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

Following the coastal route Steinbeck took, I drove south on Interstate 5 / U.S. 12 from the Seattle-Tacoma airport to Aberdeen, Washington, and got on U.S. 101, which stays close to the Pacific beaches most of the way to San Francisco. A third of the traffic seemed to be logging trucks, which roared up and over the fir-and-spruce-plastered coastal mountains as fast as their cousins in central Maine. Except for small towns like Cosmopolis and Raymond, western Washington was the usual story – nothing but nature, a smooth two-lane road and token traffic.

  After crossing the big mouth of the Columbia River at Astoria, Oregon, U.S. 101 picked up the same theme but added a few more cars and enormous beaches to the mix. The road ran close to the ocean except when it was cutting over, around and through the forests and tree farms of the Oregon Coast Range. People not in cars or trucks were rare. U.S. 101 in Oregon could be the most spectacular drive in the USA. Its biggest downside – besides hundreds of scary Tsunami Hazard Zone road signs – was that it was too beautiful and took so long.

  I must have stopped a dozen times to catch views of the Pacific surf, walk along deserted beaches, or take photos of cathedral-sized stacks of basalt rising from the sea. There were places where you could hear the surf or the barking of California sea lions from the highway. The ocean was accessible at dozens of small turnouts. All you had to do was park, lock your car and walk a few hundred yards to the water’s edge. At Arcadia Beach, where a 747 could land if it weren't for the basalt spikes, I counted eight cars, 15 people and four dogs.

  I passed scores of vintage mom & pop motels, few if any chains and little of anything that screamed new. There were resorts, campgrounds, B&Bs, rental cottages and the lucky few permanent residents with a Highway 101 address who watched the sun fall into the Pacific every day from their living rooms. At Tillamook, the monstrous Tillamook Air Museum suddenly appeared dead ahead. A manmade mountain 1,000 feet long, it was almost 200 feet high with “Air Museum” stamped on its roof in letters 50-feet tall. It had to be what it looked like it once was – a hangar used for Navy blimps. Under its roof were 30 airplanes and aviation artifacts, but there was no time to visit them.

  By nightfall I made Neskowin, Oregon, where, 283 miles south of Seattle, I stopped at an almost vacant motel. From the parking lot you can hear the surf crashing, but in the morning I didn’t even bother to check out the beach. To adapt a line from Ronald Reagan, if you’ve seen a dozen spectacular beaches in the last 24 hours, you’ve seen them all.

  Bikers in the Bush

  Sunny, 62 and no chance of tsunamis. Day 24 of my trip was another high-speed nature show: Hours of beauty interrupted by a few coastal towns and the hibernating infrastructure of commerce needed to serve the mobs of summer. U.S. 101 flew me by the beaches, cliffs and massive sand dunes of Oregon's hilly coastline and straight toward the heart of California redwood country. Traffic felt heavy for mid-October, but what did I know? Occasionally I’d blow by a long-distance bicyclist grinding up a steep hill. I didn’t feel the least bit guilty.

  After I made it through the hippie-flavored downtown of Coos Bay, the highway was suddenly straighter and lonelier. Even at 70 mph, there was no one left to pass. In Coos County Forest, in a tight channel of tall spruce and fir trees, I was starting to worry that everyone in Oregon had overdosed on raw beauty or been carried away by a tsunami.

  Then, as I slowed down for a few buildings known only to cartographers as the unincorporated town of Langlois, I passed the Greasy Spoon Café and came upon a young man on a bicycle who was from, where else, France. To tell the nonfictional truth, Boris Skrobek was only living in France. He was really a Pole.

  Boris was with two other equally colorful and totally mad long-distance bikers, Scotty from Denver and Don from Alaska. They were greedily carbing and hydrating their fat-free bodies in front of the Langlois Market & Deli, the only retail pit-stop on U.S. 101 for dozens of miles. Boris, who spoke at least Polish, French and English, was 24 and well hidden behind a full beard and glasses. He had worked for a year in Normandy, France, to get up enough money to spend a few months biking across North America by himself. His bike, like the others, was draped with saddlebags holding all his camping gear and clothes.

