Haley's blog

 
The first thing I did upon opening the guide was search for any mention of my town. Nary a word, despite 600 plus pages of information. Poor Lancaster. Once I got over that vast oversight, I read about surrounding areas and found a remarkable amount of similarities regarding tourism today. The main draw to Massachusetts is a rich cultural history, full of Native American settlements and Civil War decorations. Boston is obviously an excellent tourist destination, but areas west of the Atlantic are great places to visit as well. (I should really work for the Central/Western Massachusetts tourism industry.)
 
New England is known for its autumn foliage. The WPA guides mention apple picking and leaf peeping, which are still a huge draw for tourists today.  Horticulture hero Johnny Appleseed has both a hiking trail and a highway named after him. “Every region of the state enjoys gorgeous color, and you'll see some popular routes listed below. But don't be afraid to explore off the beaten path, where you'll find fewer cars and surprising colorful vistas. But it's not just about foliage in the fall. Make sure to check out these great Culinary Events and Farm Festivals going on in September and October. Also find out the latest apple picking info with Macintosh News.” (http://www.massvacation.com/scienceNature/fall-foliage.php) The current website for vacationing in Massachusetts has an interactive foliage map-a timetable created for optimal seasonal colors. The old WPA guide suggest taking a  “Right on Boston Rd, which leads through long stretches of apple orchards…the scene of the Nashoba Apple Blossom Festival in which, in, 1935, thirty-eight towns participated in with an attendance of some 50,000 persons. The present town comprises about 20,00 acres of land, chiefly hills, and valleys of glacial origin.” (WPA 511) Concord and Walden Pond are popular spots as well. In addition to being a beautiful small town, Concord offers the homes and writing spots of literary giant and noted transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau (something the WPA guide fails to mention.) 

The America roadside represents a wide myriad of things for citizens. It can serve as a physical manifestation of change, the ability to alter one’s life by leaving places behind. There are songs, books, poems, films, and television shows about life on the road, but how much does reality differ from fiction?
 
Many of our readings (American Roadside, most recently) have painted a very specific image of what travel looks like from the road. It’s characterized with quaint highway diners, cheap bed and breakfasts, and small-town quirkiness. This has changed greatly over the last few decades. When I think of interstate travel now, I picture miles upon miles of franchises. The first McDonalds was launched in 1940, an early height of leisure travel in America. The franchise was (obviously) a massive success, and now operates as a 3.9 billion dollar empire. It’s truly the ideal business model: travelers are hungry, and meals that market themselves as home-cooked and wholeheartedly America (hello, hamburgers and fries) are a natural solution for filling growling stomachs. It’s transformed from being a campy family drive-through to a very standard, unoriginally American operation.
 
With the streamlining of commercial vehicles and airplanes, travel has become less about the road and more about the destination, a trend of consumerism and tourist culture that began in the 1930s. Why get off Route 66 and explore a small town when you could get your favorite bacon and waffle combination at Denny’s and sleep in a Holiday Inn? “Typically, its furniture is a double bed-a sign may have told you it is a Simmons, with Beautyrest mattresses-a table, two kitchen chairs, a small mirror, a row of hooks. In one corner a washbasin with cold running water; in another, the half-opened door to a toilet.” (Agee 47) Travelers are moving away from embracing new places and have instead put their focus (and money) into massive and familiar businesses. 

Thinking back on this class reminds me of the novels I used to read as a kid; many young adult fiction stories are travel related.  A journey across the country, the world, or the sea is a timeless plot (see The Grapes of Wrath, Around the World In 80 Days, or even Moby Dick).
 
A book widely read in many middle schools is Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls.  It’s the tale of a poor boy growing up in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, and a great deal of the story is dedicated to his journey traveling to Oklahoma. The novel glamorized independent travel (to my brothers and I at least!). It was presented as fun and exciting, and the dangers he encountered along the way (food shortage, mountain lion) didn’t ultimately harm him.
 
Another popular young adult novel is the Little House On The Prairie series.  Although it takes place in the late 1800s, it remains a relevant travel story today. The Wilder family crosses the mid-West in a covered wagon in search of more economic opportunities. Their story is often less positive than Rawls tale of boyhood mishaps. The Wilders face a great deal of hardships on their journey-food is scarce, their farm yields no crops after a drought, Native American racism, etc.  It was a dramatic and controversial series, and the age group it was marketed to was often questioned. The Wilder’s draw comparisons to the Joad’s as well; both were self-sufficient, patriarchal families.  

