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

  *****

  In the failing light, the land west of Rouses Point on U.S. 11 looked more like Iowa than New York. By the time I made Churubusco, it was pitch black in every direction. I was getting pretty hungry but I wasn’t seduced by the garish light show pointing to the Pizza Barn. Minutes later my willpower was rewarded by a roadside apparition named Filion's Diner.

  Half of Clinton County must have stormed in and out of there for the Friday night specials – fish and chips ($5.75) and the hot pork sandwich ($5.95). A dozen unoccupied tables groaned under the inedible debris the diners left behind. At the counter, Nikole Patnode, 20, became my guide to her local universe, a universe she intends to stay in and raise her kids in, just like her parents did.

  Nikole was in college, taking human services. Her high school graduating class numbered about 60 and half of them were leaving her land of dairy farms close to the Canadian border. She liked where she was because life was quiet and without the hassles of big cities. She said she knew all about the hassles of big cities because she had seen both New York and Washington, D.C., on high school field trips. After consulting with Nikole, I chose the pork dinner – real pork roast, real mashed potatoes and fresh green beans. Everything, including the pies, was homemade, basic and good. The meat was so tender and juicy, my Filion’s meal instantly shot to Number 2 on my best-meal-of-the-trip list.

  The spinach and chicken salad at the Pelletier family's restaurant/bar in Millinocket, Maine, still held the top spot even though Scott Simon had ridiculed it. When he interviewed me, which seemed like a week earlier but had only been the day before, he asked what my best road meal was so far. I was stumped. I hadn’t been chasing 5-star restaurants, I'd been chasing Steinbeck’s ghost and eating pretzels and power bars for lunch.

  Simon laughed in disbelief when I told him a simple spinach salad in Maine was my top meal. I couldn't remember how to pronounce Millinocket, so I knew my garbled and stumbling answer was never going to make it onto NPR’s airwaves. But I wished I had said something cogent like, “Scott, it’s all relative. When you're in the empty gut of Maine and you’re desperate to eat something that doesn't have a wrapper on it or begins with ‘Mc-,’ a good spinach salad made by a family of TV lumberjacks is tough to beat.” It was even better than finding a homemade pork dinner in the dark of upstate Upstate New York.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Sunday, Oct. 2, 1960 – Upstate New York to Chicago

  Steinbeck says that on his last day in New England he attended Sunday services at a white wooden “John Knox” church in Vermont. He can’t remember the name of the town or church and gives no useful clues. It’s highly improbable Steinbeck was still in Vermont on Sunday morning Oct. 2. More likely, he woke up in a trailer court in Upstate New York. Whether his mystery church was actually in New York or existed at all, only Steinbeck knows. Between the trailer park in Upstate New York and his arrival in Chicago about three days later, the only clues to Steinbeck’s travels are in “Charley.” He went south on U.S. Highway 11 to state Route 104, where he turned west, went through Rochester and shadowed the southern shore of Lake Ontario to Niagara Falls.

  Midnight Suntans

  I slept alone in Potsdam, New York. No other travelers or truckers shared the bright asphalt with me at Wal-Mart’s Sunspot Inn. Up with the hunters on Saturday, I was flying down the road in the crisp pre-dawn. The flat land on both sides of U.S. Highway 11 was lined with prosperous dairy farms offering pumpkins and tomatoes for sale on the honor system. Occasionally I passed a collapsing barn or overgrown dead motel. The main streets of the slow-down-to-30-mph villages – Canton, Gouverneur, Philadelphia – were sleepy, unmemorable but healthy, despite the presence of nearby Wal-Marts.

  U.S. 11 also cuts through the classic American town of Watertown. Like many New England towns I had seen, it was an important manufacturing center until the cruel deindustrialization of the mid-20th century. Birthplace of the safety pin and the Dulles Brothers of Cold War fame, it still has 27,000 people and a city park designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. I didn’t see the park. But an alternate branch of U.S. 11 led me through the kind of old-fashioned neighborhood they don't make anymore. Broad streets, sidewalks, handsome old brick and wood houses, mature oak trees. When Steinbeck plied those quiet, friendly streets, the neighborhood was already old.

