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

  Rough Morning in Monterey

  City of Monterey. McDonald’s. Sonic hell at 6:40 a.m. I was getting off to a bad start for what would be a long Saturday in Steinbeck Country. The Neil Diamond Channel was blasting an acoustical version of "A Song Sung Blue." The place was filling up with a chattering but unintelligible mob of Japanese tourists making a pre-dawn Mac attack.

  On my way down U.S. 101 from San Francisco Friday afternoon, I had stopped in San Jose to say hello to some people at San Jose State's Steinbeck Center. I left two things behind in San Jose. I left a note under Professor Susan Shillinglaw’s office door, telling her that over the weekend I was going to be in the City of Monterey-Pacific Grove area, where I had mistakenly been told she lived. I’d been gently stalking her for six months by phone and in person at the Steinbeck Fest. I had hoped she’d finally have time to talk to me about what I had been learning about “Travels With Charley” and its problems with reality.

  The other thing I left in San Jose was my debit card. I left it sticking out of an ATM on the street corner across from San Jose State's library. No one had used it – though someone had tried. It wasn’t really much of a crisis. My bank at home automatically killed my card and I had to switch to my other bank. When you leave your debit card in an ATM, as I did in San Jose and once in Guatemala City, it can be a real pain. But I can’t believe I ever lived or traveled without ATMs, which are one of the great inventions of mankind, a modern miracle of technology and trust. People whine about transaction fees. Young people take them for granted, like cell phones. Not me. I’m old.

  In the late 1970s I remember standing in lines 25-people long at a Security Pacific bank on Hollywood Boulevard just to cash a check so I could eat lunch. I remember being in Helena, Montana, in 1980 and trying to cash a check from my bank in L.A. I might as well have been from Mars. I also remember how convenient it was in 2001 to walk up to ATMs on the streets of Lima, insert my magic plastic card from a local bank in Washington, Pa., USA, and get all the nuevo sols I needed.

  In McDonald’s, to a soundtrack of Neil Diamond, I let a middle-aged Japanese guy with a hat step in front of me at the register. I was quickly sorry I had been such a nice guy. He ordered 55 Egg McMuffins and 55 coffees. It turned out he was the driver/tour guide for the column of Japanese tourists that had been pouring out of the bus in the parking lot as I pulled in. I had hustled to the counter to beat the shuffling throng. But without a uniform or clipboard or bullhorn, the driver/guide fooled me into thinking he was just a local guy.

  In western Pennsylvania, I would have known better. Pittsburgh is officially the lily-whitest and least ethnically diverse metro area in the country. It’s hard to believe, but only 1 percent of the Pittsburgh region’s shrinking population is Latino. Asians are 2 percent, and most of them are from India. In Pittsburgh I would have assumed right away that the Japanese guy had to be the tour bus driver.

  Meanwhile, reflecting California’s human rainbow, about 8 percent of Monterey’s population is Asian, more than half are Hispanic/Latino and only a third are non-Hispanic white folk. If the average Pittsburgher came across 50 Japanese people in one of their local McDonald’s, they’d call the Pentagon. Diversity in German-Irish-Italian Pittsburgh is determined by whether your grandparents were from Croatia or Serbia.

  Everything turned out OK at the register. I got my coffee in seconds and McDonald's' staff somehow fed everyone. Handling busloads of tourists was something they were used to. About 4 million tourists come to the Monterey Peninsula every year, though most don’t sleep in the Salinas Wal-Mart like I did.

  The parking lot in Salinas was a whole different Wal-Mart experience. It was small, busy and noisy. Latino kids packed six to a car came and went and came and went until after 11 p.m. I knew Salinas had a deadly gang problem – 3,000 members in 16 youth gangs. But I parked without fear. The local gangsters were too busy gunning each other down over turf and the drug trade to worry about a bald old guy sleeping in a car at Wal-Mart on Friday night. I got 6.7 peaceful hours of sleep.

