Traveling without a Charley...

On the Way Out series...my new footprints in time

Vol.  5

Part 3

On the road, so to speak...with Steinbeck.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me. I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. . ." -- John Steinbeck

At the age of 58 and with his health issues digging at his soul, John Steinbeck bought himself a new GMC pickup in 1960, named it Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse, had it fitted with a camper shell and took off on a journey of 10,000 miles with his wife's French poodle, Charley, for one last trip across, around and through the United States in hopes of rediscovering the homeland he felt he had lost touch with.

Some historians have documented that Steinbeck was, of course, a fiction writer first and foremost, and he  took certain liberties in telling his tale as he moved or didn't move from one place to another from Long Island, New York to the Coast of California and everywhere in between.

Among other things, Steinbeck discovers a lost nation in 1960. He sees an endangered country with an uncertain future -- population shifts...tension among its people and environmental problems looming far and wide.

Sound familiar?

Fast forward 61 years and that's where I come in. Only I'm 18 years older than Steinbeck was at the time of his journey. He considered himself retired and I, on the other hand, have been retired for 14 years!

That should make me a relic at 76 years young compared to Mr. Steinbeck, but here I am chasing Father Time.

I'm dealing with, not a life-threatening illness like the great writer had, but an annoying respiratory problem nonetheless and I have made a big change in my life relocating from the Sonoran Desert to the Western Slope of Colorado -- just in time for the final few weeks of autumn and maybe just days away from witnessing my first snow fall in quite some time.

I didn't bring a Charley-like companion along, but I did say "goodbye" to my convertible Ford Mustang and bought a 2018 GMC 4x4 Canyon SLE pickup truck...with no attachments, of course. I'm a city boy from Tucson, Arizona and back on training wheels for the winter.

In a lot of ways my fiction writing is still in the beginning stages, unless you want to count a few self-published books, which have disappeared into the wilderness and an enjoyable 10-year stint as a staff sportswriter for a newspaper in Arizona.

Of course, Steinbeck was the "real deal" with a Nobel Prize in Literature and the author of 33 books including Of Mice and Men in 1937 and the The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize winner, which he released to the world in 1939, just six years before I was brought into this world.

Steinbeck and Earnest Hemingway were my favorite novelists...men who rose to the top of their profession and left an imprint... everlasting masterpieces, which will stay alive in the literary world forever.

I have found, at this very moment of my life, to be in a place like Steinbeck was always searching for. He had said matured people had told him that maturity would cure his itch...his itch to always want to be someplace else...like on a vessel sailing for the Seven Seas.

I am at that special place. Sad to say the maturity took a little longer than expected, but I can now sit back and relax and release all those words that have been bottled up inside that crazy, topsy-turvy brain of mine for over a half a century; I'm in one of those special places where writers go to write.

Chances are my name will never surface as a literary giant. Far from it.

But I will get the words out.

And that'll be fine with me.