  Somewhere along Route 11, I stopped to listen to my interview with Scott Simon on “Morning Edition Saturday.” Our 15-minute chat had been artfully boiled down to 3 minutes, which was a minute longer than I thought I’d get. It sounded NPR-good. I seemed rational and appeared to know what I was talking about. They had edited out all my “ums” and “ahs.” I was pleased – how could I not be? A million NPR listeners would hear about my adventure and become future buyers of my book.

  But then I listened to the segment again on the recording I had made with my smart phone. Nowhere were the words “Pittsburgh,” “Pittsburgh Post-Gazette” or “TravelsWithoutCharley2010.com.” My hard-earned NPR publicity coup was largely wasted. I was just “a former newspaperman” from nowhere. The whole point of getting myself on NPR’s airwaves was to drive its listeners to my road blog. When I whined in an email to producer Peter Breslow, he said the missing information was my fault. It had been up to me to tell him beforehand I wanted to plug my website, he said, or I should have mentioned the site during my interview with Simon.

  I knew that was bullshit. Breslow was aware of my Post-Gazette blog. I had urged him to read it for background, though I had the feeling he didn’t. NPR should have mentioned my blog at the end of the interview with me – not for my sake but so its listeners would be able to follow my journey if they wanted to. It was Radio 101 and NPR failed me.

  But NPR’s sloppiness/laziness didn’t stop there. When it posted the transcript and audio on its web site NPR.org, there was no link to my Post-Gazette blog. I asked Breslow in an email to have NPR’s web wizards add a link, which they did. When I finally got around to checking the link, a week after my road trip was over, I found it was broken. It was a link to nowhere. It’s not that NPR’s listeners actually would have scrambled en masse to my web site, but if anyone tried they were rewarded with incompetence.

  For the rest of Saturday I glumly rode the sunny Steinbeck Highway through northern New York. Turning west onto state Route 104 at Mexico, I passed by Oswego and almost touched Lake Ontario before taking a spin down the central business district of what's left of poor Rochester. In 1960 it was a wealthy industrial powerhouse and the home of Eastman Kodak. Now it was a victim of globalization and the digital camera. Like the previous 1,700 miles, the 90 miles of countryside under Lake Ontario from Rochester to Niagara Falls had changed little over the last 50 years – or last 100.

  Route 104 was rural, barely populated, shabby in spots but generally prosperous. The few eyesores only added to its character. Bait shops, antique stores, auto repair, welding services…. It was a super-thin strip mall/flea market – a long supermarket aisle for anyone who wanted to buy a pumpkin, a snowplow or an 1800-something farmhouse made of pink cobblestone, the road’s locally “grown” building material.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Sunday, Oct. 2, 1960 – Niagara Falls

  Steinbeck writes says in the book that he planned to cross into Canada at Niagara Falls and cut across southern Ontario to Detroit. But a Canadian border guard warns him U.S. officials might not allow him back in at Detroit because Charley didn’t have the proper inoculations. Steinbeck says he changed his mind and decided to go to Chicago by way of Erie and Toledo. First, he says, he checked into “the grandest auto court" he could find in Buffalo.

  Your Papers, Please

  Route 104 led Steinbeck and me to Niagara Falls, where he planned to save time by crossing into Canada at the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge and angling across southern Ontario from Hamilton to Detroit. Steinbeck was a world traveler and, though he didn’t need it in those innocent days, he says in “Travels With Charley” that he
had his passport with him.

  However, as he describes, he didn't have written proof from a veterinarian that Charley had his rabies shots. Canadian customs officers were OK with Charley's lack of paperwork and were happy to let him into their country. But they warned Steinbeck that when he tried to reenter the U.S. at Detroit, American customs would make him first get fresh shots for Charley.

