The day before were to leave the Bay Area to begin the long trip home, my brother-in-law Andy, who had returned from Boston, and I drove with Albie and Ollie to Salinas, about an hour from Mountain View. Dogs aren’t allowed in the National Steinbeck Center, a museum devoted to the life and work of John Steinbeck, so Andy was going to keep an eye on both dogs while I made my visit.
There was no way a trip across the United States inspired by Travels with Charley was not going to include a visit to Steinbeck’s hometown. In part, I wanted to see Rocinante, the pickup truck and camper that conveyed Steinbeck and Charley back and forth across the United States. But it was more to pay my respects to the writer who penned two of my top three favorite books of all time: East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath.§ His ability to plumb the depths of the human soul, his direct, muscular writing style, and his ability to deliver a sense of place, whether Oklahoma in the grip of drought and the Depression or a Salinas whorehouse in the early 1900s, is, for me, both glorious and intimidating.
The center is an impressive place mostly organized around several of Steinbeck’s most famous works. But it was Rocinante, restored to a shine, that captivated me most. A dark green 1960 model GMC pickup with a V-6 engine and a white-sided camper mounted in the bed, Rocinante was much as I imagined. You can’t touch her or sit inside, but the back door is open, so you can gaze inside its cozy, wood-paneled interior. Toward the front is what appears to be a Formica table bolted to the floor at which Steinbeck poked away at his typewriter as he and Charley traveled. There’s a built-in fridge, a stove, a sink, and several cabinets for storage. Steinbeck wrote of cleaning his clothes by hanging a covered bucket with his laundry from a pole in his little closet and letting the motion of the truck do the work of an agitator. I imagined Steinbeck, Charley, and their laundry being jostled to and fro on some of the rougher roads they traveled. It made me feel that perhaps Albie and I were cheating by traveling in a convertible sports car.
As I stared through the plexiglass barrier and into the back of Rocinante, a little Twilight Zone-like fantasy unspooled in my head. Steinbeck, with a few days of gray stubble lining his face and seated at his typewriter, motioned for me to come in and as I stepped forward the plexiglass behind which Rocinante sat melted away. Charley, lying at Steinbeck’s feet, lifted his head momentarily, looked at me, gave his signature “Ftt,” and lay his head back down and closed his eyes. I took a seat across from Steinbeck as he poured two cups of inky black coffee and we talked, about writing, about life, and about his journey nearly sixty years ago that had inspired my own. Then, a security guard, one still of my imagination, knocked on the glass and told me I couldn’t sit in there. I looked across the table and Steinbeck was gone, and then to the floor, and Charley was gone, too. It all lasted just a few seconds, but they were sweet.
I met Andy and the dogs outside about an hour later and we walked over to the house where Steinbeck grew up, a neat Victorian that features in East of Eden.
On our way back to Mountain View we stopped at the Mission San Juan Bautista to eat some sandwiches we’d bought in Salinas. The mission sits just yards away from the San Andreas Fault, the fault that promises to someday deliver “the big one,” a massive earthquake, to central California. I defy anyone to stand on that spot and not think about whether this might be the moment when the two tectonic plates slowly grinding against one another in opposite directions for decades suddenly give way to a brutal reorganization of the landscape.
It was dry and hot, and Albie and Ollie enjoyed lying on the cool stones under the long, arched portico that runs the perimeter of the mission. As beautiful as the golden hills of California are, they are golden in summer because the grasses that cover them are scorched and I found myself missing the lush green blanket of New England in spring and summer. New England suddenly seemed so very far away and so long ago. Traveling as we were—in no particular hurry to be anywhere on any particular day—was still playing tricks on my mind when it came to my sense of time.
