In the fall of 1960, the New Orleans public schools were accepting their first black students and the result was a national spectacle, which Steinbeck witnessed and wrote about in Travels. Kalamu ya Salaam was a 13-year-old junior high school student at the time. Now a writer, poet, filmmaker, activist, and educator, Salaam reflects on how the racial and class dynamics in New Orleans have changed, or not, since his youth.

[audio:http://www.travelswithmike.org/audio/TWM-NOLA-FINAL.mp3|titles=New Orleans, La.]

Photograph by Alex Lear

Steinbeck was born and raised in nearby Salinas, California, but his family often visited Monterey, and Steinbeck lived there as a young man while writing works such as Cannery Row. In revisiting Steinbeck’s home country, we hear from Diana Garcia, an award-winning poet and California native. Steinbeck is a literary hero to Garcia, but the two writers differ over the changes that have come to California—and on whether it’s possible to go home again.

[audio:http://www.travelswithmike.org/audio/TWM-MONTEREY-FINAL.mp3|titles=Monterey, Calif.]

Studio 360 listeners respond to Travels with Mike: Monterey with stories of going home again

Steinbeck wrote of spending two days “close to the bodies of the giants,” the sequoia. He calls the redwoods “ambassadors from another time.” For Susan “Tweet” Burdick, a Yurok Indian basket maker, the redwoods are close friends and relatives.

[audio:http://www.travelswithmike.org/audio/TWM-ORICK-FINAL.mp3|titles=Orick, Calif.]

On the outskirts of Spokane, Steinbeck met a gruff man and his son, Robbie. Steinbeck implied that Robbie was probably gay. Fifty years later, we meet a Spokane native much like Robbie – a hairdresser, actor, and resident director of one of the finest communities theatres in the country, Spokane Civic Theatre. And yes, Troy Nickerson is a gay man. But he has one big advantage over Steinbeck’s Robbie: Nickerson was born a quarter century later.

[audio:http://www.travelswithmike.org/audio/TWM-SPOKANE-FINAL.mp3|titles=Spokane, Wash.]

Having imagined Fargo as remote and exotic, Steinbeck found the town disappointingly ordinary. He drove on to camp near Alice, North Dakota, where he encountered an itinerant Shakespearean actor. We retrace Steinbeck’s path with Wayne Gudmundson, a Fargo native who has photographed the region’s eerily flat landscape, and the man-made marks on it, for forty years.

[audio:http://www.travelswithmike.org/audio/TWM-FARGO-FINAL.mp3|titles=Fargo, N.D.]

As he prepared to set out from his home at the tip of Long Island, Steinbeck noticed in the eyes of his neighbors “a burning desire to go . . . anyplace, away from any Here.” He and his Standard Poodle, Charley, set out in a makeshift camper that Steinbeck named Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse. Painter David Slater takes us to Steinbeck’s former home and offers some thoughts in response to Steinbeck’s 50-year-old question about the spirit of America.

[audio:http://www.travelswithmike.org/audio/TWM-SAGHARBOR-FINAL.mp3|titles=Sag Harbor, N.Y.]