Since no affordable motels are allowed within 20 miles of Sag Harbor, he and Ace slept the previous night in one of the Hamptons behind a business called Sleepies. John’s bed was the front seat of his red Jeep Liberty. Ace, 6, was so handsome, well mannered and friendly he made me wish I had a dog along too – for about four seconds. Though he provided John with security, somebody to talk to and unconditional love, Ace also ate like a 130-pound dog, had health and hygiene issues and consumed most of the interior of John's Jeep. Finding Ace-friendly motels was a daily issue on the road for John. Motel 6 was his fallback. It was a rare dog-friendly chain and his $40-a-night budget limit ruled out just about everything else.
John and Ace had also made a dawn pilgrimage to Steinbeck's summerhouse and found no one there. It was a tossup as to who was the most entrepreneurial ex-newspaperman: He was pretty much living with a pit bull so he could write another book and I was trying to faithfully retrace Steinbeck’s trip like I was a Carl Bernstein or John Woestendiek. We rehashed the suicide of the American newspaper industry and I told him – off the record – some of what I had discovered about Steinbeck’s actual road trip. When we reached New London, we parted in the hull of the Susan Anne with a handshake and a pat on the head. We both knew it made no sense to form a tag-team. Trips like ours had to be one-human affairs or they didn’t work. Anyway, I’d be moving much faster without a massive you-know-what to care for.
We hoped our paths might cross again either in Maine or Montana. But for the next two months, as John ate my dust and fell two or three states behind, it never happened. We emailed and shared inside-Steinbeck jokes as we followed Steinbeck’s trail in our own nutty ways. We even slept in the same motel bed in Beach, North Dakota – two weeks apart. But I never met John or Ace again, on land or sea.
Empty, Pretty and Rich
I used my GPS to escape New London and get to U.S. Highway 5. That’s the path Steinbeck took to Deerfield, Massachusetts, home of the Eaglebrook School, which his son John IV was attending in 1960.
As I was working my way out of New London on state Route 85, aka the Hartford-New London Turnpike, I passed a common sight in America that Steinbeck would have found both mysterious and depressing – a string of auto dealerships bearing names like Hyundai, Mazda and Subaru. Those Asian car dealerships were struggling with lower sales, along with the rest of the American car industry, but they were in no mortal danger from the Great Recession. Less than three miles away it was a different, crueler economic story. After four decades of doing business, Falvey’s Chrysler was dead and closed. It had become one of 800 dealerships in the country to be dropped by Chrysler as part of its 2009 bankruptcy settlement.
Steinbeck would be shocked to learn how 50 years of foreign competition, poor management, greedy unions and second-rate cars teamed up to destroy the American auto industry. On the day he and Charley drove through New London in his new green 1960 GMC pickup, GM, Ford and Chrysler controlled more than 95 percent of new car sales in the USA. GM alone sold half. By 2010, the Big Three’s market share had sunk to around 20 percent. Ford was hurt but alive and not taking corporate welfare. But hundreds of thousands of shareholders and workers had paid a heavy price for GM and Chrysler’s failure to compete and change in a global marketplace. So had American taxpayers.
The Asian car lots of New London gave way quickly to undeveloped countryside and green woods of oak and pine. Some of the trees were too young to have been alive in 1960, when the land was probably still being farmed, but Steinbeck would have seen the same token bits of civilization I saw. The roadside along state routes 85 and 2 was loosely strung with old white houses, white barns, white roadhouse restaurants, weathered fruit stands and highway picnic areas that looked unchanged in 100 years. Somewhere in the sticks of Connecticut, Steinbeck said he stopped to lay in a stock of liquor at what he called “a little bottle store” but what Connecticut folk then and now call “package stores.”
In “Charley” he says he ordered a frat party’s worth of “bourbon, scotch, gin, vermouth, vodka, a medium good brandy, aged applejack, and a case of beer.” One reason Steinbeck chose a camper shell was so he’d be able to invite people he met into his “home” for a drink. His defenders insist he wasn’t an alcoholic, but on his trip sharing a shot of booze with someone was always on the guy’s mind.
