On the Road to Find Out

I said the road is my redeemer
I never know just what on earth I’ll find
in the face of a stranger
From the song “Jesus In New Orleans” by Over the Rhine

When I share that I plan to travel the country in a camper van, some people tell me it sounds exciting or that they’ve always dreamed of making such a trip.

Others ask: “Why on earth would you do that?”

The answer I offer them is simple enough and is reflected in the quote above: “I never know just what on earth I’ll find …” My upcoming travels will be about exploration and discovery, finding experiences I couldn’t have had by sitting around waiting for them to come to me in Connecticut.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,” wrote Marcel Proust, “but in having new eyes.”

New eyes in my 70th year? Discovery isn’t reserved for the young; it can help keep us all feeling younger. 

As for me and my journeying, discovery should be a regular event, given how little of this sprawling nation I’ve actually seen. I have been all over the Northeast, of course, where I was born and raised, but outside of that … 

I went to Pennsylvania to visit a friend in Germantown, north of Philadelphia. I had a mad crush on her; it was not mutual.

I’ve been to South Carolina, to Daufuskie Island, where my daughter first rode a horse and where I photographed the picturesque root systems of oak trees that had wound up on the beach to be bleached by the sun and waves.

I have been to Florida several times, to teach technical writing to employees of a defense contractor and a few times as a child, including once in the early 1960s when my mother and I traveled there by train from New York City, watching out the window of the tiny stateroom as we passed through the backs of all the little towns along the way — literally on the wrong side of the tracks.

I’ve been to Illinois to see a friend. At Ravinia, in Highland Park, north of Chicago, we saw Ella Fitzgerald perform one Friday evening and watched Benny Goodman celebrate the bicentennial the next week.

I’ve been to California to work for photographers and again to help my middle daughter move to Oregon, where she still lives, so I’ve also been to Oregon — twice.

And that’s it. Six states, not including the eight of the Northeast, and not counting any of the brief layovers on longer flights elsewhere.

Exploration and discovery should be my companions on these voyages I’m about to undertake — discovering some of the great natural features of the country and discovering quirky and interesting people along the way. I’ll write about what and whom I encounter, and I’ll photograph them, too. As I’ve already said in an earlier post, this will be my own “Travels With Charley.”

John Steinbeck was 58 in 1960 when he set out on his 10,000-mile circumnavigation of the U.S., which he began on the East End of Long Island, N.Y. By then, he had written some fifteen novels, including his masterpiece, “The Grapes of Wrath,” which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939, and my favorite, “In Dubious Battle,” which in 1936 the New York Times called “courageous and desperately honest.” He had not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received in 1962, six years before he died in New York City at age 66.

Steinbeck’s travels with the poodle named Charley led to the 288-page volume that some people warn should not be taken too much at face value — Steinbeck was first and foremost a novelist, they say, accustomed to creating imaginative fiction. The suggestion is that the travelogue was partly anchored in truth and partly invented for the purpose of expressing his concerns about the direction his beloved country was taking then.

I’ll do my best in these posts to stick to the truth — as I see it, anyway.