David Bentley Hart on Travelogues: The Case of Steinbeck

Evidence against DBH's travel book theory.

A picture I took right here in NYC. I’ll give a free 1-year paid subscription to anyone in the comments who can guess where I stood when I took this shot.

Recently,

David Bentley Hart

— whom I respect, read often, and with whose mind I dare not dally — wrote a wonderful piece on Evelyn Waugh’s travel writing. However the piece had an assumption at the start that drove me a little nuts:

It is not, however, a particularly notable contribution to the cause of travel books considered as a distinct genre. Such books have a rich tradition in Britain, and many occupy an honored place in the nation’s literature. Many in fact preserve some of the more perdurable specimens of English prose: the dry picaresque of Robert Louis Stevenson’s travel stories, the droll elegance of A. W. Kinglake’s Eothen, the haunting beauty of C. M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, the luminous austerity of Wilfred Thesiger’s books, the crystalline perfection of Norman Douglas’s, the fluent, faintly metaphysical lyricism of Freya Stark’s. And, of course, towering above the entire field—serene and marmoreal—stand the works of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Judged alongside any of these, purely as literary excursions, Waugh’s books fail almost absolutely.

But this is only to say that the pleasure they afford is of another sort. For the most part, these books are not really about travel at all. True travel writers work upon the assumption that their task is, primarily, to see and to describe, and where possible to enter into as profound a sympathy for their subjects as they can; Waugh proceeds upon the (subversive) assumption that his business is to evaluate and to comment, and to avoid sympathy as assiduously as circumstances and good taste permit. For all his considerable prowess as a stylist, in these books he rarely troubles to convey any images or experiences with appreciable vividness or pungency (except where the possibility of mockery presents itself). Any reader of his novels knows he was quite capable of painting pictures with words when necessary; but his genius lay elsewhere. His prose is urbane, unsentimental, and economical, hospitable to moments of purple abandon, but at its best when its controlled and even flow allows him to pass from delicacy to savagery and back again without any visible show of effort. It is, in short, a prose of personality, not of scenery; of irony, not of anecdotes. And so it is in these books.

Perhaps David meant simply British travel books of a certain era. Or perhaps he meant of a certain tradition. Or perhaps he meant merely travel books prior to Waugh’s work. But it rang hollow for me when he said, “travel books considered as a distinct genre.” Qualitatively he claims this. I wonder if rather than seeing and describing travelogues in order to enter into as profound a sympathy for their authors as he could, Hart proceeded upon the (subversive) assumption that his business was to evaluate and comment upon them as if they themselves avoided the sympathy he could have afforded them?

I want to first link to his original piece because, like all of his writing, it’s great. Clever. Profound. Poetic. Lexicographic. But I also want to present several cases over in a few posts, starting with Steinbeck, that show precisely the opposite: the genre of travelogue, as we’ve come to understand it, is about evaluation and commentary, it’s as much about the traveler’s opinion as it is about her travel, more memoir and autobiography than detached anthropology or intimate empathy with the locals.

When the Going Was Bad

The Case of Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was dying.

His wife knew it. Kids knew it. He had a heart condition that would take him out soon and like a caged lion, he needed out. So he decided to build the first modern truck camper and take his French poodle Charlie on a road trip “In Search of America.” He’d been writing about the American people his whole career, but his later success had isolated him in an East Coast metropolis and Europe.

He needed to get reacquainted with his people. Or perhaps an older version of himself.

When you’re John Steinbeck at sixty, what you do is get on the phone with GMC and custom order a camper built into the bed. And when you’re John Steinbeck, doing so starts a trend with every American literary type to follow. Also, in the fullness of time, hipsters. Particularly the kind who cannot identify dry rot in the tires of old Airstreams.

It’s hard to overstate how radical Steinbeck’s truck camper was because of how many folks have owned them since. Do you even know of a millennial who could conceive of a world without a truck camper owned by someone’s grandpa somewhere? Before Steinbeck, they simply didn’t.

You had basically two lame prototypes prior to Steinbeck.

The Cree Coach by the Cree Trailer and boat company:

Obviously leaves a lot to be desired. And the Sport King by Walter King:

Both of which are, quite obviously, junk for what this man needed. 

Behold the Steinbeck camper:

It’s a thunderclap in a pre-truck camper era. It has a stove and an oven.

