Travels with Sandy: In Search of America’s Gun Cultures

Travels with Charley: In Search of America is one of my favorite books. It recounts an epic 10,000 miles road trip John Steinbeck took in 1960 from Sag Harbor in New York to the West Coast and back with his standard poodle (Charley) in his truck camper, Rocinante (named after Don Quixote’s horse).

In my book on adult initiation into the Catholic Church, Becoming Catholic, I used the story to frame the contradictory centrifugal and centripetal forces that Americans often feel – simultaneous desires for exploration and for home.

Early in his travelogue, Steinbeck tells of an encounter with a liquor store salesman in Connecticut from whom he has just purchased “bourbon, scotch, gin, vermouth, vodka, a medium good brandy, aged applejack, and a case of beer.” Steinbeck’s conversation with the “young-old man” went like this:

“Must be quite a party.”

“No—it’s just traveling supplies.”

He helped me to carry the cartons out and I opened Rocinante’s door.

“You going in that?”

“Sure”

“Where?”

“All over.”

And then I saw what I was to see so many times on the journey—a look of longing. “Lord! I wish I could go.”

“Don’t you like it here?”

“Sure. It’s all right, but I wish I could go.”

“You don’t even know where I’m going.”

“I don’t care. I’d like to go anywhere.”

It is not surprising that a land peopled by nomadic native tribes, global explorers, pilgrims, and refugees is restless in its very spirit. Indeed, some argue that restlessness is definitive of the American character, that Americans “live now (and always have) in the future tense,” rather than dwelling in the past (David Brooks, On Paradise Drive).

But in Becoming Catholic, I argued that the centrifugal forces in American society do produce counterbalancing centripetal desires—a search for some grounding, continuity, stability—at root, a desire to be home. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley again provides a telling commentary.

Having traveled from his home in New York up to Maine, across the country to Washington state, down the West Coast, through the Southwest and across Texas to New Orleans, Steinbeck directed Rocinante back North, toward New York. Toward the end, he writes:

My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned. I know exactly where and when it was over. Near Abingdon, in the dog-leg of Virginia, at four o’clock of a windy afternoon, without warning or good-by or kiss my foot, my journey went away and left me stranded far from home. . . . The road became an endless stone ribbon, the hills obstructions, the trees green blurs, the people simply moving figures with heads but no faces. . . . After Abingdon—nothing. The way was a gray, timeless, eventless tunnel, but at the end of it was the one shining reality—my own wife, my own house in my own street, my own bed. It was all there, and I lumbered my way toward it.

Americans do have to deal with the centrifugal forces of modern society, but they still frequently do so by looking to tradition to provide some stability in the face of constant change.

I recently set out for a nearly-month-long journey to Yellowstone National Park in my upgraded Rocinante (Chevy Colorado “Gatsby” towing Airstream “Joy”) with my upgraded companion (Sandy).

Although not the primary purpose of this trip, I am going to search out America’s gun cultures as we go.

Note the plural “cultures.” Gun culture in America is not a singular thing, even if concepts like “Gun Culture 2.0” make it seem that way.

I’m not sure what we’ll find, but I’m looking forward to the journey.