Dear Mr. Steinbeck
,An update from the field-- Catching up on the 64 years since "Travels With Charley"
I hope this letter finds you well. If you made it into some version of heaven, I want to think you’ve happily found a particularly seedy section of it like North Beach where liquor is served and women like to impress in ways that might be described as “indicative” or, if St. Peter failed that arts and literature appreciation test, that the divine powers at least found a section of hell not too unlike Cannery Row.
Rumor has it your present realm is somewhere beyond the mundane concepts of time and space, so you could be surprised to learn that sixty four years have passed Earthside since the events of your 1960 travelogue, “Travels with Charley”. It took just a little Googling to learn that your journey occurred in the Fall of 1960, after Labor Day, but, presumably before the holiday season and winter weather. How to explain “Google”? Well, we now have Dick Tracy watch-like devices that look up information for us as a librarian would in your time, but less personal, like too many other endeavors in our time, sorry to say. Google? No relation to Barney Google of comic strip fame, as far as I can tell. The only significant news items I recalled from your travelogue were Kruschev’s famous hammering of his shoe on the desk at the U.N. (which is well known in our time because we still have Russia fearmongering, only it’s gone weird) and the Louisiana “cheerleader” racist protests of school integration that aren’t so well known in our time because, try as we might to “never forget” our societal sins and errors, we only seem to be able to remember other societies’ transgressions and not our own. You know how it goes.
So, after reading TWC, I found myself wondering why there’s no mention of the 1960 Kennedy v. Nixon Presidential campaign. After a minute, it dawned on me that your “looking for America” story was a grass-roots quest, person-to-person not a top-down leadership-oriented vision. I think you rightly deduced that the question of who we are as a people and as a nation can’t be answered by anyone or anything within the District of Columbia or downtown Philadelphia. One has to get off the beaten paths and talk to ordinary people. You didn’t tell anyone who you were really. Easy enough for me since I have no fame or fortune at all. I suppose, if I wish, I can act important and confide in friends, “so far on this trip, I haven’t been recognized”.
America, in 1960, was only beginning to discover television (radio with pictures!), only beginning to lay down the thousands of miles of Eisenhower’s vision of the interstate superhighway system, only beginning to send things into space, following the trajectory of Russia’s Sputniks, just starting to erase regionalism with increased mobility and even mobile homes. If you wanted to figure something out, you talked to people or read books.
Now, in 2024, television is passe’. Love, war and emotional entanglements aren’t enough to hold peoples’ attention anymore and there are only so many ways you can repackage the story of a group of good-looking young people with special powers time-travelling to save the world from the problems they created the last time they made the attempt. People still watch screens but they either watch one of hundreds of cable TV channels, or video games, or on-demand videos or their own recordings of events in their own lives. Everyone has a TV and a TV camera in their pocket (I lied— the Dick Tracy watches aren’t on our wrists). One can no longer presume co-workers around the water-cooler at work (if we had them) will recognize the latest catch-phrase from a hit show on one of the “big three” networks. Television is no longer the pillar of common experience it once was.
The interstate highway system is as complete as it will ever be. It is doubtful how much longer we can run cars on gasoline. Some cars can drive themselves now, but the passenger gets the speeding tickets.
There are presently tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of satellites orbiting Earth. Men have been to the moon and back (only nine years after your cross-country trek, or about 8 months after you shuffled off your mortal coil) and probes have been sent to the furthest reaches of the solar system.
Regionalism persists but many accents have been lost as people tend to emulate the voices they hear on screens. Mobility is less an option now and more a mandatory thing. Everything changes quickly— relationships and marriages come and go, jobs and companies are created, run their course and disappear.
If you want to figure something out, you enter your search query on a screen and, according to experts on the internet, every time we seek out advice from machines we become more lonely and depressed.
It is an open question whether there really is a coherent thing called “America” anymore and whether any of the screen-trained strangers I may happen across will talk to an old white dude like me who doesn’t even have a dog. Nonetheless, the search goes on. Just because there is no fountain of youth, doesn’t mean explorers won’t comb the globe for it.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote that we all travel our own “reality tunnels”, that no two people experience or even, in any meaningfully provable way, inhabit the same reality. It may be my journey will not be relevant to anyone but me. It may be I am just looking into a mirror and seeing what I brought to the mirror.
I’m seven days into my journey, having traveled from my home in Eugene Oregon to a luxuriously quiet fishing reservoir, by way of the Redwood forests (there are still a few curated areas), highway 101 and California’s central valley. I have my Dick Tracy watch, a couple of computers and a satellite dish so I can connect to the internet when I’m too far away from the radio towers for my watch to work. I can write and publish online using something inappropriately called “social media” something that’s among the most antisocial inventions ever created. The “X” social media company is owned by the same guy who makes the rockets, satellite dishes and the self-driving cars. In another sixty-four years his heirs will probably be the monarchs of the solar system.
I am finally in nature and getting away from it all. I know because my Dick Tracy watch says it can hear a dozen different bird songs when I ask it what I’m hearing, but it doesn’t yet know how to translate what they’re actually saying in bird-speak. I don’t want to know. I fear they’re probably shouting at each other, each species against each other species, saying things like:
”You egrets are destroying democracy”
“Finches just want free stuff”
“Warblers are 100% about war— it’s in their name!”
And so on.
I’ve embarked on this journey to get away from everything even remotely resembling that level of contention which seems to be dominating national public conversations in the 2024 election cycle. Perhaps your own travels in 1960 were partly an escape from all that too. I hope to meet America face to face.
UPDATE:
I saw your traveling camper-truck Rocinante in Salinas yesterday. They’ve built an insanely posh museum in your name, all curated and narrated by docents reading off of 3”x5” index cards (a nod to the 20th century?) with gleaming architecture punctuated by weathered boards, a Model T and miscellaneous enshrined junk from your time now considered valuable antiques. You’d hate it and grudgingly love it, I suppose, in your inimicable way. And you’d laugh your ass off too. And, in my imagination, you’d put your mind to figuring out a secret back door so homeless folks like Mac and the guys from the Palace Flop House could sneak in and sleep there at night and maybe enact living dioramas from your novels to earn some pocket change.
I had to visit your favorite bar on 157 Main St, less than a block away, to wash the stainlessness of the place from my brain afterwards.
But, aside from all that, things are pretty much the same as ever.
So, my journey begins. Wish me luck.