From "Travels With Charlie" by John 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. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and the vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of the stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new hatched sin, will not think they invented it.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process; a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-glass bum relax and go with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.


I was going to begin this blog with an explanation of the spiritual and personal reasons for undertaking this journey. Luckily, I just bought this book and found that it had already been written for me. Many of you who know me intimately will immediately recognize this aspect of my personality; indeed, some of you have these intimidations yourselves and have undertaken poignantly pointless odysseys with me. I will strive to examine these feelings throughout the trip; and, as my confessional tendencies compel me, I will be writing more about this subject. I haven't embarked on an open ended tour like this in a long time. My responsibilities and conscience have done their best in quelling the longing for the open road. I have also consciously tried to silence them through dalliances and foolery; yet it is always there. I have no reservations in confessing my fear. Perhaps this will give me the taste for blood and give rise to the wanderlust I have oppressed for so long; or, and this is personally more frightening, perhaps I have finally killed the creature and I will be dogged with loneliness and bone-crushing melancholy. This book is one of an important pieces of literature I will have close at hand for the next month from which I hope to glean the strength needed when preparing to face the monster in the cave.

Once a bum always a bum.
Sax