'Dogging Steinbeck' -- at the launching pad

Fifty years to the day, on Sept. 23, 2010, I left John Steinbeck's former summer house on Long Island and began following the 10,000 mile route he took for 'Travels With Charley' in 1960. I had fun.

The chase begins

Fourteen Septembers ago, after lots of library research, I set out to retrace the 10,000-mile road trip around the USA that John Steinbeck made in 1960 for what became his 1962 nonfiction best-seller Travels With Charley.

I left his former ocean-side house in Long Island on Sept. 23, 2010, exactly 50 years after he and his poodle companion Charley did in his pickup/camper Rocinante.

I wrote up everything I learned and did on my trip and put it in Dogging Steinbeck, which is a lot of fun if you aren’t afraid of a lot of cheap jokes, a libertarian spin and learning Sorrywhat a fictionalizing, lying bastard our hero John Steinbeck was.

Sorry.

But it turned out, as I easily proved by simply practicing honest and dogged journalism in libraries and on the “Steinbeck Highway,” that the great Steinbeck and his publisher Viking Press pulled a fast one on the American public.

Much of Charley was fictionalized or written and slyly edited to mislead readers about how Steinbeck traveled (fast and not rough), whom he met (not many real people), whom he traveled with (his wife Elaine for more than half of his trip) and what he really thought was wrong with 1960 America (lots, but he didn’t say).

For the whole sorry story — for the whole unflattering truth about Travels With Charley and how the Steinbeck scholars never bothered to do the research or tell us about it — you’ll have to buy Dogging Steinbeck. For some video treats, there’s YouTube.

Meanwhile, here is a snippet of my trip that zooms in on Sept. 23, 2010, the morning I left Steinbeck’s former home on Long Island. For links to other Steinbeck items, go to my substack.

Chapter 5 – The Dogging Begins

… my trip demanded that I leave my name and my identity at home. I had to be peripatetic eyes and ears, a kind of moving gelatin plate. I could not sign hotel registers, meet people I knew, interview others, or even ask searching questions. Furthermore, two or more people disturb the ecologic complex of an area. I had to go alone and I had to be self-contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back.

– Travels with Charley

Steinbeck Timeline

Friday, Sept. 23, 1960 – Sag Harbor, New York

Early in the morning John Steinbeck and his French poodle Charley leave his summer home in his overloaded pickup truck-camper combo Rocinante. He takes three ferries to New London, Connecticut, and drives north toward his son's boarding school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. His cargo includes spare parts for his truck, dozens of books, two rifles and a shotgun.

Sleeping with Yachts

The moon was almost down and the sun was almost up as the black sky turned pink and red above Sag Harbor’s Long Wharf. My RAV4 had been one of three vehicles parked all night on the pier but the only one with a crazy person sleeping inside it. A local scofflaw in a coffee shop had tipped me off that the wharf was a safe place – i.e., I wouldn't be spotted by the cops and run out of town as a vagrant.

I cracked my sunroof so I wouldn’t fog my windows and give myself away, but I still waited all night for the tap of the local gendarme on my window. I must have blended in well with the yachts. The blackout curtains my wife made worked perfectly. The inside of my car had been dark and comfortable – like a sleeping berth on a train.

Fortunately, sleeping in strange spots was a career trait for me. In the 1960s, on a college weekend at the Jersey Shore, I slept in a laundry room on top of a washer-dryer combination. In the 1970s I slept on a picnic table at a rest stop outside Elko, Nevada. I’ve slept on trains, buses, ferries, planes and train station benches across Europe. In 1976, on Good Friday night, after I was locked out of my smaller hotel, I slept under a wall heater on the floor of a small hotel in Oban, Scotland. A kind young night clerk with a brother living in Miami let me do that. Then he woke me up with a tray of tea and toast in the morning and told me I needed to eat quickly before his boss showed up.

No one gently woke me up with a bagel and coffee on the Sag Harbor pier. But sleeping in the back of a RAV4 on foam sofa cushions with my own pillows and blankets rated far above all those strange hard places.  Pretending to myself that I got five hours of actual sleep, I drove out to Steinbeck's house again to see how many other nuts were there.  I should have realized no real journalist would be crazy/brave/stupid enough to spend a month alone on the Steinbeck Highway, but I was worried about competition.

In Steinbeck’s driveway I was afraid I’d find a scene from Smokey and the Bandit, Part IV, starring Paul Theroux, William Least Heat-Moon, P.J. O’Rourke, Anderson Cooper and an international cast of travel writers, documentary crews and dozens of steinbeckians with dogs and 30-foot motor homes. But no humans were there, just noisy seagulls and tree frogs. I wasn't, but it looked like I was going to have Steinbeck’s ornery ghost and his old highway to myself for the next 10,000 miles.

I walked around the manicured yard like I had a constitutional right to trespass there, as journalists are wont to do. The little swimming pool shimmered and gurgled. Everything looked perfect for the 50^th anniversary. I took a photo of my RAV4 idling in Steinbeck’s gravel driveway, documented the mileage on my odometer (2,920) and headed for the first of three ferries that would deliver me to New London, Connecticut. Steinbeck had taken the same watery shortcut to the continent exactly 50 years before me, primarily to avoid driving through New York City. After my recent experience in Manhattan, I was extra glad he did.