Steinbeck, Scuppers and trains

As a child, the great Amer­i­can au­thor John Stein­beck was in­spired by a scene with a bird in it: a stork. He cher­ished a toy 'Easter look­ing-egg' which he loved to peer into through a tiny hole, see­ing “a lovely lit­tle farm, a kind of dream farm, and on the farm­house chim­ney a stork sit­ting on a nest.” Stein­beck had taken this set­ting to be pure fan­tasy but to his sur­prise saw the same thing in real life one day in Den­mark.

My own young imag­i­na­tion, be­fore I could even read, had been fired by books like Mar­garet Wise Brown's 'Scup­pers The Sailor Dog' with its su­perbly mem­o­rable il­lus­tra­tions by Garth Williams. I would al­ways ask my mother to read me this story and one scene in par­tic­u­lar is im­printed on my mem­ory even still. I'm sure that it fed my un­con­scious with a deep de­sire to travel.

Brave Scup­pers is asleep in a warm bunk bed in his cosy, wood-pan­eled ship's cabin. The ship is toss­ing be­cause I can see that the light is swing­ing from the roof and out­side through the round port­hole win­dow the sea is choppy. Under his bed are his new shoes that he picked out from a shop, pic­tured on the pre­vi­ous page. Scup­pers re­jected a dif­fer­ent pair as being 'too fancy' be­cause they were curly at the toe ends.

This shop (where he also bought a 'bushel' of or­anges) had palm trees out­side and a woman in a veil walk­ing by, seem­ingly in a hurry. I'd never seen ei­ther of those things be­fore and didn't know the word 'ex­otic' then but that's what I was think­ing in my form­ing child's out­look. When I got to Mo­rocco twenty five years later and saw the same curly shoes that Scup­pers had passed over, I felt what must have been a sim­i­lar sat­is­fy­ing sur­prise as John Stein­beck had once en­joyed.

Travel has a way of also em­bold­en­ing us be­cause we are out of the realm of home's fa­mil­iar touches.

Con­sciously, my love af­fair with trav­el­ling on trains began just over two decades ago when my part­ner Paula and I spent over three months on dif­fer­ent forms of them get­ting across Eu­rope. As a child and young adult I'd barely been on a train be­fore but there was some­thing ei­ther in my an­ces­tral mem­ory or a dif­fer­ent kind of spark that kin­dled a vague in­ter­est in a dif­fer­ent sort of trans­port, aside from buses or planes. Maybe it was hear­ing Neil Di­a­mond on TV when I was eight years old. I still re­call him singing:

It's a beau­ti­ful noise

Goin' on ev'ry­where

Like the click­ety-clack

Of a train on a track

It's got rhythm to spare

In this song too he po­et­i­cised the sounds of big city street as music to the ear and my bud­ding brain was in­trigued by this idea. Liv­ing in quiet sub­ur­bia where the high-pitched 'ninga-ninga' of sum­mer lawn movers was the most com­mon week­end noise, I'd never heard any­thing like the kind of thing in Di­a­mond's lyrics and his clear af­fec­tion for the pulse and grind of the me­trop­o­lis. It has stayed with me in the same way that thoughts on a train trip from over twenty years ago will now and then float back into mem­ory.