#1599 Underway! Tracing Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” Journey

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay Jenkinson and special guest host Russ Eagle discuss the first days of Listening to America’s Travels with Charley Tour. Clay reports from a campground near Cedar Rapids, Iowa en route to Sag Harbor out on the end of Long Island, New York, to touch base with Steinbeck’s starting point for his 1960 journey through America. Clay recounts his wrestling match with an uncooperative bike rack, and other details of getting underway on a twenty-week odyssey around the perimeter of the United States. Russ and Clay talk about Steinbeck’s state of mind—and declining health—as he set out in late September 1960, and the ways in which Steinbeck shaped his book Travels with Charley as a literary masterpiece and not just a dry reporting of verifiable road facts. They discuss the place of Travels with Charley in the larger trajectory of Steinbeck’s amazing career, and the places Clay will visit on his way to Long Island.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.
0:08.0	I'm Russ Ego, I'm your guest host and as regular listeners to this podcast know, Clay has hit the road.
0:15.0	He hit the road a few days ago with his air stream.
0:18.0	So this will be the first in a series of podcast we'll do throughout 2024 2024 where we periodically track down and check in with
0:25.7	Clay on the road find out where he is what he's doing who he's talking to what he's
0:29.6	learning I can see him now on my screen clay can you hear me?
0:34.0	Yes Russ I do hear you. I'm in my airstring in a place called the Amana
0:41.0	Colonies near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and this is the fourth night of my journey heading
0:50.0	towards Long Island to SAG Harbor so that I can begin the Steinbeck portion of this
0:56.1	great journey in earnest.
0:57.1	All right, fourth night, so you left from Bismarck.
1:01.1	I left from Bismarck Saturday the 27th of April at 11.50 a.m.
1:06.8	About an hour after I expected to go but I was pretty pleased to get on the road in that way. It was still
1:11.2	wintry. It was still winter really there. In fact it's rained every day so far and sometimes
1:18.8	huge rains to the point where it's hard to drive. So I saw my first son this morning, but now as we as we
1:26.8	record this later in the evening on the 30th of April 2024 2024, a storm is coming in so you may hear a little.
1:35.8	I'm sitting in the airstream, I'm at this campground.
1:38.7	There are probably, I don't know, 30ers 30 trailers many of them are fifth wheels some of them are
1:48.1	those giant two hundred thousand dollar bus campers the kind that you would expect Willie Nelson to be in. I'm the only
1:56.2	airstream. There was one other last night. It was a old retro airstream.
2:00.4	It's nothing the way it will be. I was in a campground the other night in Mancato,
2:06.3	Minnesota and the campground holds 200 units and I was one of three people in that campground.
	...

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