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

  Gilchrist spent many summers at her aunt’s house and knew Steinbeck’s agent Elizabeth Otis well. When Otis, who was tiny and elegant, rented the cottage in the pines each summer, she didn’t spend her time sailing Aunt Eleanor’s 16-footer around East Penobscot Bay. She arrived with a pile of books and manuscripts by authors like Steinbeck and Walker Percy and never changed out of her New York City clothes, including her high-heeled sandals.

  Before I left, Gilchrist went upstairs and came back with a page from the memoir she was writing about her life on the island. “Steinbeck visits Eleanor in his camper Rocinante for a few days,” she had written. “Theirs is an uneasy relationship: shocked by his profanity, she becomes increasingly proper. Charley drives Eleanor’s cat, George, glowering into the woods, where Eleanor has to bring supper to her (George is actually a girl).”

  Because Steinbeck described the strange gray cat in vivid detail in “Charley,” and because he also thoughtlessly provided readers with directions to the Brace house, cat nuts from around the world began showing up at the door asking to see George. Serious “Travels With Charley” fans and crazy Steinbeck-trip-repeaters like me still occasionally appeared at Gilchrist’s home, which wasn’t as hard to find as I had thought.

  Gilchrist let me photograph and video her place, but stupidly I forgot to ask her to pose for me. She was a lovely, warm and intelligent woman who treated me like a lost nephew and proved to me, for the zillionth time in my career, that the country is overpopulated with good people, not village creeps. I was sorry the only photo I took of her was when she was disappearing into the front door of her unforgettable home by the sea.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Wednesday, Sept. 28, 1960 – Deer Isle, Maine

  Steinbeck writes a letter to Adlai Stevenson, saying he “heard” part of the JFK-Nixon debate Monday, Sept. 26, and was distressed that both candidates were so courteous toward each other. He leaves Eleanor Brace’s house in the afternoon and drives north along the coast on U.S. Highway 1 toward the top of Maine. He calls his wife from a grocery store, but where he stops for the night is not known.

  Go North, Old Men

  I was dead at the wheel. I had traveled only 130 miles from Deer Isle, picking up U.S. Highway 1 at Ellsworth and running up the coast. It was gloomy and rainy and then black and rainy. The ocean was there to my right, but un-seeable. Just long dark walls of pine trees and a string of depressing interchangeable small towns Steinbeck had passed through – Steuben, Machias, East Machias, Whiting.

  I was a day ahead of Steinbeck’s pace, but not making good time. It was almost 10 p.m. I had left Brenda Gilchrist’s home at 2:30, but stopped in Ellsworth for lunch and to buy a lightweight jacket at, where else, an L.L. Bean outlet. I lost more driving time blogging back to Pittsburgh after eating dinner somewhere on U.S. Highway 1.

  I would have stopped at a motel, if there had been one. I would have pulled off into a “wayside” or rest stop, if I had passed one. At Pleasant Point I drove into the center of town but turned back to U.S. 1 after seeing two cop cars and no motel. Less than a mile later a sign pointing toward the ocean said “Gleason Cove, 1.2 miles.” Following a hard dirt road down until it ended at a turnaround, I parked by some sea grass. It was pitch dark but I put up my blackout curtains so no one could see in. Discovering I had a Verizon cell phone signal, in the interest of Internet immediacy, I posted a blog to my Pittsburgh Post-Gazette site “Travels Without Charley”:

  Sleeping by the Sea

  Gleason Cove, Me.

  Right now I am parked by the ocean not far from Pleasant Point, Me. It's not actually the ocean, it's the Bay of Fundy and the Canadian border, drawn somewhere in the water out there in the pitch dark, is not far. I'll not do any trick photography like I did in the Wal-Mart lot Saturday night, because I don't want to attract attention with a flash.

  I didn't see any signs that said I couldn't drive down here and sleep for a few hours – or the night – so I just did. I chose this road because I knew it led to a public access spot on the beach and because there is a Verizon phone signal, which means my Samsung phone's mobile hot spot will send this note all the way to Pittsburgh. … It's totally dark – except the glow from my laptop's screen – but I'm sure it's perfectly safe here.

  It would have been very dramatic to have been robbed or murdered during the night, but I can’t say that I was. The few local kids who visited my end of Gleason Cove Road turned around and left without setting my car on fire. I was parked all night where sand and grass met the sea in the extreme northeast corner of the Lower 48, not far from where the sun’s morning rays first strike U.S. soil.

  If the sun rose on Tuesday morning Sept. 28, 2010, it was news to me. Dawn didn’t break, it oozed. At 6:15 there was no telling where the sun was. There was no horizon. The whole world was murky gray. The ocean could have been a pond. Sleeping on the “beach” turned out not to be so scary. It had been dark and lonely but safe as a Wal-Mart. And the Bay of Fundy's famous high tides didn’t rise up and sweep me out to sea.

  Of Eggs & Books

  We'll never know if Steinbeck stopped at the border town of Calais for a bed or a cup of bad coffee, but he had to pass down its main street as he drove north on U.S. 1 toward the top of Maine. Pronounced callous despite or perhaps in spite of its French origins, Calais is in Washington County, the state's poorest. Across the St. Croix River from New Brunswick, Calais was only 22 miles from my beach resort at Gleason Cove. Its economy was far healthier in 1960, according to one of the local “Down Easters”/”Up Easters” I met at the counter in Karen's Main Street Diner.

