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

  Sauk Centre’s Favorite Dead Son

  Steinbeck ultimately made it to Sauk Centre the same way I did – by turning off U.S. 10 and running up U.S. Route 52. He was making a side trip because he was curious to see how his old pal Sinclair Lewis had been treated by his hometown after he died. Lewis’ big early books, "Main Street" and "Babbitt," were uncomplimentary fictionalizations of the folks of Sauk Centre, especially businessmen. Though he turned out so many hits in the 1920s that he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, Lewis was not declared a local hero until he was safely dead, as Steinbeck wryly noted. Then Sauk Centre’s city fathers started naming streets after Lewis and using his name to draw tourists.

  By 1960 Steinbeck already knew his own fame was going to be exploited in the same way by his hometown Salinas. “Cannery Row” and “East of Eden” were works of fiction but were clearly written about real people and places in Monterey County. They didn’t exactly flatter the local folks or the power brokers, who were conservative Republican businessmen and not at all appreciative of Steinbeck’s sympathies for the New Deal, unions and migrants from Mexico or the Dust Bowl.

  “The Grapes of Wrath,” though set 200 miles south in Kern County at the bottom of the Great Central Valley, was publicly burned in Salinas only months after it came out in 1939. No matter how world-famous Steinbeck had become, by 1960 he had not been honored as a homegrown hero. He knew after he died he’d be rehabilitated as a “good” writer by his hometown, like Lewis had been. In fact, the process that would lead to the creation of “Steinbeck Country” had already started in Monterey, where the city had renamed Ocean View Avenue “Cannery Row.”

  Based on my quick spin around Sauk Centre, Sinclair Lewis didn’t seem to have much to complain about. It well may have had some slimy civic boosters in Lewis’ day, but the town of 4,300 Middle Americans looked ideal to me. Sleeping in the sun, the business district had broad streets, old brick storefronts, a restored movie theater and a visible pulse but few humans. The tallest buildings in town were churches.

  The tiny homes on Original Main Street were priced way under $100,000, a guy living in one told me. Even two-story beauties were in the $150,000 range. Residential streets like the one where Lewis’ home is preserved were lined with tidy wood-frame homes on tree-shaded lots and laid out in a grid of square blocks bordered with sidewalks. You could buy one for $120,000. Sauk Centre was another of those livable, lovable, walkable, affordable late-1800s dream-towns that today’s New Urbanists try to recreate from scratch but never can.

  I’ve forgotten what local crimes and hypocrisies Lewis was all worked up about in his anti-capitalist books. But decrying them made him a very rich and world-famous writer and gave Sauk Centre something to be known for besides being a model of Midwestern town planning.

  Steinbeck ended up blowing right through Sauk Centre. I was in a hurry too. I didn't have time to visit the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home on Sinclair Lewis Avenue, the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center or the Sinclair Lewis Campground. I followed state Route 71 toward Wadena and a welcome reunion with U.S. Highway 10.

  Minnesota dairy country is no doubt special in many ways, but to a non-farm boy like me it had the same look and feel of rural Wisconsin, rural New England and rural everywhere else. Almost nothing was new – almost nothing was there at all, in fact, except the usual meager allotment of farms, harvested cornfields, woods, little lakes and a few small towns like Long Prairie and Eagle Bend. The two-lane state road was smoother, wider, faster and safer than in Steinbeck's time. He would have seen more trucks on Route 71, because there were no interstates nearby. But they couldn't have been as intimidating as the 18-wheel hay wagons that thundered by my left shoulder every 5 minutes.

  I cruised over strangely sculpted terrain at 70 mph through nearly invisible clouds of fat, suicidal bugs. Humans were nowhere to be seen off-road. Even the GreyStone Golf Club, a nationally known public course with a high pedigree, had no one hacking around it on a beautiful autumn day. Evidence of human economic life littered the roadside. A turkey farm. Pumpkins and corn on the honor system. A cord of firewood already on a trailer and ready to go. An auction tent near Clarissa. An Amish co-op. A Christmas tree farm. A live person on a palomino horse!