This makes me laugh because some personality test advocates (i.e. advocates of horoscopes for people that had a bit of college) seem to peg me as the kind of guy who’d love to live a “van life,” who wants to live out his days sailing some pirate schooner. Nothing could be further from the truth — and, frankly — I mention myself because I don’t think that’s even the case for Steinbeck and therefore these Steinbeck travelogues. I do think he gets restless. I do think he likes the wild. I understand that: yes, I’ve camped on rock banks without a tent. Yes, I’m proud of roadtripping across America without any supervision when I was twenty. There’s a level of independence there that cannot be forged or forged elsewhere. Steinbeck and I have that small-w wanderlust in common, so I can say from extremely personal experience:

Such a disposition invites commentary when traveling.

At 60 years old (58 when he wrote it), Steinbeck measures how long since his 30^th year he’d absconded from most of America without interacting with the real American voices behind the characters who’d built his career. The United States that year went through the year of integration, of red scare elections, of immigration, of overproducing plastic and easy-to-make meals.

As much as Steinbeck felt the need to travel in his book, he seems a radical home body. Bilbo travels to protect home and bring things home again. Because of what’s behind him, not so much because of what’s before him. Did Steinbeck travel to run away? Or did he run away from bad travelers? That’s something the personality test enthusiasts tend to miss about me and about various travel writers. I’ve stayed in the same ten block radius for a decade now. Have I travelled to Alaska? Yes. Italy? Sure. London? Tunis? Of course. 

But I’ve also stayed put in that ten block radius while other extended family members and in laws have moved houses and therefore neighborhoods four times or what have you.

I bring my travel experiences back to tell neighbors and friends and to populate my novels and stories and scripts, written from the comfort of my home, with characters I’ve met living out the very poem I’m always most trying to write in Brooklyn, among neighbors, artists, culture makers.

Every year the poem I most want to write, the poem that would in effect allow me to stop writing, changes shapes, changes directions. It refuses to come forward, to stand still while I move to meet it, embrace and coax it to sit on the porch with me and watch the lightning bugs steal behind the fog’s heavy veil, listen for the drag of johnboats through the orchestra of locusts and frogs…

—C. D. Wright (January 6, 1949 – January 12, 2016)

Steinbeck needed fodder. He needed to know how far he’d gotten from the experiences that jump started his career. He wanted to personally meet our country in its new stage of life because he made his living writing about her. As I hinted at earlier, his eldest son later said that his dad knew he was dying and wanted to see his country one last time. His youngest sounded shocked his stepmother “allowed” this voyage to even happen. Steinbeck shortly after may have been saved by a modern cardiac surgeon — he died with his arteries completely blocked. 

Of course, the man doesn’t deny what shaped his life and mind:

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

— Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

“Not to instruct others but to inform myself” could be a tagline for Steinbeck’s whole travelogue. At very least, can we agree that he clearly begins with a commentary and evaluation of himself?

He wouldn’t talk so long at the start about his docked boat if he really believed the rolling stone myth. Bob Dylan, after all, was critiquing Edie Sedgwick’s rejection of the society of artists in Manhattan:

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.

Dylan was subverting the old lie that the rolling stone gathers no moss. I like to think Dylan had read Chesterton’s response to the Rudyard Kipling vision to travel, the opposite of which formed the basis of Chesterton’s own travelogue What I Saw in America. We’ll get to that one in a future case study, but as a foretaste, Chesterton writes:

In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, “Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?” But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

— GK Chesterton, Heretics

Something about this book and these Steinbeck travels possessed a nation full of baby boomers being born — including Steinbeck’s own kids. And they went out and all bought truck campers like his in the wake of his travelogue and Nobel prize. 

He decided to take his wife’s French poodle named Charley, thus the title (and considering Hart’s own book cowritten with his own dog, it seems an apt place to begin). This dog was huge with a huge bark, yet would have rolled over and died at the slightest provocation from some antagonist. Steinbeck also — and this was illuminating to me mainly for how he did journalism and narrative — bought some very expensive booze and filled up the cab with that. He took way too much water. Way too many hunting guns. Propane and all sorts of madness: burdened that shiny new nickel of a truck. 

Named it Rocinante.

After Don Quixote’s horse and rider, so truck camper and writer: awkward, past his prime, engaged in a task beyond his brittle capacity. It’s also an interesting double entendre because Rocin in Spanish means a “work horse” or a cheap horse, but it can also mean an illiterate man. For Steinbeck to imply illiteracy of himself the very year he would win the Nobel Prize astounds me. It’s Cervantes who said:

“A name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.”

