Steinbeck's Travels: A Prescient Meditation on Americana Road Trips
I read John Steinbeck's final work, "Travels with Charley in Search of America", and found deeper truths seemingly unexplored in other road trip stories.
The first road trip I remember taking was a four-hour drive east from Detroit to the North American tourist Mecca, Niagara Falls. I was approximately four years old and I only remember fragments: taking two caravans with family friends, communicating with them on Walkie-Talkies, making a bathroom break at a rest stop whose graffiti-laden walls I owe the pleasure of teaching me the word “cunt”, a memorably mediocre dinner at Rainforest Cafe, my first Tim Horton’s foray, and two adjoining hotel rooms with an unlocked door in between them for easy maneuvering. I don’t actually remember anything about the waterfalls. The travel and the pit stops that take residence in my core memory could be because I was a small child who viewed the world’s mundanities with an imposing lens, but it speaks to an inherently American experience. As Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “there is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
That idea has become canon in our culture, revealing a greater truth about the American experience and why it’s sometimes better to take the scenic route. There’s something about the journey as opposed to the destination that is devoid of expectations, where each occurrence feels like a happy accident along life’s trials and tribulations. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but destination vacations usually hinge on a good plan. When I reach the destination, there’s usually a plan, and the better I stick to my script, the better my time at the destination will be. But on the way there, everything that happens is a bonus, little folds of life that can add to the texture of a wonderful trip. I’m not the first person to wax poetic about road trips; some of the most essential American art centers around travel and road trips. The irreverence of Little Miss Sunshine, the social commentary of Green Book, and Paris, Texas’ grapple with mortality are all stories that take place across the country’s highways and back roads. Many preeminent American literary classics center around road trips as well-- think Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, or Charles Portis’ Dog of the South.
There are endless examples of road trip art, but what spurred my thought process was John Steinbeck’s final (and somewhat unappreciated) masterpiece, 1962’s Travels with Charley in Search of America. In true red-blooded, Land of the Free fashion, Steinbeck-- arguably the most important voice of 20th century America-- set back out on the road in a rigged caravan with his dog to recapture the glory and relearn the culture of a country he had won over, and since become so out of touch with. The trip was supposed to give Steinbeck a greater understanding of what made the country great, and while he succeeded in that mission-- the fabric of hundreds of different cultures in each of the country’s regional pockets endlessly fascinated him-- the road trip became an exercise in chaos, frenzy, and horror, a microcosm America’s evolution.
He had spent much of the previous two decades living a quiet life in Long Island with his second wife, and set out towards his hometown of Salinas, California, to get a feel for America’s progress post-World War II and the 1950s baby boom. Instead, he found unhappy people and crumbling infrastructure around the country, only saved by the innate greatness of the human condition. Steinbeck never called it a failed trip, but as he rode through the eastern seaboard into America’s heartland, it was evident that he began to get disillusioned with the State of the Union. “I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here,” Steinbeck noted. “They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.”
Towards the end of his trip he stopped in New Orleans to see the cheerleaders-- a group of “concerned” mothers vocally protesting integration in Louisiana schools. They would heckle the students every morning. This seemed to be Steinbeck’s last straw. “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction,” he said, in earnest, and drove back home to Long Island, and died with a brand new American vision in 1968.
To me, that’s the truest road trip work created to date. It doesn’t shy away from the fear and destruction one encounters on the road, but still manages to understand its inherent importance. Even so, Steinbeck still experienced joy throughout his trip; he drank with his countrymen, appreciated the cultural identity of places like Texas, and marveled at the stunning beauty of the west. The endless ebb and flow of how Steinbeck felt about the country he has always admired in his old age was moving, and a bit terrifying. He died with less hope about its future than he ever did, but at least had the closure of one more massive road trip before he died. The road trip was also the perfect vessel for a novel about the state of American affairs, because it’s so uniquely American.
Sure, cars exist in other countries, but the mass reliance is mostly unique to North America. Besides, when compared to other countries that similarly depend on cars, the United States is a vast expanse of land that covers dozens of subclimates. We have the ability to spend days— neé, weeks, months— years (!) in a car traveling to different pockets of the country. If you were in, say, western Europe trying to do the same thing, you’d end up circling Antwerp and every other major city center about 300 times. When you combine America’s sheer size and car-reliant culture with the economic ties— mass automobile production was birthed in the United States, a pride point we’ve never expressed interest in shedding— the American Road Trip becomes a monolith of its own making. While a car-centric culture may be detrimental, there are still moments, momentous and minute, embedded in the mind of United States citizens that are inseparable from car culture: losing your virginity in the too-small backseat of a used coupe, or maybe your first kiss at the drive-in theater; sneaking out of your parents’ house and into a car with older siblings who make you take your first drink of whiskey; trapped in hellish traffic in or near a major city center on the precipice of a big event; bleak, cold, dark midwestern mornings spent scraping ice off your windshield; cigarette smoke billowing out the driver’s side window while your favorite radio station plays on a back country road; playing the alphabet game with your sister in the back seat on vacation while your parents argue in the front about directions and logistics. It’s all so truly, unmistakably, painfully American. Even though we rove around in death machines that kill more people than anything else in the history of the world, they are a link in our minds-- a vessel to experience the human condition. At least we have that.