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

  Halfway to the peak you expect to see crashed SUVs still burning in the ravines below. From the parking lot it’s still a steep walk past a grove of communications towers, then up to a short stone stairway that leads to a jumble of marble rocks that must be scaled mountain-goat style. Needless to say, there’s never much of a crowd to greet you on the summit.

  During my research tour in March of 2010 I had Fremont Peak to myself for a chilly two-hour sunset. Seven months later, on a partly cloudy Saturday afternoon, I was up there alone again. This time it was warm and the grassy hillsides were brown from the summer sun, not green from winter rains. And this time I was not thinking such fond thoughts about my trying friend John Steinbeck.

  By late October of 2010 I knew how much of his “nonfiction” book was faked or dubious. I could no longer assume he actually came up to Fremont Peak in November of 1960. It’s a steep hard climb to the summit for a boy and he had a bum knee and a cane. It really didn’t matter if Steinbeck mailed it in, because he had been on Fremont Peak so many times he knew its vista by heart. But still, my inner journalist was annoyed at Steinbeck for being so hard to trust.

  It was great owning my own mountaintop again, but my solitude was short-lived. I heard voices. Ten people between the ages of 11 and 60-something were working their way up the boulders. Eight of them were part of a picnic outing by an extended Latino family from Salinas.

  Being in a crowd on Fremont Peak turned out to be much better than being there alone. On Steinbeck Country’s highest point, which is about the size of a tennis court, we had our own spontaneous little photo party.

  I took a group picture of them, then put my camera around the neck of 11-year-old Marcos Duliba and told him to take a good one of me, which he did. I made a few more friends, though they looked at me funny when I told them I had spent the night before in the Salinas Wal-Mart parking lot.

  Two other summiteers, Marty and Sheila Edelen, had driven up from the valley floor on their white and chrome Honda Goldwing motorcycle. Marty was about 65 and Sheila about 54. They had sold their house in Colorado in 2007 and had been living in their RV and traveling the western USA with their bike in tow. They had everything they owned with them on the road, including two dogs, and were having a ball.

  Like so many other random Americans I had met, including the Latino family from Salinas, the Edelens were happy, prosperous looking and not suffering in the Great Recession. As Sheila said after I photographed them standing proudly behind their gleaming $20,000 motorcycle, “We’re living our dream.”

  I hated leaving the top of Fremont Peak that Saturday afternoon. After two visits, it had become my favorite government mountain. It had no rangers, safety fences or railings. No minimum age requirements. No dumb nanny signs warning you’d die or be arrested if you weren’t wearing a helmet and kneepads. Up there you were free and on your own. You were responsible for your own clumsy ass. And it was up to you to get along peacefully with anyone who showed up, without the aid of a cop, a lawyer or a social worker.

  If all that freedom and lack of oversight on Fremont Peak sounded like a recipe for lawlessness and personal injury lawsuits, it wasn’t. The park spokesperson I called when I got back to Pittsburgh said no one had ever been murdered or even mugged on the peak, and no one had been seriously hurt in a fall. Maybe it was not as dangerous or exciting as I thought, but it was still my favorite mountain.

  18 – Heading Back East

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Tuesday, Nov. 15 to Nov. 18, 1960 – Bound for home

  Steinbeck leaves the Monterey Peninsula on Tuesday, Nov. 15, bound for Amarillo, Texas, which is 1,333 miles away. Elaine flies on ahead. With his boyhood friend and lawyer Toby Street riding with him in Rocinante, Steinbeck goes through Los Banos, Fresno and Bakersfield. He crosses the Mojave Desert and picks up Route 66 at Barstow, California. After four days, Street leaves him in Flagstaff, Arizona.

  Worshipping Route 66

  Like Steinbeck 50 years before, I slipped out the back door of the Monterey Peninsula. East into the dry gut of central California I sped along state routes 156 and 99. They were the same roads Steinbeck took on his way east to a Thanksgiving holiday at a cattle ranch near Amarillo, Texas, only my asphalt – per usual – was smoother, wider and safer.