I hate the very idea of Don Quixote, to be honest. The Platonist in me, I suppose.

And yet, mindful of Cervantes’s quote, I love the humility of a 60-year-old Steinbeck mocking his own illiteracy on such a tour. Does that count as commentary and evaluation? Even if on himself?

He planned to leave on Labor Day out of Sag Harbor. Old Lancelot wouldn’t have known about that place, would have thought it was in Connecticut or Canada growing up. Now I know it’s just north of the Hamptons, have driven there. It sits right across the water from Shelter Island where a mystery writer I know resides (and writes creepy thrillers about a winterized island accessibly only by ferries covered in snow). Sag Harbor’s on the northern tip of the southern fork of Long Island. You can pinpoint it on a globe, almost: find Long Island, find the smaller Shelter Island, pinprick the north coast of the southern fork and you’re there.

Steinbeck’s ready to set forth on his trusty steed of illiteracy.

Then Hurricane Donna hits. 

And Steinbeck is crazy, the way he responds. Reckless and courageous both, a manful approach to something he seems to take as his own, personal hurricane. He describes at one point the state of his wife’s mind:

During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap.

Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. I knew that ten or twelve thousand miles driving a truck, alone and unattended, over every kind of road, would be hard work, but to me it represented the antidote for the poison of the professional sick man. And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity. If this projected journey should prove too much then it was time to go anyway. I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It’s bad theater as well as bad living. I am very fortunate in having a wife who likes being a woman, which means that she likes men, not elderly babies. Although this last foundation for the journey was never discussed, I am sure she understood it.

— Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

He takes that wild courage — something that seems a bit thin, a bit faux in Hemingway, but authentic in Steinbeck (indeed Steinbeck was the man Hemingway so desperately wanted to become) — and applies his manfulness to a frigging hurricane.

Our bay is better protected than most, so that many small craft came cruising in for mooring. And I saw with fear that many of their owners didn’t know how to moor. Finally two boats, pretty things, came in, one towing the other. A light anchor went down and they were left, the bow of one tethered to the stern of the other and both within the swing of the Fayre Eleyne. I took a megaphone to the end of my pier and tried to protest against this foolishness, but the owners either did not hear or did not know or did not care.

The wind struck on the moment we were told it would, and ripped the water like a black sheet. It hammered like a fist. The whole top of an oak tree crashed down, grazing the cottage where we watched. The next gust stove one of the big windows in. I forced it back and drove wedges in top and bottom with a hand ax. Electric power and telephones went out with the first blast, as we knew they must. And eight-foot tides were predicted. We watched the wind rip at earth and sea like a surging pack of terriers. The trees plunged and bent like grasses, and the whipped water raised a cream of foam. A boat broke loose and tobogganed up on the shore, and then another. Houses built in the benign spring and early summer took waves in their second-story windows. Our cottage is on a little hill thirty feet above sea level. But the rising tide washed over my high pier. As the wind changed direction I moved Rocinante to keep her always to leeward of our big oaks. The Fayre Eleyne rode gallantly, swinging like a weather vane away from the changing wind.

The boats which had been tethered one to the other had fouled up by now, the tow line under propeller and rudder and the two hulls bashing and scraping together. Another craft had dragged its anchor and gone ashore on a mud bank.

Charley dog has no nerves. Gunfire or thunder, explosions or high winds leave him utterly unconcerned. In the midst of the howling storm, he found a warm place under a table and went to sleep.

The wind stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and although the waves continued out of rhythm they were not wind-tattered, and the tide rose higher and higher. All the piers around our little bay had disappeared under water, and only their piles or hand rails showed. The silence was like a rushing sound. The radio told us we were in the eye of Donna, the still and frightening calm in the middle of the revolving storm. I don’t know how long the calm lasted. It seemed a long time of waiting. And then the other side struck us, the wind from the opposite direction. The Fayre Eleyne swung sweetly around and put her bow into the wind. But the two lashed boats dragged anchor, swarmed down on Fayre Eleyne, and bracketed her. She was dragged fighting and protesting downwind and forced against a neighboring pier, and we could hear her hull crying against the oaken piles. The wind registered over ninety-five miles now.

