charley lost a piece of his right ear that time.

A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.

“I’ll do anything,” he said. And I believe he would. I don’t think he ever gave up until I drove away without him. He had the dream I’ve had all my life, and there is no cure.

Also 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 around to reading.

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.

For the first time in my life I had a knife when I needed it.

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.

In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won’t happen.

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.

They visited my truck in droves, as many as fifteen at a time in the little cabin. And they looked courteous curses at me because I could go and they could not. My own son will probably never forgive me. Soon after I drove off, I stopped to make sure there were no stowaways.

In the morning I would have to reorganize my cargo. No one can tell how to do it. The technique must be learned the way I learned it, by failures.

Roosters were crowing before I went to sleep. And I felt at last that my journey was started.

Early-rising men not only do not talk much to strangers, they barely talk to one another. Breakfast conversation is limited to a series of laconic grunts. The natural New England taciturnity reaches its glorious perfection at breakfast.

I’d like to see how long an Aroostook County man can stand Florida.

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

I can’t even imagine the forest colors when I am not seeing them. I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. “It is a glory,” she said, “and can’t be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise.”

Not far outside of Bangor I stopped at an auto court and rented a room. It wasn’t expensive. The sign said “Greatly Reduced Winter Rates.”

On a chance I asked, “How soon you going to Florida? ” “Nex’ week,” she said listlessly. Then something stirred in that aching void. “Say, how do you know I’m going?” “Read your mind, I guess.”

Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.

I began to formulate a new law describing the relationship of protection to despondency. A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

It is not unlike me that in heading toward the West I should travel east. That has always been my tendency.

I also got lost in Ellsworth, which I am told is impossible.

“I seem to be lost, officer. I wonder if you could direct me?” “Where is it you want to go?” “I’m trying to get to Deer Isle.” He looked at me closely, and when he was satisfied that I wasn’t joking he swung on his hips and pointed across a small stretch of open water, and he didn’t bother to speak. “Is that it?” He nodded from up to down and left his head down. “Well, how do I get there?” I have always heard that Maine people are rather taciturn, but for this candidate for Mount Rushmore to point twice in an afternoon was to be unbearably talkative. He swung his chin in a small arc in the direction I had been traveling. If the afternoon had not been advancing I would have tried for another word from him even if doomed to failure. “Thank you,” I said, and sounded to myself as though I rattled on forever.

“Perhaps he catches mice and rats,” I suggested helpfully. “Never,” said Miss Brace. “Wouldn’t think of it. And do you want to know something? George is a girl.”

One doesn’t have to be sensitive to feel the strangeness of Deer Isle.

And not only here but in other inlets nearby are very large lobster pounds crawling with those dark-shelled Maine lobsters from the dark water which are the best lobsters in the world. Miss Brace ordered up three, not more than a pound and a half, she said, and that night their excellence was demonstrated beyond a doubt. There are no lobsters like these—simply boiled, with no fancy sauces, only melted butter and lemon, they have no equals anywhere.

A farmer in upper New York State painted the word “cow” in big black letters on both sides of his white bossy, but the hunters shot it anyway.

The radios warned against carrying a white handkerchief. Too many hunters seeing a flash of white have taken it for the tail of a running deer and cured a head cold with a single shot.

Lots of people had talked of Aroostook County, but I had never met anyone who had actually been there.

That old fake about the moss growing on the north sides of trees lied to me when I was a Boy Scout. Moss grows on the shady side, and that may be any side.

Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly.

“It’s words,” he said. “It’s a word charm.” “Can you say them to me?” “Sure,” he said and he droned, “In nomine Patris et Fillii et Spiritus Sancti.” “What does it mean?” I asked. He raised his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a charm against evil spirits so I am not afraid of them.”

I got up from bed and lifted my 30/30 carbine from the wall and listened again near the door of Rocinante—and I heard the steps come closer. Then Charley roared his warning and I opened the door and sprayed the road with light. It was a man in boots and a yellow oilskin. The light pinned him still. “What do you want?” I called. He must have been startled. It took him a moment to answer. “I want to go home. I live up the road.”

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. 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.

roulotte

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states.

I can report that I moved north in Maine roughly parallel to U.S. Highway 1 through Houlton, Mars Hill, Presque Isle, Caribou, Van Buren, turned westward, still on U.S. 1, past Madawaska, Upper Frenchville, and Fort Kent, then went due south on State Highway 11 past Eagle Lake, Winterville, Portage, Squa Pan, Masardis, Knowles Corner, Patten, Sherman, Grindstone, and so to Millinocket.