 |
LAST MAY I SET OUT WITH MY CANINE PAL BODHI on a camping trip through the Southwest, her third major car trip since I’d adopted her the previous fall. Determined that sharing my life with a dog need not put an end to my peripatetic ways, from the beginning I accustomed Bodhi to going with me wherever I went—around town or across state lines.
A dog enlivens a road trip. The secret pleasures of the solitary driver—talking out loud, singing off-key—lose any residual sense of weirdness; after all, you’re not really alone. And traveling with a dog enforces healthier road habits; frequent rest stops, too easily foregone when in the grip of white-line fever, are mandatory.
The real benefit, though, is that having a dog along alleviates the particular loneliness of solo travel—the flip side of that glorious, anonymous freedom it confers. Whatever you may encounter, from missed turnoffs to traffic to breakdowns (mechanical, emotional), things go better with dog as your copilot: bad days are tolerable, good days great. Dog-pals also serve this function in daily, stationary life, of course, but on the road the presence of a simpatico fellow traveler—of a familiar, loved being—is especially reassuring.
This theme, explicitly or implicitly, threads through two great “road” books, John Steinbeck’s classic Travels With Charley, published in 1962, and Lars Eighner’s 1993 tour de force Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets. Though literally worlds apart—the America just emerging from its 1950s somnolence and complacency traversed by the elder literary statesman is another country from Eighner’s marginal nineties version—both writers pay delightful homage to their canine co-travelers.
Charley, an aging, elegant blue Standard Poodle, is a typically likable Steinbeck character: friendly, dignified, curious —and harboring a hidden streak of wildness (which emerges violently during an encounter with bears at Yellowstone). Charley is Steinbeck’s “ambassador” in making contact with fellow travelers, such as a family of French Canadian migrant farmworkers in Maine: “I release him, and he drifts toward the objective, or rather to whatever the objective may be preparing for dinner. I retrieve him so that he will not be a nuisance—et voilà! A child can do the same thing, but a dog is better.”
In contrast, the unflappable mutt Lizbeth offers the gentle Eighner “an extra pair of keen ears, a good nose, and sharp teeth on a loud, ferocious ally of unquestionable loyalty.” Though protection is not her sole contribution to his life and travels, this illustrates the authors’ very different modes of travel. Steinbeck’s leisurely cross-country tour in a specially outfitted vehicle (called “Rocinante” after Don Quixote’s horse) is the temporary homelessness of a pleasure trip. Eighner’s hitchhiking journeys, on the other hand, result from actual homelessness.
Travels With Lizbeth is a curious and fascinating book. A superb essayist, Eighner describes being down and out in Austin and Los Angeles (and points in between) in a wry, mannerly voice utterly devoid of sentimentality and self-pity. A subtle, sharp-eyed and above all knowledgeable critic of bankrupt social institutions, seemingly designed to degrade those they are supposed to help, and of mainstream society’s willful ignorance of the poor, Eighner lives by a strong personal ethic: no stealing or begging. Instead, he scavenges what he and Lizbeth need from the castoffs of the wasteful consumer culture. (The chapter “On Dumpster Diving” offers a crash course in theory and practice.) In this he is an eloquent advocate of “simple living,” refreshingly free of the smug, self-congratulatory trappings of a middle-class “New Age” movement.
While he acknowledges “the romantic and timeless aspects of man and dog seeking their sustenance together, relying on each other’s special skills for survival,” Eighner is careful to not anthropomorphize Lizbeth. He does not “write clever things she is supposed to have thought” (though he does “talk to her and say to her some things I think are witty,” and the reader may well wish to have been in on those conversations). Lizbeth is comrade and comfort in what to her is a “great adventure,” though her presence canceled some of the few options Eighner may have had for shelter or support. But there is no real choice between Lizbeth’s companionship and an occasional night under a roof: “That I have made some sacrifices to avoid abandoning her or having her put to death in her youth” (detailed in the harrowing “Lizbeth on Death Row”) is “entirely within the scheme of … an ancient interspecies contract.”
In his Travels, Steinbeck does at times attribute clever remarks to Charley, voicing both parts of their brief, funny conversations. Charley even speaks, saying “Ftt” to communicate his desire to “salute a bush or tree,” and Steinbeck marvels at “the only dog I ever knew that can pronounce F.” Yet he too refuses to debase a “mature and thoughtful” animal’s integrity by heaping upon it “sloppy characteristics … until the dog becomes in his mind an alter ego .… Charley is not a human; he’s a dog, and he likes it that way. He feels that he is a first-rate dog and has no wish to be second-rate human.”
Like their differing motives for hitting the road, both writers encounter and describe the lands they pass through from divergent perspectives. Steinbeck’s desert, viewed from the comfort of his camper, is “a mystery, something concealed and waiting .… The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert.” Eighner’s experience is not quite so sublime. Stranded off the freeway in Tucson, Arizona for four days, he and Lizbeth, nearly baked alive, are set upon by thieves and hostile passers-by. “I recalled an anthropology professor …,” he remarks dryly, “who in proposing a list of cultural universals cited the duty to aid the wayfarer as a common aspect of desert cultures. He had never, I supposed, been to Tucson.”
As different as the two chronicles are, Travels with Charley and Travels with Lizbeth share one quality: their eponymous dogs’ presence, while infrequently the main topic, is always palpable, their personalities vividly portrayed. A dog is the perfect road companion, Steinbeck and Eighner engagingly convey, each in their own signature style. These books get to the heart of what it feels like to hit the road with a fellow sentient creature in blissful, companionable camaraderie.
Photography:
Mark Ragland ("Elmore in Suburban")
Anonymous (Others)
From the collection of DoubleTakes
HOME | TOP | CONTACT US | ABOUT THE BARK | WEBMASTER
|
|
 |