I found myself running, fighting the wind around the head of the bay toward the pier where the boats were breaking up. I think my wife, for whom the Fayre Eleyne is named, ran after me, shouting orders for me to stop. The floor of the pier was four feet under water, but piles stuck up and offered hand-holds. I worked my way out little by little up to my breast pockets, the shore-driven wind slapping water in my mouth. My boat cried and whined against the piles, and plunged like a frightened calf. Then I jumped and fumbled my way aboard her. For the first time in my life I had a knife when I needed it. The bracketing wayward boats were pushing Eleyne against the pier. I cut anchor line and tow line and kicked them free, and they blew ashore on the mudbank. But Eleyne’s anchor chain was intact, and that great old mud hook was still down, a hundred pounds of iron with spear-shaped flukes wide as a shovel.

Eleyne’s engine is not always obedient, but this day it started at a touch. I hung on, standing on the deck, reaching inboard for wheel and throttle and clutch with my left hand. And that boat tried to help—I suppose she was that scared. I edged her out and worked up the anchor chain with my right hand. Under ordinary conditions I can barely pull that anchor with both hands in a calm. But everything went right this time. I edged over the hook and it tipped up and freed its spades. Then I lifted it clear of the bottom and nosed into the wind and gave it throttle and we headed into that goddamn wind and gained on it. It was as though we pushed our way through thick porridge. A hundred yards offshore I let the hook go and it plunged down and grabbed bottom, and the Fayre Eleyne straightened and raised her bow and seemed to sigh with relief.

Well, there I was, a hundred yards offshore with Donna baying over me like a pack of white-whiskered hounds. No skiff could possibly weather it for a minute. I saw a piece of branch go skidding by and simply jumped in after it. There was no danger. If I could keep my head up I had to blow ashore, but I admit the half-Wellington rubber boots I wore got pretty heavy. It couldn’t have been more than three minutes before I grounded and that other Fayre Eleyne and a neighbor pulled me out. It was only then that I began to shake all over, but looking out and seeing our little boat riding well and safely was nice. I must have strained something pulling that anchor with one hand, because I needed a little help home; a tumbler of whisky on the kitchen table was some help too. I’ve tried since to raise that anchor with one hand and I can’t do it.

— Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I bolded the start of that section because it’s clear commentary on the idiocy of his neighbors. In fact, Steinbeck’s entire escapade through the eye of the hurricane predicates itself on his commentary. That never lets up throughout his book, though it’s subtle. Especially since, in some ways, he’s about to reenter the hurricane from out of the eye.

Once he finally left Long Island, post hurricane, he went north first. Long Island to Connecticut. He took the way I’ve always wanted to go — skipping the city entirely, skipping the temptation to visit friends all the way in New York City. That’s quite the move, if you know how the archipelago works. Instead he took the ferry. He took three ferries: Shelter Island, Greenport, Orient Point. The Orient Point one, like the Port Jeff one I’ve always seen and never taken, goes all the way to the coast of Connecticut. That always seems so fun to me: a straight cut, you and your family and your car, across the Atlantic to entirely different state. There aren’t many places in the states where you can do something like that outside of an actual cruise. I find something visceral and wonderful in such a ferry, especially for someone who didn’t grow up coastal, for someone that needs to drive six to ten hours to reach their state’s opposing border. Especially mindful of the hurricane having passed. 

Up there, he passed a submarine base. Tons of them docked and he compares them to angler fish — their single eye perched on a single stalk piercing waves. He bemoans (comments upon, evaluates) a future of rapid technological and political change in the face of a sailor who said otherwise. It caused him to think of how wasteful we remain as Americans. He set out — determined — to define an America, but found his senses over and again assaulted with paradoxes. One American contradicts every other American. This embodied koan defines America: a nation of folks who are in the present state of having gathered all of the paradoxes of the world and asked them to remain United.

Or, as

David Bentley Hart

himself has said:

“To be American is to be the deracinated child of some other land or people or several other lands or peoples. Our own national identity is quite often a bright garish fabulous surface that we spread thinly over forgotten depths. Our national narrative is an idea, never fully realized, of course, but able to keep us borne aloft above an abyss of immense historical oblivion.”

— David Bentley Hart

An idea. One to comment upon and evaluate.

That paradox of America was and is as much geographic as cultural. Steinbeck’s border crossing at Canada mirrors his time near the Mexican border towns, the northeasterners provided counterpoint both to the south and to the California leg. Chicago and Texas parallel one another’s feasts. “Orgies” he calls these feasts along the southern path. Montana and the Southwest also seemed very parallel in ways. And the racism of the south also seemed to dove tail with a northern listlessness, a northern eye of the hurricane.