  I would need it for my quick tour of Steinbeck Country, much of which I had already seen on my two previous trips. It was Saturday, Oct. 30. Fifty years earlier, to the day, Steinbeck and his little troupe left the St. Francis Hotel and moved south to the Monterey Peninsula. They briefly visited one of his sisters north of the peninsula in Watsonville, where most of the strawberries the country eats come from. Then he, Elaine and Charley moved in with his sister Beth for two weeks at the modest Steinbeck family cottage on 11th Street in Pacific Grove, a short walk from the black rocks and crashing surf of Monterey Bay.

  When Whistles Blow at Dawn

  My first stop was Cannery Row at dawn. Steinbeck said in “Cannery Row” that sunrise there was a magical time. He wasn’t fictionalizing. I arrived in time to see the sun come up from behind the low mountains on the other side of cold, choppy, deep green Monterey Bay. It was quiet except for the plump seagulls hanging in the wind above the tourist traps, landscaped plazas, upscale hotels and wide decks standing on piers in the shallows.

  As usual, Deborah Hannas was getting Lilly Mae’s Cinnamon Rolls ready for the day. Hannas gets to experience dawn on Cannery Row early every morning when she drives down the hill from her house and opens her small shiny shop. Depending on the season and a bunch of unpredictable meteorological things, her dawn could be misty or sunny, rainy or cloudy, pleasant or chilly. The bay could be rough or calm. Sometimes the fog sat gently on the water. Sometimes it flowed ashore like thick soft surf. Whatever kind of dawn greeted her, she agreed with Mr. Steinbeck that it was pretty magical.

  I stopped in to say hi to Hannas. I first met her in the spring when I was on my Steinbeck research tour. She’s been working on Cannery Row since she was 17 – since 1977. “I know everyone who works on the street,” she said, “It’s like my own neighborhood. I know a lot of people who worked down here their whole lives, who worked themselves up from busboys to chefs.” When I told her I was following Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” trail around the country, she spoke for all who believe the road to “anywhere but here” is full of steinbeckian romance and adventure. “I want a camper truck. Everyone should have a camper truck. It’s the American Dream.”

  While I was talking to Hannas the previous spring, her old friend Harry Traylor came into Lilly Mae’s with his order pad to see if she needed anything. Traylor had sold his wholesale dairy five years before but still supplied fresh milk to a few friends like Hannas. Traylor was 85 with lots of white hair, but he looked youthful and trim in his layered look – long-sleeved shirt, T-shirt and all-weather vest.

  He migrated to Monterey from Arkansas in 1957. Harry the Milkman remembered precisely what Cannery Row was like in 1960. Dead. He could park on the street on a Saturday night and go to a piano bar or the Steinbeck Theater. Unfortunately, that was it for nightly entertainment – except for the fires. “There was lots of arson at that time,” he said. “All the old canneries were being burned down.”

  Hannas had watched the street’s steady resurrection and she knew a bit of its ancient history. Before it was officially renamed Cannery Row in the 1950s, in honor of Steinbeck’s 1945 book, it was Ocean View Avenue. During the 1930s a row of canneries built on the water’s edge each had its own coded whistle that blew at 1 or 3 or 4 in the morning.

  The whistle would alert the cannery’s workers that its fishing boats were coming in with bellies full of the sardines that thrived by the billions on Monterey Bay’s plankton blooms. The cannery packers were mostly wives of Portuguese and Italian fishermen. They’d hear the whistles and come down off the hill in the dark like extras in a scene from a George Romero zombie movie, clomping in their rubber boots, wearing aprons and hairnets. It must have been a crazy sight.

  Like so many of our ancestors, the sardine packers had unbelievably horrible working conditions. They often stood knee-deep for 10 or 12 hours in icy ocean water packing fish into cans on assembly lines. In the late 1930s they we
re making 58 cents an hour – about minimum wage in today’s money. The best thing you can say about those cannery jobs was they were seasonal and were ultimately replaced by machinery or were shipped overseas. Eighty years later, Hannas was still doing what those poor cannery women did. “Every morning at 5 a.m. my whistle blows,” she said cheerfully. But her workday, though long, wasn’t a dirty, stinky torture session. And when she got home, she smelled of coffee and cinnamon, not fish guts.