  So far Boris had pedaled his way from Montreal to Vancouver. On a budget of $30 a day, he was sleeping mostly in campgrounds in the USA. But in Canada he slept “a lot in the bush.” His final destination was San Francisco, 450 miles south. I asked him for his total distance traveled so far. He said he didn’t know it for sure, but in Quebec alone he rode 3,000 kilometers, which was European for 1,800 miles.

  Scotty of Denver, 32, was scarfing down a whole tube of Pringles when I pulled up. He and Boris had each started out alone, but they met on the road somewhere, liked each other and paired up. They weren't really traveling with Don, who was on a short 1,500-mile cruise from Bellingham, Washington, to San Diego.

  Almost two months earlier Scotty quit his job at a bike shop in Denver and biked through Yellowstone Park and Missoula to Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia. Rarely riding in the dark, averaging 60 miles a day, he was a few short of 3,000 – miles, not kilometers. His final target was either San Diego or New Mexico. He had been sleeping mostly at campgrounds and RV parks, where he paid a hiker/biker rate, or, when it was permitted, sleeping in city parks. Sometimes he slept off the side of the road “in the bush.”

  Scotty’s trip down the Pacific Coast route was part of the Adventure Cycling Association’s network of bike routes. The Pacific Coast trail starts in Vancouver and runs 1,853 miles to San Diego. It’s not all downhill. The association's description of the 415-mile Oregon leg gives you an idea what a bicyclist – or a motorist – has to suffer to partake of the coastline's stupendous beauty.

  "During the peak tourist season, there is heavy recreational vehicle traffic along U.S. Highway 101 along the coast, so cyclists must ride cautiously and defensively. This route can be ridden from early spring to late fall. Heavy winter rains can cause flooding and mud slides and may close roads, especially along the coast in the spring. Fog can also be a problem during any season. Due to changing local conditions, it is difficult to predict any major wind patterns."

  I thought I was roughing it until I met Boris, Scotty and Don. I took photos of them and their bikes in front of the market and ambushed them again a little bit down the road. In the next hour, I drove farther than they could go in a day. I stopped to eat in the working fishing village of Port Oroford, which boasts that it is the oldest town on the Oregon Coast and the most westerly town in the Lower 48.

  The shingles, boats, dock, sea air and fresh seafood at The Crazy Norwegian’s Fish & Chips shack reminded me of Deer Isle and Stonington, Maine. But the prices and homes in Port Oroford were cheaper and plainer. And the 1,100 inhabitants – wherever they were – were too busy sweating for a living to fully enjoy the ocean views or stand around looking quaint.

  Not long after the sun went down I parked to rest my eyes somewhere along the seacoast near some low sand dunes and high grass. I accidentally hit “home” on my Tom-Tom GPS. I was 2,893 miles, 43 hours and 48 minutes due west of my house in the southern exurbs of Pittsburgh. By dark I had breezed past Brookings-Harbor, the only spot in the continental U.S. to be bombed by a foreign power, thanks to a Japanese World War II seaplane launched from a submarine. And then I crossed into beautiful bankrupt California, where more than a fifth of all the country’s foreclosed homes were located.

  No Space at the Wal-Mart Inn

  In the fishing port of Crescent City I was deeply disappointed to learn – in defiance of Sam Walton’s wishes – that the Wal-Mart did not allow bums of any class to park in its lot overnight. The store manager, after apologizing twice for my pain, explained that a local ordinance outlawed sleeping in cars, even on private property. The law, a special affront to property rights worshippers like myself, was designed to thwart the indigenous homeless population, she said. Of course most homeless folk weren’t affected because they were carless and were sleeping
in the bush with the long-distance bicyclists.

  My sleeping crisis ended in a pleasing and memorable way when I lucked upon a room at California’s least politically correct mom & pop motel, the fabulous Curly Redwood Lodge. The Curly Redwood sits directly across U.S. 101 from the Crescent City harbor, which regularly gets battered by tsunamis like the one caused by the earthquake off Japan in March of 2011, which created 8-foot waves and destroyed 35 boats.

