So, we’ve been talking about The Grapes of Wrath and migrant farmwork, which led me here now to David Sedaris and his very funny book, Naked. His story “C.O.G.” starts with a long-distance bus ride to Oregon where he is bound for an apple orchard so he can pick fruit from trees. On this road trip, he encounters a number of people, some of them quite “touched.”

I love how he describes some of the people he encounters on the bus, particularly the girl who curses her dead-beat ex-boyfriend for knocking her up. (As a contrast, Wade over at Vagabond Journey describes how super nice it is to travel by bus in countries that aren’t the US. Who knew?)

Sedaris seems to have gone the way of Kerouac, slipping into these farm-workers’ worlds for a moment of his time, just to escape home to the east coast when things get a little too hairy for him. Of course, Sedaris is well aware of his youthful delusions and pretensions in the hindsight telling of the tale, poking fun at himself as mercilessly as he does the people he encounters. It just makes him all the more endearing.

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