  Confronting Steinbeck’s Ghost

  Much of the America I had seen so far on the Steinbeck Highway had barely changed in 50 years. But in 2010 Cannery Row was nothing like what Steinbeck saw during his “Charley” trip. In 1960 it was a hollowed out shipwreck. The lovable lowlifes, rough bars and tender cathouses he knew in the 1930s and immortalized in “Cannery Row” were already long gone by 1960. So was most of the sardine industry – dead from overfishing and natural causes. “The Sardine Capital of the World” no longer employed 5,000 or 10,000 people. Its 19 sardine canneries were closed and already worth nothing but their history.

  By 2010 only a few wooden storefronts and a remodeled cannery remained, weathered islands of 1930s character clashing with the glassy modern edifices. The holiest and shabbiest remnant was the brown wood lab where marine biologist Ed Ricketts worked, lived and hosted a party house/ bohemian salon for local artists, musicians and writers like Steinbeck, Henry Miller and the young Joseph Campbell.

  Ricketts was Doc in “Cannery Row” and served as a model for characters in other Steinbeck books. He and Steinbeck became great pals and Steinbeck essentially became Ricketts’ marine-biology student. The lab, which is occasionally opened for tours by the Cannery Row Foundation and once was a jazz club, had its backdoor to the bay and a walkout basement to the rocks and surf. Ricketts was more than just a cool guy who listened to Count Basie records and got laid a lot. He was a pioneering intertidal ecologist and amateur philosopher. His holistic and then-innovative ideas about ecology and the interdependence and cooperation of all organisms within a specific habitat were said to have strongly influenced Steinbeck’s writing and thinking.

  Steinbeck was heartbroken when Ricketts was killed in 1948. A bust of Ricketts marks the spot in Monterey where his car was hit by a train. Busts and photos and historical markers haunt the sidewalks, decks and plazas of Cannery Row. But little evidence is left of Steinbeck’s real or imaginary street. Today, as every travel writer and parachuting journalist must mention because it is so obvious, Cannery Row is a PG-rated theme park of its former colorful, sinful self. A street that stunk of dead fish and teemed with cannery workers, fishermen and flies has been spiffed up with wine-tasting rooms and snazzy seaside hotels with names like “Intercontinental: The Clement Monterey.”

  Over the decades Cannery Row has been reborn, thanks to the midwifery of a collective of entrepreneurs, real estate developers, enlightened government officials and Packard Foundation money. It’s become a safe place for wholesome nuclear families from Iowa heading for the Monterey Bay Aquarium or the candy stores and souvenir shops, where Steinbeck’s brand name and face are used to sell jewelry, wax museum tickets and refrigerator magnets.

  While I watched Cannery Row wake up and ready itself for a busy Saturday, I felt Steinbeck staring at me. Dozens of times. His face and name were everywhere, like a creepy Big Author. Across the street, filling a window at the Cannery Row Trading Company, an oversized black-and-white photo of Steinbeck the Serious Young Writer watched me. If this were not a true story of my trip, I’d write that I finally confronted him. I’d write that I looked deeply into the frozen eyes of his bust on Steinbeck Plaza and spoke directly to his ghost.

  Why so serious, John? Are you thinking about how ironic it is that you no longer recognize the street you made world famous? Are you mad your name is being used to sell everything from jewelry to the entire Monterey Peninsula? Are you pissed at me for laughing out loud at that stunt you tried to pull in North Dakota? Don’t you like an ex-newspaper hack coming along after 50 years raising questions and fact-checking your “nonfiction” book?

  Then, employing some of the lowest tricks of creative nonfiction, I’d write that Steinbeck spoke to me telepathically. I’d say that he told me he understood I didn’t set out to bring him down or show him up. That he forgave me for my troublemaking. That he was sorry his lies were going to cost me two years of my life. I’d write that he told me it was always good to seek truth for its own sake, even if it disappointed people or made them hate you.

  Of course Steinbeck did nothing of the kind. As usual, he had nothing to say to me. All I heard was the chattering of seagulls.

