"Travels With Charley"

[fiefoe]

It's startling to see a color photograph of the author of "Wrath of the Grapes" - a black & white movie if there was ever one - but there he was on the book cover, a man in his late fifties in trim shape with his handsome standard poodle. In the photo, man and dog assume the same squinty, calm expression.

John Steinbeck described his own looks early in the book because Joseph Addison advised him so. ('I remember so well loving Addison's use of capital letters for nouns. He writes under this date: "I have observed that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure 'till he knows whether the Writer of it be a  black or fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor...") This line brings a smile, 'I cultivate this beard... as pure unblushing decoration, much as a peacock finds pleasure in his tail.'

Trudging along with Belloc has its awards, but I have to admit that Steinbeck with his truck is more my speed. The truck's name ('the name Rocinante painted on the side of my truck in sixteenth-century Spanish script...'), naturally, comes from "Don Quixote".

His musings before setting off:
__ I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
__ When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet...
__ They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something.
__ In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won't happen.