first paragraphs . . . to inform myself . . .

John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley in Search of America was published the year I graduated from high school . . . a while ago and sometimes a bit frayed around the edges . . .

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 ship's 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 vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of 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.

And so it goes . . . a fine book of its time and a comforting companion on some few lonely and mostly cold hitch-hiking nights trying to sleep under bridges . . .