  The 60-something man, wearing a pristine gold and black United States Army baseball cap, told a familiar story of change and decline. Hundreds of good-paying jobs had disappeared at the paper mills. Young people were leaving and would never come back. The town had lost 25 percent of its population since 1990 and was now about 3,100. Local unemployment was 11 percent compared to the state average of 7.9 percent. If it weren't for the fact that the department of homeland security beefed up the three border crossings with Canada after it learned one of the 9/11 hijackers entered the States at Calais, he said, there'd be even fewer jobs around.

  Karen's had to be the best diner in a hundred miles – maybe the only one. A friendly pit stop for anyone following Steinbeck’s trail into upper Maine, it’s one of those priceless family-run eateries where getting a perfect breakfast is routine, not a matter of chance. I ordered what would become my signature breakfast for the rest of my trip. It was a #2 at Karen’s – two eggs over medium, sausage, home fries, wheat toast and coffee. It cost $6.25 and became the standard against which I compared 25 others like it that followed. Steinbeck wrote that getting a bad breakfast on the road was almost impossible, and he was still right.

  Waitress Traci Brown said the diner’s owners, Karen and Lou Scribner, had been doing a steady business for five years. Their son Sean was the cook and daughter Caitlin the main waitress. Unless you went exotic and chose the fried fresh clams, you couldn’t spend more than $9 on something sensible like a hot turkey sandwich.

  Brown, a blonde in her thirties who’d soon be laid off, said her regulars included Ed, a man in his 80s. Ed came in every morning at 6:30, drank two cups of coffee at the counter and went out the door. Like other regulars, he kept his own coffee cup at the diner. “It’s stuff like that that makes you feel so good,” Brown said. “The diner’s a part of his life. If he wasn’t in here at 6:30 I’d worry about him.” In “Charley” Steinbeck apparently didn’t meet a single pleasant waitress like Brown on his trip worth mentioning. I met a dozen.

  A few brick storefronts up the street from Karen’s was something you’d never expect to find in Calais’ corner of the world – the Calais Book Shop. Carole Heinlein, 59, was the owner/operator. She opened it around 2005 with the 8 tons of new and used books she trucked up from the toes of Florida. She grew up in Key West and worked for almost 20 years at various newspaper jobs in the South, includi
ng reporting.

  Unlike half the Maine folk around Calais who go south for winter or forever, Heinlein came north to start her own business. Unable to afford to hire any help, she said she was hanging on, running a semi-funky place awash with thousands of books of all genres. She originally intended to specialize in used books and Maine history, but quickly found she had to buy new titles too. A fresh copy of "Travels With Charley" sat two feet inside her front door.

  It was "Banned Books Week," and Steinbeck would have cheered that annual fight by the American Library Association against censorship. Two of his greatest works, "Of Mice and Men" and "The Grapes of Wrath," were perennial victims of America's nuttier local school boards and professional bluenoses. The library association ranks him in the top 10 of most frequently banned authors. It’s only a matter of time before his heavy use of the n-word in “Travels With Charley ” attracts a modern wave of censors.

  Heinlein’s friend Carol-Ann pulled up to the curb. A local newspaper reporter, she was either delivering or picking up a trunk-full of books, I wasn’t sure which. I took her photo. But I didn’t get her last name, her age, her address or her paper’s name, which was pretty shameful for an ex-major league journalist.

  Carol-Ann, the fellow journalist.

  I think she may have actually lived in Canada. But she was a happy ambassador for what she called “Down East Mainers.” “We’re very political,” she said. “We’re quirky. We talk politics. We talk hunting. Killing moose is a big thing. We go blueberry picking….”

  She didn’t mention the regional traits I had noticed – that Mainers all wore hats, worshipped wood and had at least one exotic mode of transportation for sale parked on their front lawn. Carol-Ann said Washington County and the city of Calais voted for Obama, which was a surprise to everyone but maybe her: “We’re independent. We change.”

  Part of the 2008 Obama electoral landslide, Maine was a Blue State. So was every state I’d been in so far. Though I was traveling through small towns and countryside that I assumed were populated by fairly conservative Yankee folk, I was deep in Democrat territory. I wouldn’t see my first Red State on the Steinbeck Highway until I reached North Dakota and Montana. After that it’d be Obama blue again until Arizona, Texas and Louisiana.

  Speaking of change and hope, Carole Heinlein knew she was going to have to build an Internet site and sell her books globally if she hoped to survive in her tiny market. Heinlein had chosen a tough path. She wouldn’t call herself one, but she was a true entrepreneur, a risk-taker playing with her own money and life to make her living in hard economic times.

  Millions of women like her own and operate their own small businesses today, which is something that was not true in Steinbeck’s time. Running a small business is never easy, especially solo. So far Heinlein hadn't made her initial investment back, but she was not about to give up. "I opened a bookstore in the poorest county in Maine – on April Fool's Day," she laughed. "The joke's on me. But I'd do the same thing again in the poorest county of any state."