U.S. Route 5 pierces ancient towns like Enfield, Connecticut, before climbing into the underbelly of Massachusetts and becoming the main street of lively college towns like Springfield, Holyoke and Northampton. I don’t know what Steinbeck would have thought of a Hooters, or if he would have wondered why there were so many Latinos riding bicycles in Springfield. But he’d have been impressed by Northampton’s beautiful historic buildings and thriving downtown retail scene.
On a Thursday night at 8 a diverse and thick mob of well-heeled college kids, professional counter-culture types and liberal political activists flowed along Northampton’s sidewalks. After so much unpopulated countryside, it was weird to suddenly come upon that bustling street scene. I wouldn’t see that many young people and backpacks crammed into one place again until Missoula, Montana.
The vitality of Northampton was testimony to the economic power of art, music, culture, tourism and the concentration of many millions of private and public dollars from the U. Mass-Smith-Amherst-Hampshire-Mt. Holyoke educational complex. They had combined to lift the region out of the decline it suffered when its manufacturing base rusted away in the 1970s. Leaving Northampton, I thought I could hear former Mayor Calvin Coolidge, my favorite do-nothing president of the 20th century, spinning in his local grave.
Mostly, U.S. Highway 5 was green, undeveloped and timeless. The drive from New London to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where I got a room for the night at a Day’s Inn, reminded me yet again just how empty America is. I hadn’t even seen North Dakota and Montana yet. But the view from the “Purple Heart Memorial Highway” made Connecticut look as un-peopled and forested as central Pennsylvania or anywhere in West Virginia.
When there were homes posted along the road – and there were hundreds – they were usually large, white, pre-Teddy Roosevelt House & Garden beauties with wide porches on big, perfectly landscaped lots. Steinbeck was a wealthy man and may not have been as impressed as I was by that gauntlet of mature American affluence. But as he drove up U.S. Route 5 to Deerfield in 1960 he would have gone by 99 percent of the same McMansions of yesteryear I did.
Steinbeck Timeline
Friday, Sept. 23 to Sept. 24, 1960 – Deerfield, Mass.
Steinbeck camps out Friday and Saturday nights in Rocinante in an apple orchard on a dairy farm on top of the mountain above his 14-year-old son John IV’s exclusive boarding school, Eaglebrook. In “Charley” Steinbeck says almost nothing about his visit, but from a letter to his wife Elaine it’s clear he stayed at the school until Sunday afternoon.
Ghost Farm
There can’t be a more beautiful middle school in America than Eaglebrook. Its campus hangs on the side of an ancient round mountain overlooking the absurdly historic village of Deerfield on U.S. Highway 5, not 25 miles shy of Vermont. It's not your run-of-the-mill school for kids in grades 6 through 9. It's private, exclusive and all-boy. It’s so pricy if you have to ask what a year's tuition and room and board cost, you're not rich enough to send your heir there.
Eaglebrook School was Steinbeck’s first overnight stop. His youngest son John IV, who became a respected journalist in Vietnam and died from complications of back surgery in 1991, went to school there. So did many of the sons of corporate bigwigs at IBM and TWA and Michael Douglas, actor Kirk’s son. Things have changed a great deal since 1960, Eaglebrook’s former headmaster O. Stuart Chase told me when I met him in his office on campus.
Steinbeck would have found preppies outfitted in identical Navy blazers and thick-striped red and blue school ties. They also had a Sunday tie they wore when they walked to church in Deerfield village every Sunday morning. Today's 256 students, drawn from around
the world, don't dress so formally. But Chase said they still aren't allowed to ruin the pre-prep-school milieu with blue jeans, torn pants or un-collared shirts.