All of this paralleling is more than just observing. It’s chiastic structure. It’s ordered in the midst of commentary, almost a Baroque series of points and counterpoints.

A New England farmer talked about how no one was talking, politically. This plus the submarines Steinbeck encountered truly emphasized, over and again, the Cold War climate. No one talked to their neighbors or family about the election the way they had in the past — and this particular election was Richard Nixon VS. John F. Kennedy. Steinbeck stumbled out of his trench into this politically silent no man’s land by doing early breakfasts with farmers (who were frustratingly reticent) and by listening to local radio which, in his opinion, had seemed to replace the market crier and even the newspaper. Of course the same top 40 songs played across the entire country — a united voice of division.

He travelled to Maine and lauded and critiqued both all of the roadside antique stores, speaking of how he was addicted to “junk” like may of his time — if there’s any starving artist that comes to mind as representative of the Great Depression, it’s Steinbeck who stole bacon with his wife to serve to the neighbors. He reminds me a ton of both my grandpa and father in this section. Outside Bangor, Maine, future home of Stephen King, he talked about how some of the people there with a sour attitude really dampened his own.

He stopped off at Deer Island, Maine at the demand of his literary agent Elizabeth Otis, perhaps she was also the obscure poet who wrote a response to Kipling. Which explains why she wouldn’t stop praising Deer Island, but never really gave him any reason for why it was so wonderful. Which, of course, is a critique.

In fact, it’s precisely the opposite of what Hart claims happens in most travelogues: this moment from Steinbeck is an almost painful absence of sight, description, profound sympathy, experience with appreciable vividness or pungency.

En route, Steinbeck asked for directions from a local Mainer who told him NEVER DO THIS. He asked why and the guy literally told him that Mainers hate tourists and so regularly give bad directions to them. That’s hilarious and cruel on a level of late stage Remmy, if you ask me.

Fresh lobster straight from the saline of Atlantis, the grandchildren of her antediluvian tears.

Then north.

He ended up camping next to French Canadians who had immigrated to farm potatoes. And this is where his brilliance in stocking up on all of that hyper-specific, super expensive liquor started to shine through. A buddy of mine from high school who lives here was always good at this and I never really quite understood his passion for it, but there’s a specificity to radical hospitality that, if you’re really good at it, you can anticipate.

Steinbeck may not have known the current weather of the American mind, what had changed in the intervening years, but he knew enough about his motherland to know the kinds of people he’d come across. And frankly, I think he’d experienced enough of Europe at this point to really understand how that works better in Europe. Americans are more welcoming initially, Europeans more over the long haul. It’s one of the reasons Europeans are rather skeptical of that American saccharine welcome: it tends to be followed with bombs, which in the fullness of time, is indistinguishable from a snake oil scam or a traitorous con job.

But these Steinbeck travels proved him no fool. He’d prepared ahead with extremely fine French vintages and insisted upon sharing it with this French speaking crowd. The sharing of the hyper specific French vintage made for a brightening and Christening of his truck camper in a way that he might not have achieved so early otherwise. This required not only his camper and the preparation of the vintage. It required the chance meeting of French Canadian travelers.

He described them almost in a Wordsworthian register. With nimbuses on every finger.

Then west back into New York (which tends to mess with folks from Missouri) towards Niagara Falls. He went the Detroit route — originally had planned to cut across Ontario. But he had a weird run-in with American and not Canadian border patrol. It almost prevented him from reentering his own country. It’s a ridiculous moment that really shows the problems with the American security state: how the government makes people feel small.

Which is obviously commentary.

Through to Chicago.

Not south. At all.

And here — and only here — will I gripe.

At this point, the man had sold me on the trip, on his storytelling capabilities remaining undiminished in his elder years. He’d sold me on the characters. His dog. His truck camper. Beat by beat I followed him up until this point.

But as you’ll see on the map:

He completely and utterly bypassed the midwest for the northern states. Steinbeck ignored basically every single town that I and Ray Bradbury and even the Hemingway Steinbeck idolized (I do not) and Mark Twain and Langston Hughs — I could list literary greats forever. The bulk of our culture at some point touched the Mississippi watershed. In this place, America — from the Cahokia empire to Lewis and Clark to jazz — spent our most nostalgic years in touch with the riverboats.

