John Steinbeck Visits Pike Place Market, c. 1960

When we mentioned to a friend that we're re-reading John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley, the friend remarked that he knew another reading same. With summer approaching, maybe the greatest of all American road-trip travelogues (sorry, Kerouac) is just the thing to whet one's appetite for the season of travel.

We had forgotten that Steinbeck and his French standard poodle Charley stopped in Seattle. We had also forgotten that one of his (Steinbeck's, not Charley's) many cogent observations of American life came from a visit to a location that Steinbeck doesn't name, but which you'll recognize, though it's been nearly fifty years since he visited.

I walked in the old port of Seattle, where the fish and crabs and shrimps lay beautifully on white beds of shaved ice and where the washed and shining vegetables were arranged in pictures.

Steinbeck mentions a meal of clam juice and crab cocktail, and, noting that Pike Place Market was "a little more run-down and dingy that it was twenty years ago," makes a prediction:

When a city begins to grow and spread outward, from the edges, the center which was once its glory is in a sense abandoned to time. Then the buildings grow dark and decay sets in; ... and then one day perhaps the city returns and rips out the sore and builds a monument to its past.

Steinbeck, who died in 1968, would be happy that his prediction went unfulfilled. We in Seattle did not abandon our center; we didn't rip it out. We preserved it. Visitors to Seattle can walk the stalls of the Market just as Steinbeck did--and, judging from the typically crowded summer scene there, most do.

Though perhaps they choose a Jones Soda and a humbow over a clam juice and crab cocktail.

You can buy Travels with Charley in Search of America new for $8 at Amazon, or get one of the three copies currently available through the Seattle Public Library.