  By Saturday night, I had made it past Fresno and Tulare to a $62 motel in Bakersfield. The next morning I breezed south through flat, arid, dead valleys on Route 58. Dodging grassy tan mountains, passing beneath a forest of wind turbines stretched across several ridge tops, I skirted the town of Mojave, slipped by the edge of Edwards Air Force Base and drove through the bleak Mojave Desert to the crossroads town of Barstow.

  At Barstow, Steinbeck met U.S. Highway 66, his “Mother Road” from “The Grapes of Wrath,” and followed it all the way to Texas. I-40 has replaced, covered or bypassed Route 66, which no longer officially exists. But long, desolate stretches of the historic and culturally powerful road still parallel the interstate. Old Route 66 comes back to life when it becomes the main street of traveler-centric desert towns like Gallup, Winslow, Kingman and Winona. Jazzman Bobby Troup made those dusty places hip & famous forever with the lyrics of his swinging 1946 hit “Route 66,” which Nat King Cole sang first and the Rolling Stones, John Mayer and dozens of others have covered.

  If any road in America deserved to be worshipped, it was old Route 66. Starting in the 1930s, and until the western interstates were completed in the 1970s, it was the only practical east-west route by car from Chicago to L.A. Route 66 made it possible for migrants of every socioeconomic class to reach for the golden promises of California, not just the desperate migrants in the "The Grapes of Wrath."

  Long before national chain motels, restaurants and truck stops were invented, the independent motels and mom & pop diners along Route 66 allowed truckers and ordinary tourists to cross a thousand miles of desert in comfort and safety. Like a long, thin travel theme park, the road was lined with wacky restaurants, wild Art-Deco architecture, reptile farms and motel rooms made out of teepees. Neon signs in small towns like Gallup, Grants and Tucumcari lit up the desert sky all night.

  I had been on parts of Route 66 a dozen times. The first time was in the summer of 1974, when I was a free but poor divorced bartender/weekly newspaper associate editor in Cincinnati. I was feeling deprived because I’d never been west of Chicago. I had a few hundred bucks to my name and one credit card with a $500 limit, but my younger brother Paul and I decided it was time to tour the Wild West in my tinny 1972 Datsun 510.

  Paul was 19. I was 26. We did what tens of millions of young Americans with two or four wheels and no serious responsibilities had done before and since. We just went. For a bunch of reasons having to do with a family vacation and returning my kids to my ex-wife in Philadelphia, we started in Canada near Buffalo and drove to Philly. From there it was on to Chicago, Denver, Yellowstone, San Francisco, Yosemite, L.A./Newport Beach, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and back to Cincinnati.

  We didn’t log our mileage, but Google Maps says Paul and I traveled 6,400 miles. It seemed much longer at the time, mainly because Nixon and Congress had imposed their idiotic 55-mph slowdown on the country. Our cross-country drive wasn’t very comfortable in a little Japanese bug with no AC, but we thought we were traveling in style because the front seats folded back and we could sleep in the car.

  We were totally unequipped for life on or off the road. We didn’t own a tent or a sleeping bag. We slept in the car a lot. That’s also the time I slept on top of the picnic table in Nevada. Our great adventure lasted a month. All we had to guide us, besides the setting sun, was a single Rand McNally road atlas. We felt like Lewis & Clark every time we turned a bend and didn’t care what we ate or where we slept.

  Of course, we had a blast. We chased the Holy Trinity of the American road – girls, music and beer. We were so happy to be totally free and exploring the West for the first time we didn’t notice we were essentially two bums in a car. In San Francisco, wh
ere two of my friends from Cincinnati flew out to join us, we sat on a wall in the sun in Ghirardelli Square with our shirts off next to several cold six-packs of Coors. We thought we were in heaven and for an afternoon we were.

