Travels with Charley and Ghost Dancing

Travels with Charley In Search of America.  By John Steinbeck

First Published: The Curtis Publishing Company, Inc. 1961

Currently available:  Penguin Books. pb., 214 pp. $15.

Blue Highways A Journey into America. By William Least Heat-Moon

First Published:  Little Brown and Company. 1982

Currently Available:  First Back Bay pb., 429 pp.  $14.95

            The travel narrative in America has a lustrous provenance.  Early visitors like Thomas Harriot and Rene de Chateaubriand, explorers like John Powell and Stephen Long, and adventurers like Jack London and Everett Ruess have all left their imprint on our national consciousness, have helped us form our thoughts about who we are and where we’re going.

            John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways are both thoughtful representatives of this genre which not only describes but which, at its best, references a larger gestalt of meaning.  Both men set out to explore the back roads of America.  Both writers regard their journey partially as an escape and partially as an exploration.  Both are well aware that the one person the traveler cannot leave behind is himself, and that what he sees and describes is characterized as much by his own personality as by chance encounters in the places he visits.

            The condition from which Steinbeck is retreating during his three month trip around America, is the encroaching infirmity of old age.  In 1959 he suffered a series of small strokes, and by setting off alone, accompanied only by a large, blue poodle named Charley, he is proving to himself that he can once again take charge of his life.  It is a gesture of courage.

            Significantly, Steinbeck names the three-quarter-ton truck that he outfits with a cabin for his expedition, after Don Quixote’s horse, Rocinate.  For, twenty-one years after its publication, the writer of Grapes of Wrath now sees Americans as obsessed with material things.  He feels that the nation has lost its way, but that the issues are too big, too complicated and amorphous for any clear solutions to present themselves.  Hence he is the idealistic Don Quixote throwing lances at windmills, and his dog Charley serves as the foil Sancho Panza for comic relief.

            In a series of fugue-like essays distilled from his experiences, he mulls over the plasticizing of  America, the disappearance of regional speech, the advent of mobile homes, free-floating anxiety over nuclear capability, and a bleak environmental future (yes, even then).  Interspersed between these musings are some wonderful descriptions which are indelibly Steinbeck’s.  He describes people, for instance, who “are folded over their coffee cups like ferns,” and a place where the “darkling water seems to suck up the light.”  Like any good travel writer, Steinbeck makes us want to go where he has been.  His haunting characterization of Deer Isle had me hunched over my computer for hours looking at beaches and driftwood and wind-blasted trees.  I’d rent a cabin on the isle in an instant, based on nothing more than Steinbeck’s recommendation.

            An idea may grow hidden in the mind until an event or trauma gives it compelling impetus.  As a young man in the navy, William Least Heat-Moon had read Steinbeck’s best-seller, Travels with Charley, but it wasn’t until sixteen years later, with only some gasoline credit cards and $454 dollars to his name, that Least Heat-Moon left home to follow in the spirit of Steinbeck’s journey.

            Least Heat-Moon had just learned that he had lost his job teaching college English and that his estranged wife was living with someone else.  Partly in flight from the upheaval of his “cancelled expectations,” and partly in a quest to define what he, himself, values,  Least Heat-Moon hits the road on the vernal equinox of 1978 to circle the nation on its back roads, the roads represented by the blue lines on the maps of America.  The vehicle that he chooses is a half-ton van that he names Ghost Dancing.

            As with Steinbeck’s Rocinate, this choice of names for his vehicle is significant, representing for Least Heat-Moon a past beyond redeeming.  But against the author’s expectations, the journey changes and renews him, and the reader, along for the ride, is treated to some of the most exquisite prose in the English language.

            Right off, in the beginning of his narrative, Least Heat-Moon recalls his father’s observation that “a man becomes his attentions.”  What Least Heat-Moon pays attention to is the geography and the history of a place and how they form or erode the individuals within it.  He is interested in what motivates people, from a former policeman turned Trappist monk, to a couple building a boat by hand, to a man who carries a live bullet in his breast pocket.  He is interested in why a road pike is called a pike and how the number of calendars hung on a café wall may be used to predict the food quality, and how towns like Babylon, Decoy, Bear Wallow, and Remote got their names.  Most of all, he is interested in the finely crafted sentence, and it is his skill with language which allows William Least Heat-Moon to rivet the reader right there with him following “a curve so long” that you cannot “see the bend.”