The Reader Travels

The final destination of The Grapes of Wrath is California, land of (dis)illusion. Much like all the would-be starlets who end up waiting tables in Los Angeles and the “actors” who wind up on their knees, the Oklahoma farmers didn’t find the salvation they had longed for.

Nearly 100 years earlier, people were coming for the promise of gold. How many of those travelers ended up poor, with no place left to go?

In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Sal finds himself picking cotton among the “Okies” outside of Fresno. California may not have been what they had hoped, but over a decade after they had arrived, they still weren’t leaving.

Maybe it’s eternal hope. Maybe it’s sheer resignation. Or, maybe it’s because the place is just so dang gorgeous.

After visiting with The Outsiders in 1960s Tulsa, I went back in time to rural Oklahoma in the 1930s. It seemed to me that Ponyboy and Johnny could have been direct descendents of some of the farmers who lost their land in The Grapes of Wrath.

Instead of traveling across the country on Route 66, these folks moved to the city and took low paying jobs so they could feed their families. Or maybe they went all the way to California and back, deciding that if they were going to be poor anyway, they might as well be back in their home state.

I found it quite interesting that both of these books had a beloved martyr with the initials JC. You know, like Jesus Christ? Life was dismal, but there was eternal hope.

One thing I loved about John Casey in The Grapes of Wrath was that he used to be a preacher, but his humanity and humility made him give it up. Little did he know, those were the very traits that made people want to follow him and listen to him even more. He was a servant leader, a shepherd. He was holy.

Don’t you know? Jesus lives in Oklahoma.

How come everybody I know from Oklahoma is shrouded in a cloud of drama? Is there something about Oklahoma? Maybe it’s the ghosts of spurned Cherokees, haunting the land. Or maybe all the lost souls in the world get reincarnated into Oklahoma babies. Who knows?

Or maybe it’s just that everybody I know from Oklahoma was so maladjusted they had to leave home in search of something better, and the closest something better was the shiny city of Dallas, Texas. So, that would mean that the people that stay in Oklahoma are just, well, OK.

Pondering these thoughts, I set out on a short literary journey of Oklahoma, starting with S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. This is exactly the type of drama I’m talking about - orphaned young hooligans, drinking and fighting and searching for love, all misunderstood. For such a small book, it was filled with a whole lot of pain.

Here’s to my Oklahoma drama queens. Stay gold.

Sometimes I live vicariously through my friends’ travels. I look at their vacation pictures, listen to their stories, imagine myself there. One of my dearest friends is a huge fan of Stephen King. In fact I think she’s read everything except his memoir, On Writing (because she doesn’t really do memoirs).

So when the long-awaited final book of the Dark Tower series came out in 2004, she dropped everything to read it. It was the end of the series, but it sent her on a journey she never expected. And where did she go? Forward and backward in time, slantways and sideways, reading through all of King’s past works, following the threads and the clues that tie his body of work together.

It’s not just a matter of picking out the bad guys with the initials R.F. either. It’s way beyond that.

If you’re interested in the journey, check out The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King by Christopher Golden, Stanley Wiater and Hank Wagner. They’ll tell you all about it.

There’s this spooky ghost hotel resort called the Overlook, high in the Rocky Mountains near Estes Park, Colorado. So maybe it doesn’t physically exist, but it does exist in the minds of many. Like unicorns and Santa Claus and the boogey man, the Overlook Hotel is eternal.

There are two versions of the hotel. One has this incredible hedge labyrinth, a psychological horror of confusion and captivation. The other has a topiary instead, a bunch of big scary hedge animals that will f* you up if you don’t watch out. Boo!

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was oh-so loosely based on Stephen King’s novel. I’m sure Mr. King was much more comfortable with the TV mini-series version done nearly 20 years later. Like the characters in the book, the mini-series actors were pretty and blond. But Kubrick didn’t go for pretty and blond. He picked Shelley Duvall instead. And of course, Jack Nicholson. How brilliant was that?

It’s not that I hated the book. I just loved the movie. And without the book there would have been no movie. Stanley Kubrick just made a good thing a whole lot better. Great art doesn’t happen in a vaccuum, but it does happen in Colorado.