  As Easterners, Paul and I were blown away by the West’s open spaces and awesome beauty – at first. By the time we hit Yosemite National Park, we had overdosed on big sky, natural wonders and official scenic overlooks. We cynically dubbed the waterfall at Yosemite “Ho Hum Falls” and made fun of the camping/hiking ethos, then set out for Los Angeles, a tasteless and ugly place we four spoiled brats agreed would benefit from a 9.0 earthquake. Little did I know that two years later I’d be living in downtown Hollywood and raving about L.A. and its free and open lifestyle.

  We finished that 1974 trip the same way Steinbeck finished his 1960 trip – with a non-stop dash for home. We drove to Cincinnati from Las Vegas, with a quick detour to the single most impressive work of Mother Nature on the continent, the Grand Canyon. Four guys packed into a Datsun 510 for almost 30 straight hours is not something I’d ever want to do again. And it was no way to appreciate legendary Route 66, which had not yet been reduced to ruins, relics and memories.

  The French Attack en masse

  East of Barstow, I came upon the first and only serious traffic accident of my entire trip. Minutes earlier a sleek new silver tractor-trailer had rolled on its side, crushing the nose of its cab and exposing its pristine underside and 18 wheels to the desert blue sky. As a state cop kept the trickle of I-40 traffic moving, the driver, though unhurt, walked down the road with an anguished look on his face and both hands on top of his head. Clear day, good road, no traffic – the poor guy must have fallen asleep or been texting his girlfriend.

  Shortly after that rare 30-second burst of interstate excitement, I exited at Newberry Springs to get on a stretch of old Route 66. The sign said I was on the National Trails Highway, which has been Route 66’s official name since 1985. When I saw the ruins of a small boarded-up motel, I pulled over and parked, which is always easy to do in the desert. “Free TV” was written on a tall “M-O-T-E-L” sign whose neon hadn’t glowed in many years. It would be the first of a hundred dead Eisenhower Era motels, roadside cafes and gas stations I’d pass in the next two days – road kill from when the interstate made Route 66 and its commerce obsolete.

  After photographing the motel’s sun-baked corpse, I turned around and had the strangest experience of my trip. A gleaming white bus with "Divine Transportation" written on its side had pulled into the parking lot behind me and was disgorging passengers. People in shorts and T-shirts were walking right out into the middle of the highway, where they stood on the yellow centerline in threes and fours and took pictures of each other.

  Employing my best journalism skills, and despite the usual language barrier, I quickly learned they were French tourists – cultural pilgrims, really. They had come to stand on old Route 66’s pavement and visit the world-famous Bagdad Cafe, which I had never heard of before and hadn't noticed was 100 yards behind me.

  Fifty-two French people, all from Marseilles, had traveled halfway around the world to come to the Bagdad Café. As apparently every hip French person knows, the little red restaurant with the pointy brown shingled roof is two culturally important things in one: It's a shrine to the memory of Route 66 and it bears the name of an independent West German/American movie comedy that became a cult classic in Western Europe.

  I had never seen or even heard of the movie. That was particularly embarrassing, since I was working for the Sunday entertainment section of the L.A. Times in 1987 when “Bagdad Café’ came out. Nominated for an Academy Award, featuring Jack Palance, "Bagdad Cafe" is described by the International Movie Data Base as a film about "A lonely German woman" who "ends up in the most desolated motel on Earth and decides to make it brighter."

  When I got back to Pittsburgh I watched it. It wasn’t a typical Hollywood hack job, which made sense because it was made by a German, Percy Adlon. It was strange and slow at times, but also funny, sweet and magical. Most Americans would hate it because it involves no car chases or vampires. But it was easy to see why it was so beloved by the nutty French.

  The movie was shot on location in Newberry Springs in the Sidewinder Café – what the current Bagdad Café was called in 1987. The original Bagdad Café was actually in the town of Bagdad itself, 50 miles farther east on Obsolete 66. It and the town both turned to dust in the late 1960s after Interstate 40 passed them by. But those trivial realities don't matter to thousands of Western Europeans. They come to the desert by the busload to buy T-shirts, sweatshirts and caps at an oasis of American road culture that's wallpapered to the ceiling with movie posters, banners, flags and thousands of letters and postcards scrawled in a dozen languages.

