I am fearful and exhilarated as I think about this trip, which starts two weeks from tomorrow. I’ve decided to relax the pace, take six or seven weeks instead of four, in order to stay two nights in more places. That way I can get to the historical society and library, talk with more folks in each town. I’m fascinated with Fargo and Bismarck, North Dakota, and Billings and Helena, Montana. These towns are peopled with hardy, resourceful folks, I imagine. My ancestors wrested a living out of the harsh North Atlantic; their ancestors wrested it from flowing prairie, enduring harsh Arctic winters.
I’ve got to read several books before and during the trip: “Undaunted Courage,” about the Lewis and Clark expedition; “The Last American Man” was recommended to me yesterday as a description of the men who conquered the West.
And I think constantly of “Travels with Charley.” I re-read the introduction and found solace for my trepidation:
"Once a journey is designed, equipped and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip, a trip takes us."
This trip is taking me already.
My penpal, Bill Tarleton, whom I met through Classmates.com, wrote an e-mail about Travels with Charley but was unable to post his comments to this blog 'cuz he's not techy. He said I could do it for him.
ReplyDelete"as i was reading the Travels w/Charley i tried to fathom why Matt [a high school English teacher we both had] had not pressed upon our class any of Steinbecks' work....John Steinbeck had been awarded not only the Pulitzer but the Nobel Prize in literature in 1962....so he was very topical for the time and place.
I guess that i read the Pearl then, but was not enamored with Steinbeck. Travels is such a lovely book, it's a great segue into Steinbeck, if i had read it then i would have dived into the meaty stuff.
In the version of Travels that i just finished is a 2002 addition of an alternate ending. He wraps up the book with the troubles in New Orleans, and in particular the "cheer-ladies" of hate during school desegregation in 1960.
That's the year that we left the south, and i have no memories of that.
But the last chapter in the alternate ending is the snowstorm of Kennedy's inauguration....and we were in Timonium, Maryland and my aunt & uncle were attending the inaug. and i do remember the blizzard that paralyzed Washington, D.C. that weekend in 1961...
Bill closed his note to me in a most amusing way:
ReplyDelete"from a Louisianna son of a disposessed dust-bowl Okie living in the God-forsaken-frozen-northern-yankee heartland"