Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  As “the trees plunged and bent like grasses” and the “whipped water raised a cream of foam,” Steinbeck said he waded through chest-high water to his boat, which was pinned against a neighbor’s pier. He started its 100 horsepower engine, moved it back to the middle of the cove, re-anchored it, jumped into the water and rode a wind-blown log to shore. If he really did all those heroics – and if he wasn’t slyly creating a dramatic metaphor for the risky trip he was about to take around the USA – it was an impressive feat. Especially with a bum knee and a bad ticker.

  Steinbeck also went in search of America and Americans for practical reasons. For 20 years he had been living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and traveling around Western Europe like an archduke. As he explained in letters written before his trip, he constantly was expected to write and comment about America, to represent its values and culture. Yet he no longer knew his own country or people except from memory or by reading. He understood New York City was not really America. It was a political and cultural terrarium – an “island” he called it. The high-end celebrities and power-people he loafed with – Elia Kazan, John Huston, Arthur Miller, Adlai Stevenson – were not representative of real Americans and he knew it.

  Steinbeck hoped his road trip, undertaken discreetly, would put him back in touch with Real America. His plan was to get out into the sticks and meet regular people face-to-face. Anonymously. Alone. Not on tour buses or in motels, but where they lived and worked and drank and prayed. He wanted to see for himself what Americans were up to and what they were thinking and arguing about during a historic presidential election. It was Journalism 101 – a grassroots observing and reporting mission by one of the world’s most popular writers. He and his agent, editor and publisher knew the great author’s quest for America would make another successful Steinbeck book, which it did, in spades. It’s just a shame that the ambitious trip he planned so carefully never really happened.

  4 – John Steinbeck’s America

  Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

  – “Travels With Charley”

  Little remains of the country Steinbeck was determined to rediscover. In 1960 the USA was as simple as ABC, CBS and NBC, the only national networks its people were permitted by federal communications law to watch.

  Stuck in a MAD nuke-rattling Cold War with the Soviet Union, the country had changed dramatically since the Depression and the end of World War II. But it was essentially still a collection of disparate regions with their own funny accents, strange foods, local laws, favorite kinds of music and distinct subcultures. About the only thing every region could agree on was the importance of preserving their own socioeconomic and cultural status quos.

  The numbers tell the story of a changing country. The 1960 population was about to touch 180 million, up 19 percent in just 10 years. Almost 89 percent of Americans were white. Almost a third of the population was under age 15, thanks to the first wave of Baby Boomers. About 87 percent of all families had a mother and father at home. Unemployment in 1960 was 5.5 percent but moving to Females made up 38 percent of workers and their participation rate was growing. sokers, up work pBaby boomers had

  To a lot of reality-challenged Americans today the America of 1960 was a kind of Golden Age. Everything that mattered was still “Made in America” by strong unions that were largely white and male and politically powerful.

  Society supposedly still made sense: Fathers worked, mothers stayed home, children were raised in packs of five. The family ate dinner together every night at 5:30. Laws and priests and teachers and parents were obeyed. Flags and politicians were saluted. Doctors came to your house. New immigrants were rare. Crime, taxes and prices were low and people paid with cash not credit cards. Baseball and college football were our simple and innocent co-national pastimes.

  Of course 1960 America was not America the Beautiful. It had warts that took decades of bloody surgery to remove. Daily life and the 15-minute nightly network TV news programs were haunted by real and imaginary fears – thermonuclear war, juvenile delinquents, restless Negroes, communists, Playboy, Mad magazine, A&P supermarkets and so-called-life in the suburbs.

  Despite the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and protections of the Constitution, about 18 million black Americans were humiliated, dehumanized or blatantly or subtly denied their civil rights by law or custom above and below the Mason Dixon Line. Almost all black women who worked were domestics. Only 20 percent of blacks graduated from high school, compared to 43 percent for whites. One in a thousand marriages was between a white and black, compared to 1 in 60 today.

