Dogging Steinbeck -- Chapter 1
In 2010 I faithfully retraced the route John Steinbeck took in 1960 for his iconic Travels With Charley. On my mad road trip I had lots of fun and found out some truths about the untruths in Charley.
Introduction
I discovered two important and surprising truths when I retraced the route John Steinbeck took around the country in 1960 and turned into his Travels with Charley in Search of America.
I found out the great author’s iconic “nonfiction” road book was a deceptive, dishonest and highly fictionalized account of his actual 10,000-mile road trip.
And I found out that despite the Great Recession and national headlines dripping with gloom and doom, America was still a big, beautiful, empty, healthy, rich, safe, clean, prosperous and friendly country.
Dogging Steinbeck is the story of my adventures on and off the road with John Steinbeck’s ghost. It’s about the dozens of good Americans I met and the great places I saw on my high-speed drive from Maine to Monterey along what’s left of the Old Steinbeck Highway.
And it tells how I stumbled onto a literary scoop that forced a major book publisher to finally confess the truth about Travels with Charley after 50 years.
Part literary detective story, part travel book, part book review, part primer in drive-by journalism, part commentary on what a libertarian newspaperman thinks is right and wrong about America, my book is subjective as hell. But it’s entirely nonfiction.
Bill Steigerwald,
April 1, 2013
1 – Taking the Trip
So it was that I determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land. Otherwise, in writing, I could not tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the larger truth.
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Laughing at Steinbeck's Ghost
No one could hear me talking to John Steinbeck’s ghost. I was standing alone on a sunburned farm road in the earthly equivalent of outer space – the vast cornfields of eastern North Dakota. Fargo was 47 miles back. The closest “town” was Alice, a 51-person dot on the map of a state famous for its emptiness. The closest human was half a mile off, hidden in the brief cloud of brown dirt her combine raised as it tacked through a stiff wind across her family’s 1,400-acre farm.
It was Oct. 12, 2010. For three weeks and 12 states I had been retracing the 10,000-mile road trip Steinbeck made around America in the fall of 1960 and turned into his bestseller Travels with Charley in Search of America. From Long Island to Maine to Chicago to Seattle to California to Texas and back, wherever Steinbeck and his poodle companion Charley went on their famed journey, I was going too – exactly 50 years later.
I wasn’t following Steinbeck for any of the usual TV-docudrama reasons. He wasn’t my real father. I wasn’t hoping to find myself or lose anyone else. My old dog and I didn’t each have prostate cancer and six months to live. I didn’t even own a dog.
The unromantic, un-cinematic truth was I thought it would make a good book if I followed Steinbeck’s route and compared the country I found with the America he toured. It’d be a simple and easy way to show how much the country has changed along the Steinbeck Highway since Ike was president, Elvis was king and everything worth buying was still Made in America and sold at Sears.
I wasn’t a Steinbeck nut, a dog nut or a travel nut. I was a seasoned journalist – actually, a seasoned ex-journalist. For 30 years I had been a reporter/feature writer/ columnist/editor at the L.A. Times and two Pittsburgh daily newspapers. I had more than my share of fun and a little success working for an increasingly irrelevant 19th-century news-delivery system as it committed suicide by refusing to embrace the Internet. Then, in 2009, as I turned 62 and a minimal buyout came along at my paper, I dove from the deck of the Daily Titanic and swam off to look for books to write till I die.
Writing a book about America hooked around Steinbeck’s trip would not be complicated or controversial. Or so I thought. I figured I’d simply retrace the trail he blazed as faithfully as possible, as a journalist, using Travels with Charley as my guide, map and timeline. But when I reread the book I quickly learned Charley made a lousy map. Though it was a nonfiction book filled with real places, real people and real events, it was often vague and confusing about where Steinbeck really was on any given date. It was not a travelogue, not a serious work of journalism and, as I soon realized, it was not an accurate, full or reliable account of his actual road trip.
Since Steinbeck, who died in 1968, left no notes, no journal and no expense records from the road, I had a lot of work to do. I plotted every town and highway he mentioned in Travels with Charley on a 1962 road atlas. I read the major Steinbeck biographies. I called up scholars and archivists from what I affectionately dubbed the West Coast Steinbeck Studies Industrial Complex.
