Travels with Charley: A Desire to Move

Dear John Steinbeck,

The quote I most loved in your book, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, was the following commentary on your neighbors in Sag Harbor:

I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation – a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move. (Steinbeck 10)

            When I was growing up in Kensington, all I saw around me were people hungry to move, forget, transcend. My best friend Laurie moved out of her house when she was sixteen. She wanted to fight in a courtroom for her brothers and sisters on the streets and didn’t see a road to that future in our world. She sent in an application to Deerfield Academy, a college preparatory school in Massachusetts. Laurie didn’t tell her parents, or her brothers, or me.

And, one day, she got a letter in the mail saying, “Yes, congratulations! Welcome to a whole new world,” and she sprinted to my house, barefoot, and screamed until I opened the door. We cried on my front porch together, and I saw in her eyes the look you described on page ten: “a burning desire to go [and] to move.”

She left on a sticky August morning; I haven’t seen her since.

I am here to tell you, John Steinbeck, that there is another way to live. I stayed in Kensington; I finished high school, college. I was forced to stay, because I wasn’t clever enough, or like Laurie enough, and my family needed me. There is a beauty in staying. There is a beauty in being anchored.

I ask you, John Steinbeck, to consider whether it may be a privilege to desire movement in the way you described on page ten. I wonder if such a want comes from an ability to imagine futures unknown by people with responsibility and family and financial concerns. I’m asking myself the same questions, too.

-Bess