  Steinbeck opted to skip his stretch in Canada and take the Buffalo-Erie-Toledo route to Chicago. When he returned to the U.S. end of Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, however, he says he was greeted by U.S. customs like he’d been out of the country 10 years, not 10 minutes. The border scene in "Charley" – whether true or, more likely, an embellished composite drawn from Steinbeck's many experiences at international border crossings – is an entertaining and accurate snapshot of the U.S.-Canada border reality then and now.

  Because my family has vacationed in southern Ontario for 63 years, I've crossed back and forth into Canada a hundred times on the Peace Bridge at Buffalo. I once faced the same annoying choice Steinbeck did and had to take our family dog to a vet before we entered Canada. As he also showed, Canadian border cops were more welcoming and less officious than their hard-guy American counterparts. Canadian guards have always been more human and still were in 2010. They don’t manage to make you feel like you’re a smuggler, a terrorist or a welfare tourist who's sneaking into their country.

  Steinbeck milked the border scene for all its irony and humor. It also gave the New Deal Democrat a chance to impersonate a libertarian for a few paragraphs – to arouse what he called his "natural anarchism." His annoyance at what happened at the border is more of a complaint about government bureaucracy and "the fine-print men" who enforce the rules than a resounding defense of the natural rights of man or a cry for limited government. But his experience caused him to write libertarian applause lines like "this is why I hate governments, all governments" and "I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments."

  My border crossing at Niagara Falls on a quiet Saturday evening was not nearly as exciting or humorous as Steinbeck's version of his. I had to use the Rainbow Bridge because these days the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge is reserved for people who commute to jobs on both sides of the border. Thanks to the hysteria of 9/11, passports are required to cross the U.S.-Canadian border. But I had no trouble talking my way into Canada without one. I told the Canadian border guard I didn’t have it and explained what I was doing and why. I suspect she let me in out of pity. Or perhaps she sensed I was half-Canadian, since my mother was born there in 1917.

  The border guard also cheerfully gave me directions to the Canadian end of Whirlpool Rapids Bridge. There a second equally charming Canadian border guard told me that if Steinbeck showed up with an un-vaccinated Charley in 2010 he would be confronted with the same dilemma. Dogless, I was immune to this requirement. After working my way through drizzly Niagara Falls I slept cheaply and well that night at my family’s cottage on the shore of Lake Erie in Port Colborne, Ontario. I had wrung up about 2,000 miles since Sag Harbor. My trip was nearly one-fifth complete. The next day’s job was to break into my own country without a passport.

  Home Free

  On Sunday morning, hundreds of feet above the broad and deceivingly friendly Niagara River, the long line of traffic crept across the Peace Bridge until I had my one-on-one with an American border guard. "This is all I've got," I said, handing my fellow countryman my Pennsylvania driver's license. I expected to find myself hustled into a cold little room to explain what kind of un-American crap I was trying to pull.

  "They let you in, huh?" the cool guard said, betraying how little respect he had for his counterparts protecting Canada. He looked me up on his computer and found I wasn’t wanted for murder or felony plagiarism. Handing back my license, he said, “There you go, guy.”

  That was it. No annoying trick questions about where I had been or how much duty-free booze or smokes I was smuggling. It was one of my quickest and least irritating re-entries into my own country in years. It was not the heavy-handed response I was expecting – and secretly hoping for. I was hoping for a hint of post-9/11 totalitarianism – a search of my car, a search of at least one body cavity. I was hoping for some border excitement, like the time in 1987 at Checkpoint Charlie in East Berlin when I had to empty my pockets, take off half my clothes and watch a punk commie border guard rummage through my wallet.

  Lucky me. It was Oct. 3. Steinbeck spent five days rendezvousing with his wife in Chicago and didn’t get back on the road until Oct. 10, 1960. That meant there was time for me to kill a few days in Pittsburgh. I planned to continue matching Steinbeck’s pace across the country as closely as possible until San Francisco and Monterey, where he relaxed for three weeks.

