U.S. road trip: California teacher’s journey inspired by Steinbeck’s ‘Travels with Charley’
Bryan Starchman called in sick from work a couple years ago to visit a museum devoted to one of his favorite authors. It was an outing that gave impetus to a big adventure.
Displays about John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley: In Search of America” were of special interest to the teacher and playwright from rural Mariposa as he walked around the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. The iconic book chronicles a U.S. road trip Steinbeck took in 1960 with his French poodle, Charley.
“Seeing one of my literary hero’s works laid out like that inspired me,” Starchman wrote of the Steinbeck center, “and I began planning my own road trip in search of America.”
That road trip started Feb. 25. The 40-year-old took a sabbatical from teaching to visit 49 U.S. states in four months, including Alaska, and then fly to Hawaii after his sister’s California wedding in July. There will also be a drive into Canada, a walk into Mexico, and a cruise to the Bahamas.
He’s sharing his travels along the way on social media and a new website, unitedscenes.com, and writing columns for his local newspaper, the Mariposa Gazette, and the National Steinbeck Center, which is publishing them on the center’s blog.
Linked to Steinbeck
Michele Speich, the center’s executive director, called “Travels with Charley” one of Steinbeck’s most beloved books and a frequent inspiration to visitors of her center.
“I love the fact that that’s still happening,” Speich said of readers like Starchman retracing Steinbeck’s route 60 years later. “People are still asking those questions, ‘What unites us? And what divides us?’”
She said those questions are as relevant now as they were when Steinbeck took his road trip across the country in 1960.
Like Steinbeck, Starchman is hitting the road in an election year. Steinbeck embarked on his trip, which took him to 38 states, in the months leading up to the presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Starchman’s trip isn’t meant to be political, but he acknowledged he will be “hard-pressed” to avoid 2020 politics completely.
After his road trip, he wants to publish his reflections in a book titled, “The United Scenes of America.”
“This is to be a book about the places and the people and hopefully the beliefs, traditions and cultures that unite us,” he said.
He will visit a number of places Steinbeck did, but with greater emphasis on bigger cities and spectacles. Starchman lives in a rural mountain town near Yosemite National Park. Steinbeck was living in New York City and Long Island when he started his trip.
The Salinas native set out to reconnect himself to an America he felt he had lost touch of – an America that inspired him to write such classics as “The Grapes of Wrath,” “East of Eden,” “Of Mice and Men” and “Cannery Row.”
The Mariposa native, by contrast, is leaving his small town “fascinated by the grandeur” of America and the “gray areas” of life.
Destination America
Starchman’s trip will include theaters, sporting events, giant shopping malls and a “sprinkling of the bizarre, from giant balls of twine to rattlesnake museums.”
His stays in each state will range from a night to a week. Historic Savannah, Georgia – one of his favorite cities – will be among his longer visits. Starchman previously visited 38 U.S. states.
There will also be literary stops, including a courthouse in Alabama that inspired “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Classic American destinations, like the Grand Canyon. And some serious explorations, including a tour of a closed mental asylum in West Virginia – where Starchman expects to delve into the question of what now happens to those suffering from mental health issues in the U.S. – and a machine gun range in Nevada. He expects that experience will get him reflecting more on the strangeness of having seen third-graders being taught to use fire extinguishers as weapons in drills to prepare for more possible school shootings.
Starchman has worked at Mariposa County High School for nearly two decades, where he’s taught English, language and rhetoric, film and theater. He has 21 published plays and previously worked as a script reader and production assistant at FOX Studios after graduating from UCLA.
He’s traveling around the country in a compact SUV “lovingly christened Rocinante Numero Dos” in honor of Steinbeck’s road trip camper truck, Rocinante – named after Don Quixote’s noble steed in the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes. Starchman isn’t planning to do much camping, though, opting instead for historic hotels and other interesting lodgings.
In another nod to Steinbeck, Starchman is traveling with a sock puppet dog named Bobby Sock as a kind of stand-in for Steinbeck’s Charley. He’s writing postcards, signed from the sock puppet, to an elementary school class in Mariposa County that his sister teaches.
He’s also working on a collection of short stories from the trip that he would love to see produced as plays.
Starchman wrote his second U.S. travel column from a cottage in Pacific Grove where Steinbeck wrote “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” – a story about Steinbeck and a biologist friend chartering a boat in 1940 to collect specimens from the Gulf of California.
“So I leaf through my copy of The Sea of Cortez and I imagine what he must have thought about sitting in this cottage, searching for a ship to charter for what many thought was a fool’s errand,” Starchman wrote, “and I have to remember that in order to write about this country I have to get out there and see it. All of it. Or as much as I can in the time that I have.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2020 at 12:26 PM.