The morning after our first night on the road, we paid a brief visit to a woman named Jody Proct and her three-legged rescued Lab, Magnolia, in Norwalk, Connecticut. I’d met Jody at a book talk I’d given months before and she saw one of my first Instagram posts about my trip with Albie and knew we were in her neighborhood. It was just four weeks ago that we’d seen Jody and Magnolia, but it may as well have been two years ago. It felt like I hadn’t seen Judy, Salina, and Jamba in ages either. In the scheme of a lifetime, in my case sixty-four years, four weeks is a mere blip, yet it seemed we’d been on the road for eternity. Even stops we’d made less than two weeks earlier along old Route 66 in Arizona seemed as distant as memories of childhood. It’s been said that dogs don’t have a sense of time, that whether you go out for four minutes, four hours, or four days, they can’t distinguish. I’m not convinced this is true, largely because when we’ve been away for a few days and the dogs have been in the care of a dog sitter it takes an unusually long time for them to settle down when we come home. But I had no idea how Albie was processing the passage of time on our trip, if he was processing it at all.
And, so, after five days in the company of friends and family in the Bay Area and in Sacramento, people I’d known for decades, the trip home began.¶ We were four weeks into a six-week trip, and just past the halfway point mileage-wise.# The road home promised to be a very long one.
We spent the first night after leaving Mountain View in Redding. On Mother’s Day morning, before heading up into eastern Oregon, Albie and I drove from our motel near the highway into downtown Redding, which, in a few weeks, would be ravaged by the massive Carr Fire, one of several enormous forest fires that tormented California in the summer of 2018. Since it was early on a Sunday morning the streets were deadly quiet.
In front of the old city hall building, now a community arts center, we met a woman organizing her belongings. She called to mind the woman of the streets in Mary Poppins selling bird feed to passersby for “tuppence a bag.” She wore a floppy gray hat, several layers of shirts, a baggy turquoise parka, and a long skirt.
Her name was Jean and she’d arrived in Redding the night before by train from Los Angeles. She slept on a bench at Shasta College a few blocks away until she was rousted by a security guard who told her to move on. Jean was very articulate, laughed easily, and was enchanted by Albie.
As well-spoken as she was, much of what she told me didn’t quite make sense. She’d come to Redding because she was convinced there were people here who could help her, people affiliated with an anti-immigrant organization in Redding she’d read about in the newspaper in L.A. Why she thought this was completely unclear, but she added that she didn’t want to insult me in case I was a Communist or a socialist. She told me she’d grown up in Queens, New York (her accent betrayed her New York roots), and when I told her I had grown up in New Jersey she said, “So you understand, we’re all some shade of liberal.” She said she had some sinus-related ailment caused by people pointing their iPhones and iPads at her. She was quite coherent, if a bit off and given to conspiratorial thoughts.
Jean, in her late sixties, has no family and never had children. When she asked, I told her I was married and had two grown boys. With no trace of shame, which I admired, she spoke of some of the most intimate details of life on the streets.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “but living on the streets, where do you take care of your basic hygiene?”
“Most of the coffee shops keep their bathrooms locked now,” she told me, precisely to keep the homeless from using them. “I’m not an animal. If I have to defecate I shield myself and pick it up with a bag and dispose of it.” She pointed to Albie. “That’s how we do it for dogs,” she said.
But the comparison itself was heartbreaking. How does one maintain any sense of dignity having to use the streets as a toilet?
When I asked where she would go next, she wasn’t sure, but figured it would be back to L.A. “I have stuff in s
torage there,” she told me, “and a post office box where my social security check is delivered.”
“Do you need some money?” I asked, though it was obvious that anyone in Jean’s circumstances could use some money.
“I’m not a panhandler,” she replied, “and I don’t want to get inside your wallet. I don’t want you to think that’s what this is about. I don’t drink or take drugs.”
“Well,” I answered, “you didn’t ask. I offered.” With that she accepted a five-dollar bill.
As we started to say our goodbyes, I told her even though she didn’t have kids I hoped she would have a happy Mother’s Day.
“And a happy Father’s Day in June to you!” she replied.
