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

  A Modern Man of the Mountains

  At the other end of Main Street was the Greater Saltese region’s one-stop entertainment complex, the Old Montana Bar & Grill. Part slots casino, part restaurant, part bar, part gallery of local historical photos, it had a wild kingdom of dead game animals mounted on its walls and on its menu. Bryan Teeters, 48, was the mountain man personally responsible for many of the elk heads, bear skins and the stuffed mountain lion. He said except for the moose, the animals were locally grown and shot. Teeters, who lived across the street, bagged his trophies the old-fashioned way – with a bow and arrow.

  Pointing to the mountain lion high above the pool table, he said, “I got that one with a bow out back.” By “out back,” he meant the infinite forest and looming mountainside that was his backyard. He said he tracked the mountain lion in the snow and when it climbed a tree, it was all over for the big cat. “I shot it from 30 yards,” he said, as if the magnificent beast was an ordinary gray squirrel.

  Teeters came to Montana from California with his parents when he was 12 and basically grew up and became Jim Bridger with a snowmobile. The wilds of Montana were a paradise for him and his restaurant was full nearly every night. But Teeters was miffed that Montana's he-man government was turning soft – and kicking him in the pocketbook.

  The state had recently banned smoking in all public buildings, which he said hurt his casino business. And state wildlife experts were talking about reintroducing wolves into the area. Teeters didn’t like wolves for both sensible and selfish reasons. He said wolves kill for the fun of it and kill a lot more game than they can eat, unaware that he was also describing what human hunters do.

  But that was not a fair thought. It was a city-boy’s cheap shot. Teeters was a smart guy. He was worried that the wolves would wipe out the elk. Then there’d be no hunters to come to his backyard to hunt elk by day and eat them at his place by night. As I left he recommended that I take in some of the local attractions, including the 8,300-foot long Taft Tunnel and the unlucky ghost town of Taft.

  Taft was a rollicking but nameless young railroad town in 1907 when William Howard Taft visited and, according to Teeters, declared it “the most wicked town in the country.” The civic fathers forgave Taft and named their city after him in 1908 when he became America’s heftiest president. It didn’t matter much, though, because Taft the town was soon destroyed in “the Big Burn,” the 1910 wildfire that scoured the valley of its pines and log houses. Only the trees grew back, which they always do.

  I thanked Teeters for his suggestion, but I had no time for side-trips. Steinbeck’s ghost was moving too fast. As I was getting into my car on Main Street, I told Teeters that the great John Steinbeck drove down the exact road we were standing on 50 years and one day earlier. He thought that was pretty cool. I didn’t have to explain who Steinbeck was to Teeters. He knew a lot more about him than the average Montana mountain man because he and Steinbeck had something pretty important in common. They were both born in Salinas, California.

  Steinbeck’s Ratty Cabins

  Between Saltese and Seattle Steinbeck’s trail disappears for a few days into the fog of time and fiction. There are no letters to his wife or editor or agent to consult, no newspaper articles to believe or disbelieve. Because he said it in a letter to his wife, it’s certain that Steinbeck and Charley spent Friday night encamped somewhere along U.S. 10 about 40 miles west of Missoula.

  On Saturday morning, Oct. 15, 1960, they would have started out on Day 6 of their Sprint to Seattle. Steinbeck would have come through downtown Saltese on Highway 10, then up and over the pine-green mountains at Lookout Pass into Idaho, down the long and swerving hill to the quiet streets of Wallace, across the top of Idaho through Kellogg to Cataldo near the Washington border.

  In “Travels With Charley" Steinbeck says he stopped for the night in the mountains “under the ridge of a pass” near the Idaho-Washington border at a ratty motel/gas station combo. He described the place in his usual fine detail, saying it was “a little put-together, do-it-yourself group of cabins, square boxes, each with a stoop, a door, and one window, and no vestige of a garden or gravel paths.” He says that “The small combined store, repair shop, and lunch room behind the gas pumps was as unprepossessing as any I have ever seen.”

  For several pages of mostly dialogue, Steinbeck mediates an argument between a burly, he-man father and his fey 20-year-old son. The mother was gone. The son had a light male voice, dressed flamboyantly (he wore an ascot) and was interested in theater, fashion and in becoming a hairdresser. His father was interested only in hunting, fishing, drinking and not seeing his son become a hairdresser.

  If this caricature of a young gay man trying to escape the mountain-man culture of upper Idaho sounds like something Steinbeck-the-great-novelist made up, it's because he almost certainly did. Steinbeck said the young man even subscribed to The New Yorker, which to me was the most unbelievable thing of all. By this time in my trip I had little doubt that the father and son were dramatic inventions – just like the itinerant actor in Alice, the Canucks, the Yankee farmer, et al. But just in case Steinbeck really did stop near the Idaho-Washington border, I left the interstate and looked for Steinbeck's crummy cabins.

  Not far from Cataldo, within earshot of where I-90’s traffic arced through a mountain pass toward Spokane, I searched for several miles along a piece of old U.S. 10. In the Mission Inn restaurant I read some locals the description of the cabins from "Travels With Charley." I followed up a tip from a long-time resident. I knocked on the doors of several older houses. I peered into heavy underbrush looking for the ruins of a gas station or a collapsed tourist cabin. No luck.