Kromer’s memoir is a massively affecting piece of literary work. Without sentiment or overreaction, he employs the bare facts of his life at the time to tell his story. The declarative, no frills language in the text implies that Kromer has no intentions of using anything more than what happened to conjure an emotional reaction in his reader. This passage in chapter 10, “I crouch here in the dark and wait. Farther up the track I can see these other stiffs crouching beside the tracks. They are only a shadow through the dark. I hope I can make it, but I am plenty nervous. It is too dark to see the steps on the cars. I will have to feel for them. I pick me out an even place to run in. I look close to see that there are no switches to trip me up. If a guy was to trip over something when he was running after this drag, it would be just too bad. That guy would not have to worry about any more drags.” perfectly exemplifies this line of thinking. By giving a quick explanation of the scene at hand, Kromer effectively reaches the audience without going overboard in his descriptions.
 
Although they are both 1930s travel stories, Waiting For Nothing was drastically different than our first novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Aside from the obvious fiction vs. memoir comparison, Steinbeck is an author first and foremost, and this is evident in the literary form he adopts throughout his book. Kromer has a much more relaxed, conversational style that explains situations in a very matter of fact manner.
 
Another key difference is the family structure that exists within The Grapes of Wrath, and the solitary journey Kromer takes. It could be argued that Kromer cultivates a “road family”, but the truth is that nobody sticks around for long enough to truly count as kin. He is without the built in support system the Joad’s had. Kromer’s lonely travel adds to the desolate feeling one gets reading his work. In some ways, The Grapes of Wrath feels like a more personal story, in spite of the fact it is an imagined account. A gift of fiction is that we can go inside the heads of the characters from an omnipresent narrator. Thoughts are not (or less frequently, at least) filtered through one man’s thoughts and instead through the character’s. Kromer’s writing is without romanticism, and though the lack of emotion works for the tone of the story, it can be hard to relate to. The Joads manage to be both lovable and relatable.
 
 

What I noticed most about the readings this week was the first person, narrative quality of each. Anderson, Guthrie and Reitman (our theoretical Bertha) all told personal/autobiographical accounts of what they encountered in their travels. Unlike previous weeks however, the stories told in these excerpts were very positive recollections of life as a vagabond.
 
Although I know the Bertha story is not actually an autobiography, it doesn’t change how I view the story. The events that occur within it are based on factual accounts from years of experience on the road, and therefore do exist in that manner. In one way, I was almost glad it was a false story, because I found the ending very unsatisfying. Bertha is painted as such a positive, free-wheeling spirit, I hated that she gave up the life she loved to settle and be a mother. It implied that parenthood was what all women were expected to do, and that notion is obnoxious.
 
The article “Woody Guthrie and his Folk Tradition” was less of a travel story but fascinating nonetheless. It discussed why Guthrie garners less attention than his folk cohorts, and why he tends to be left out of the conversation. His life was an interesting one-he learned traditional songs from his mother and eventually moved on to writing his own. He lived a very nomadic lifestyle throughout his early years, traveling from Oklahoma to California and penning stories and songs along the way.

When he began to perform, “he was quickly idealized as a ’rusty-voiced Homer’ and ‘the best folk ballad composer whose identity has ever been known”. He became a radical prototype of the democratic and enlightened white ‘folk.” (280) Guthrie went on to inspires many great artists such as Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and of course Bob Dylan.
 
 
 
 
*Ummm, so this didn’t post yesterday morning when I thought it did. It’s my fault for not checking, but I’m going to go ahead and blame my apartment’s terrible wifi all the same.
 

The many iconic images that emerged from and throughout the 1930s serve as powerful reminders of people who went relatively ignored. Writing is a good medium for evoking sympathy. It’s easy to read a story of somebody’s misfortune and feel sad on their behalf. Photographs have the potential for a stronger impact. When confronted with the realities of a situation by seeing it yourself, sympathy becomes empathy. We relate to people to images, can put ourselves in the situations more accurately, creating a personal connection. Asking someone in New York City to understand what daily life is like for someone on a farm in Macon, Georgia is a difficult task. It’s hard for even the wildest of imaginations to such a varied lifestyle. Photographs do the work for us by creating a sense of time and place for those in disparate situations.
 