There was a Starbucks a couple of blocks away and as Albie and I walked up there we saw another homeless woman pushing her belongings in a shopping cart. Her face was deeply weathered and lined and brown as a hazelnut from the sun. She looked far worse for wear than Jean. There are so many people like this roaming the streets for so many reasons—mental illness, addiction, poverty—hollowed out souls who lurk in the shadows and live on the margins. Most of the time we look away because it makes us uncomfortable; many among us wish the powers that be would simply make the problem disappear, just as the security guard at Shasta College made Jean disappear from the campus that morning. Albie, of course, cannot make judgments about people’s circumstances, which may be why meeting a dog that cannot and will not discriminate against you based on your circumstances, your race, or your religion, must be refreshing for a woman such as Jean and perhaps a lesson for us all. We underestimate the resourcefulness it takes to survive on the streets and the humiliations that must be endured daily, and for that reason alone Jean had my esteem.
When we got back in the car, I circled back to the spot where we had met Jean intending to wish her one more farewell, but she was already gone, vanished as quickly as she had appeared, however briefly, in our lives—vanished back into the margins and the shadows.
California’s lightly traveled northeast corner, its quiet corner, was a welcome departure from the frenzy of the Bay Area. We drove up and over pine-forested mountains and across expansive green valleys that offered breathtaking views of Mount Shasta dressed in snow practically to its base; through tiny towns such as Adin, Canby, and Davis Creek, many with populations under one hundred.
As the road turned north at Alturas the land gradually became less vertical and more horizontal, the dense forests yielding to a paler, sparser landscape, bluer and grayer than the rich green of the forests. We were still about 5,000 feet above sea level, as we had been through some of the mountain passes, but it was flatter, a sign that we were approaching the high desert country of eastern Oregon.
Just south of the Oregon border the road hewed to the eastern side of a wide valley and to the left was a massive, grayish flat, miles across and many miles long. Try as I might I couldn’t figure out what we were looking at. It wasn’t cultivated land and it didn’t look like water. Puzzled, I pulled over, took out the road atlas and discovered we were looking at Goose Lake, but it appeared to have no defined edges. Where the lake ended and the land began was impossible to tell; the lake blended seamlessly into fields with grazing horses and cattle. Goose Lake is thirty miles from north to south. The northern end is in Oregon and it doesn’t seem to end so much as it appears to simply, imperceptibly peter out. It was otherworldly and unlike anything I’d ever seen.
Later that night, when we’d arrived in tiny Burns, Oregon, I did a little research. Goose Lake is a “closed basin” meaning it retains water but has no outflow to other water bodies. It’s heavily alkaline, thus its grayish appearance. Nine times since 1851 the lake has completely dried up, which is why NASA designates it as an “ephemeral” lake. Ominously, four of those nine times have been within the last decade: in 2009, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Can anyone say climate change?
Over the previous four weeks, Albie and I had driven across some barren landscapes, places where human settlements were separated by tens of miles. But nowhere we’d been, or would go, rivals eastern Oregon for sheer, unnerving isolation. One no longer needed to imagine what the land looked like hundreds or even thousands of years ago. You only needed to look out the car window.
* Davening is part of the prayer ritual of orthodox Jews who, while praying, repeatedly rock back and forth from the waist up, their heads bobbing up and down, as if to take a sip of water from a water fountain.
† It reopened in mid-July, a couple of months after our trip.
‡ In 1985, about six months after I started working there, IPPNW won the Nobel Peace Prize. I wish I could say there was a cause and effect relationship between the two, but clearly there was not.
§ The third would be William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.
¶ In addition to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law and my friend Bill Monning, we spent time with my nephew Nicky and Sam, a close friend of my son Dan’s since kindergarten, then living and working in the Bay Area.
# Somewhere between Tehachapi and Mariposa we passed the halfway mark of our eventual 9,187 miles.
PART THREE
. . . and Back Again
FOURTEEN
North Up to Oregon*
About a half hour after we crossed the Oregon border, near Valley View, the landscape changed dramatically. We were driving on a tree-lined, two-lane road, came around a bend, and suddenly found ourselves staring at the leading edge of a formidable mesa that stretched for miles. The trees yielded immediately to sagebrush, announcing our arrival in the high desert. It was among the most abrupt transitions in the landscape we’d seen or would see.