  Steinbeck would have seen most everything I saw on Route 71, including what looked like a combination car museum and junkyard trying to hide behind some trees outside Eagle Bend. Zooming by, I counted a dozen cars from the 1940s and '50s, their hoods neatly pointed at the highway like they were sitting on a used car lot time forgot. Auto junkyards ringing cities offended Steinbeck’s tender eyes, but seeing one was so rare, so out of date and so strangely out of place, I regretted not stopping.

  Speaking of shocking juxtapositions, one sight Steinbeck definitely never saw was the graceful monster standing on the horizon as I approached Hewlitt. It was a lone wind turbine. Its three wings slowly swept a huge patch of the sky, supplying all the energy needs of Metropolitan Hewitt’s 267 people and still having plenty of juice left over to sell to the power grid owned by Minnesota Power. I stopped to take its picture and listen to its hum, but wind turbines, like redwoods, are too huge to photograph up close.

  How and why that towering boondoggle of subsidies and energy credits ended up in the middle of nowhere would probably make a good “60 Minutes” horror story, if “60 Minutes” cared about exposing such green horror stories. But no matter how uneconomic wind turbines are, or how much noise they make, or how many birds and bats they kill, they sure look pretty when they’re standing alone in a place they shouldn’t be.

  At Wadena I rejoined U.S. Highway 10, which from then on would be my main street all the way to Seattle. I saw the glow of Detroit Lakes’ motels, malls and billboards long before I saw the vacation playground’s empty resorts. It was too late to poke around much, but it was easy to see that the City of Detroit Lakes was more popular and more electrified than it was in 1960. It had 5,600 residents then instead of 8,300. And in 1960 Detroit Lakes didn’t have quite so many fishing, boating, sailing, jet-skiing, swimming, scuba diving, river tubing and, for landlubbers, horse riding and golfing opportunities. Not to mention an amusement park, a paintball arena and a mile-long beach on Lake Detroit that drew tourists and desperate water-sport enthusiasts from the surrounding dry plains.

  An old-timer told me Detroit Lakes ain’t what it once was. A lot of the old resorts were closed. The Canadians didn’t come down to spend their money anymore. And rich people from North Dakota had grabbed up all the lakefront property. “It used to be cheap to live on the lake,” he said. “Not now.” After a quick spin through Detroit Lakes’ dark original downtown, I opted for another quiet night under the lights at Wal-Mart.

  Trucks, Cattle & 22-foot Turkeys

  In “Travels With Charley” Steinbeck mentions Detroit Lakes, but only says “I stopped near there late at night and so did Charley, and I don’t know any more about it than he does.” He went into greater detail in his nightly road letter to his wife. On Oct. 11, 1960, he told her he had pulled into a truck stop for the night “not far from Detroit Lakes” and was “camped in a row of great cattle trailers” in “turkey country.”

  The next morning, without even peeking at the beach, I went looking for Steinbeck’s truck stop. It only took two hours to find and my quest was a textbook lesson in the how-to's of drive-by journalism. First I went to the nearest McDonald's, ordered a coffee and sat in a booth next to the six old-timers I knew would be there. After waiting for a lull in a heated conversation about the deficiencies of the Minnesota Vikings, I gently butted into their world.

  Excusing myself as a traveling journalist, I explained I was chasing the ghost of John Steinbeck. After explaining who John Steinbeck was, I told the old coots I was looking for a truck stop near Detroit Lakes that in 1960 handled cattle trucks and was near a turkey farm. In a chorus, three of them agreed I was looking for Daggett Truck Line in Frazee, Minnesota.

  Thanking t
hem profusely, I headed eight miles back down U.S. 10 to Frazee, famous to motorists across all of western Minnesota as the “Home of the World’s Largest Turkey.” I found Daggett’s operations right where they had been in 1960. The company stopped hauling local cattle to Fargo a long time ago and its 95 refrigerated trucks now carried frozen food, pet food and junk food all over the country.

