My mad 'Dogging Steinbeck' road trip around the USA started on this day 13 years ago
On Sept. 23, 2010 I set out to retrace John Steinbeck's 'Travels With Charley' route as faithfully as I could. 11,276 miles later I proved his book was not the nonfiction work it was cracked up to be.
Sixty-three years ago this morning, on September 23, 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle Charley set out from Sag Harbor on the iconic road trip around the United States that would become Travels with Charley in Search of America.
Thirteen years ago this morning I set out alone from Steinbeck’s seaside house on the eastern end of Long Island in my RAV4 and followed his 10,000-mile trail as faithfully as possible.
I admit I had my suspicions that Steinbeck had embellished Charley and had invented some of the colorful Americans he said he met at random. (I couldn’t help it—I was a veteran drive-by print journalist who knew how hard it was on the road to bump into the right people you need for a story.)
Despite what many commentators on Amazon charged, my original intention was not to discredit Steinbeck, show him up, or prove that his 1962 New York Times nonfiction bestseller was a heavily fictionalized and disappointingly dishonest account of his actual journey.
My main goal simply was to turn my solo adventure along the Steinbeck Highway into a book that would compare the America of Barack Obama that I saw in 2010 with the America of JFK and Nixon that Steinbeck saw in the historic fall of 1960.
Some of what I saw out my windshield on my mad 11,276-mile dash around the country can be seen in these 16 videos on YouTube.
I’m no documentary maker, as you will see. The videos are largely unedited and the wind is a recurring character. But I visit Steinbeck’s houses, the top of Fremont Peak, and many other places he stopped on his journey.
What I learned about the facts and fictions of Travels with Charley, the character of John Steinbeck, and the nature of America’s Flyover People is documented in my Amazon book Dogging Steinbeck. And Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost is a guide to where Steinbeck really was on each day of a nearly 11-week search for the country he admitted he did not find.
A free excerpt from ‘Dogging Steinbeck’:
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. – John Steinbeck, 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 sun roof 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 50th 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.