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

  As the Saturday sun was coming up, I came upon an eye-catching photo-op. Two very aerodynamic roller-bladers in black were gliding in synch along a bike trail paralleling the highway. I passed the two women, then pulled over and ambushed them with my video camera as they pumped by me in their skin-tight suits. It was a cruel and sexist thing to do, and if I had committed it inside liberal Madison’s city limits it probably would have been a capital hate crime. But the muscled duo was all smiles. Good thing, because they probably could have beaten me up for breakfast.

  A Scary American

  Just north of Sauk City, as U.S. 12’s traffic was becoming noticeably thicker, partisan Tea Party politics reared its ugly head. It started at 8:30 when I flew past a large homemade billboard in front of a John Deere equipment rental place. In all caps it presciently screamed “OUR PRESIDENT WILL PUT US IN DEBT BEYOND OUR WILDEST NIGHTMARE.”

  I doubled back to take the billboard’s picture, but as I made my illegal U-turn at a rural intersection I was distracted by another photo-op and potential interview victim. By the road an older man in sunglasses was sitting on an ATV by a little shed with a sign that said “Campfire Wood.” He wore a camo hat, a camo shirt and rode a camo ATV. If he hadn’t been wearing those shades, I joked to myself, I might not have noticed him.

  I parked, grabbed my camera and snapped off a quick shot as I walked toward him.

  “You didn’t take my picture without my permission did you?” he asked in a way that troubled me enough to make sure he didn’t have a camo shotgun in his lap.

  “No sir,” I lied. “I just want to get a picture of your little shed.”

  For the next 20 minutes I asked questions and Camo Man answered them. Let’s just say his name was Jim, so he doesn’t come looking for me. Jim lived 200 feet off U.S. Highway 12 in a house he built in 1962 on 40 acres of flat farmland, which 48 years later was covered by neat rows of mature pine trees. From Google’s satellite camera his personal square of Middle America looks like a green wool area rug surrounded by 40-acre squares of corn.

  He had been a carpenter since 1953. He was the youngest of 13 kids. His dad was a farmer – not a big rich farmer, but “a regular farmer” who grew grain and corn and raised hogs and beef. An avid duck and goose hunter, Jim was uncomfortably believable when he said he used to be a tough guy who wasn’t afraid to use his fists.

  His shed – no bigger than a freezer chest – was the only retail establishment for miles. He sold split and seasoned firewood on the honor system to campers and Sauk City city folk for $3.50 or $6 a bundle all year round.

  “Most people are honest,” he said, accurately summing up the human race, as far as I was concerned. “Ninety-nine percent are good. Some are losers. There always will be losers.”

  The extra money he made from selling wood Jim put aside for the education of three granddaughters who lived with him. Health-wise, he was a wreck. He had a heart attack and two days later had a stroke. Now, he said, “I’ve got a pacemaker and two artificial knees."

  He spoke so slowly and coherently I had no trouble taking perfect notes.

  “I've had my knees for 16 years. If not for them, I'd be in a wheelchair. I had five kids to raise. It's not like you could go on welfare right away, the way you do now. I've never had a credit card in my life and never will. We were brought up if you didn’t have the money, you didn't buy it.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Too damn old – 77.”

  I asked Jim if there was as much traffic on U.S. 12 half a century ago as there was that morning.

  “In 1962, 12 cars a day came by on Route 12. There was no traffic on the road – none. This is Saturday. Weekdays are worse. Some days if you want to cross the highway you have to wait 10 minutes because of the commuters and people going to school from the countryside.”

  “Was it lonely out here in 1962?”

  “It wasn't lonely then. It was just right.”

  Jim looked and sounded like a pretty conservative Midwestern guy – until I asked what he thought about the big anti-Obama billboard I had seen up the road. Then he started channeling an MSNBC talk show host on fast-forward.