  In the first secretary's office I saw I asked if there was a Daggett I could talk to. Soon I was reading Chris Daggett the part in "Travels With Charley" where Steinbeck describes his overnight at a truck stop. Then I read him the letter Steinbeck wrote to his wife where he mentions a truck stop with cattle trailers and a small valley carpeted with thousands of turkeys. I stipulated to Daggett that Steinbeck's letter to his wife was credible, but what he described so beautifully in “Travels With Charley” was not. It was a fictionalized composite of his stays at a truck stop in Mauston, Wisconsin, and one near Detroit Lakes, I said. I wrote down exactly what Chris Daggett told me: "This was the place he's talking about. Absolutely, it was. It was the only place around Detroit Lakes that handled cattle.”

  I thanked Daggett, took my photos and got out of town. I never saw where Frazee kept the world’s largest turkey, but the town’s big sign on U.S. 10 was a felony case of false advertising. “Big Tom” the town turkey was large all right – 5,000 pounds and 20 feet tall. But he was made out of steel and fiberglass, not white meat and dark meat.

  The story of Frazee’s attempts to use a huge piece of hideous public art to publicize its local turkey industry is so pathetic it sounds like a lost episode of “Parks and Recreation.” The original “Big Tom” was born in 1986. Made from the finest fiberglass, cardboard and insulation $20,000 could buy, “Big Tom” quickly justified his price tag by getting covered by ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

  By the mid-1990s, however, “Big Tom” was in serious trouble. Not only did he need to have his shabby exterior painted white all the time, local turkey interests were complaining he wasn’t proportioned like a real turkey. A new bird – the current properly proportioned one – was commissioned. But while the original “Big Tom” was being dismantled in 1998, a misdirected welding torch turned him into a 22-foot flaming butterball. The news report and photo of “Big Tom” engulfed by fire made the embarrassing kind of news Frazee’s booster community never intended.

  “Big Toms I and II” have put Frazee and its 1,377 people on the national map of dumb roadside tourist attractions. Somehow I missed meeting “Big Tom II,” I’m not sorry to say. But I did see some of his little brothers and sisters. Their faces were staring out through the screened windows of a dozen massive turkey barns, including one next door to Daggett's operations on old U.S. 10. The barns, stuffed with tens of thousands of doomed birds, were up to 1,000 feet long. They were impressive sights, but not the kind tourist families would want to stop and see.

  12 – Making Time in North Dakota

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Wednesday, Oct. 12, 1960 – Beach, North Dakota

  Sticking to U.S. 10, Steinbeck moves from Frazee, Minnesota, through Fargo and Bismarck to Beach, North Dakota, a small agricultural town near the Montana border. He drives about 425 miles, almost straight west. In Beach he checks into a small motel, probably the Westgate, and has a bath.

  Town Without People

  Steinbeck had romantic ideas about the city of Fargo and he was looking forward to seeing it for the first time. But when he drove through its downtown on Wednesday morning Oct. 12, 1960, he apparently got swept along in the traffic and didn’t stop. I had a similar experience in Fargo when crossing over the Red River of the North into North Dakota from Detroit Lakes. The “West 10” signs I was following vanished and I ended up on North Broadway Drive. In the lunch-hour rush I inched bumper-to-bumper past the Fargo Theater, the city’s signature downtown landmark, and the stone-faced Fargo National Bank.

  Steinbeck’s description of Fargo in “Travels With Charley” shows how much information a great writer can pack into half a sentence: “… it was a golden autumn day, the town as traffic-troubled, as neon-plastered, as cluttered and milling with activity as any other up-and-coming town of forty-six thousand souls.” Except that there were more than twice as many Fargonians alive in 2010, that sounded like the town we both briefly met. Fargo and its “broken-metal-and-glass outer-ring,” as Steinbeck called its trashy outskirts, extended farther west into the void of eastern North Dakota than when he complained about it. I didn’t see any auto graveyards or landfills. But soon the malls, pawnshops, car dealers, tank farms and fairgrounds evaporated. U.S. 10 West and its signs vanished, too, buried forever under Interstate 94.

