Travels with Charley
It's been a long July for me. The past few weeks I've experienced passion, anxiety, sickness, humility, and deep connection. As I've reduced my pace, I've dedicated myself to reading more. This is the first month I've read three books since last July - a funny pattern to appear. I read Thinking in Systems, Look to Windward, and just finished Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck.
I've long admired Steinbeck. I remember once checking out several of his books at once from the college library, dutifully stacking them by my bed: The Pearl, The Winter of our Discontent. I remember reading Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden - the latter to impress a college girlfriend. The Grapes of Wrath radically altered my politics at an impressionable age. I suspect revisiting these books now I'd have a completely different experience.
That's all to say that I have a history with John Steinbeck, as an author. I never explored his personal life. Written towards the end of his career, Travels is a story of a man trying to reconnect with his Americana roots. Places are memories, shaped by the tides of time. The gaps in the story are written in embarassment - guiltily, as if to avoid the pain of owning his own changes from scrapping youth to fame and success. There's a contradiction between rich author staying in a luxurious hotel to camping by the riverside in Rocinante.
I enjoyed the book and found myself drifting in my imagination on my own road trip across the country. I've previously attempted two and completed one cross country road trip. At 17, desperate to get away, I set out from New Jersey - but never made it out of Pennsylvania, felled by the first road block. A second go in my early 20s succeeded, when I joined my friend moving to SoCal. We cleared the country in 4 days, going so fast as to overheat the engine. As Steinbeck says, sticking to the highways I can't say that I saw the country, just a shifting landscape.
The nature of trips
Steinbeck says that a trip takes the traveler more than the traveler takes the trip. I think this may be true. I've experienced hints of it over the years. I notice that, leaving the house, a subtle turn overtakes me: I attune to being on a trip, my rhythms adjust to the variations. When I return, I feel somehow completely different and exactly the same, as I embrace my home coffee maker and rocking chair. A trip subjects me to itself, its will is in charge, not mine - I am a passenger in the true sense.
I also relate to how trips may end before returning home. On my trip to Thailand, I recall distinctly arriving in Bangkok for the last leg, and being absolutely sure I could go home that instant and not be sorry for it. I was done, I had seen all I could possibly see, experienced as many highs and lows as possible: my tank was on empty. On the other hand, other trips beg for more, leave me aching to return, to see more, do more, experience more. I felt this way in London, not getting to do more than half of what I had planned - and that being a fraction of all available to do!
Mass production
A common observation of Steinbeck is the changing of the cityscapes. As he describes, cities are ringed with wrecked and decaying cars and such detritus of mass production. The old city centers are hollowed out, surrounded by suburbs teeming with wealth and investment. He doesn't lament the changes; rather, throughout the book, he accepts that change is inevitable, neither good nor bad, just a fact of being old enough to remember when things were different.
Another common observation is the impact of mass produced goods. Breakfast, he notes, is always freshly prepared and delicious, while plastic wrapped dinners are bland and hardly worth eating. Goods then trend towards a tolerable minimum quality, they're standardized in their blandness. The same applies to culture: as radio and television spread a mass produced culture, regional variations in speech and behavior start to fade. What was noticeable in 1960 can only be verified in 2025, with the internet erasing every last barrier to connection between communities.
On this last point I can't help but reflect on my own life. When I need anything I reach immediately for Amazon and have the item next day. The information I receive through media content on the television, phone and computer are bland, harmless and without meaning. There's little real in my life, not mediated through safety filters and quality control. It's not all bad, I am grateful that I have clean water and safe food to eat. But I think the overproduction of safety and comfort has come at a price.
America
In his humble quest, Steinbeck set out to find the real America. By his own admission, it was an impossible quest: he talked to maybe a few dozen individuals out of countless millions. I am amazed at the similarities between his observations in 1960 and today. Maybe most notably, the politic divisions. He describes family political disagreements as a kind of civil war in intensity - something that cuts against the narrative that recent times are the most political (a recurring theme, I guess, kept alive through media agitation and political interests).
I am fully American, I don't have roots outside the country. I can trace my ancestry back to the revolutionary war. When I think of the country, I think of opportunity, as a shared belief. It's a land of immigrants cutting ties and starting over. And within the country itself, cutting ties and starting over - it's a big country after all. Maybe prosperity is the shared belief, shared myth, that binds us together. I promise that I don't know either.