Don’t believe me?

Here’s a picture of the Mississippi watershed:

You’ll not it includes Big Red and even kisses the Chesapeake watershed.

Steinbeck bypassed the Nashville that pumped Top 40 songs like Johnny Cash into his radio, the Indy 500 that defended from his GMC engine, the Gateway Arch of his wanderlust, the bulk of the Mississippi, Kansas City of OKLAHOMA fame, the Iowa caucuses in an election year, the Ozark Mountains, the Appalachian Mountains, all Kentucky bourbon, Memphis blues, the Oklahoma of the Trial of Tears, the ENTIRE EASTERN HALF OF ROUTE 66, and — and this is greatest tragedy of all — the still blooming orchards of that land of milk and honey, Little Egypt.

Orchards Monsanto later tilled up for corn and Texaco later drilled past for oil. Orchards eaten by Chronos. Orchards I can only know in the maps of historiographic agronomists and the whispers of the handful of men in the nursing homes of that 25,000 square miles who still remember picking pears and persimmons.

Only Steinbeck with the rest of the book could dig himself out of so egregiously deep a hole in my personal preferences. Any other writer — any other book — I would have thrown his coastal bias across the room and washed my hands and kicked the paginated dust off my sandals.

You think I’m joking, but I woke half the house on vacation shouting about it. I was shouting.

Anyways.

He did at least notice some of the culture shifts in the northern states as he moved west. Even though he turned flyover country into drive around country. Didn’t even stop by the Great Darke County Fair.

Chicago. Which I love, but which is decidedly not Illinois any more than New York City is New York State or Los Angeles is California or Houston is Texas or Anchorage is Alaska or London is England.

He had this fascinating moment in the hotel he stopped at — his wife was to meet him halfway on his journey.

At that fancy hotel, he was absolutely filthy in their lobby waiting for them to prep the room. As he was a paying customer, they didn’t want to piss him off, but as he was also filthy in their lobby, they didn’t want him sitting around. All he wanted was a shower and a place to rest his eyes while he waited. Finally they compromised by letting him go shower in a room that was filthy itself. He walks into this room and immediately turns detective. He notices dry cleaning slips and receipts and lipstick on pillows and leftover lingere and bits of bourbon and notes on pages and begins piecing together an affair of a married businessman. It was wild to watch his observation skills work and really motivated me to up my own game in description, poetry, and the like.

One of the things he noticed in this time was how the local strangers in these northern states openly and honestly interacted with him, yearning for a newness, for another place. Their everyday life had been shattered when someone new came to town. Through that person they imagined new places. Tolstoy said there’s only two stories: man goes on an adventure or stranger comes to town. This one had both.

Steinbeck, in an almost scifi kind of way, bemoaned the way the country had grown addicted to instant gratification. He talked about hot soup and hot coffee machines at roadside stops. And here he goes off on this mobile home tangent where he lauds them, where he praises how much they’ll transform the country for the better, that I find strangely illuminating:

Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the African Americans forced here as slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home. Wouldn’t it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency? And the fact is that we have. But that’s the short view. What are roots and how long have we had them? If our species has existed for a couple of million years, what is its history? Our remote ancestors followed the game, moved with the food supply, and fled from evil weather, from ice and the changing seasons. Then after millennia beyond thinking they domesticated some animals so that they lived with their food supply. Then of necessity they followed the grass that fed their flocks in endless wanderings. Only when agriculture came into practice–and that’s not very long ago in terms of the whole history–did a place achieve meaning and value and permanence. But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands. Thus it was that one man wanted ownership of land and at the same time wanted servitude because someone had to work it. Roots were in ownership of land, in tangible and immovable possessions. In this view we are a restless species with a very short history of roots, and those not widely distributed. Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need. Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else.

Perhaps.

But of course, there’s also John Oliver’s take:

Whatever it is, it isn’t detached observation.

