Fantasy Non-Fiction of Steinbeck

 

We just returned from a week of "camping".  I put camping in quotes because it was not camping in the truest sense.  We were car camping, sometimes pitching tents on friend's parent's summer home's yards.  We had lovely drives though on uncongested highways and back roads, stopping at Amish farm stands, and all the while I read my book club pick out loud to my fellow travelers for entertainment, since we were never organized enough to download any media for the ride.  

So after almost a year of being in a book club, it was finally my turn to pick a book!  I initially chose Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which was a book I'd been wanting to read for a long time...but since the libraries were not open and the book has a total of 588 pages, it was nixed and so I searched for another shorter book, with lighter summer reading on my mind.  At the same time, I was putting together Hiro's summer reading list, combing through, library lists, and Hunter High School lists of the past, and somehow, all the lists became jumbled up in my mind, and thus John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley was chosen.   

So as I read this genre I call Fantasy Non-Fiction, I had my own rambling thoughts on traveling, subtitled: Travels with Harley: reconfirming the shithole country that we call America.  (btw, Steinbeck's travel book is a fantasy for anyone who is not a white male.  There is no way anyone but a white male could have traveled in this manner back in 1960, rambling leisurely along in a truck, no matter what type of dog you had as a companion. And this guy's research  and subsequent book, found Steinbeck's book to be fiction as he retraced his route in a Toyota Rav4-which coincidentally is our car)

Steinbeck's book was published in 1962, and in a sense, he already saw the shithole-ness of what was happening to our country: the necessity for trailer park living, greed, planned obsolescence, death of cities, and overall trashing of the environment by people disguising it as progress.   We saw this everywhere we went.  In one camp site, we were the only ones in an actual tent.  Everyone else was in huge trailers, hooking up their RVs to every imaginable "luxury" of electricity possible.  Just 3 hours outside of NYC we passed signs put up by delusional people that said things like "GUN OWNERS FOR TRUMP!" and "Trump 2020, make America Great".  I did see one huge banner on a farmhouse that said "Biden: Truth overLies", which made me a bit hopeful.

But the most depressing part about our trek out in nature was that there was no nature. Not the type of peaceful , secluded, at one with Nature, nature.   I was on my Travels with Harley: in Search of Nature.  You cant go for 15 minutes these days without hearing man made noise, no matter where you are.  At our first campsite, as the 10pm curfew wound down the sounds of drinking, radios and streamed tv, we could still hear the rumbling of 18 wheelers tumbling down the highway.  And everywhere we went, even in the most remote areas, there was plastic.  At a campsite in the Adirondacks, as we looked for kindling, I picked up a usb flash drive, broken plastic bits of packaging, plastic wrap, etc.  When we went swimming in Schroon lake, Hiro got a plastic splinter in his hand.  On another day, when we went canoeing, we saw styrofoam cooler bits and plastic bags tangled up in the marsh, and nearby on a seemingly deserted shore, we saw a solitary loon dying.  We were not innocent either.  No matter how much we tried to adhere to the "You bring it in, you pack it out" rule, bits of refuse still fell out of pockets, a plastic cup blew out of our canoe and as we tried to retrieve it, it just sank, and no matter how much we tried to contain our litter, we seemed to be guilty of not leaving with everything we came into the woods with.