I was still laughing when I found a farmer, or he found me. He was running a big blue Ford tractor, pulling a disk plough that magically turned a wide swath of his soft green field to black. Looking as pathetic as possible, I hailed him. He climbed down from his cab to see what was wrong with my car or my head. We were both wearing blue jeans, T-shirts and baseball caps, but he was wearing work boots and, presumably, socks.
After I explained what I was doing, he trusted me with the basic facts of his life as long as I promised not to tell the whole World Wide Web his name. He was 50, the son of a farmer and a farmer himself for 23 years. He had what he called a “smallish” farm – 1,400 acres, a little over 2 square miles. He grew half wheat and half soybeans, not just corn like most of his neighbors, because he said wheat doesn't take as many people or trucks to produce. I didn’t pry into his finances. But an Internet business directory listed his company as having $95,000 in annual revenue and a staff of 1, which I assumed was him. The only help the farmer had was his wife, two daughters and a good credit line. His wife – he pointed to a dust cloud half a mile away – was running the family combine. His older daughter ran it when she wasn’t away at college.
I told the farmer what Steinbeck said he did near Alice. Then I asked if he knew a spot nearby where Steinbeck might have camped overnight by the Maple River and met a traveling Shakespearean actor with a John Gielgud letter in his wallet. He looked around, got the joke and laughed.
In “Travels With Charley” Steinbeck states without equivocation that he camped overnight near Alice. He didn’t. In the real world, the nonfiction world, he passed by Alice on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 1960. It was Day 3 of his 2,100-mile, seven-day sprint from Chicago to Seattle and he spent it crossing the entire state of North Dakota.
In the morning he may have paused for several hours along the Maple River somewhere near Alice. It’s even possible he met an itinerant Shakespearean actor – or a man from Mars. But in a day that started in Frazee, Minnesota, Steinbeck logged about 425 miles before stopping for the night in Beach, North Dakota, an agricultural town in the Badlands near the Montana border. By sundown Wednesday he was already 321 miles past Alice, about to take a hot bath in a motel. We know all this is true because it’s what he told his wife in a letter he wrote that night from Beach.
Alice wasn’t the only overnight campout in North Dakota that Steinbeck invented. The next night he didn’t sleep under the stars in the spooky Badlands, either. In “Charley” Steinbeck beautifully describes how the slanting evening sunlight warmed the strange and harsh landscape of the Badlands, how he built a fire, how the starry night was filled with sounds of hunting screech owls and barking coyotes, and how the “night was so cold that I put on my insulated underwear for pajamas.”
It was total fiction. On Thursday night, Oct. 13 – Day 4 of his Chicago-Seattle sprint – he was actually already 400 miles west of Beach and the Badlands. He was in Livingston, Montana, watching the third Nixon-Kennedy TV debate at a trailer court. Because he was moving so quickly from Chicago to Seattle, Steinbeck was forced to make up two overnight camping adventures in North Dakota and stick them in between his actual stays in Frazee and Beach.
Steinbeck’s two flights of “creative nonfiction” under the stars in North Dakota are important, but not just because they are such bald-faced fabrications. Along with his non-meeting with the Yankee farmer in New Hampshire, they are the scenes in the book that created the myth that he was traveling slowly, camping out and roughing it alone in the American outback.
After snapping a corncob in half and telling me it was fit only for ethanol, the friendly farmer went back to his disking. For half an hour I drove to several places where farm roads intersected with the tiny Maple River as it squirmed through the tall grass. I didn’t know it then, but there were a dozen possible places west, south or east of Alice where the river meets a road. Bumping into a sophisticated thespian anywhere near Alice – or anywhere else – would have been a fantastic bit of good luck for any traveling writer. It wasn’t impossible. It’s just that it doesn’t happen like that in the real world.
I left the cornfields near Alice and aimed for Bismarck, 165 miles west on I-94. Somewhere in the hilly terrain I crossed the Continental Divide. The elevation was only 1,490 feet because, though North Dakota is rich in oil and gas and energy jobs, it’s poor in mountain ranges. In Bismarck, where the supply of motels was not keeping pace with the demand from the energy boom, I couldn’t find a room under $125, but I was more than happy to check in at the nearest Wal-Mart.