He goes through Wisconsin (which alone among the states he described sold me on it as a place I really need to visit). Wisconsin also happens to be where Jessie lives as well as the Worldbuilder nonprofit. And some of Tara’s family. So I have no more excuse:

Why then was I unprepared for the beauty of this region, for its variety of field and hill, forest, lake? I think now I must have considered it one big level cow pasture because of the state’s enormous yield of milk products. I never saw a country that changed so rapidly, and because I had not expected it everything I saw brought a delight. I don’t know how it is in other seasons, the summers may reek and rock with heat, the winters may groan with dismal cold, but when I saw it for the first and only time in early October, the air was rich with butter-colored sunlight, not fuzzy but crisp and clear so that every frost-gay tree was set off, the rising hills were not compounded, but alone and separate. There was a penetration of the light into solid substance so that I seemed to see into things, deep in, and I’ve seen that kind of light elsewhere only in Greece. I remembered now that I had been told Wisconsin is a lovely state, but the telling had not prepared me. It was a magic day. The land dripped with richness, the fat cows and pigs gleaming against green, and, in the smaller holdings, corn standing in little tents as corn should, and pumpkins all about.

He fled the region in an “Evacuation Route” designed by the country motivated by fear in case of nuclear war. That paranoia drove the country at the time.

He got to this diner and was trying to find the way to Sinclair Lewis’s birthplace:

“I wonder if you can help me?” I asked the young-ancient waitress.

“What’s your trouble?”

“I guess I’m a little lost.”

“How do you mean lost?” she said.

The cook leaned through his window and rested bare elbows on the serving counter.

“I want to go to Sauk Centre and I don’t seem to be getting there.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Minneapolis.”

“Then what you doing this side of the river?”

“Well, I seem to have got lost in Minneapolis, too.”

She looked at the cook. “He got lost in Minneapolis,” she said.

“Nobody can get lost in Minneapolis,” the cook said. “I was born there and I know.”

The waitress said, “I come from St. Cloud and I can’t get lost in Minneapolis.”

“I guess I brought some new talent to it. But I want to go to Sauk Centre.”

The cook said, “If he can stay on a road he can’t get lost. You’re on Fifty-two. Cross over at St. Cloud and stay on Fifty-two.”

“Is Sauk Centre on Fifty-two?”

“Ain’t no place else. You must be a stranger around here, getting lost in Minneapolis. I couldn’t get lost blindfolded.”

I said a little snappishly, “Could you get lost in Albany or San Francisco?”

“I never been there but I bet I wouldn’t get lost.”

“I been to Duluth,” the waitress said. “And Christmas I’m going to Sioux Falls. I got a aunt there.”

“Ain’t you got relatives in Sauk Centre?” the cook asked.

“Sure, but that’s not so far away–like he says San Francisco. My brother’s in the Navy. He’s in San Diego. You got relations in Sauk Centre?”

“No, I just want to see it. Sinclair Lewis came from there.”

“Oh! Yeah. They got a sign up. I guess quite a few folks come to see it. It does the town some good.”

“He’s the first man who told me about this part of the country.”

“Who is?”

“Sinclair Lewis.”

“Oh! Yeah. You know him?”

“No, I just read him.”

I’m sure she was going to say “Who?” but I stopped her. “You say I cross at St. Cloud and stay on Fifty-two?”

The cook said, “I don’t think what’s-his-name is there any more.”

“I know. He’s dead.”

“You don’t say.”

There was a sign in Sauk Centre all right: “Birthplace of Sinclair Lewis.”

For some reason I went through there fast and turned north on 71 to Wadena and it got dark and I pounded on to Detroit Lakes. There was a face before me, a lean and shriveled face like an apple too long in the barrel, a lonely face and sick with loneliness.

I didn’t know him well, never knew him in the boisterous days when he was called Red. Toward the end of his life he called me several times in New York and we would have lunch at the Algonquin. I called him Mr. Lewis–still do in my mind. He didn’t drink any more and took no pleasure in his food, but now and then his eyes would glitter with steel.

I had read Main Street when I was in high school, and I remember the violent hatred it aroused in the countryside of his nativity.

Did he go back?

Just went through now and again. The only good writer was a dead writer. Then he couldn’t surprise anyone any more, couldn’t hurt anyone any more. And the last time I saw him he seemed to have shriveled even more. He said, “I’m cold. I seem to be always cold. I’m going to Italy.”

And he did, and he died there, and I don’t know whether or not it’s true but I’ve heard he died alone. And now he’s good for the town. Brings in some tourists. He’s a good writer now.

Felt that deep in my bones. I have more regular readers from Vienna Austria than I do in my own hometown.

