Travels With Charley is the book that, at age 13, lit my hunger for taking road trips. I bought the novel in 1968 while on vacation with mom in Ocean City NJ, (relaxing on the beach with a book was something people did before smartphones) and devoured it before we made the trip home.

Then I read it again. And again. That worn 22nd printing Bantam paperback sits on my special books shelf with a few others, including Mary Renault’s The Charioteer and that first Golden Book of the Stars and Planets mom gave me when I was 9 because I spent so much time looking up at the night sky.

California was his birthplace and mine. He moved to the east coast of his own free will and I was dragged there at age two after my parents divorced, but I see a yearning for the land of his birth in this book that is similar to my own. Maybe this yearning for the homeland that was once ours is the wellspring of wanderlust and road trips. I didn’t know until recently that the motivation for Steinbeck’s road trip was his heart was failing and he knew he didn’t have much longer and he wanted to see America one last time. In his book he says simply that a writer who writes about his country should go look at it now and then. I wonder if the deeper motivation was that he wanted to plant his feet in California and Salinas one last time. If I knew I didn’t have much longer to live I would absolutely do one last road trip that ended up in Oceano, and the shores of Pismo Beach. 

Since that first road trip with classmates to the Southwest and California in 1974, I’ve taken more than I can count offhand. I remember Steinbeck’s warning that you don’t take a journey, it takes you, and it starts and ends on its own good time. But at the end of one road trip I am always ready for the next one. I look at my road atlas like I used to look at the annual Christmas catalogues when I was a young boy. I plan my trips to California selecting roads I’ve not yet driven to get me from Maryland to Oceano. I have spoken here before about escaping the gravity of home…

There’s a moment in every long distance road trip that I think of as escaping the gravity of home. Like the Apollo astronauts who escaped the earth’s gravity to go to the moon, there is a threshold you cross on a long distance drive where heading back home to your own comfortable bed is no longer possible, even if you push it bleary eyed into the night. You must bed down somewhere else. Keep going and its two nights. Then three. You’ve left the safe comfortable orbit of home. Now you’re traveling among the planets. At some point, and for me it’s usually the middle of the second day, comes the awareness that no matter what happens, you’re not getting back home any time soon. You and your car are a self contained capsule, scooting down the highway, looking for whatever it is ahead of you that you’ve never seen before…

Friday May 24, 2003

And even when the destination isn’t California, but somewhere else like Ocean City or Disney World and I am on vacation time and I am not going far, I know the vacation begins the moment I am on the highway travelling away from home. 

Next time I’m there I really need to see if I can get up to Salinas and behold his camper truck Rocinante with my own eyes and whisper a thank you.