A Day at Beach
It was a gorgeous morning to be cruising the Old Steinbeck Highway. The sun was behind me. The sky was big and blue with only the thinnest gauze of high white clouds. It was 54 outside but 68 in my personal space capsule. The North Dakota headwind, which Steinbeck complained about, had not yet risen to its usual afternoon car-shoving intensity.
Beach was my target du jour. Twenty minutes out of Bismarck, I was cruising at 70 mph on I-94, five miles below the speed limit. My Professional Reporter's Notebook was on my right knee. My laptop, cell phone and camcorder were sipping their morning juice from the cigarette lighter and the RAV4's 110-volt plug, a bonus I never thought I’d come to depend on so much.
Gobbling up mileage, I was alone and free and in total control of my life. I had nothing to fear and nothing to do but listen to CNBC on my blessed satellite radio and steer with one finger. As the local universe scrolled by like an abstract painting on a video loop, the emptiness of North Dakota became manifestly ridiculous.
I could see two miles of four-lane superhighway ahead of me and a mile behind. I counted five cars and trucks. In every direction were desolate zip codes of smooth green-brown grassland and low hills. I counted one farm. One tree taller than a house, but no house. A few plump rolls of hay near a stray fence line. Power lines and the occasional cell tower were my only reliable companions. The black dots on the horizon were probably cows.
North Dakota’s excess of space and shortage of humankind became more glaring at noon when I exited I-94 at what I thought at first was my personal interstate rest stop. One vehicle was parked there, but it was leaving. It belonged to a hunched-over North Dakota grandma with a cane and a friendly attitude toward strange men with no socks who asked her questions.
When grandma drove away, the place was all mine. Made of reddish sandstone, attended by no one, the “wayside” was pretty and architecturally in synch with the vacant windswept landscape. It looked more like an art museum or a modern church than a place to answer nature's call or grab a brochure about where to picnic in the Badlands. The grounds – teen-age pine trees, country-club thick grass and picnic tables – were as spotless as the bathrooms and chapel-like lobby.
I thanked the good taxpayers of North Dakota for their generous hospitality and taste, though of course as a libertarian I questioned their government’s extravagant expenditure of state funds for something so underused.
I don’t know how Cranky John Steinbeck would have reacted to the place. He was repulsed by the primitive interstate rest stops of his day, which he discovered laying in wait for him on the New York Thruway and Indiana Toll Road.
He didn’t like the lunch counters, steam-table food or deodorized bathrooms. Vending machines dispensing coffee and soup were high tech then, and the stuff that came out of them was god-awful. He was entranced by their mechanics and seemed to appreciate their convenience. Over all, however, he thought the flower-bedecked and sanitized rest stop represented “life at a peak of some kind of civilization” – a kind he didn’t like.
Sitting in the sun writing a blog item on my laptop, I became annoyed when other people began invading my personal wayside. At least a dozen cars stopped in an hour. And a long truck. Half of the cars contained dogs like Sam Iversen, 12, and Jack Graff, 5. Sam the gentle black Lab and Jack the wired-up pointer belonged to a pair of Minnesota hunters, Eric Iversen and Jason Graff.
It was pheasant slaughtering s
eason and they were making their annual pilgrimage to their secret hunting grounds in Scranton, North Dakota. They stopped their overloaded Suburban at my wayside so their bird dogs could make a pit stop. Keeping with the Steinbeck-Charley subtext of my trip, I took portraits of each man-dog combination and again silently gave thanks that I was traveling doglessly.
The Iversens, Eric and Sam.
Crossing North Dakota made me realize how fast Steinbeck moved west – without the aid of interstates. Steinbeck drove from Fargo to Beach on old U.S. Highway 10, which in its glory days stretched to Seattle and served as the Main Avenue of every North Dakota town hanging onto it. The towns were later bypassed by I-94 and most of U.S. 10’s old route is buried now beneath four lanes of concrete.
