In Search of America, Part 1

"Rocinante," John Steinbeck's camper, named for Don Quixote's horse.

Recently I was given a copy of John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley: In Search of America, from Kevin and Amy. This book is already shaping up to define the next leg of this trip, and possibly the whole journey. In September I was attached to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and in October it was Into The Wild and Walden. Travels With Charley speaks to me just as those books did then, and it often seems as if Steinbeck's trip around the country in 1956, with his trusted dog Charlie, parallels much of my own experiences and thinking.

I haven't gotten through half of the book yet, but almost every page is dog-eared. In 2004, Laura bought me Rilke's Letters To a Young Poet, and it has been by my side on every trip I've been on since then. Travels With Charley seems to be on that same path...

"A trip, a safari, and exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it." --Jon Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America, 1962