  “They're all money men. They’re all Republicans. I was born a Democrat and I'll die a Democrat. If you’re a workingman, you don't want to vote Republican. I belonged to Carpenters Local 314 in Madison for 55 years. Every time we had a Republican administration, we were out of work and starving. Once the Democrats got in, we had feasts. When the Republicans were in, we had famines. If they want to vote for those damn people again and put them back in, let them pay the price. It's the working people, the children – they’re the people that will suffer. John McCain was a sensible guy. When he got tangled up with ‘Motor-mouth,’ I call her, and chose her as his running mate, that took all the credibility out of him. I said, ‘You’ve got to be a fool to pick someone like her. She's dumber than a stump.’ McCain proved one thing else to me. He’s also stupid. How could he expect to win with a running mate not much smarter than that stop sign?”

  Wow.

  What a great American.

  Steinbeck would have fallen in love with Jim’s angry brand of workingman’s politics. I didn’t argue, I didn’t agree. I scribbled and let him rant. Jim wasn’t finished with Republicans.

  “They’ve been fighting Obama since day one. Everything he tries to accomplish, they shut it down. John Boehner. He's nuts. They call him the ‘Tan Man’ on TV. He doesn't have too much between the ears. He's a typical Republican. We've got Republican politicians right now. Once they get a little power they'll try to abolish Social Security and Medicare. That's their main goal. Social Security has been a thorn in the Republicans’ side since day one. I call them like I see them. If they don’t like it, tough.”

  For a guy in camo with a box of shotgun shells in his pocket, it was a MacArthur Award-winning monologue. I had told him roughly why I was driving around the country, but he didn’t seem interested and never warmed up to me. He didn’t ask me a thing about myself or what I thought about Obama or the Tea Party or anything else until I was about to leave.

  “Who’s financing you?”

  “I wish,” I said.

  He probably suspected I was being bankrolled by rightwing moneymen Rupert Murdoch or Roger Ailes. I told him I was paying my own way – with credit cards. He clearly didn’t think that was too wise, but he held his tired tongue. I didn’t dare ask to take his portrait, but wish I had. Several hours later I would do something very stupid with my camera’s digital memory card and wipe out the entire day’s photos. When I had to retrace my steps 90 miles to retake the most important shots, I stopped and took a replacement picture of Jim’s firewood shed.

  Not for a second did I consider knocking on his front door. A year and a half later I dropped the little yellow man from Google Maps onto Jim’s corner of North America for a 360-degree look-see. Jim’s shed was there, but not him – unless he was really well camouflaged.

  Jim was a lucky random encounter – and the first angry Democrat I’d bumped into on my trip. He was politically intense and deeply grouchy, but he wasn’t nuts. The guy I met wearing the “Obama ‘08” T-shirt two hours later in downtown Baraboo was nuts. Proudly. Defiantly. Publicly. Professionally.

  A Scarier American

  Bob Oehner was sitting two empty stools away from me at the counter in Jen’s Alpine Café and Soup Kitchen. I was innocently eating my usual breakfast of two eggs over medium. Outside, Fourth Street was already curb-to-curb with local farm folk who were pouring into downtown for the annual Baraboo Arts Fair.

  Bob was finishing breakfast, reading the paper and indiscreetly trying to make a date with Anna, the cute 30-something waitress who had recently cut her dreadlocks and quit her local realtor’s job because the housing market was so bad. I don’t remember how we started talking, but suddenly Bob was sitting next to me and we were loudly and seriously discussing national politics.

  One of the few people I would meet on my tr
ip who knew all about “Travels With Charley,” and who had even read it, he introduced himself as “a poster child for all the good things the Democrats have done to save the economy.” Democrat social programs – extended unemployment benefits and Cobra health insurance subsidies, mainly – had saved his life, he said, after he lost his job as a computer consultant 18 months before. He also proclaimed himself “the meanest damn liberal in the United States.”

  Bob lived in South Chicago, where he was born and raised. He was 54, in good shape and full of life, big laughs and himself. He was in Baraboo to rock-climb at Devil’s Lake and to play golf. I was relieved to be able to tell him I hadn’t thought to bring my clubs on my trip. Bob, who said that on his first Halloween as a boy he dressed up like JFK, had been a political activist in extremis since 1968.

