Dogging Steinbeck: America the Mostly Beautiful

In 2010 I retraced the route John Steinbeck took around the country in 1960 and turned into “Travels With Charley.” I 'discovered' the good MAGA people before they knew they were MAGA people.

Following Steinbeck’s cold trail in the fall of 2010 I raced alone – and doglessly -- in my Toyota RAV4 from Long Island to the top of Maine to Seattle to San Francisco to New Orleans and back to my home south of Pittsburgh.

My 2013 e-book “Dogging Steinbeck” describes the America and the Americans I found along what I call the Old Steinbeck Highway and explains how I discovered that, as I like to say, “Travels With Charley” was a “literary fraud.”

(Though it had been marketed, sold and taught for 50 years as a true account, I proved that “Charley” did not deserve to be considered a work of non-fiction but was actually a highly fictionalized and dishonest account of Steinbeck’s iconic journey.)

Here is the first part of the chapter from my book that describes the peaceful, less politically divisive America and its diverse, good and decent people I saw during my 11,276-mile road trip. Parts 2 and 3 follow.

21 – America the Mostly Beautiful

If I found matters to criticize and to deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself. If I were to prepare one immaculately inspected generality it would be this: For all of our enormous range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart.

– John Steinbeck, “Travels With Charley”

"Big."

"Empty."

"Rich."

"No change since 1960."

Long after the old farms and new forests of New England disappeared in my rearview mirror, I was still scrawling those words in the notebook on my knee. Big, empty, rich and unchanged – that's a pretty boring scouting report for the America I “discovered” along the Steinbeck Highway. You can add a bunch of other boring but fitting words – “beautiful,” “safe,” “friendly,” “clean,” and “quiet.”

Like Steinbeck, I didn’t see the Real America or even a representative cross-section of America, neither of which exists in the real world anyway. The ribbon of the country I cut through was skewed geographically, demographically, socially, politically and economically.

Selfie on Route 66.

Because I went almost exactly where Steinbeck went and stopped where he stopped, I saw a mostly White Anglo Saxon Protestant Republican America, not an Obama one. Mostly rural or open country, it included few impoverished or crime-tortured inner cities and no over-developed/underwater suburbs.

Steinbeck was depressed by the America he found. I “re-discovered” the country I already knew existed from having done 35 years of drive-by journalism. America wasn’t perfect and never was. It had the usual ills that make libertarians sick and will never be cured – too many government wars overseas and at home, too many laws, politicians, cops, lawyers, do-gooders and preachers.

Thanks to the bums and crooks in Washington and on Wall Street who co-produced the Great Recession, a larger minority of my fellow Americans than usual was suffering from too much Big Government in their lives. I felt their pain more than most. Little Government was way too big for me.

America the Beautiful was hurting. But it was not dead, dying or decaying. The land I speed-toured in the fall of 2010 was not the broken and doomed one described in the daily headlines of the Drudge Report and the New York Times. There were no signs the country was in danger of becoming a liberal or conservative dystopia.

America hadn’t been ruined by too many illegal immigrants, too many rich people, too many poor people, too many non-white people, too many imports, too many cars or too many carbon emissions. The U.S. of A., as always, was blessed with a diverse population of productive, wealthy, generous, decent people and a continent of gorgeous natural resources.

Everyday I was surrounded by undeniable evidence of America’s underlying health and incredible prosperity. Everywhere I went people were living in good homes, driving new cars and monster pickup trucks and playing with powerboats, motorcycles and snowmobiles.

sRoads and bridges and parks and main streets were well maintained. Litter and trash were scarce. Specific towns and regions were hurting, and too many people were out of work, but it was still the same country I knew.

I didn’t seek out poverty or misery or pollution on my journey, and I encountered little of it. The destitute and jobless, not to mention the increasing millions on food stamps, on welfare or buried in debt, were especially hard to spot in a generous country where taking care of the less fortunate is a huge public-private industry – where even the poor have homes, cars, wide-screen TVs and smart phones.

I saw the familiar permanent American eyesores – homeless men sleeping on the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco at noon, the sun-bleached ruins of abandoned gas-stations on Route 66, ratty trailer homes parked in beautiful locations surrounded by decades of family junk. I saw Butte’s post-industrial carcass, New Orleans’ struggling Upper Ninth Ward and towns that could desperately use a Japanese car plant.

But the country as a whole was not crippled or even limping. The Great Recession was nothing like the Great Depression, when unemployment topped at 25 percent in 1933 and was still at 17 percent in 1939. In the fall of 2010, nine in 10 Americans who said they wanted jobs still had them. The one in 10 who were jobless had 99 weeks of extended unemployment benefits and more than 90 percent of homeowners were still making their mortgage payments.

Most of the states I shot through had unemployment and foreclosure rates well below the national averages. I didn't visit the abandoned neighborhoods of poor Detroit – future urban farmland where trees were taking root on the roofs of vacant homes the city didn’t have enough money to demolish.

I didn’t see battered Las Vegas, where 14.5 percent of the people were unemployed and one in nine houses – five times the national average – had received some kind of default notice in 2010. But I spent almost two weeks in the Great Train Wreck State of California, where jobless and foreclosure rates were higher than the national average and municipal bankruptcies loomed.