As it is stated in the Lange/Taylor piece, the farm population declined by 57%, and the number of sharecroppers dropped by 83%. This regression was so dramatic the Census Bureau stopped classifying them “because their declining number and importance.” (12) Although this is a shocking statistic with very real consequences, it is hard to envision if you are neither a farmer nor a sharecropper. Lange’s portrayal of their plights created a physical tie for the rest of America. From a journalistic standpoint, field research was a fresh way to achieve familiarity across the United States. This new form of documentation was almost scientific, Lange herself described her camera as “a tool of research.” (15) She used it as an instrument to emotionally access more people than just a news article would have; an effective, lasting tactic. 

Asch's writing adopts a very specific style in The Road. He tells his travel story through a series of vignettes rather than a straight narrative. He begins with a strip club, and moves on through Detroit, a visit with a college friend, etc. Within each of these moments, themes of travel and the time period seep through. Poverty is one that shows up frequently. The girl he meets in the opening paragraph is working a demeaning job for a low wage to make ends meet. He meets a man who has recently lost his job and whose future appears bleak.  When he stays with his college friend’s family, it is an acute reminder of the fact that life goes on. Asch experiences a shift in perspective when he arrives in New York City. People seem less friendly, less concern, and more willing to revolt. He cites “Union Square roaring out a protest” (266) as an example of the Northeast’s reluctance to settle.
 
In Home Country, Pyle is also on a journey, though his is told from the viewpoint of a rather disheartened man. The misery he witnessed build as he travels from site to site. He sums up years of people and places in just a page-by listing them; he inadvertently (or perhaps on purpose?) lessens their existences to the reader. Pyle’s writing is similar to Asch’s in that they both show mere snippets of the things they come across, instead of painting entire pictures. This wide-angle view of circumstances is an unusual way of framing a time period, but it works to express the distress people lived in.
 

The Joad’s began their journey as a solo migration. They had nobody outside of their family they could turn to, and it created many extra hardships. The Dust Bowl had ravaged their way of life, and they we alone in fighting for stability. The Joad’s felt abandoned, and rightfully so. Their way of thinking was altered however, when they arrived at Weedpatch, a federally funded camp for migrants. Appointed committees keep the land clean and functional, allowing migrants to live comfortably and securely. Ma states that the goodwill and turn of luck makes her “feel like people again.” It also granted them the ability to govern themselves. This helped migrants avoid unhappy local civilians as well as corrupt police officers. Within their vast community, the once lost migrants now have somewhere to call home, and people in similar predicaments to lean on for support. When Rose of Sharon expressed worry over her pregnancy, Ma Joad offers support by saying "Rosasharn, you're jest one person, an' they's a lot of other folks. You git to your proper place. I knowed people built theirself up with sin till they  figgered they was big mean shucks in the sight a the Lord." The migrants work together, passing on hints such as weighing down cotton sacks with stones to override rigged scales.
 
When the camp begins to run low on resources, the Joad’s hit the road again looking for work. They were spoiled by the luxury of living in a community, and are surprised to find themselves working long days only to go hungry at night. This proves yet again that unity supersedes individual desires. Although each member of the family is hard at work, only $1 is made at the end of the day.  The Joad’s had grown accustomed to relying on others for help sustaining their livelihoods, and are disheartened by the lack of a network. Living with the Wainwright’s is a step in that direction, but still to small to truly qualify as an extended kinship. One effect of this is a crucial change in the architecture of the Joad family. Ma takes over the typically patriarchal duty of making decisions as she sees fit, serving as both caregiver and leader. This structural shift is one of the many results of the loss of their migrant cohorts.
 

At the start of their travels, the Joads were an efficient family unit. Within their patriarchal structure, each member had an inherent job, driven by both ability and biology. Their definition of family extends beyond bloodlines, Reverend Jim Casy and The Wilsons are welcomed in as members. As they continue on through California however, they begin to fall apart. It begins with the untimely death of Grampa, followed quickly by Noah’s decision to stay behind. He believes his choice will not negatively impact the family because his parents are kind but do not truly love him.  The Joads struggle to maintain the strength of their relationships throughout the story.
 