Just for ducks, let’s try a little of what my boys would call this generality jazz. Under heads and subheads. Let’s take food as we have found it. It is more than possible that in the cities we have passed through, traffic-harried, there are good and distinguished restaurants with menus of delight. But in the eating places along the roads the food has been clean, tasteless, colorless, and of a complete sameness. It is almost as though the customers had no interest in what they ate as long as it had no character to embarrass them. This is true of all but the breakfasts, which are uniformly wonderful if you stick to bacon and eggs and pan-fried potatoes. At the roadsides I never had a really good dinner or a really bad breakfast. The bacon or sausage was good and packaged at the factory, the eggs fresh or kept fresh by refrigeration, and refrigeration was universal.” I might even say roadside America is the paradise of breakfast except for one thing. Now and then I would see a sign that said “home-made sausage” or “home-smoked bacons and hams” or “new-laid eggs” and I would stop and lay in supplies. Then, cooking my own breakfast and making my own coffee, I found that the difference was instantly apparent. A freshly laid egg does not taste remotely like the pale, battery-produced refrigerated egg. The sausage would be sweet and sharp and pungent with spices, and my coffee a wine-dark happiness. Can I then say that the America I saw has put cleanliness first, at the expense of taste? And–since all our perceptive nerve trunks including that of taste are not only perfectible but also capable of trauma–that the sense of taste tends to disappear and that strong, pungent, or exotic flavors arouse suspicion and dislike and so are eliminated?

Let’s go a little farther into other fields, Charley. Let’s take the books, magazines, and papers we have seen displayed where we have stopped. The dominant publication has been the comic book. There have been local papers and I’ve bought and read them. There have been racks of paperbacks with some great and good titles but overwhelmingly outnumbered by the volumes of sex, sadism, and homicide. The big-city papers cast their shadows over large areas around them, the New York Times as far as the Great Lakes, the Chicago Tribune all the way here to North Dakota. Here, Charley, I give you a warning, should you be drawn to generalities. If this people has so atrophied its taste buds as to find tasteless food not only acceptable but desirable, what of the emotional life of the nation? Do they find their emotional fare so bland that it must be spiced with sex and sadism through the medium of the paperback? And if this is so, why are there no condiments save ketchup and mustard to enhance their foods?

We have, in his view, become far too comfortable and travelled far too afield from our inborn risk taking spirit.

Fargo didn’t impress him. But it also didn’t distort his imaginary Fargo.

He crossed the Mississippi, noticing a shift in the smells, and fell in love with Montana. A place unaffected by television.

Finding Yellowstone to be the natural equivalent of Disneyland, he thought it to misrepresent the rest of America with its bounty. Charley, the dog, FREAKED OUT in this time and turned killer, ready to pick a fight with every single bear they passed. He’d never seen the dog do that before, but the poodle was spoiling for a fight at every turn.

Seattle really disturbed him with how radically it had changed from a small fishing village. How much had been gone or gutted or cannibalized for the sake of the suburbs.

Then his overloaded truck got caught in a rainstorm. He gets an incredible amount of help from an honest mechanic, commenting on their nature as well. He felt convicted to get the French poodle to piss on a redwood — the penultimate experience for a dog. That scene is worth the price of the book.

He returned to California and found “you can’t go home again” by Thomas Wolfe was true of him and everyone he knew. Through his meditation on not killing a couple of coyotes in the Mojave, he says:

Then I remembered something I heard long ago that I hope is true. It was unwritten law in China, so my informant told me, that when one man saved another’s life he became responsible for that life to the end of its existence. For, having interfered with a course of events, the savior could not escape his responsibility. And that has always made good sense to me.

Now I had a token responsibility for two live and healthy coyotes. In the delicate world of relationships, we are tied together for all time. I opened two cans of dog food and left them as a votive.

Texas, his wife met him again for a Texan “orgy” and I was stirred by his naming of Texas as a militant nation that robs from the poor of other states and gives to themselves. That seems true to me. And their mystical nationalism of that militant state that is little more than a worship of the place.

He ended up going and witnessing the “cheerleaders” of the racist New Orleans folk (and those against it) with some incredibly prophetic insights of race in America. This was during integration. He makes his way home.

And at home in New York City at last, he has to ask for directions.

He was lost in his own home. Lost in the American hurricane, but not without opinions. You’d have to be lost in your own home to bring back that many boons. And I’ve always felt most lost in the “stranger comes to town” situation more than I did out on the road. Lost in our own home?

That’s America.

And it’s a travelogue with an opinion, an evaluation, a commentary. It’s only one case. In time, I’ll add a few more…

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This is a shortened, modified version of this original article.