America from sea to shining sea was noticeably quiet – as if half the population had disappeared. From Maine to Oregon – despite perfect fall weather – public and private golf courses were deserted. Ball fields were vacant. Parks and rest-stops and beaches were barely populated.

Except for metropolises like Manhattan and San Francisco and college towns like Missoula and Northampton, people in throngs simply did not exist. I went through small towns that looked like they’d been evacuated a year earlier. America’s kids apparently were indoors playing videogames or downloading porn, because they sure weren’t riding bikes or playing ball in the streets or parks.

Every day I was reminded of a truth that the national media never emphasize or even bother to mention. It’s so obvious, it’s embarrassing to have to write it down: Everyplace I went was unique and different. America is not one big country with its economic or social problems or its ethnic groups – or anything else – distributed evenly from New York to L.A.

The “America” the national media talks about all the time does not exist. There is no “Average America.” America is many little “americas,” each with their own local or regional realities and problems and strengths and mix of people. It always has been true and always will be.

Take race, for example.

About 12.6 percent of all Americans are black. Yet there is only one state – Ohio with 12.04 percent – that has a black population near that “average” number. And within Ohio, there are no “average” counties, either. Only seven of 88 counties have black populations of 12.6 percent or more. For 26 counties, the figure is 1 percent or less.

Only 17 states have a black population higher than the national percentage of 12.6 and 33 states – including most of those along the Steinbeck Highway – have 12 percent or less. Of all the states I spent more than 12 hours in, only Louisiana (32 percent), New York (15.1) and Illinois (14.9) had significant black populations.

And in New York and Illinois, like Ohio and most states, most black people were concentrated in one or two major cities or counties. Upstate New York was as white as the 1 percent black states – New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maine, Idaho, Vermont and Montana, the whitest of the white.

The Hispanic or Latino population, now 16 percent of Americans, is even more disproportionately distributed/concentrated. More than half live in just three states – California, Texas and Florida. More than three-quarters of America’s 50 million Hispanics live in just eight states, and within those states they are concentrated in cities like Chicago and New York.

Of the states Steinbeck and I traveled, those with Hispanic populations above 16 percent included California (37 percent), Texas (37 percent), Arizona (30 percent), New York (17 percent) and the highest of all, New Mexico (46 percent).

So forget “Average America.” It doesn’t exist and never did. And therefore it is literally true that except for a few macro-things like the declining value of the dollar, there is no such thing as “a national problem.” All problems, like all politics, are local.

Whether it’s unemployment or foreclosures, murders or illegal immigrants, traffic fatalities or drug gangs, racism, bad schools, water shortages, droughts or floods, heat waves or cold waves, not every region, state, county, city or town suffers equally or necessarily at all. Even in a Great Recession, many places across the country were never touched by an economic cyclone the national media would have you think had flattened every square mile of America evenly.

There’s something else obvious about America that’s never pointed out by the media: The states and counties and cities and villages and crossroads are filled with smart, good Americans who can take pretty good care of themselves. They prove it every day. People in Baraboo and Stonington and Amarillo know what’s best for them. They’ll adjust to whatever changes that come.

Maybe their towns will gradually disappear like Alice, a 50-person “town” in the cornfields of eastern North Dakota, or dry up and blow away like the old Route 66 desert rest-stop of Bagdad, Calif., or suffer a slow de-industrial death like Butte.

Maybe their towns will stay frozen in time, like Saltese, Mt., or Williams, Az., or reinvent themselves as lively tourist traps like Monterey or Livingston, Mt. Maybe they’ll strike it rich on oil and gas and boom like North Dakota or get the next Subaru plant.

Whatever happens in their local worlds, they’ll figure it out locally. Usually without any media attention or “help” from Washington, D.C.

As I drove the Steinbeck Highway, it was obvious many important changes had occurred along it since 1960. Industrial Age powerhouses like Rochester, Buffalo and Gary had seen their founding industries and the hordes of humans they employed swept away by technological change and the destructive hurricane of global capitalism. Small towns like Calais in northeastern Maine had lost people and jobs, and vice versa.

New Orleans had shrunk by half, and not just because of Katrina. The metro areas of Seattle, San Francisco and Albuquerque had exploded and prospered in the digital age. The populations of the West Coast and the Sunbelt had expanded. The South had shed its shameful system of apartheid and its overt racism, as well as much of its deep-rooted poverty and ignorance. The Northeast had bled people, manufacturing industries and national political power.

Change is inevitable, unpredictable, un-stoppable, disruptive, often cruel to individuals and towns in the short run but steadfastly beneficial to American society in the long run. Nevertheless, it was clear that a great deal of what I saw out my window on the Steinbeck Highway had hardly changed at all since Steinbeck and Charley raced by.

He saw more farmland and fewer forests than I did, especially in the East. But in many places almost nothing was newly built. Many farms and crossroads and small towns and churches were frozen in the same place and time they were eons ago, particularly in the East and Midwest.

In Maine the busy fishing village of Stonington was as picturesque as the day Steinbeck left it. He’d recognize the tidy farms of the Corn Belt and the raw beauty of Redwood Country and the buildings if not the people of New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward. And at 70 mph whole states – North Dakota and Montana – would look the same to him except for the cell towers and the McDonald’s and Pilot signs staked out at the interstate exits.

“Dogging Steinbeck” is for sale at an Amazon site near you.