Though U.S. 10 no longer officially exists west of Fargo, I found an old two-lane piece of it paralleling I-94 and followed it through dry farmland toward the town of Hebron. In spots I could fly along at 60 or 70, then it’d get too bumpy and rough. No shoulder to speak of, sometimes no painted lines. It couldn’t have been that bad in 1960, could it? No wonder the auto death rate was so high then.
Most of Hebron’s 747 humans must have been feeding their cattle or working down at the 106-year-old Hebron Brick Company factory, because I didn’t see many people when I stopped for gas. Anyone looking to join North Dakota’s energy boom, which has kept the state’s unemployment rate well under 4 percent despite the Great Recession, might consider relocating to rural, dusty Hebron.
Its municipal web site almost blew a disk touting the community’s awesome amenities. “We have a hard working Post Office, a movie theater with a modern projection system, two restaurants, two banks, two gas stations, three auto repair places, and a RS Jack and Jill Market that will deliver groceries to you every Friday during Winter.” Not only did Hebron have a swimming pool and fiber optic cable service, it was “just 30 minutes to Wal-Mart.”
After another 25 miles of time-travel through pastureland on a stretch of deserted old U.S. 10 that Steinbeck and Charley drove on, I resumed my pleasant cruise on I-94. A few minutes later I turned a big bend and found myself in the dead, grey, brown, craggy, eroded, hilly, unfriendly but not unattractive moonscape of the Badlands. At the Medora exit I drove in and out of “town” as fast as possible. North Dakota’s No. 1 tourist trap – the gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park’s rough outdoor recreations – was closed for the season. Medora’s 112 citizens, like most of North Dakota’s populace, were in hiding.
Where Steinbeck Took His Bath
Steinbeck arrived in Beach, North Dakota, on the evening of Oct. 12, 1960. It was the end of Day 3 of his Chicago-Seattle leg. He never mentions his stay in Beach in “Charley,” obviously, because that was the night he was pretending to be sleeping under the stars near Alice. But he betrayed where he was in a letter to his wife Elaine. Telling her he had stopped at a place that had the only public phone for 40 miles, he joked that he was staying "in a motel called the Dairy Queen.”
He told Elaine that when he went into a bar, all the talk was about deer hunting, not Game 6 of the Yankees-Pirates World Series, which he had listened to that day on his truck’s AM radio. He could have walked over to the Bijou Theater a few blocks away and seen Alec Guinness in "Our Man in Havana." But Steinbeck probably didn't take in a movie for the same reason I didn't go to the Bijou to see Angelina Jolie star in "Salt." We had both spent our days driving across North Dakota and were both pretty beat.
As part of my pre-trip research, I had called the only motel I could find online in Beach, the Westgate Motel on Old Highway 10. The manager, Sandy, told me there was never a Dairy Queen Motel in town but there had been a Dairy Queen franchise. It used to be right across the street. By the time I arrived in Beach, 50 years and one night after Steinbeck did, I had come to realize he had been kidding his wife about staying in a motel called the Dairy Queen. But what motel was it? Was it the “modern” Westgate, the obvious choice, where Sandy had kindly saved me one of her 11 rooms without my asking? Or did Steinbeck stay in one of the old-style motel cabins that once stood on the vacant lot across from the Westgate?
I spent the next early morning sleuthing around Beach. Based on a random drive-around, Beach was a mix of good homes and a few shabby ones in mostly older neighborhoods. It still seemed to have everything it needed for a town that had shrunk from 1,460 people in 1960 to 1,019 in 2010. No Wal-Mart was closer than 60 miles. But there were several churches, a couple of banks, a county courthouse, a hardware store, a pharmacy, a supermarket, a few shaky restaurants. Beach had a busy railroad line through its heart and one of those cool old water towers that looks like a fat rocket taking off. It even had some history. General Custer and his doomed column came through Beach on their way to immortality at Little Big Horn.