  The Curly Redwood wasn’t the place you'd want to spend your first honeymoon, or third. But what it lacked in contrived charm was more than made up for by its character, low price ($55) and what it was built from – a single redwood tree. Redwood paneling, redwood roof posts, redwood siding, solid redwood closet doors. Redwood was the one and only motif – 57,000 board feet of it.

  It was no accident the 1950s-vintage motel was made of redwood. It sits on the front door of Redwood National and State Parks on U.S. 101, aka “The Redwood Highway.” Taking a side trip down Old U.S. Highway 101 to the ocean, I did what Steinbeck, trucks and everyone had to do in 1960 before the bypass was constructed. I drove at 40 mph for almost 15 minutes through a forest of giants 10 and 15 feet wide at their base. Not a redwood grove, but a redwood forest. I don’t know how many Sequoia sempervirens there are growing in California, but half an hour after leaving the Curly Redwood I was no longer worried about their survival as a species.

  Sixty miles south of Crescent City I passed Trinidad, where a Steinbeck postcard to his editor Pascal Covici was postmarked on Oct. 24, 1960. Steinbeck said he and Elaine had stopped the night near the grove of redwoods illustrated on the card. It was the only proof I had that pinpointed where they were at any given time between Seattle and San Francisco. Steinbeck never wrote a word I could find about the magnificent Oregon Coast, which is kind of surprising if he and Elaine had seen it but doesn’t prove they didn’t.

  Travels With the Duchess

  It was on the West Coast that “Travels With Charley” reached its height of deception. In the real world, John, Elaine and Charley made their slow trip down to San Francisco in their overloaded pickup truck. But in the book Elaine is not there. It is only the author and his faithful poodle who visit Seattle, fix a flat tire on a rainy Sunday in Oregon and commune with the great bodies of the redwoods.

  It wasn’t that way at all in the original manuscript, which co-stars Elaine and reads like the travel log of the Duke and Duchess of Sag Harbor. As soon as she made it to Seattle, Elaine – aka “my wife” – is in about six straight scenes at the waterfront and on the road. Some of those scenes were dropped completely and some were retained, but her presence was stripped out.

  One scene completely dropped from the first draft mentions "the several days" Mr. and Mrs. Steinbeck stayed “at a partially closed resort in a big redwood grove." Holed up in “a cottage at the base of a cluster of monster trees," he wrote that he was sore and scraped up after having to flounder in “thick yellow muck” while fixing Rocinante's flat tire, which he said he did as Elaine sat in the cab reading a book.

  Steinbeck wrote that the cottage in the redwoods seemed like "the perfect place to rest and refurbish our souls." Apparently, he was halfway to heaven. As he soaked in “a tub of near boiling water,” he wrote, “My lady wife slipped in and set a scotch and soda on the edge of the tub. And the world and the people there of, the grasses and the trees became very beautiful.”

  Another completely dropped scene does not reflect well on Steinbeck’s vaunted love for the common man. After he and Elaine hear about a good restaurant nearby, they decide to get dolled up and do the "town." They were disappointed to find that the eatery in the sticks of Northern California was not a Trader Vic's franchise but a neon hellhole. Sounding like an old fogey, Steinbeck wrote that the restaurant possessed "every damnable feature of our civilization – cold glaring light, despondent roaring music from a cathedral juke box, batteries of coin machines, Formica counters and tables. One wall was a cemetery of ugly … pies."

  Great descriptive writing, as usual. But when Steinbeck – who rarely let a commoner he meets on his journey escape without uttering a “he don’t” or a “them people” – made fun of the waitress for saying “fried tatters” and "We ain't got no (liquor) license," he doesn’t sound like a friend of the working class. Later he was happy to report that while he and Elaine slept close to the redwoods, there were “no trippers, no chattering troupes with cameras” to spoil their stay. The entire restaurant tragedy was easily snipped from the final version of "Charley." But excising Elaine from the other scenes posed a larger editorial problem. On the West Coast, whenever he writes “we” in the book he was originally referring to himself and Elaine, not himself and Charley.