  A higher percentage of white and black Americans were poor back then and far fewer members of either race were middle-class or rich or well educated. Latinos? They were called Mexicans and lived in the deserts of the Southwest or picked grapes in California. Women, who outnumber men in colleges today, were outnumbered by men on campus by 10-1.

  In the economy, big numbers were much smaller and more sensible in 1960, but that’s largely because the U.S. dollar was worth a little more than seven times what it is now. In other words, it took only one 1960 dollar to buy what it took seven 2010 dollars to buy and vice versa. The federal budget in 1960 was a minuscule $91 billion, with a $300 million surplus. That did not include big-ticket items like Social Security or Medicare, which didn’t exist yet. In 2010, the budget of the bankrupt state of California was $126 billion and the federal budget had ballooned to incomprehensibility – $3.5 trillion with a $1.3 trillion deficit.

  In 1960 the average manufacturing job paid $2.22 an hour and the minimum wage was $1. About 31 percent of the workforce was unionized compared to 12 percent in 2010. Gas cost 31 cents a gallon and Steinbeck’s new GMC pickup-camper combo set him back less than $3,000. The median house in America was worth about $12,000 and the median family income was around $5,600.

  Most people’s lives resembled the stark working-class scarcity of “The Honeymooners,” not the suburban perfection of “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Leave It to Beaver.” Consumers had fewer choices in 1960 and everyone paid higher prices because of government policies that created or protected monopolies or oligopolies like the phone system, TV broadcasting and the airline industry.

  A long-distance phone call that’s virtually free today cost $1 a minute in 1960 ($7 in today’s money). A quarter of American households did not have telephones and a quarter of those that did shared party lines. It’s a wonder anyone could communicate. The cutting-edge communication marvel of the day was the beeper.

  Transportation was being democratized and radically transformed in 1960. Plane travel has become a form of mass torture today, thanks to the excesses of the security state and the economics of hauling humans like cattle, but it’s a far cheaper and safer way to fly to grandma’s house. Half a century ago only elites could afford a droning, bumpy plane flight from New York to L.A., which, because of federal regulations prohibiting price competition, could cost no less than about $210 each way – about $1,500 today. In 1960, when 58 million Americans flew on U.S. airlines, more than 350 died in six major commercial plane crashes. In 2010, when 786 million Americans flew, both the number of crashes and people who died in crashes were the same as in 2007, 2008 and 2009 – zero.

  By 1960 cars had replaced trains as the country’s mass mode of transportation. Interstates, truck stops and national motel and restaurant chains barely existed. Wal-Mart did not. America's fleet of cars had doubled since 1941 to 74 million.
About 75 percent of homes owned a car and 15 percent owned two. Automobiles were 4,000-pound death wagons with metal dashboards, crummy tires and lights and no safety gear; 1 percent of drivers used seat belts. America’s highways were criminally lethal. About 36,000 of the country’s 180 million people were killed in or by cars in 1960. In 2010, when there were three times as many autos and trucks on the road and 310 million Americans riding around in them, the annual death toll had fallen to 32,708.

  Pockets of hipness existed in the pop culture of 1960 America. The Beat Poets and comedians like Mort Sahl and Nichols and May were headquartered in the North Beach neighborhood of downtown San Francisco. Jazz was the coolest sound on campus but folk music was rising. The hard-bop scene was happening in New York City, electrified Delta bluesmen like Muddy Waters had migrated to Chicago and country & Western was still a regional taste. Barry Gordy’s unknown record label was a year old and called Motown.

  In the fall of 1960, a lot of things hadn’t happened yet. The civil rights movement in the South hadn’t earned its capital letters. The Berlin Wall hadn’t been built. Hanoi was the answer to a “GE College Bowl” question no one could answer. But sweeping sociopolitical and cultural revolutions were quickening in the American womb.