  7 – Touching the Top of Maine

  It isn’t traveling to cross the country and talk to your pug instead of people along the way. Besides, being alone on the road makes you ready to meet someone when you stop. You get sociable traveling alone.

  – William Least Heat-Moon, “Blue Highways”

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Thursday, Sept. 29, 1960 – To the top of Maine

  From wherever he stopped Wednesday night in northeast Maine after leaving Deer Isle, Steinbeck drives north into Aroostook County on U.S. 1 along the U.S.-Canadian border. He reaches the top of Maine, turns south on state Route 11 and plunges deep into the pine wilderness of Maine’s interior. He parks alone for the night somewhere under a concrete bridge in the rain.

  Fact Fudging 101

  Aroostook County is famous for two things – potatoes and its enormous size. It’s one fifth of Maine and bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. No one traveling north from Calais along the pretty St. Croix River would challenge those facts. I was 929 miles from Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor driveway. Steinbeck drove the same stretch of U.S. Route 1 on Sept. 29, 1960, exactly 50 years ahead of me. He had a weird thing about wanting to touch the top of Maine before heading west, a weird thing he ultimately regretted as he realized how endless and empty the state was. Steinbeck also wanted to see the famed potato fields of Aroostook County, then the foremost spud-producing area of the country.

  In 1960 families of Canucks were still crossing the border from Canada in large numbers to pick potatoes in the fall. Machines do most of the picking now, and, as with most backbreaking farm work humans once had to do, muscle and sweat have been replaced by brainpower and machines and technology. Aroostook’s potatoes are still grown on about 400 farms and employ about 6,000 people in various ways. But the crop isn’t what it used to be. Between 1928 and 1958, the county alone produced more potatoes than any other state. But when French fries became a major food group in America, Maine lost the national potato race to the Russet Burbanks of Idaho and the state is now in about seventh place.

  Steinbeck noted in “Charley” that Maine’s sparsely populated land already was being “abandoned to the creeping forest.” Since 1960 Aroostook County has taken a big population hit, dropping from 106,000 to 72,000. To give an idea how big and empty Aroostook County is, its population density is 11 people per square mile, about the same as the Dakotas and 100 times less dense than New Jersey, the most people-packed state.

  Though Aroostook is one of the most conservative counties in Maine, it too went for Obama in 2008. More pleasing to my radical political taste, the county keeps toying with the s-word – secession. Located at the very top of the state, far from the rest of what we know as Maine, Aroostookians feel a closer kinship to Canada. With a fifth of its population speaking French at home, some of its politicians have been proposing that the county join with New Brunswick or become the 51st state. The only dumb part of their commendable but hopeless plan is that they might call their new land Aroostook, which is unpronounceable to anyone not born north of Bangor.

  Maine’s size and desolation beat Steinbeck down. As he learned quickly, to his dismay, Maine’s roads were long, lonely and rough. His ass already hurt. He had traveled nearly 1,000 miles yet he was still east of Sag Harbor. Though he had been gone a week and had actually been alone for only a few days, he was already feeling lonesome for his wife.

  Letters of Betrayal

  Steinbeck’s road letters to Elaine essentially served as the only notes he took on his trip. Many observations and opinions in them show up later in “Travels With Charley.” But the letters, eight of which appear in the 1975 book “Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,” betray that what Steinbeck actually did on his trip and what he said he did in “Travels With Charley” often were not the same.

  What he did in Maine is an early good example. In the real world, after he left Eleanor Brace’s front yard on Deer Isle Wednesday afternoon, Steinbeck spent only two more nights in the state – Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 28 and 29, 1960.

  Nothing is known about where he stopped Wednesday night, just that it was on the way to Maine’s rooftop. A logical guess is somewhere along U.S. Highway 1 around Calais, 150 miles north of Deer Isle. In the letter he wrote Thursday night, Steinbeck told his wife he had gone nearly to the top of Aroostook County that day and then turned south and went “in and way down” on what would have been state Route 11.

  He told her “we are bedded down behind a bridge” in the rain, adding he thought he wasn’t far from the New Hampshire border. The next day, Friday, he motored west on U.S. Route 2 to Lancaster, New Hampshire, which he had passed through going east earlier in the week.

  To build his storyline in "Charley," Steinbeck had to pull the fiction wrench out of his toolbox. In the book he switched around the two nights he spent in Maine. He wrote that he parked by a bridge in the rain on Wednesday night and then the next night threw a little after-dinner
party in Rocinante for a family of Canuck potato pickers at a campground in Aroostook County. The extended family of Canucks jamming into Rocinante is a favorite scene in “Charley.” But like other favorite scenes in the book, it most likely never happened – certainly not in the protracted, theatrical way Steinbeck described.

  It’s highly unlikely he could have made the 150-mile drive on Wednesday afternoon from Deer Isle to Aroostook County potato country in time to meet the Canucks and set up his little party. He obviously didn’t entertain the Canucks with beer and brandy on Thursday night when he was parked under a bridge many miles south of potato country. So when did he entertain them? My guess is only in his novelist’s imagination.