In the spring of 2010 I traveled to central California’s magnificent Monterey Peninsula – aka “Steinbeck Country” – to do research and scout old Steinbeck haunts like Cannery Row. I visited libraries at Stanford, San Jose State and in New York City, looking for clues of time and place in letters he wrote from the road and in old newspaper articles.
By the time I arrived in the cornfields of Alice, I was – by default – the world expert on Steinbeck’s actual trip. I was also a little road crazy. I was doing 300 miles of drive-by journalism every day on America’s two-lane highways. I was waving my Professional Reporter’s Notebook in the faces of strangers, interviewing and photographing them, and blogging back to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
I was traveling solo. Quickly. Cheaply. Doglessly. When I wasn’t staying in a $60-a-night, 1960s-vintage mom & pop motel, I was sleeping in the back of my Toyota RAV4 along dark country roads in New England or in bright Walmart parking lots.
So far, despite the Great Recession, most of America was looking pretty good. I was moving fast, but there were few signs of real poverty. I had met no people who were seriously hurting. I wasn’t going out of my way to find poster children for America’s rural poor or urban underclass. Ditto for 2010 America’s nearly 10 percent unemployed, the 10 percent foreclosed upon, the freshly bankrupted, the deeply indebted and every other real or alleged victim of Crony Capitalism-gone-bad.
Either they weren’t living and working along the Steinbeck Highway or they were invisible in a down-and-out economy that was nevertheless overflowing with material wealth. Just the pickup trucks, boats and farm equipment I saw parked for sale along the highways exceeded the GDP of Greece.
Flying down the two-lane slivers of ordinary America that never seem to get covered when bicoastal journalists parachute into Flyover Country, I had already encountered scores of the everyday citizens who make America good and make it go. In 3,500 miles I hadn’t bumped into a single soul who lived in a house made of highway signs or who’d wasted his life creating the world’s greatest Museum of Mailboxes.
But I wasn’t seeking out new acts in the hackneyed sideshow of American weirdoes and eccentrics. After three decades of practicing on-the-road journalism from Hollywood to Key West to Cut Bank, Montana, I’d seen my share of cultural embarrassments and political and religious whack jobs. America itches with crazies. I had no desire to scratch around for fresh examples of the reductio ad absurdums of American individualism that populate great road works like William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways and Andrei Codrescu's Road Scholar.
By the time I reached Alice, I was also a little Steinbeck crazy. He had been my invisible passenger on and off the road for 10 months. I had gotten to know the grumpy old New Dealer pretty well. We had some major political issues. But I was always thinking about him, trying to imagine what he had seen or thought as he droned through Maine’s endless pine forests or pulled into a manure-carpeted truck stop for the night in Frazee, Minnesota.
Four decades after his death, Steinbeck was arguably the most widely read American writer in the world. Yet he wasn’t as famous in his own country as I had thought. When I stopped for gas or snacks in unknown places like Milo, Maine, I’d ask clerks if they knew that the great author John Steinbeck had passed down their main street exactly 50 years ago. The name Steinbeck might as well have been Solzhenitsyn.
I usually had to remind dumfounded young and old people alike who the heck the Nobel Prize-winner was. "The Grapes of Wrath? Of Mice and Men”? I’d prompt. “Oh yeah,” they’d say. “I think I read them in high school.”
I wasn’t in the habit of speaking out loud to Steinbeck’s ghost. But I couldn’t help it. In Travels with Charley he says he camped overnight on the little Maple River somewhere near Alice and met a traveling Shakespearean actor who carried a letter from John Gielgud folded in his wallet.
Long before I reached the boondocks of eastern North Dakota I knew Steinbeck’s encounter with that actor never happened in the real world. It was pure fiction. I already knew from my research he had invented the entire scene – and many others in Travels with Charley.
But when I actually stood in the middle of that absurd ocean of agriculture and looked around, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the ballsy lie Steinbeck told his readers – and got away with for half a century. “Hah,” I blurted, as a million dead cornstalks rattled in the hard, chilly wind. “Who were you trying to kid, John? Who did you think would ever believe you met a Shakespearean actor out here?”