Yet again — as surely as Sancho Panza can grind a knight errant’s soul between a thousand proverbs — we come to the marriage of literature and the road.
This week, the betrothal comes by way of Michael Kimball, a Baltimore-based novelist and co-host of the monthly “510 Readings” at the Minas Gallery in Hampden.
Kimball’s third novel — “Dear Everybody” — will be released tomorrow by Alma Books of Great Britain.
But it was his first novel, 2000’s “The Way The Family Got Away,” for which he traveled the back roads and two-lane highways of Texas and Dust Bowl America.
If the Joad family had left Oklahoma for the utopian orange groves of California with a dead baby under all their worldly possessions, they would be kin to Kimball’s tale of down-on-their-luck-Americans on the road.
“I chose Mineola, Texas, because of family history,” Kimball said. “The first sentence of the book is a story handed down by my great-grandmother to my grandfather and from my grandfather down to me.”
It reads: “My brother’s cradle and other baby stuff got us from Mineola to Birthrock . . .”
Mineola — self-lauded as “The Birding Capital of East Texas” — sits at the intersection of Highway 80 and Highway 69. I am not sure where Birthrock is, but it points the way to a good read.
The route that Kimball took to research the book in 1998 is the general route that the family takes in the book.
“I didn’t know the exact route that my great-great-grandparents would have taken, but I felt compelled to imagine it,” said Kimball.
Thus beats the heart of every road trip that must be taken, like the time in 1988 that I ill-advisedly left my wife and three young kids at home in Baltimore for a pilgrimage down Interstate 81 to the grave of Sherwood Anderson in Marion, Va.
As well as the lure of every book worth reading: to compel, the urgent twin of obsession.
“I mostly stayed off the interstates and took back roads,” said Kimball. “I stayed in roadside motels on the edges of small towns and revised the novel at night.
“The book got shorter and shorter — 450 pages became fewer than 200 — as the family in the story shed all of their belongings. I crossed the Mississippi River at Cape Girardeau and drove through Anna, Illinois.”
Anna, Illinois — good Lord, I miss her so.