  Speaking of poor Charley, he all but disappears from the first draft once Elaine takes over the passenger seat. It became so obvious to some folks (i.e., the editors or Steinbeck’s agent) that the poodle was missing that Steinbeck felt obligated to explain to the reader where Charley went. He handwrote a short chapter – obviously never published – answering the criticism that Charley was being ignored and assuring everyone he was feeling fine. He explained that with the missus onboard, the standard Steinbeck family pecking order had reasserted itself: “When Charley and I traveled alone together, the dog was indeed man’s best friend. But Charley knows better than anyone when the wife is present, he is man’s second best friend, and he finds this a normal relationship and perhaps a better one.”

  In the end, Charley was restored to top billing and Elaine's presence on the West Coast for four weeks was completely eliminated. It was editorially smart – and necessary – to dump the duchess. First of all, the scenes focusing on her were boring as hell. But most important, she seriously undermined the book's romantic conceit. With her by his side every night, Steinbeck was no longer the man alone. He was a love-struck honeymooner.

  Whoever made or ordered the changes in "Charley" saved the day. They ensured that the book would become a classic story about a famous writer, his beloved dog and the lonely road they traveled, not a book about a wealthy New Yorker, his spoiled “lady wife” and their quest for the perfect cocktail in Northern California.

  “Travels With Charley” wasn’t the first time one of Steinbeck’s wives was dropped from one of his nonfiction books. It also happened in “The Log of the Sea of Cortez,” his journal about the six-week scientific expedition to the Gulf of California he took in 1940 with marine biologist friend Doc Ricketts. Steinbeck’s first wife Carol was never mentioned yet she was aboard the whole time.

  It’s up to Steinbeck scholars, if they care, to find out who made the editorial decision at Viking Press to remove Elaine from “Travels With Charley.” For extra credit, they can explain why pretending Steinbeck was alone on the West Coast wasn’t, by itself, an act of deceit that broke faith with readers and disqualifies “Travels With Charley” as a work of nonfiction.

  So many redwoods …

  After passing among so many redwoods, I was afraid I’d be bored with them by the time I got to the Avenue of the Giants. I wasn’t. The narrow highway – also once a part of old U.S. 101 – snaked for 33 miles through 51,000 acres of redwood groves. Often impenetrable to sunlight and the signals of cell phones and satellite radio, and connecting a chain of small communities like Pepperwood and Miranda, the avenue was surrounded by a state park that contained the largest stand of virgin redwoods on the planet.

  The curvy two-lane highway was often so narrow the monstrous tree trunks touched the edge of the pavement. It didn’t seem possible that until the mid-1960s, when the bypass was put in, the avenue was a main route for truckers and the only road to the outside world for Humboldt County marijuana growers. With plenty of small places to pull over, you could shut off your engine and just listen to the silence or walk a hundred yards into the darkness. A million people visit the Avenue of the Giants every year. Yet on a Thursday afternoon in October I was able to stand in the middle of the road for five minutes and take all th
e photos I wanted.

  Running out of daylight, I searched for the old Hartsook Inn at the southern end of the avenue. The inn, closed and now owned by the Save-the-Redwoods League, was a real getaway in its day with 62 rustic cabins in the woods and no phones. It was once the place to go for the Hollywood crowd and celebrities like Steinbeck. Several local people at an organic fruit and veggie stand near Pepperwood told me the Hartsook was most likely the resort the Steinbecks stayed at when they were consorting with the redwoods. Maybe so. The Save-the-Redwoods League had no old guest records. And in the fading light I never did see the inn, though everyone told me it was impossible to miss.

  Emerging from the dark redwood forest, I stopped for dinner in a grocery store/cafe in downtown Garberville, the prosperous capital of Marijuana County. I swear everyone was stoned. Demographically, everyone on the sidewalk was either old and homeless looking or young and homeless looking (they were the ones with the overstuffed backpacks).

  As I was getting back into my RAV4, a stereotypically solid citizen of Garberville was squatting with his back against a storefront.

  "Is that a 2010?"

  "Yeah."

  "I've got an '09."