On the Road with Steinbeck

I started a new book today. If I'm being totally honest, I started a new audio book. Todd got me hooked on Amazon's Audible.com, it has effectively tripled my reading time. It's a strange thing, being happy traffic is adding time to my commute; it means I can get in another chapter. Today I began "Travels with Charley" by John Steinbeck. Of all the books I've listened to so far this is the first one I've been a little sad I'm not reading in the old fashioned way. There is something about the way the prose sounds; I know it would make me happy to see the words play together and jump off the page. When I selected this book, I actually was selecting a book Todd had placed on his wish list. I'd read some Steinbeck before, obviously the "Grapes of Wrath" is one of the most necessary books for any American to read. Images from that book still stick with me today, I have a feeling that this book is going to be the same. Since I don't know anything about this book, other that what I've listened to this morning, I'm going to take the plot at face value. I'm going to fight my urge to Google the locations that he's visiting and the name of his truck. Because even if it isn't autobiographical I want to believe it is. He sets out on a cross country journey, just to prove that he isn't stagnant, that he has life in him and he isn't going to just lay down and let himself get comfortable. He talks about wanting to live fiercely rather than gain a little extra yardage (such an adept image the day after the Superbowl). He's writing in a time where America is on the cusp of something. Like I said, I refuse to Google, so I'm going to piece together the bits that I can. America is in the middle of the Cold war, he sees submarines that are carrying "mass death", and Khrushchev is visiting the United Nations. He's mad that America is letting Russia to take the lead. It's an election year and he isn't revealing who's running, just that everyone is very secretive and there isn't much debate, as though there hasn't been enough time to digest the changes the world had seen in the past decade, that man needed to mull it over a bit longer before they could make up their mind. He's contemplative about the effect manufacturing must be having on the Earth, that everything we make comes in boxes and packaging, that the bulk of that is more than everything we use combined. he wonders out loud if we'll reach a point where we can't keep burying ourselves in the trash of it all, polluting our rivers, and burying the radioactive waste we create underground. Steinbeck is ahead of his time, seeing the wastefulness of modern life. He's only been on the road for a couple days. I can't wait to see where Rocinante, his truck, takes him next.