  Bagdad Cafe

  Andree Pruett and her staff were waiting for the French mob with a lunch of chicken, mashed potatoes and broccoli. Pruett, in her mid-60s, is the owner of the Bagdad Café. She and her late husband Harold moved from California’s biggest desert town – Los Angeles – to one of its tiniest, Newberry Springs. She came to write. He came to raise ostriches. But with no restaurant experience they bought the Sidewinder Café on a whim and a prayer in the mid 1990s, renamed it the Bagdad Cafe and figured out how to attract tourists from around the world.

  Foreigners were Pruett’s main customers, especially the French. “They’re wonderful people,” she said, carrying six plates of food into the jammed dining room. “My doors are open because of them. Without the French I’d be almost out of business.”

  About 75 percent of Bagdad Café’s pilgrims come from France and its former colonies, with 20 percent from the rest of the world and only 5 percent from the United States. The French, Italians and Portuguese flock to the cafe year round. Ten to 15 tour buses arrive each day between March and October, her peak season. Japanese come. Brazilians, also big fans of the “Bagdad Café” movie, usually arrive on motorcycles.

  Watching Pruett in action was a seminar in the American work ethic Steinbeck worried was disappearing in 1960. On a lovely Sunday afternoon she was working her tail off, delivering food, running the register, helping people with T-shirt sizes, being pestered by me. She was the boss and she was doing most of the sweating.

  Her small place was packed and noisy with the sound of French. Yet she was never rude or brusque to her employees or her customers, whose language was as alien to her as Greek. Pruett wasn’t getting rich, which was too bad because she deserved to be. She had built a world-famous small business in the middle of the desert. Literally and literally. How’s that for good old entrepreneurship and American knowhow, Mr. Steinbeck?

  Pruett was unique, but then again she really wasn’t. She was one of more than 8 million American women who owned a small business. Unlike Steinbeck, whose contact with women was mostly limited to irritable waitresses and housewives, on my trip I met dozens of women who owned and operated their own restaurants, coffee shops, motels, bookstores and cinnamon bun shops. Women owned a third of American businesses in 2010, up dramatically since 2000, and their numbers were increasing. They were important job creators and a major source of growth for the economy, but most of them were plain nuts. You had to be nuts to start a small business because running one will drive you crazy.

  The French mob belied all of their vicious but largely accurate ethnic stereotypes. They were well-behaved and enthusiastic guests. A mix of old and young, couples and groups, they waited patiently in the café dining room, then wolfed down their meals. If they didn’t like American road food, they didn’t show it.

  As the French took turns posing with a genuine “California US Route 66” highway sign and tried on any piece of clothing with a “66” on it, I ate my free lunch with Sonia the Tour Guide. Sonia was the only French-English-speaking person within 40 miles. She explained that for Europeans the Bagdad Cafe/Route 66/Jack Kerouac/"On the Road"/“Grapes of Wrath”-thing is all part of the American myth.

  Sonia the
Tour Guide.

  The “Bagdad Café” movie was a huge hit throughout Western Europe. Before her tour group arrived at the cafe, Sonia said, “They had a very special experience viewing the movie and hearing the soundtrack. For them it is part of the American Dream.”

  Sonia was French Canadian, 30-ish, good-natured and a resident of L.A. She had been to the Bagdad Cafe 40 or 50 times, which must be the world record. The cafe was the first stop on a popular 10-day tour that began in Los Angeles, ended in San Francisco and included the Grand Canyon, Death Valley and Vegas. At the risk of being arrested, Sonia agreed to ethnically profile her clients. “The French were tough but they adapt. The Italians are honeymooners and are always arguing. The Portuguese are very conservative. I prefer the French people,” she admitted chauvinistically. “They are more open and flexible.”

  In the Bagdad Café’s parking lot, as the French were reluctantly boarding their bus, Sonia the Tour Guide pointed to the derriere of my red RAV4 and announced something, in French, of course. All I could make out was the word "journaliste." A dozen men and women with cameras crunched down around the back of my car and began taking close-ups.