Deerfield is about 160 road miles from Sag Harbor and Steinbeck arrived there Friday evening, Sept. 23, 1960. It was too late to see his son, he writes in "Travels With Charley," so he drove to the top of the mountain and "found a dairy, bought some milk, and asked permission to camp under an apple tree." Steinbeck writes that he preferred “to draw a curtain over my visit to Eaglebrook school” – the first of several places he stopped on his trip that he chose not to write about. But his first road-letter to his wife goes into detail about the visit, which included a school bonfire and a church service and lasted until Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Chase, whose father preceded him as Eaglebrook headmaster and whose son in turn succeeded him, gave me directions to the dairy farm. Climbing Pine Nook Road above Eaglebrook through the dense woods, I found the orchard right where Chase said it would be. He had called it a "skeleton" of an orchard and that's what it was. I parked under what could have been the same large apple tree Steinbeck said he camped under. Strangled by wild rose bushes and vines, the trees were gnarly and heavy with red apples – apples that were no longer being sprayed, harvested and sold but allowed to fall into the weeds, where they provided a feast for the local fly and bee population. The rotting fruit made the whole orchard smell like apple juice.
Unlike Steinbeck, I found no dairyman with a Ph.D. in mathematics to shoot the breeze with. Humans had lost control of what had been a thriving dairy farm. The fields were uncut and the barns and silos were neglected and draped with wild grape vines, but the handsome big white farmhouse appeared to be in excellent shape. It was as if one afternoon someone just locked the front door and drove away to Boston, content to let Mother Nature slowly reclaim another 100-acre piece of her stolen property.
I left Deerfield in the late afternoon, pushing north on U.S. Highway 5 toward the Vermont line. At some point on the way I scribbled in the Professional Reporter’s Notebook resting on my knee:
Man. He must have been nuts to do this trip. I’m not that nuts because I’m following him. He was nuts first. The colors are just coming…. It’s pure country. Very few homes and they are smaller. Old barns, old farmhouses, few new or modern homes. No development …. It must have been daunting to think he had 11 weeks and 10,000 miles ahead of him, yet instead of heading west he was driving north and east to Maine. Most of the places that exist now probably existed in 1960. Christ Church in Guilford, Vermont, for instance. A large white wooden church by itself with old cemetery attached. Its steeple looks like someone very big and important in the sky snapped or bit it off… Almost to Brattleboro. Welcome commerce. An outlet center – Bass shoes, Van Heusen… A Walgreen’s. All the sudden a total traffic jam in Brattleboro. Six gas stations to choose from … or a urologist. Lots of people on the sidewalks. Another great preserved little town that looks like it didn’t get bulldozed by 1960s urban planning experts….
Except for the different names of the states and towns, I could have written that same note to myself at any time during my week in New England. Five decades had passed along the Steinbeck Highway, yet little had changed.
Steinbeck Timeline
Sunday, Sept. 25, 1960 – White Mountains
Steinbeck says in “Travels With Charley” that he left his son’s school in Deerfield and drove north into Vermont, then east into the rugged White Mountains near Lancaster, New Hampshire. He describes camping on a farm that night and talking with the landowner about Nikita Khrushchev reportedly pounding his shoe on his desk that day at the United Nations. Khrushchev’s tantrum at the U.N. actually happened nearly two weeks later. In 2010, a local writer searched hard for Steinbeck’s farm and Yankee farmer near Lancaster and concluded both never existed.
Sleeping by the River
For almost two hours the Connecticut River, the black White Mountains of New Hampshire and a fat rising moon were on my right as I drove north along the ragged edge of Vermont toward St. Johnsbury. The GPS Person kept insisting I leave the valley and climb the ridge to Interstate 91, which parallels U.S. Route 5 to the west but didn’t exist in Steinbeck’s day. I stuck religiously to the two-lane piece of the Steinbeck Highway with its small river valley towns and rural spaces. I stopped at a busy mom & pop motel somewhere but declined the opportunity to spend $70 for a tiny box with one locked window.