  Steinbeck had to stop somewhere the night of Oct. 15, 1960, on his way to Seattle, which was about 400 miles from his last known campout. East Canyon Road, the two-lane remnant of U.S. 10 north of Cataldo, fit Steinbeck's description pretty well. But if the cabins had really existed, they shouldn't have been so hard to find. Then again, maybe the cabins existed but the father and son didn’t.

  As I crossed into Washington I wasn’t too happy with my man Steinbeck. His creative-nonfictions in “Charley” had caused me to go driving in circles and knocking on people’s doors in an under-populated, over-armed part of country I’d never been to before and would never see again. Thank God the natives were so friendly. Pushing hard until midnight, I made it to all the way to Moses Lake, Washington. After a 300-mile Sunday I slept eagerly, happily, in my seventh Wal-Mart parking lot. I had gotten to be a fan of Wal-Mart’s hassle-free lodging: Just pull in, park with your windshield pointed away from the nearest light standard, kick off your sandals and climb in back.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Sunday, Oct. 16, 1960 – Seattle

  While there’s no way of knowing for sure where or if Steinbeck stayed in eastern Washington Saturday night, he almost certainly made it to Seattle by Sunday evening, Oct. 16, since he was hurrying and the drive from Spokane to Seattle on U.S. Highway 10 was only 300 miles.

  Sprawling in Seattle

  The temperature in Moses Lake bottomed at 33 degrees, but I barely noticed in my cozy berth. Only my nose and my indispensible Apple MacBook Pro were icy when I woke at 5:50 and aimed at Seattle, only 180 miles west. The previous night I had crossed most of Eastern Washington’s dry agricultural tundra, but I was still in the rain shadow of the Cascades. The tree-less land, scrubby with green sage, was almost desert-like.

  At dawn I swooped down one long hill to the wide Columbia River and up to the top of the other side, where an orderly line of wind turbines twirled in the orange light. It became dry and dead again. No people. Nothing green. Nothing alive taller than a four-year-old. I-90/Old Highway 10 climbed gently for miles. For a little while I was aiming straight at a large snow-capped mountain that was pinking up nicely in the sun. Mt. Rainier? No idea. The mountaintop disappeared as I entered semi-green valleys and began passing thirsty, untidy farms with cows, horses and pigs. Gigantic open sheds stuff
ed with bales of hay waited for winter. I even spotted a few stray humans who were not behind a wheel.

  Steinbeck came the same way on old U.S. 10 to get to Seattle – and he traveled just as fast. In the first draft of his book, in a paragraph that would be deleted, he wrote, “As before reaching Chicago, I found myself packing on the mileage and for the same reason. My lady wife was to fly out to meet me in Seattle and to travel with me down the West Coast for she had never seen the great real woods. I drove farther and faster than I intended. Increasingly I chose the wider and faster roads.”

  This was one of several instances where Steinbeck admits he was rushing almost blindly to meet his wife Elaine – and where he betrays how little time he actually spent studying the country or meeting its people. When he was alone on the road – whether he was on his Chicago-Seattle sprint, his California-Amarillo dash or his New Orleans-New York City final kick – he was busting ass, not searching for the heart and soul of America.

  In Seattle I was going to be staying at a Holiday Inn near the Seattle-Tacoma airport for $65, thanks to Hotwire.com. It would take great luck to find Steinbeck’s motel. According to his original manuscript, he cooled his heels at the airport in a modern motor court for three days while he waited for Elaine to jet out from Manhattan.

  The Cascade Mountains and their thick evergreen coats finally showed up in my windshield at 10:30, when I was 90 miles east of Seattle. It began to look like Montana again, with a smaller sky. The surface of I-90 got worse by the mile. Spokane had already won the prize for worst roads of the trip, but Seattle’s grooved pavement was trying hard to compete.

  As he approached Seattle on U.S. Highway 10, Steinbeck barely recognized the “little city of space and trees and gardens” he knew as a skirt-chasing young man. He had read about the West Coast’s post-war population explosion, but he couldn’t believe the changes. More with sadness than anger, he wrote, “Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”

  That out-the-car-window observation of suburban sprawl on the march forever endeared Steinbeck to future generations of the no-growth crowd as a Nostradamus. But it only proved how out of touch he was with 1960 America and the needs of middle-class Americans. With his extra house and two acres by the sea, he didn’t need an affordable new home with a little yard in the suburbs. But millions of ordinary urban American families did – and in 1960 they were getting them.

  In the 20 years since he’d last seen the city, Seattle’s population had jumped from 368,000 to 557,000. Those extra 189,000 humans had to live somewhere. And suburbs, which Steinbeck rarely if ever saw on his trip, were being built where farmers’ fields and wooded hilltops used to be. I was growing up in one of them six miles south of downtown Pittsburgh.

  Steinbeck wasn't automatically against change – an attitude that he wisely knew was "the currency of the rich and stupid." He knew change was inevitable and unstoppable. But he would be amazed and possibly appalled to see how much more Seattle has spread and changed since he saw it in 1960. In step with the population boom of the West, its metro area has exploded from about 1 million people in 1960 to 3.4 million in 2010.

