Gone to Look for America

“Conejo de mi Alma,” I said. “Rabbit of my soul, hear me out.”
—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

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Perhaps I should be ashamed, as a well-educated wannabe U.S. history teacher, that I just read my first John Steinbeck book. (I might have read some shorter Steinbeck for high school lit, but I don’t remember, so it doesn’t count.) But now that I’ve finished Travels with Charley, I mostly feel that I’ve missed out.

I guess that gives away the ending: I loved Travels. Loved. (The kind that takes up a sentence of its own just so it can be both “capital L” and “period.”)

Writers of travels encounter the story according to their own temperament. Bill Bryson travels from one joke to the next. Brad Herzog looks for the neat story, no loose ends. William Least Heat Moon (Blue Highways), running away as he is, and in love with the land, sees geology and geography and climate wherever he looks. Steinbeck sees what happens to himself. It is his focus on the experience of travel, and his unabashed chutzpah (seen, e.g., in his spending less than five minutes in Yellowstone N.P., all of it in his truck), that won my heart.

Steinbeck doesn’t ignore what he travels through. He spends a lot of time, for example, describing the dark woods of Maine. But the point is how those woods make him feel, more than to paint a word picture or explain how the climate affected Mainer culture. The book is subtitled “in search of America,” but the journey Steinbeck records is one in search of himself.

As I’ve been reading more travel writing, one of the things I’ve thought about is, do you need to be an outsider to do it well? Is the fresh perspective that alien eyes bring a sine qua non for good travelogues? After reading Travels with Charley, I’ll answer “no.” Steinbeck is a native son if ever there was one. He knows America. He is still moved by it. And he passes that onto his readers.

Read Travels with Charley. Finding America through Steinbeck’s eyes is a rare experience.