It’s always easier to stay awake on dangerous back roads, because they demand your constant attention or you’ll hit something and die. But by 10 o’clock I was too tired to go on. On a dark curve on U.S. 5 I pulled into a shallow turnout lit only by the moon. After backing up so the trees would block my taillights, I locked myself in, climbed in back, hung my "blackout curtains" and crawled under the blankets. Once the spooks were put to rest and I got used to the whoosh of an occasional car, I slept straight through till dawn.
In the foggy morning light, I discovered I had slept barely 15 feet from the steep wooded bank of the wide Connecticut River, which was as flat and silent as a lake. If I had been the mythical John Steinbeck, I would have gotten out my fishing pole, caught my breakfast and cooked it over a fire. Instead I took a piss in the river and drove 23 miles north to St. Johnsbury, where I was hoping to stop at one of the dozens of hip Internet cafes I imagined would be open at 7 on a Saturday morning. Things weren’t quite poppin’ yet in "St. Jay's" brick downtown, so I stuck to Steinbeck’s trail and turned east on U.S. Highway 2.
It quickly became a fast smooth ride in the country. With fall foliage at its peak, it was “Leaf Peeper” season, when motel room prices spike and locals complain about strangers from other states cluttering their underutilized highways. But the road was virtually empty. At one point I was doing 65 and being pushed from behind by a guy in a pickup pulling a racing car on a trailer. Otherwise, for about 20 miles almost nothing but gorgeous scenery existed beyond my windows and mirrors. A few snowmobiles and pickup trucks were seductively parked nose-first by the side of the road, hung with "For Sale" signs. But mostly I traveled alone through yellow and orange and red and green hills and woods broken by an occasional "Moose" warning sign.
Near the New Hampshire border was the first evidence that the upcoming off-year elections were important to some politically disturbed folks in the Obama-blue state of Vermont. The front yard of a small farm had a little roadside display of pumpkins for sale – just like half the places clinging to U.S. 5 and U.S. 2. It also had a dozen political signs for state and local candidates carefully staked along the curve. I would pass a thousand official red-white-and-blue political signs for both parties from Maine to Oregon to Los Banos, California. But this partisan’s placards came with a special hand-lettered message that made his sympathies Tea Party-clear: “Take Back America Vote the Liberals Out.”
Town of White Churches
Steinbeck passed through the handsome Connecticut River town of Lancaster, New Hampshire, twice. Once when he was on his way east to the top of Maine and again five days later, when he was bound for Chicago. He made no mention of the town's surfeit of white churches. But I could see five steeples from the front door of the venerable Lancaster Motor Inn, where I squatted in their lobby and borrowed their Wi-Fi after a fine $8 breakfast of steak and eggs.
A local man estimated 13 or 14 churches were doing their best to save Lancaster’s 3,200 sinners. Lancaster’s main drag – U.S. Highway 2 – was almost as busy as it must be on an Easter Sunday morning. A farmers market was setting up on the lawn next to the old brick courthouse. Among the sellers of maple syrup, organic vegetables and gluten-free breadstuff was photographer Gerry Gallick. He was putting his color photos and nature calendars on display in his booth.
Gallick, 52, was living in the state with the highest median income in the country, but he was a poster-victim for the national economic downturn. He had plenty of qualifications and experience. He was an ex-civil engineer, ex-cop, ex-truck driver, a music
ian, a poet. Now he was trying to support himself with photography, what used to be his hobby. He had lost his engineering gig in January of 2010 and could talk your ear off about all the jobs he had looked for since but didn't get.
The father of four, he said he’d been rejected often because he was too old or over-qualified. Now he was scraping up $50 or $100 a week selling large color photos of the magnificent natural resources he said God made for everyone to enjoy – the surrounding mountains, woods and fauna.
Gallick wasn’t bitter about his own fate, which he didn’t blame on anyone or any party. “Everyone is suffering,” he said. The top third of New Hampshire had less than 5 percent of the state's population and its tourist-and-ski economy couldn’t overcome the long-term decline in the logging and paper industries. The state’s unemployment rate was low at 5.8 percent, but Gallick said permanent jobs with benefits were scarce for 100 miles.
Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley' Page 6