  As far as I could tell, as I hurtled down the steep grades and curves of the Cascades to the valley floor, nothing of significance had changed in Seattle since the last ice age. Steinbeck and I dodged the same ancient monoliths covered with trees, just as we had both passed 95 percent of the same farms, little towns and scenic wonders since Sag Harbor. In spite of Steinbeck’s worries about overpopulation and rapid growth, in more than 5,000 highway miles I had seen little evidence that America had added 130 million citizens since 1960. I have a pretty good idea where all those new Americans are living their happy lives, and it’s definitely not between Chicago and Seattle.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Monday, Oct. 17 to Oct. 20, 1960 – Seattle

  Steinbeck stayed in Seattle longer than he intended. Based on a handful of detailed scenes he wrote in the first draft of his book but were cut entirely, he checked into a modern motel near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. He waited three days for Elaine to fly out from New York. He then showed her his old haunts in downtown Seattle before heading south. There’s no way to tell when he left Seattle, but based on when he arrived in San Francisco and what he wrote in the first draft, a good guess is that it was Thursday, Oct. 20.

  Steinbeck’s Old Seattle

  When Steinbeck took Elaine downtown to show her Old Seattle, they went to Pike Place Market, a busy waterfront marketplace on the brink of a steep hill where locals bought seafood, farm produce and flowers. Seattle’s waterfront then was nothing like the official tourist attraction it has become since.

  I arrived in time for the evening light show. As the red and blue sky slowly dimmed over the harbor, a ferry full of commuters headed out to sea and the moon rose between two skyscrapers. Though it was Monday night, thousands of people were milling around on cobblestone streets warmly lit by dozens of classic neon signs. Pike Place Market’s disorderly maze of fish stalls, flower shops, veggie stands, restaurants, bars and specialty shops is the city’s Number 1 destination, attracting as many as 40,000 residents and tourists on a summer’s day.

  Pike Place Market has its artificial, touristy spots, but overall it’s an organic, real marketplace oozing with character. Miraculously, in 1963 an alliance of preservationists and private groups prevented the mayor, members of city council and their chosen developers from replacing it with a redevelopment project that included a hotel, apartments, office buildings and a parking lot. Since then a public-private group has run it with a mission to preserve its unique historic charm.

  Packs of raggedy older men occupy the market. Many were residents of the neighborhood who took advantage of low-cost housing and a free medical clinic. They squatted on benches and patrolled the sidewalks. Many were homeless and some clearly crazy. Like thousands of their brothers and sisters who are permanently encamped in the public spaces of downtown San Francisco, they were unsightly but no more dangerous than pigeons.

  Before I left Seattle for Oregon, I made a brief attempt to find the motel Steinbeck stayed in at SeaTac, the Seattle-Tacoma airport. I went around to several older motels. But there had been too many changes in 50 years and he provided no helpful clues in the West Coast scenes cut from the first draft of “Travels With Charley.”

  There were interesting details in those lost scenes, however. For example, Steinbeck said he waited for three days in a “modern” glass and Plexiglas motel room while wife Elaine struggled to book a direct jet flight from New York to Seattle. He rattled on about luxuriating in its bathtub and soft bed. He played with modern push-button gizmos. He listed – and mocked – the TV shows he watched.

  "The beauty and culture of our time," he wrote sarcastically: "Gunsmoke. Have Gun Will Travel. I Love Lucy. I love Dinah Shore. I love Barbara Stanwick. The greatest engineering minds in the history of the world had made these marvels available to me. Just looking at all those buttons brought home to me what a primitive life I had been leading."

  Steinbeck went on way too long about how horribly his poor “lady wife” suffered from the stress and disappointments of jet travel. When she tried to get a direct flight, he wrote, she found that first-class seats on jets to Seattle were sold out for two weeks. She had to fly a prop plane to San Francisco and switch to a jet there. Then came a luggage snafu.

  No wonder Elaine was distressed and cranky upon her arrival. Steinbeck made it sound like the poor woman had walked from Manhattan. It was lame and dull stuff, and deserved to be cut. It’s hard to believe Steinbeck thought anyone but his own famous friends would want to read about the travails and minor agonies of the jet-setter class.

  15 – Cruising the Coast

  A writer must so rearrange reality so that it will seem reason
ably real to the reader.

  – Cut from first draft of “Travels With Charley”

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Friday, Oct. 21 to Oct. 26, 1960 – The Pacific Coast Highway

  There are virtually no hard clues to determine where the Steinbecks stopped as they came down the Pacific Coast through redwood country to San Francisco. Based on scenes deleted from the book’s original manuscript, once they crossed the California line they stayed for at least two days at a large, nearly empty resort in the shade of redwoods. The only reliable clue is a postcard Steinbeck mailed on Monday, Oct. 24, 1960, to his editor Pascal Covici from Trinidad, California, where he said he and Elaine were staying the night in a motel by a redwood grove on U.S. 101, about 300 miles north of San Francisco.

  America’s Prettiest Drive