Travels With Charley Dog Quotes

Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully.

A dog...is a bond between strangers.

But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself. He doesn’t even know about race, nor is he concerned with his sisters’ marriage. It’s quite the opposite. Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully. It would be difficult to explain to a dog the good and moral purpose of a thousand humans gathered to curse one tiny human. I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quick and vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true- a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? ... Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

But from the start I had withheld from him any information about the giant redwoods. It seemed to me that a Long Island poodle who had made his devoirs to Sequoia sempervirens or Sequoia gigantea might be set apart from other dogs--might even be like that Galahad who saw the Grail. The concept is staggering.

Travels with Charley, which Lori was devouring. John Steinbeck’s tale of road-tripping in a pickup camper with his French poodle was popular among the nomads, and dog-eared copies passed from hand to hand.

If Charley hadn’t shaken and bounced and said “Ftt,” I might have forgotten that every night he gets two dog biscuits and a walk to clear his head. I put on clean clothes and went out with him into the star-raddled night. And the Aurora Borealis was out. I’ve seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveler upstage in an infinite theater. In colors of rose and lavender and purple it moved and pulsed against the night, and the frost-sharpened stars shone through it. What a thing to see at a time when I needed it so badly!

Steinbeck set off from Sag Harbor on the morning of September 23, 1960, with Charley, his tall and gregarious French poodle, for company. “I remember when he asked to take Charley Dog,” his wife later recalled. “He said rather meekly, ‘This is a big favor I’m going to ask, Elaine. Can I take Charley?’ ‘What a good idea,’ I said, ‘if you get into any kind of trouble, Charley can go get help.’ John looked at me sternly and said, ‘Elaine, Charley isn’t Lassie.

Charley is a born diplomat. He prefers negotiation to fighting, and properly so, since he is very bad at fighting. Only once in his ten years has he been in trouble—when he met a dog who refused to negotiate. Charley lost a piece of his right ear that time. But he is a good watch dog—has a roar like a lion, designed to conceal from night-wandering strangers the fact that he couldn’t bite his way out of a cornet de papier. He is a good friend and traveling companion, and would rather travel about than anything he can imagine. If he occurs at length in this account, it is because he contributed much to the trip. A dog, particularly an exotic like Charley, is a bond between strangers. Many conversations en route began with “What degree of a dog is that?

It would be difficult to explain to a dog the good and moral purpose of a thousand humans gathered to curse one tiny human. I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

He feels that he is a first-rate dog and has no wish to be a second-rate human.

I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

If Charley hadn’t shaken and bounced and said “Ftt,” I might have forgotten that every night he gets two dog biscuits and a walk to clear his head.

When a park employee told Steinbeck that Charley would have to be leashed in the park on account of “the bears,” Steinbeck wrote that he told the ranger, “This is a dog of peace and tranquility. I suggest that the greatest danger to your bears will be pique at being ignored by Charley.

The transformative nature of road trips: On the Road (Jack Kerouac, 1957): Heralded as quintessentially American, On the Road captures the restless Beat movement and subsequent 1960s counterculture. Blue Highways (William Least Heat-Moon, 1982): Personal anguish sends the author on a three-month soul-searching road trip through the forgotten corners of America. The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (Luis Alberto Urrea, 2004): Socially engaged in a way that Steinbeck would have endorsed, The Devil’s Highway details the trials of twenty-six men who attempt to cross the Mexican border into southern Arizona. “Go Greyhound” (Bob Hicok, 2004): Hicok’s poem speaks to the feelings of loneliness and exhaustion that often plague travelers, as well as the relief that comes with shedding a turbulent past. Easy Rider (1969): In this classic film, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper cross America on bikes. Thelma and Louise (1991): Two working women set out on their own, with unexpected consequences. Bombón: El Perro (2004): A struggling mechanic begins to turn his life around when he adopts a dog, who accompanies him on his escapades.