At a fork in the road, we turned in the direction of our destination for the evening, Burns, and a sign proclaimed: “Last Gas for 90 Miles.” Even the Mojave was more touched by the hand of man. Indeed, the traffic on I-40 across the Mojave seemed like the morning commute into Manhattan compared to the desolation of the next ninety miles—we could have counted the number of cars and trucks we saw on two hands. All around was a sea of sagebrush until the road hugged the shore of another alkaline lake on the other side of which were great expanses of flat rock. It would not surprise me to learn that this is where they shot the scene where Charlton Heston’s spacecraft crashed in the original Planet of the Apes. For ninety miles the only man-made structures were the occasional fence to confine livestock, a few corrugated tin storage sheds, a state highway maintenance garage, and a small café at Wagontire which, from what I could tell, was the town of Wagontire.
If you’re a political junkie, as I am, you are probably well familiar with electoral maps that show America, county by county, to be a mostly red country with small pockets of blue, and looking at that map you would, depending on your political persuasion, be vastly reassured or ready to go into hiding. But Harney County, Oregon, where we now were, offers some perspective.
Harney County is deep, deep red America. It’s home to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the federal property occupied in early 2016 by a small band of armed anti-government extremists led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy, sons of the infamous Nevada rancher and Sean Hannity hero, Cliven Bundy. As the standoff continued, the tiny town of Burns, the nearest town to the refuge, was itself besieged by national media who had come to cover the story. During the siege, which lasted six weeks, one of the occupiers was shot and killed by authorities as he reached for a weapon. Though some of those eventually arrested pled guilty to federal charges, the Bundy brothers, who led the armed occupation, ostensibly to protest federal ownership of public lands, were acquitted on all charges in what ought to be exhibit A in the case establishing white privilege in America. Imagine a group of armed black men taking over a federal building and occupying it in defiance of federal and state authorities for six weeks. How would that have ended?
In any event, Harney County comprises more than ten thousand square miles of land, larger than all of Massachusetts. Roughly seven million people live in
deep blue Massachusetts. A little more than seven thousand people live in Harney County, and sixty percent of them live in the five square miles that comprise the adjacent towns of Burns and Hines. On an electoral map, Harney County is red and Massachusetts, of comparable size, is blue, but Massachusetts has eight hundred seventy-five times the number of people, which explains why so much of the country, the places where few people live in vast empty spaces, is colored red. To put an even finer point on it, there is less than one person per square mile in Harney County. Manhattan is 73,000 times more densely populated but on an electoral map Manhattan’s twenty-three square miles are just a tiny speck of blue while Harney County’s 10,228 square miles is a solid chunk of red. But as Ammon Bundy and his merry band of heavily armed right-wing extremists proved, some people in Harney County can be just as dense as those in Manhattan.
We arrived in tiny Burns, Oregon, a little after 4:00 P.M. The main drag was what you’d expect, a McDonald’s (our only dinner option for that night), a few discount stores, some boarded-up storefronts, a small strip mall, and almost no activity. It was, after all, Mother’s Day Sunday. Old trailers, rusted lawn mowers, and broken-down pickups littered the lawns of the small single-story houses, many surrounded by chain-link fences.
As Albie and I walked the streets behind the seedy motel where we were staying the night, I thought of something JoAnn Clevenger, the New Orleans restaurateur, told me a few weeks before about people from all walks of life rubbing elbows in the Big Easy: that familiarity, far from breeding contempt, fosters understanding. When you live in a tiny town like Burns, profoundly isolated, 92 percent white and 4.7 percent Latino, who is there to challenge your prejudices and offer you another perspective? It’s no coincidence that red America is overwhelmingly rural, sparsely populated America.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 20
