An Incomplete Journey?

Inspired by my brother’s comment and the subsequent email discussion among him, my father and other brother, I recently picked up and read John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, a book I’d postponed reading for many years.

This wandering-America genre of literature, at its heart, is the author's own self-exploration. Steinbeck's introspection is remarkably honest, often hilarious and other times sad. He writes of his quest to determine what exactly it means to be an American – almost at an arm's length, as though he's excluding himself from consideration – and ultimately decides he can't quite pin it down.

It’s a studied glimpse of America in 1960. And he didn't balk at exploring the underside, too. He purposefully went to New Orleans to witness the ugliness of racism, where white housewives loudly taunted a little black girl attending a newly segregated school. He indulged in analysis of the meaning of racism in the American South, wondering where it would lead and how or if it would end.

Colin Fletcher's The Thousand-Mile Summer (which I wrote about here last September in "The Concertina of Life") qualifies for this genre. It, too, is a retelling of a similar journey of self-discovery, a trip with a pre-determined beginning and end.

One trait these books share is their rush to finish. The end of Steinbeck's trip was the same as Fletcher's – hurried and harried. Steinbeck drove a counter-clockwise route in a camper with his dog Charley, a very intelligent standard poodle, going from New York through New England and then west through Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana to Seattle, returning by way of California, Texas and the South.

By the time he reached the western tip of Virginia, he fairly raced home, stopping only for gas and catnaps. He admitted that his interest in the passing landscape was non-existent, that he didn't really see anything. Fletcher, too, admitted that the last three weeks of his hike, which mileage-wise amounted to nearly a third of his total trip, were "dull." The telling of the final miles, in both, takes up far fewer pages than did the equivalent number of miles earlier in the books.

The initial purpose of their trips – to explore and delve into their subjects – fades into tedious recitation as they approach their final destinations, perhaps a reflection of human nature, our innate desire to complete the tasks we assign ourselves.

Steinbeck started his trip in New York and headed north into New England where he dug into the territory and the people. It was far closer to his home than Virginia, yet he didn't spend as much time or analysis there as he had in nearby Maine. The freshness of the idea of exploring got stale. Maybe it’s simply a longing to return home.

We set goals for ourselves, inject purpose into what we do. Often, in the heat of the moment, in the reality of the act, we lose track and just want to be done with it. I think by the time he extricated himself from the ugly racism of the South, enduring what he referred to as “weary nausea,” Steinbeck had tired of the journey and the subject matter. It had lost its magic pull and became a push to get back home in New York. He wrote:

It is very strange. Up to Abingdon, Virginia, I can reel back the trip like a film. I have almost total recall, every face is there, every hill and tree and color, and sound of speech and small scene ready to replay themselves in my memory. After Abingdon – nothing. The way was a gray, timeless, eventless tunnel, but at the end of it was the one shining reality – my own wife, my own house in my own street, my own bed. It was all there, and I lumbered my way toward it.

It is the rare human able to treat the journey’s end (or the task, for that matter) as intently as he/she does the beginning. Is it typical of the genre, of the human race? I want to undertake a more detailed analysis to include others: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, On the Road by Jack Kerouac (both of which I read years ago), and Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent (which I haven’t yet read). I’ll let you know what I learn.