  Because Erie was only two interstate hours north of my house, I went home for some R&R. It was only a brief pit stop. I needed to adjust some things with my car bed and get the Bluetooth hooked up in my RAV4. Otherwise I was going to wreck while trying to unlock my smart phone every time someone called me. Hands-free calling also made it easier to take notes, check maps, drink coffee, eat pretzels, shoot photos and video and talk on the phone at the same time while doing 70 on the interstate.

  Interstates may have taken the curves and joys out of driving. And I’ve laughed at Charles Kuralt’s clever but untrue quip about interstates making it so you can cross America without seeing anything or meeting anyone. It’s a quip he cribbed from Steinbeck’s line in “Travels With Charley”: “When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”

  But interstates get a bum rap, usually from people in Manhattan or DC who don’t use them every day to save time and money. Interstates are blindly accused of causing suburban sprawl by car-haters, the smart-growth crowd and Big Transit interests who want everyone to ride a government bus or a bike to work and pack themselves into cities denser than Calcutta.

  Our high-speed rivers of concrete aren’t without sin. They shouldn’t have been sent ripping through the downtowns of cities like Pittsburgh or Cincinnati or used as slum-clearance tools by local governments. They’re also supremely hideous, which is what you get in America when government civil engineers are commissioned to build big public things with concrete. But since 1956 our boring, safer interstates have easily saved a million American lives and too much time and money to count. And anyone who’s driven out West knows it’s absurd to say you can’t see anything from them.

  On his way to Chicago, Steinbeck describes using interstates for the first time on his trip, or possibly his life. Sounding like an old lady stuck in the Indianapolis 500, he was tortured by the speed and flow of the intense truck traffic on “this wide, eventless way called U.S. 90,” aka the New York Thruway, which he took from Buffalo to where it ended at Madison, Ohio.

  The thruway and the Indiana Toll Road, which he also used, were some of the earliest pieces of the Interstate Highway System, which in 1960 was 16 percent complete and barely existed outside major population centers. Steinbeck also had a practical reason for wanting to avoid interstates. His journey was “designed for observation,” he said, not self-reflection or daydreaming. He wanted to stay “as much as possible on secondary roads where there was much to see and hear and smell.”

  Steinbeck preferred two-lane highways to interstates. He said he missed being able to stop at fruit stands or local diners. He didn’t mention the small towns, traffic lights, deadly intersections, stop signs, blind turns, business districts, schools, farm tractors, stray dogs and 1,001 other hazards to life and obstacles to efficient car travel. Interstates eliminated 99 percent of them. Steinbeck didn’t realize it, but statistically he was much safer dueling with “trucks as long as freighters” on those four-lane "gashes of concrete and tar" than he had been when he was touring the two-lane roads of New England. But he understood that the quickest way to his wife’s embrace in Chicago
was via the Indiana Toll Road, which he was happy to use.

  Growing up in Pittsburgh in the late 1950s, we prayed for the interstate system to get done. Before the New York Thruway and I-79 existed, the 240-mile trip from Pittsburgh to our rented cottage in Canada 20 miles west of Buffalo could take 8 hours. How long it’d take the seven of us to get to the Peace Bridge was a crapshoot. It depended on how many trucks, farmers and pile-ups my dad encountered on clogged U.S. Route 19, which was the main street of a dozen small Pennsylvania towns between Pittsburgh and Erie, or whether we hit Buffalo just as 10,000 Bethlehem Steel workers were changing shifts.

  My non-stop cruise from the Peace Bridge to my home in Pittsburgh, entirely via interstates, took 3½ hours. I saw many things Steinbeck didn’t in 1960. I saw more woods and less open farmland. Ironically, the new growth of tall trees crowding the road often blocked any view of Lake Erie or the flat countryside of farms and vineyards. There was infinitely more development clinging to exits, where dozens of chain motels and 24/7/365 restaurants Steinbeck never heard of exist only to serve the nation of pampered travelers we’ve become.