  The Pill was okayed for sale by our puritanical federal government – but only to married women. Robert Allen Zimmerman, a college dropout, was a baby-faced folk singer in Minneapolis. The Beatles were reinventing rock 'n' roll in Hamburg. Elvis was an ex-G.I. who had not yet gone Vegas. Marilyn Monroe was about to divorce Arthur Miller. Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay. Ronald Reagan was still a Democrat and Martin Luther King was a Republican. Jim Crow looked invincible. Billy Gates was four years old. Andy Warhol was earning $70,000 a year in New York drawing ads for ladies shoes, hats and handbags. And a crazy Harvard professor named Dr. Timothy Leary had just had his first breakfast of psilocybin mushrooms.

  When Steinbeck and Charley took to the highway, America was a much different place. It was still mostly a square, well-behaved, soulless, church-going, booze-loving, white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-owned-and-operated country that wasn’t living up to its founding ideals or its promises. But big changes were a-coming.

  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. 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.

  Island Hopping, Ferry Jumping

  It was a smooth journey by land and sea from Sag Harbor to the ferry at Orient Point, where the Cross Sound Ferry departs for New London. Two 10-minute ferry crossings, sandwiched around an eight-mile drive, got me on and off Shelter Island, which is mostly a protected wetlands and nature preserve.

  Shelter Island has 2,200 lucky permanent residents and 6,000 summer invaders. A third of it is privately owned by the Nature Conservancy, which has promised to keep its property in its natural state forever. Not that Shelter Island is in any danger of becoming overdeveloped – or developed at all. Virtually every white shingled home, roadside store or berry farm I sped past was classy, picture-perfect and of pre-1960 vintage. Much of it was no doubt spiffier and pricier in 2010 than it was in 1960. But new development or sprawl of any kind simply didn’t exist.

  For a guy traveling on credit cards, ferry hopping was a pricy backdoor exit from Long Island. It was $12 and $9 for the two Shelter Island ferries and $49 for Cross Sound Ferry Service’s 16.5-mile voyage to New London, which about 1,000 cars make each day.

  On Steinbeck's way to New London aboard "the clanking iron ferry boat," he says he saw U.S. Navy submarines surfacing nearby and met a sailor on leave – a nuclear submariner, to be exact. They talked about the nuclear subs that were home-ported at the U.S. naval base in New London on the Thames River, which in 1960 was the largest submarine base in the world. Like many Americans in those spooky Cold War days, Steinbeck was not fond of the U.S./Soviet strategy of mutual assured destruction (MAD), part of which involved building a fleet of Polaris-firing nuclear submarines. He didn’t like subs, either. As he wrote in “Travels With Charley,” despite their beauty they were “designed for destruction” and “armed with mass murder.”

  I didn't see any of New London’s current school of 21 attack subs or meet any submariners on the boat ride from Orient Point. But as I waited to enter the gaping belly of the ferry Susan Anne, I met Blaize Zabel, a 20-year-old high school dro
pout.

  He looked tough with his big forearms, black T-shirt and shorts and cross tattoo. But he turned out to be an incredibly nice kid. He was on his way back to his home in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and said – without hinting for a handout – that he hoped he would have enough money for the Greyhound. His immediate career plans were to get a GED and add his grandmother’s name, Ruth Zabel, to his forearm.

  On the ferry Susan Anne, I was jumped – in a friendly way – by a homeless Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter and his 130-pound companion Ace. John Woestendiek, 57, used to work for the Philly Inquirer and the Baltimore Sun. Houseless by choice, with all his possessions in storage, he was not sure where his next permanent address would be. He had taken a buyout at the Sun and was now the owner-operator of two dog-centric Web sites.

  Ace, his Rotweiller/Akita/Chow/pitbull, was traveling around America with John – or vice versa. The duo had been living on the very cheap for several months, mostly down South. Finished with his book on dog cloning, “Dog, Inc.,” John thought it would be cool for him and Ace to start following Steinbeck and Charley's trail exactly 50 years later. He was blogging, having dog-related adventures and surfing on the couches of friends and family as he went.