Highways, Byways, and Travels With Charley: A Road Report from Vermont

Guest Host David Horton of Radford University in Virginia asks Clay for a progress report on his adventure retracing John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” journey. Clay was in Middlebury, Vermont, at the time of the interview, still aglow from his interview with Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini of Middlebury College. Topics include the clunky joys of rural AM radio; whether it matters that not everything in Travels with Charley happened precisely as Steinbeck reports; and what Clay is learning along the way. They discuss the changes in America’s highways between 1960 and today, including the Blue Highways far away from the Interstate Highway System. Clay talks about some of the other pilgrimages he has made so far in the journey: Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts; Thoreau’s Walden Pond; and Montauk Point at the end of Long Island where Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders quarantined after their heroics in Cuba.