Beach was a real town. In no way was it quaint or charming or hip or artificially polished to appeal to tourists. To a parachuting journalist it looked exactly like what it was – working-class. Susan Davidson, the Golden Valley County Recorder, preferred the term "blue-collar" town. I had stopped in her office at the courthouse shortly after 8 and read her the description of Beach that I was going to put on the World Wide Web for the entire planet to read. I explained what I was doing, begged forgiveness for my superficial 25-mph assumptions about her fine town and got the names of several local historians who never answered or returned my phone calls.
Recorder Davidson clued me in on a few things I never could have learned from driving around Beach: Its economy, like the rest of North Dakota’s, was doing better and still improving, thanks to the regional oil and gas boom. Unemployment was down. A local entrepreneur was starting up a vineyard east of town on Old Highway 10. By noon, I had stopped by the office of the Golden Valley News newspaper, which had 1,000 subscribers and seemed to be located in a fabric store. Editor Richard Volesky interviewed me briefly after I told him why I was in town, then let me look through his newspaper’s archives.
I read the Oct. 13, 1960, edition of the News. I was hoping to find a front-page story about famous John Steinbeck being spotted the night before at the Bijou with a French dog or getting punched out by a cowboy in a bar fight. No such luck. Just dozens of 2-inch long local items on Page 1 bearing headlines like “Mrs. J. Ballard Succumbs Oct. 5” and “Feeding Calves Becoming Big Business in County.”
Inside its 12 old-fashioned pages, the News held an array of large display ads that would make a starving big-city newspaper publisher of today weep. Ads for political candidates. Quarter-page ads for $15.95 Goodyear winter tires. The new 1961 Ford was coming. So was the compact 1961 Rambler American with its infamous reclining front seats, which the Hammond Implement & Mt. Co. of Beach was offering for as little as $1,845.
At the paper I met subscriber Harold Lassell. Wearing pressed jeans, a pressed shirt and the shiniest cowboy boots in town, he introduced himself as “the oldest mechanic left in Beach.” Lassell, 86 and a lifelong Beach resident, instantly became the last word on what the intersection of U.S. 10 and 1st Avenue NW looked like in 1960.
He knew the names of the original owners of the Westgate Motel, the owners of the Dairy Queen that sat diagonally across from it and the owners of the long-gone tourist cabins. He even knew whether they were dead or alive. He listened patiently to the evidence I presented: John Steinbeck came into town from the east on U.S. 10. The Westgate was the only modern motel near enough to the Dairy Queen to become a Steinbeck joke. Steinbeck called it a "motel" in his letter, not a "cabin," and he raved about a bathtub in his room.
Lassell agreed with my logic and my conclusion – Steinbeck slept at the Westgate. But final confirmation, at least as far as I was concerned, didn’t come until two months later. Back in Pittsburgh, I got a call from Doug Davis of Bozeman. He was only 8 in 1960, but his father built and owned the Westgate Motel, his uncle designed it and he grew up helping his mother run it.
Davis, who called because he heard I was looking for information, said it was too bad he hadn’t he
ard about me sooner. His mother had died a few weeks earlier and he and his older brother found all the motel's registration books, including those from the fall of 1960, stored at her house – and immediately pitched them in the trash. Davis said there was no Davis-family lore about John Steinbeck visiting their place, but he believes the Westgate was the "Dairy Queen.” It was the only modern hotel in Beach at the time. Across the street were some rustic "It Happened One Night"-style cabins. But they didn’t have what Steinbeck lusted after and what Davis said the Westgate Motel definitely had in each of its rooms in 1960 – a bathtub.
13 – Loving Montana
I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love…
– “Travels With Charley”
Steinbeck Timeline
Thursday, Oct. 13, 1960 – Livingston, Montana
Steinbeck rides U.S. 10 from Beach into Montana. He passes through Miles City, drops down to the Custer Battlefield site briefly and continues on old U.S. 10 West through Billings to Livingston. At the end of his fourth long day of driving since he left Chicago, he says in a letter to his wife that he was parked in a trailer court.
Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley' Page 17