Travels With Charley

Part 3 of Travels With Charley proceeds much like Part 2: Descriptions of landscapes and towns are interspersed with anecdotes about people Steinbeck meets and his interpretations of what it all means, emphasizing the theme The Journey. Personification of natural landscapes is a major element of Part 3, as evident in Steinbeck’s descriptions of the Badlands and the Mojave Desert. Deserts have a particular allure for him—they instill fear because of their harsh desolation yet are intriguing because of their apparent emptiness and their unique geography and ecology. Steinbeck characterizes the desert’s human population as hardy and, like the landscape, somewhat mysterious. He describes camping in the Mojave:

At night in this waterless air the stars come down just out of reach of your fingers. In such a place lived the hermits of the early church piercing to infinity with unlettered minds. The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert (157).

While in the Mojave, Steinbeck focuses almost entirely on describing the desert in these semi-mystical terms. When he decides against shooting the coyotes, for example, he feels a deep sense of responsibility tied to traditional myths. His writing about the Badlands shares some of these qualities, but his descriptions of the two deserts have several sharp contrasts. Unlike the Mojave, for which he conveys a deep affinity, the Badlands terrify him when he first arrives: “I was not prepared for the Bad Lands. They deserve this name. They are like the work of an evil child. Such a place the Fallen Angels might have built as a spite to Heaven, dry and sharp, desolate and dangerous, and for me filled with foreboding” (112). Although his mood toward the Badlands changes dramatically as darkness falls and the desert world begins to come alive, he still feels like a foreign intruder in the landscape. In light of other scenes in the book, it seems likely that this results from a desire for familiarity. Steinbeck traveled in the Mojave many times, so he knows what to expect. He knows exactly what dangers lurk there and recalls the unique beauty of the place. The Badlands, on the other hand, are new to him. He comes upon them unexpectedly after days of driving through lush midwestern farmland. In describing the disparity between his experience in two largely similar desert landscapes, as in other descriptions throughout the book, Steinbeck illustrates his unease with unfamiliar places or familiar places that have changed, touching on the theme Fear and Acceptance of Change.

Steinbeck’s love of Montana is a major exception to his typical view of unfamiliar places. He sees Montana as the realization of the American ideal. The functional small towns support his idea that community should be protected, and the distinct regional accent gives him hope that his fear of homogeneity is overblown. Despite falling in love with Montana, he dislikes Yellowstone Park and national parks in general: He sees them as similar to Disneyworld—packaged versions of a region that encompass the “freaks” of nature and attract hordes of tourists to see the tallest mountain or waterfall while ignoring the subtler beauty outside park boundaries. The elaborate account of Charley’s bear-related aggression is an excuse to leave the park quickly, but Steinbeck clearly stopped by only to say he had anyway.

In Montana, Steinbeck touches on Indigenous history, and this is the only time he discusses the subject. He stops at the Little Big Horn battlefield to “pay our respects to General Custer and Sitting Bull” (116). He then recalls a conversation with, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, a fellow writer who was a soldier during the Indigenous removal campaigns in the West. Steinbeck and Wood both sympathized with the people who were relocated or murdered, and both authors recall the period as very sad. However, Steinbeck characterizes the period as somewhat of an unfortunate inevitability, which obscures the reality of the brutal campaign. Wood’s conclusion in their conversation was that he wished he didn’t have to kill the native men, because they were “real men” who could have easily beaten the army had they not had their families and all their belongings with them, reflecting the theme Masculinity in Modern America. Steinbeck repeats Wood’s words verbatim and doesn’t explore their implications more deeply—or consider what it means for him, as a wealthy white man, to want to relocate into the white communities built on land stolen from its original inhabitants. The choice to ignore the racial undercurrent of Western culture is particularly noticeable given that racism is a major topic in Part 4 of the book.

Charley, and—to a lesser extent—Rosinante, start to run into trouble in Part 3 of Travels With Charley. Charley’s urinary habits are a running theme; at every stop he marks a tree, bush, or trash can. Steinbeck often attributes emotions to these “salutes.” For example, at Little Big Horn, Charley does his duty “respectfully.” Thus, when Charley starts to have bladder problems near the Montana border, they become a symbol for the frustration Steinbeck is feeling. He’s halfway through his trip, thousands of miles from home, and feels even more old and out of touch with the country than he did at the beginning. This frustration reaches a head at the office of the incompetent veterinarian. Charley gets better but has no official diagnosis. Between the vet’s office and Steinbeck’s hometown in California, bad things continue to happen. He’s excited to visit Seattle but is horrified that it grew from a sleepy fishing town, surrounded by forest, into a huge city with the same highways and crowds as any other metropolis. In Oregon, Rosinante’s tires give out. The gigantic, menacing, but ultimately friendly man who fixes the truck lightens Steinbeck’s mood immensely, but the only thing on his mind at this point is seeing the sequoias in northern California.

The sequoias are one of the ecosystems that Steinbeck anthropomorphizes in Travels With Charley. In contrast to the rapidly changing culture of humans, he describes the trees as ancient sentinels, with their own type of feelings and communication, to whom humans are just a minor blip in history. Steinbeck devotes a whole chapter solely to the awe he feels in the presence of the redwoods. In this chapter, he overtly states that his love for the redwoods connects to his familiarity with them. He suspects that casual visitors feel uneasy in such an alien landscape and considers this unease well-founded: “Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainly that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?” (141). The redwood forest is a contrast to Steinbeck’s hometown: Although he sees familiar faces and visits places he knows well, the landscape and culture have changed so much that he no longer considers it home. Home, to him, is the memory of northern California when he lived there, a place lost forever to time.