I’d been re-reading Travels with Charley, that lovely, wandering book by John Steinbeck, and it struck me – not for the first time – that a man doesn’t outgrow the need to travel, or indeed if you are of my generation, the need to read. Steinbeck travelled in his truck named Rosinante, named after Don Quixote’s horse, accompanied by his noble giant poodle named Charlie. I had my somewhat temperamental Toyota with my mountain bike rattling on the bike rack and Basil eagerly waiting for our next adventure.
When I first read Travels with Charlie, I was a callow youth of 14 and I loved the book as a travel adventure of an ageing man and his dog driving off in a camper van one last time to seek out the soul of their homeland… the USA. Now, over sixty years later, as I’d re-read it, I became all too aware of the tragic context within which Steinbeck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, had written it. In his early sixties, after a lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking, he was diagnosed with severe heart disease with little time to live. He’d set off on this final journey for a last look at his homeland of America and died aged 66, just a few years after this book was published.
Now aged 77 myself, though I have not been diagnosed with any life threatening ailments thus far, even if I beat the actuarial tables and soldier on for a while yet, time, as they say, is running out!!
“Come on then,” I said, to Basil, “tempus fugit, old son, we’d best be off.”
Anticipation
There is a particular pleasure in driving without urgency as Steinbeck noted. The road becomes less a means and more a companion – sometimes generous, sometimes contrary. Ours led us across the Sarasin Bridge and up the long curve of the Andaman coast, where the sea seemed to move with a silken seductiveness. At Thai Mueang I parked beneath a stand of Casuarina trees and unloaded the bicycle, as Basil bounded out, full of bottled-up energy and anticipation.
Cycling at my age has become an act both of defiance and negotiation. My legs remember what they once knew, but they require persuasion now, and occasionally forgiveness. Basil, unencumbered by any such considerations of ageing, ran ahead, then circled back, then darted off again, conducting his own erratic survey of the shoreline.
We moved north over the next few days – Takuapa, Phang Nga, Ao Nang, Krabi, places where limestone karsts rise like the bones of the earth itself, their 280-million-year-old history ardently reminding me of the value of TIME.
In the evenings, we found modest lodgings – rooms with fans that hummed like exhausted bees and beds that accepted Basil and I without question. Basil would collapse in a tangle of limbs, exhausted by his own joy. I would sit outside with a cold drink and watch the light fade, browsing through Steinbeck who wrote of rediscovering America, but what he was really after, I think, was rediscovering his lost younger self.
There is something about travel – especially the solitary kind – that strips away the unnecessary. At age 77, one has accumulated a great deal of unnecessary.
On a narrow road near Ao Nang, I stopped the car and simply listened. The jungle has a voice, though it is not a single sound. It is a conversation – leaves, insects, distant water – and Basil, for once, stood still beside me. We shared that moment, neither of us compelled to chase or explain it.
“Not bad, eh?” I said. Basil sneezed, which I took to be agreement.