'Dogging' John Steinbeck across Montana...
13 years ago I was chasing John Steinbeck's ghost across South Dakota and Montana for my book 'Dogging Steinbeck,' which proved a lot of his iconic road book 'Travels With Charley' was BS.
Here's one of my favorite parts of 'Dogging Steinbeck,' my crazy 2013 work of 'True Nonfiction' that proved that John Steinbeck’s iconic 'Travels With Charley' was highly fictionalized and not the nonfiction account of his 1960 road trip that it was purported to be for 50 years.
13 years ago this week I was dogging Steinbeck's cold trail across North Dakota and Montana, where he spent about 50 hours of his life as he raced to Seattle and a rendezvous with his wife Elaine. Since my beautiful and saintly wife Trudi was from Montana, I had the chance to write about her family and one of the state's great citizens, the late Bud Miller of Lewistown.
From 'Dogging Steinbeck':
Two-Night Stand
Steinbeck fell hard for Montana. As he mooned in Travels with Charley, “Montana has a spell on me. It is grandeur and warmth. If Montana had a seacoast, or if I could live away from the sea, I would instantly move there and petition for admission. Of all the states it is my favorite and my love.”
He can’t be blamed for being smitten. But his relationship was more like a two-night stand than a serious love affair. He drove down the main streets of Billings, Bozeman, Butte and Missoula and other smaller U.S. 10 towns. He stopped in bars, a clothing shop and a gun store. He stayed one night in a trailer court near Livingston and a second on private land west of Missoula along the Clark Fork River.
But other than gawking out his windshield for hours at the state’s natural grandeur, that was pretty much it for Steinbeck’s fling with lovely Montana: Two days, two nights, two sunsets. Fifty total hours and about 850 miles of driving. All packed into 2.5 pages of Travels with Charley. Steinbeck obviously missed a lot of Montana. Curving from southeast to northwest on old U.S. Highway 10, he saw just a sliver of the country’s fourth biggest state.
He didn’t see Glacier National Park, Flathead Lake or the Missouri Breaks. He didn't have time to do the signature outdoor Montana things –- fly fishing in the Yellowstone River, hiking up creeks to the toxic but cool ruins of silver mines, driving 10 miles into a pine forest on a dirt road for a picnic in a meadow at 7,000 feet or conquering your own nameless mountain.
Yet after only 50 hours in Montana, Steinbeck got it. He nailed her and its people. In Charley, he writes “… It seemed to me that the frantic bustle of America was not in Montana. Its people did not seem afraid of shadows in a John Birch Society sense. The calm of the mountains and the rolling grassland had got into the inhabitants.... Again my attitude may be informed by love, but it seems to me that the towns were places to live in rather than nervous hives. People had time to pause in their occupations to undertake the passing art of neighborliness.”
How he figured out Montana so quickly testifies to Steinbeck’s superior powers of observation. I’m just a Montanan by marriage. My wife Trudi grew up in Great Falls in a family that was part working class and part bohemian. Her dad James Logan, who died of a heart attack at age 54, was a foreman at the Anaconda copper smelter by day and a prominent Montana artist and Paris Review subscriber the rest of the time. Her mother Ele was a Northwestern grad and drama major who after the death of her husband taught at the Goodman Institute in Chicago and did acting in New York with young bucks like Danny DeVito.
Trudi’s family lived on Smelter Hill, a storybook company-owned neighborhood at the foot of the copper smelter’s colossal smoke stack along the Missouri River. They spent their summers at a log cabin on federal forestland in Lewis and Clark National Forest near Neihart, a gas station/variety store “town” of 51 on U.S. 89 about 150 miles north of Bozeman.
Near their cabin, scattered about the beautiful wide and winding canyons of the Little Belt Mountains, were rectangles of fenced-in concrete. Located at the end of conspicuously well-maintained gravel roads, they looked like vacant parking lots that someone had perversely carved out in the middle of the vast forest of spruce, fir and lodge pole pine. The only clues that you had come upon an armed-and-ready Minuteman ICBM silo were a strong razor-topped cyclone fence and a small, serious sign that warned that lethal force would be used against trespassers, KGB agents or Washington Post editorial writers like Rachel Dry.
For decades, thanks to the Cold War’s doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction and those Minutemen silos, the empty beauty of North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana was a prime target for Soviet ICBMs. Steinbeck worried about “The Bomb” and complained about the absurdity of the nuclear arms race. But local Montana folks – what few there were scattered around Neihart – didn’t seem to notice the nukes in their backyards. They had learned long ago to live with the fact that if World War III broke out they would be among the first Republicans to die.
From what I know of the state and its lucky inhabitants, what Steinbeck wrote about Montana was still true. Since the early 1980s I had spent a total of about three months of my life there. I liked the natives as well as the land. My favorite Montanan was my sister-in-law’s boyfriend Bud. He had a big place on a hill where he could see four different mountain ranges and the lights of downtown Lewistown, population 8,000 in a spacious county of 15,000.
Bud’s apparently a fairly common Montana type, but to an effete Easterner like me he looked, thought, talked and acted like an old-time Western movie hero. In his 60s when I met him, his hair and sideburns were gray, his skin thick and suntanned. As solid as a Marine recruit, with powerful forearms and hands, on a family picnic he carried my six-year-old daughter Lucy on his back across a swift icy creek that was hip deep and wide as an interstate.
Bud was an archetypal American success story. He migrated to Montana in the late '30s from Missouri, when he was 17. A farm boy, he arrived with an eighth grade education, $15 in his blue jeans and a yearning to get his own place someday. His first job was as a ranch hand. By the time Steinbeck and Charley sped by, Bud was well on his way to owning 2,500 acres and 350 head of cattle. He also would get his very own Minuteman silo.
One day in the mid-1980s Bud decided to run for county commissioner as an independent and was elected in a landslide. He didn’t say much at the public meetings. But when he did, it was exactly what he thought. He kept his own tax return on public display at the courthouse and spent most of his time helping troubled local kids, fixing fences and remodeling the county jail.
Bud was my kind of local politician – a throwback from the 19th century. His inherent common sense and simple ideas about government would terrify anyone living east of the Hudson River, but they sprang up from inside his “own self,” as he might say. They were pure Jeffersonian – keep government limited, local and out of people’s hair. He thought people should own up for what they do, pay their own way and be left alone if they weren’t hurting anybody. Sounded pretty progressive to me, but I was a radical.