The second family structure within the Grapes of Wrath is the one created by the migrant workers. They create a hierarchy amongst themselves, and are working together towards better lives. With no homes to call their own, life as migrants calls for new kinships to be formed. “In the evening, a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts o twenty families, of a hundred people, that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with birth-joy in the morning.” (193) Facing hardships together trumped genetics, and familial unions became crucial to survival. Leaders were established amongst the migrants, as well as a set of ‘laws’ to abide by. “And as the worlds moved westward they were more complete and better furnished, for their builders were more experienced in building them.” (195)
 
As the Joads themselves had done before their move to California, each member of their new and extended family had jobs to fulfill to keep the machine of their lives continuing forward. “Each member of the family grew into his proper place, grew into his duties; so that each member, old and young, had his place in the car; so that in the weary, hot evenings, when the cars pulled into the camping places, each member had his duty and went to it without instruction: children to gather wood, to carry water; men to pitch tents and bring down the beds; women to cook the supper and to watch while the family fed. And this was done without command.” (195) It was a familiar, comfortable scene for most of the migrants-fathers did heavy labor while mothers cooked and cared for the children.

Tom Joad’s homecoming is not what he expected. The once flourishing farm he was raised on is now a barren wasteland, and only one stubborn neighbor remains. It seems life as he knew it is on the brink of disaster,  and the Joad’s turn to their final viable option-California. The move from Dust Bowl to rich agricultural fields seemed to be the natural step for suffering workers and their families. It is estimated that 1.3 million people migrated West in the 1930s, the largest exodus in American history. This created a group of mostly seasonal farmers who were scorned by the local population. “Okies”, as the Joads are referred to, is not a term of endearment, but a jeer towards the influx of foreigners.
 
California however, was not the promised land people had hoped for. “Although the weather was comparatively balmy and farmers' fields were bountiful with produce, Californians also felt the effects of the Depression. Local and state infrastructures were already overburdened, and the steady stream of newly arriving migrants was more than the system could bear. After struggling to make it to California, many found themselves turned away at its borders. Those who did cross over into California found that the available labor pool was vastly disproportionate to the number of job openings that could be filled.” The few migrants who were fortunate enough to be employed were paid low wages, barely enough to support their families. They also were faced with the harsh realities of continued travel; to maintain a job, workers had to follow the crop around the state, from the North to the Mexican border. Many families were forced to reside in “ditch bank” camps, tents along irrigation trails that harbored disease and became a public health concern.
 
During recreational time, many migrants took solace in music. They adopted traditional ballads of their own, some that continue to be covered today. Many also wrote their own music about the disappoints they faced in California. Jack Bryant’s Sunny Cal is an example of the typical folk song the migrants sang. For some, California was ultimately a failure, a jobless promise land that provided no opportunities for out of towners. For others however, it provided them with exactly what they needed-security and an escape from a drought that seemed to never end. California the golden indeed. 
 

For some people, the desire to travel was the result of a well-cultivated American platform to relieve and rest its workers.  Paid vacation time was a relatively new amenity, and its usage was best put on the road.  For others it was about the search- for an idealized America, for a land of misfortune and poverty, and to document all of the above. Bus travel was heavily romanticized and the idea sold well to writers, photographers and other artists. “Why, we writers do not want to put an end to extravagant living. We want more of it. “Hurrah!” we cry. “Let everyone live extravagantly…if the American writer chances to be a good deal of a wandered, as I am, he is constantly struck by something.” (Anderson xi)
 
In The Road, Asch sets out with the intention of finding America, and lists his hesitations regarding meeting people. The idea of vagrant traveling was still a novelty for most citizens, and they were wary of accepting strangers into their lives.  Asch lends advice on his rules of travel-take an empty bus, be comfortable, talk to strangers, and if you do all of the above, Find America. “They are held by something. Always you know that they are in America. It’s not that there are no passport restrictions, no customs lines, that every time you come to a new place you don’t Have to go to the police and register, as you would do outside of America…But there is no tradition of suffering. When you’re born you’re not born to suffer.” (Asch 10) The idea behind travel was to create a national identity, with less focus on states and the threat of a disintegrated country.