Who is the Traveler

Roadtrip Circa NowThe traveler today is no longer the same as he was 50, 60 or 70 years ago. Today the sight of a traveler on an interstate highway with a car loaded with camping gear is not suspect, but rather commonplace. Yet what the pieces of Adamic and Asch so clearly illustrate, is the manner in which the traveler was received during a time like the great depression, and what it meant to be traveling.Roadtrip Circa Then

In Adamic's "Girl on the Road", the narrator, the hitchhiking girl he picks up and all the characters in the girl's stories, give us an idea of who was on the road during the depression and what the people on the side of the road, such as restaurant owners, inhabitants of small towns, gas station attendants etc, saw in these travelers. No one took to the road to simply explore, though Hazel admits to being awed by the landscape of Arizona and other parts of the country she passed through. It seems that anyone on the road had a purpose. Either they were heading west in search of opportunity, as was Hazel and the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, or they are on the road to do a job, such as the journalist narrators of Adamic and Asch's pieces and the truck drivers Hazel encounters. And all of the characters in these pieces convey a desire to find or return to a place they can call home, or at least feel comfortable in.

There is a sense of loneliness and melancholy that pervades these accounts, revealing that life on the road, regardless of the impetus behind it, was difficult emotionally and separated people from one another. It is clear from the reception Adamic's narrator and Hazel receive at the restaurants they stop at and from their brief encounter with the law, that people noticed travelers, that they found each stranger passing through suspicious. Asch also confronts this problem when the Hamtramck police interrogate and harass him simply because he is an outsider, and therefor suspicious. Today, even in some of the most remote places in America, travelers are received very differently, because the reasons people take to the road have changed somewhat.

In the 30's it seems that people feared and disliked travelers because in general they were broke and often running away from something or toward something. Before the depression it wasn't common for people to move around the country for work, and all of a sudden towns and businesses along the main interstates were seeing thousands of people drive by and probably not profiting from them as much as they would expect. Today people who travel the country may be broke, but some speed along the highways in pursuit of leisure, to experience America up close, and gas station attendants, roadside restaurants and small towns along the highways never know what to expect from the stream of people that pass through, but at least it is no longer a sight that distresses people.