  Five months earlier he had posted a live grenade on Daily Kos, the leftwing web site. “I have declared war on all Righties, Neo-cons, Tea-baggers and Libertarians,” he wrote. After bashing Nixon and Cheney he dared his enemies to engage in either a “legit, in-the-ring” boxing match or a “Non-Contact Shouting Match,” which he would have been a 10-1 favorite to win.

  Bob hated Big Business and CEOs, who he said were really “Hell’s Angels in suits” and/or psychotics who wanted “cheap labor, low taxes and no regulations.” But what he hated most of all were Republicans. He hated them so much he currently was starring in several self-produced YouTube videos in which he ranted into the camera about Tea Baggers and challenged anyone to the right of Barack Obama’s favorite college professor to a fight. He provided his phone number and email address.

  In one video Bob – whose father was an entertainer who worked in resorts and was known as “Angry Al” – called himself “the craziest SOB you’ve ever seen.” It was a boast Bob repeatedly proved to me in person. Though I had told him I was a libertarian who didn’t like war-mongering Big Government Republicans any more than wealth-stealing Big Government Democrats, it didn’t let me off the hook. He pretty much used me as a Tea Party/GOP punching bag for an hour.

  He happily posed for photos on a bench out front of the Alpine Café, then tagged along as I made a quick tour of the street festival. Echoing several others in Baraboo, Bob insisted that I see Devil’s Lake. He offered to take me there and even sketched a map of its best hiking trail in my notebook. “You can’t go through here without going through Devil’s Lake,” he said, suddenly becoming serious. “It’s very spiritual.” Tragically, the photos I took of Chicago Bob were among the victims of my camera-card disaster, so I had go to his YouTube channel to refresh my memory of him. His provocative videos do justice to his volatile persona, but he was a much scarier American when he was right in my face.

  Baraboo

  Baraboo, the biggest city in the county with 12,048 people, was an interesting All-American town, albeit embarrassingly monochromatic. With a population that was 97 percent white, and with more Native Americans and Asians than blacks, it’ll never win any diversity prizes from the NAACP. Its downtown blocks looked healthy and patriotic and its side streets were lined with trees and lovely homes. Teams of wholesome high school kids were decorating its storefronts with cornstalks and autumn-themed stencils. It was creepily idyllic in a Rockwellian way. Of course, for all I knew, Baraboo was riddled with meth labs and brothels and as bankrupt as California.

  The arts and crafts fair on Fourth Street had stalls hawking the usual handmade crap no one needs or wants, but it was fairly classy fare, not tacky. As a decent blues band provided the soundtrack, at least half of the county's populace sat in the sun on benches, checked out the artistic rocks, stained-glass windows and quilts on display or dined on bad food being grilled to death by overweight guys wearing Packers jerseys.

  Baraboo used to be the home base and wintering headquarters of the Ringling Brothers circus, which became one of the largest circuses in the world when it merged with Barnum & Bailey in the early 1900s. Baraboo’s Circus World Museum was closed but is said to contain circus wagons and other artifacts, plus the planet's largest library of circus information.

  The other big tourist draw was the Al Ringling Theatre. A beautifully restored movie house built downtown in 1915 by Ringling brother Albert, it was designed like a grand French opera house with fancy drapes, plasterwork and a ceiling fresco. Like small-town movie palaces I’d seen in Trinidad, Colorado, and Lewistown, Montana, it had been faithfully restored to its original grandeur and showed Corn Belt-friendly movies like "The Wizard of Oz" on Saturday afternoons.

  Half the town told me I had to see Devil’s Lake, the most popular state park in Wisconsin. Ordinarily, I would have avoided a popular destination for the sole reason that it was massively popular. But I was writing a travel piece from the road each week for the Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and I already had decided lovely Baraboo and Devil’s Lake would make a good article.

