The Reader Travels

When I was growing up, I remember thinking I didn’t like black and white movies. I realize now that it’s mostly because black and white movies weren’t often targeted to kids. If a movie was done in black and white, it was usually a serious, grown-up movie. I mean, there’s nothing that would have made me sit through The Grapes of Wrath when I was a kid. Of course, even as a grown-up I wouldn’t want to watch it a second time. It’s just too depressing.

I understand the artistic choice to film in black and white, but I also feel there’s a lot of beauty and nature and, yes, color, in the story of The Grapes of Wrath. The land that they reach in California is so green and fertile. I’ve been there, I know. But this long and treacherous road to get there, the bleakness and hopelessness of their situation, is not lifted when they reach that land. They’re still hungry, and they’re still dusty and poor. I guess it’s the richness of Steinbeck’s language in the book that gives it so much color and vibrancy, despite the perils the Joads face on that long road.

Perhaps another impactful approach might have been to take some pointers from another road trip film released one year earlier – The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy’s scenes on the farm in Kansas are filmed in black and white. Her life is drab and depressing, but when she reaches Oz, everything is in vibrant color. It takes her the entire story to figure out this place is not the promised land she might have hoped for.

It wouldn’t have taken the Joads that long once they made it to California. But wouldn’t it have been cool to see everything in black and white and then for just a few brief scenes we see the vibrant green and the blue skies of California before it fades to black and white just as quickly as the color appeared? Nah, that’s just silly kids’ stuff.

Lots of musicians have recorded the song, “Route 66,” but before Depeche Mode did it, it was just a US highway to me. After all, we have Interstates now, so there’s an easier route to get from here to California. The Grapes of Wrath made the road more personal, even though I have yet to drive any part of it. And any time I hear others sing the song, it makes me want to drive that road and stop for Coca-Colas at every town they mention - St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Wynonna, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino. You get the picture.

But when Depeche Mode recorded it, “route 66″ suddenly turned from a highway into a sexual position. I mean, how could it not, after such tunes as “Master and Servant” and “Strangelove”?  And when they sang, “let me show you the world through my eyes,” it was dripping with innuendo. I had never seen the video, but I’ll share it now. It’s gratuitously cryptic, I think. Not sure what the deal is with the multiplying babies or alien sitings, but there’s certainly some imagery to support my interpretation.

So I was watching Kung Fu Panda the other night, and I noticed that the ancient turtle master Oogway wore his shell as if it were a cloak, a man-made armor, connected with braided rope instead of flesh. The next day, I visited my sister and met her pet turtle Mack, whom she had saved from a treacherous suburban throughway. She named him after the tiny turtle whose belch destroyed Yertle’s reign of oppression, and then she stuck him in a tank.

Care of John Steinbeck, I have this image that connects automobile travel with turtles. It’s an imperfect system, this clunky armor protecting the naked flesh of the vulnerable creature inside. If we were a jack-rabbit with no armor at all, we’d be lithe and fluid and fast like a man on a motorcycle. We’d be connected to the world around us, breathing with it, but also living a bit more dangerously. Our automotive shell protects us but also limits us.

In The Grapes of Wrath, the automobile is not just a symbol of armor, but that of home, like a turtle’s shell is his house that he carries with him wherever he goes. These turtle people piled up their cars with all their earthly belongings and traveled west along Route 66.

Before the road trip starts, there’s a scene back home in Oklahoma, two men watching this determined little turtle, trying to head west. He’s climbing over obstacles, falling down hills, only to right himself again and slowly head his way back in his chosen direction. One fellow even picks him up and turns him around, planting him somewhere far from his original starting point, but when we look back, we see he’s back up and running, tenacious in finding his way.

My sister saved this tiny baby turtle she found in the street. She took him home and fed and nurtered him. But despite his protective shell, she only sees a vulnerable creature. She brought him outside, and he got into some fire ants, so they had to save him again. They are also cautious about setting him free. They look to the sky, afraid of birds of prey, that their little Mack would make a tasty snack for one of them. But he’ll never reach his destination in a glass tank.

After all, he could be destined to become a master turtle like Oogway, who shares his wisdom and flies with the cherry blossoms to the sky.

My dad worked for the Boy Scouts of America when his kids were young. He hooked up with them in New Orleans and was immediately transferred to a little town in northeastern Louisiana called Bogalusa. We were there four years before they decided to transfer him to Texas. My brother had been in Cub Scouts in that pine-filled, paper-mill town in Louisiana, with my mom serving as Den Mother, but it was the extended road trip from Bogalusa to Galveston that made his sisters feel like honorary Boy Scouts, despite our genitalia.

We packed up the house at 1616 Bird Avenue and said good-bye to our acre lot towering with pine trees, fecund with pears and figs, wild strawberries, watermelon, tomatoes, okra, blackberries, honeysuckle and wild cherries that my uncles fermented into big green jugs of cherry bounce. The trouble was, Dad had to report for work, but we didn’t have a house to move into just yet. It didn’t matter, it was summer, and we were Boy Scouts.

The first stop on the long road trip was Hill Country outside of Austin. The Boy Scouts have since sold the land, but this was by far the best Boy Scout camp I’ve ever been to. Our first instruction was to watch out for scorpions, to put our shoes up high before we went to bed, and to check them for those tiny, sand-colored creatures before we put our feet back into them. We loved to see the long, brown jack rabbits racing ahead of us and marvelled at the strange brown grasshoppers whose music echoed all around us. It was hot, but there was cool water to swim in, a deep blue pool with huge goldfish and a small cliff that served as a diving board.

We had to leave after a few weeks, and the next stop was Camp Karankawa in Brazoria County, Texas, which would become our home base for the many camping trips we took as honorary Boy Scouts over the next few years. Karankawa was a lot greener and shadier than Hill Country. There was this tree that had grown sideways, and you could walk straight up it.  The cabins had a party line, so you never knew who was answering the phone and where they were in the camp.  I learned the difference between coral snakes and king snakes - black and yellow kill a fellow; red on black, venom lack.  Plus, I always thought it was pretty cool that they would name a camp after a group of cannibals.

All this time we were camping out, my parents were wheeling and dealing, trying to find a house in Galveston County that would sleep a family of six on a Boy Scout regional exec’s salary. They eventually found a place in La Marque, Texas, and our road trip ended there. The house was smaller and the yard was tiny compared to the vastness of our land in Louisiana. And the one thing we had hoped for, that we’d lose the smell of the paper mill, was dashed when we smelled the putrid stench of petroleum production. But it was all a new adventure.