  He wouldn’t be happy that he’s been turned into a posthumous marketing tool for “Steinbeck Country.” But he was no blind romantic or limousine preservationist. He knew restaurants and antique shops or almost anything would be a big improvement over smelly sardine canneries and whorehouses. In “Travels With Charley” he acknowledged that much progress already had occurred across the Monterey Peninsula in the 20 years he hadn’t been watching it. He’d grumble and growl, but he’d have to agree that in 2010 Cannery Row – like the rest of the America he toured in 1960 – was a better, safer, cleaner and more prosperous place. And it was a much nicer place to make your living when your whistle blows at dawn.

  Perfect Pacific Grove

  From Cannery Row I drove next door to Pacific Grove to see if anyone was staying at the Steinbeck family's old cottage on 11th Street. America's prime candidate for most perfect community ever was, well, as perfect as ever. Lovely quiet streets lined with million-dollar Victorian homes tilted toward the sea. Its spiffy Victorian-flavored downtown along Lighthouse Avenue purred with the expensive rides of its 15,000 lucky citizens.

  Founded by Methodists as a seaside retreat, initially promoted as “a city of homes,” dry until 1969, winter headquarters of billions of Monarch butterflies, Pacific Grove is a windier, less nautical West Coast echo of the Village of Sag Harbor. It’s just as disproportionately white and rich, but not as self-consciously historical and not as tiny or hard to get to by car.

  On PG’s main drag I went in to buy a scone and write a blog item at Lighthouse Coffee Company. A steady parade of locals came and went. Mostly middle-age men in blue jeans, they were served their breakfast burritos, lattes and mochas by the sincerely friendly and welcoming owner. She looked like Kim Basinger and seduced every male she knew by first name and every male she didn’t know with “dear” or “darling.”

  Lighthouse Coffee was a neighborhood hangout, with lots of potted plants and tables out front on the wide bricked sidewalk under some small trees. At one table a guy with a latte and hair too long for his age railed about some public schools being closed for budget reasons in Kansas City or somewhere in Flyover Country. “Why don’t they start educating those kids?” he moaned to his two buddies. “We spend three times as much money on the war in Iraq than on schools.”

  It was the first complaint I had heard on my trip about military spending or the war in Iraq. As a George Washington noninterventionist, I agreed with the guy about Iraq being a terrible waste of blood and treasure. But he had been living too long in his Pacific Grove ivory tower. He had no idea what was going on in the typical city public school system. The last thing they needed was more money. Pittsburgh’s city schools – though not as horrible as most urban districts – spent more than $20,000 a kid per year. Half of that, at least, was wasted.

  I’d have told the long-haired dude failing urban districts like Pittsburgh’s needed to be blown up, i.e., privatized, and turned over to parents, teachers, unions, churches, businesses, neighborhood groups, bridge clubs, the Elks – anyone but the idiots who’ve been running Big Public Education. Of course, what did I know? He was probably living in a million-dollar dream house by the sea and I was chasing a ghost around the country and sleeping in parking lots.

  In between customers I asked the owner of Lighthouse Coffee how Pacific Grove real estate was faring in
the “Great Recession.” Housing values had crashed more than 50 percent in Montgomery County and were back to pre-bubble 1999 levels. But from all appearances the economic apocalypse had not reached her tony corner of America.

  “The real estate market’s down a little,” she said, “but it’s not bad.” PG was a town of “money people,” she said, and not many houses were on the market or under deep water. A vacant lot with a view of Monterey Bay cost $375,000. She was happy to report that her home, on a double lot, was worth $1 million. The small ex-cottages near Steinbeck’s place were going for about $600,000, depending on their condition.

  On 11th Street I parked across from the Steinbeck family cottage. Except that it was probably the least renovated and shabbiest structure on the block, it fit in well with its cramped neighborhood of little yellow-and-dark-green-trimmed stucco houses on micro-lots. Two blocks from the surf, with a low gray wood fence at the sidewalk and a dense side garden, it had been remodeled by Steinbeck so it’d have no door to the street.