  Created by glaciers and surrounded by cliffs as high as 500 feet, Devil’s Lake is enmeshed in miles of hiking/biking/skiing trails and home to hundreds of campsites and two small sandy beaches. An old forest of red, orange and yellow oak, ash and maple trees hid a horde of people and the cars they had come in. If you wanted to be alone in that human swarm you had two choices – launch a kayak or other non-carbon-spewing boat or scale a cliff made out of some of the hardest rock on the planet.

  I don't know what John Steinbeck saw in the Wisconsin Dells that was so "enchanting," but I sure didn't see it. It’s a pretty place. But he saw less of the "Wis Dells," as the highway signs say, through his windshield than I did. The casino and the new massive developments on U.S. 12 weren’t there in 1960. And he had no time to linger in Baraboo, visit Devil’s Lake or ride the Wisconsin River's "dells" – from the French word "dalles," which means "a fast-moving stretch of water.”

  I didn’t have the time or interest to do any of the hardcore tourist stuff, either. After my token tour of Devil’s Lake, I headed north on U.S. 12, hitting a serious Saturday traffic jam and passing through a Vegas-like strip of garish theme motels, amusement parks and water parks that Steinbeck would still be bitching about if he had seen it. The Hotel Rome, a huge Trojan Horse, the Pink Flamingo, a fake ruin of the Coliseum. Everything was closed until next season, thank God.

  The gauntlet of tackiness on U.S. 12 wasn’t entirely new. Steinbeck said in a letter that the Wisconsin Dells in 1960 were “lousy with tourist places.” In “Charley,” with his usual contempt for the vulgar pleasures of the proletariat, he said the Dells’ “dreamlike waterways” were lined by “the litter of our times, the motels, the hot-dog stands, the merchants of the cheap and mediocre and tawdry so loved by summer tourists.” I’m no fan of cheap tourist hells like Niagara Falls, Atlantic City or Hollywood Boulevard, but I appreciate neon and outdoor advertising in all its forms. No doubt the Dells’ strip looked better at night, but I got out of there as fast as I could.

  11 – Into the Corn Belt

  “There are certain limitations inherent in our method, you understand that. Whole segments of American life are cut off from us. The life of business, the life of cities, of the well to do middle class…. In our contacts are we seeing anything but a fringe? Fringe people, fringe associations.”

  – Conversation with Charley, cut from

  First draft of “Travels With Charley”

  Steinbeck’s Truck Stop

  "This is what we called a 'skinny road,' " my new friend Bob Rose said. Bob was referring to U.S. Highway 12, the "skinny" two-lane road outside American Legion Post 81’s front door in south Mauston, Wisconsin. Whatever Bob said about highways, trucks and what life was like in 1960 in Mauston, I believed. He had credibility. Not only had he been a truck driver for 47 years, he said he racked up enough career miles – 5 million – to go around the earth 232 times. I didn’t check his math, but he had a commemorative pen to prove it.

  Bob worked for Consolidated Freightways from the time he got out of the Korean War in 1951 until 1998. He was 81 but he could still tell me
what it was like to drive every mile of just about every U.S. and state highway in the USA. He took aluminum from Oswego to St. Paul, cattle from Billings to Minneapolis and cast-iron woodstoves from Wisconsin to Pittsburgh. In the early years, he wore a collared shirt and a tie while he drove. If Bob Rose said the truck stop/coffee shop where Steinbeck slept in his camper on the night of Oct. 10, 1960, was probably Ernie's Truck Stop, then it was. Ernie's is long gone now, along with the other truck-servicing businesses that flourished on U.S. 12. Until I-94 sucked the trucks off it in the '60s, U.S. 12 with its 45 mph speed limit was the main freight route from Chicago to the Twin Cities. Now all the truck stops are clustered at Mauston's interstate exits.

  I had found Bob and his wife Dona at the legion hall, where they had come to dance to the music of a country band called Shitz & Giggles. They both were born and raised in Mauston and had lived in places like Chicago and Minneapolis. Bob was retired and they wintered in Yuma, Arizona.