  The land west of Fargo on I-94 was flat and wide, un-peopled and plowed to the max – like it’d been since about 1900, I’d bet. Turning off the interstate at County Road 38, which went nowhere in two directions, I went south toward the town of Alice, where Steinbeck says in “Charley” he camped out overnight. North Dakota is the fourth least densely populated state and most of it is farmland, facts that would surprise no one driving across it. The combines I saw from Route 38 looked like ants, and there were more combines on the horizons than houses. Traffic simply did not exist.

  From outer space, Alice is a little splash of civilization spilled on a gigantic grid of farmland and perfectly straight roads. Everything around Alice is disturbingly parallel and perpendicular, except one thing – the drunken Maple River. Starting northwest of Alice and flowing south, it wriggles and wanders for miles, doubling back on itself, forming little pools, disappearing into wetlands and almost encircling Alice before trickling northeast to join larger rivers and lakes that ultimately empty into Hudson Bay.

  I was looking forward to Alice. I had Google Mapped it before my trip and it wasn’t really a town or even a village. From its satellite photo, it looked more like an unfinished, poorly zoned suburban development – a random scattering of a few dozen homes, buildings, a church or two, with a lot of empty space tied together with what looked like gravel roads.

  When I arrived in Alice at 3:30 in the afternoon, no one was there to greet me. That was because hardly a soul is left in Alice. When Steinbeck wrote about it, it had only about 160 inhabitants, but it still had all the proper parts of a town. By 2010 Alice was down to 50 humans. The post office was closed. So was the town grain silo, the town school and the town Catholic Church, St. Henry’s. It still had a mayor. And the town cemetery was still alive and well, though it was going to run out of dead people long before it ran out of space.

  Steinbeck says in the first draft of “Travels With Charley” that he “found a pleasant place to stop on the Maple River just north of Alice.” While there alone, away from the road, he says an itinerant Shakespearean actor pulled in and parked his trailer not far from him. Steinbeck describes the actor in minute detail. He had a classic profile and wore a leather jacket, olive-drab trousers and a cowboy hat with “the brim curled and held to a peak by the chin strap.” Eventually the two men share coffee and whisky and discourse for five boring pages about the joys and sorrows of the acting profession. The tedious scene could have been worse. Steinbeck originally had the actor deliver 20-lines of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” rap. Wisely, that overt hunk of page filler was cut from the first draft.

  The actor says when he performed Shakespeare on the road he respectfully borrowed the “words, tones and inflections” of John Gielgud. Then he pulls out a treasured letter he kept folded in his wallet. It was from Sir John himself. Steinbeck quotes the brief note in full. His lucky encounter with the actor, long on dialogue, is rich in specifics and detail. But it never happened.

  A Farmer Gets the Joke

  Two miles west of Alice, near the vacant intersection of 45th and 137th streets, I stood next to an impenetrable dry cornfield on an elevated farm road. It was the highest ground for miles. It was sunny and warm, but the chilly wind whipped up whitecaps on the small lake nearby and slapped little high-frequency waves against its gra
ssy shore. I was looking for signs of the Maple River – what in Pennsylvania we’d more accurately call Maple Creek.

  It was there that the absurdity of what Steinbeck tried to pull on his readers really hit me. I already knew from a letter he sent to his wife that he lied in “Charley” about camping overnight in Alice. I also knew he didn’t bump into his quotable thespian soul mate. Not anywhere near Alice, anyway, and not in the theatrical, stilted way he described. But standing in the middle of that middle of nowhere, trying to imagine anyone meeting anyone else there at all – I really did laugh out loud. You had to be there with all that corn and farmland to appreciate the joke.