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

  "What's the big deal?" I asked Sonia. "Did you tell them I was a famous journalist or something?"

  "Pas excitement, mon ami," she would have said if she thought I understood four words of her native tongue.

  It turned out the French are not just crazy about Jerry Lewis, Louis Armstrong and American road culture. They also have a thing about our license plates. In France, Sonia explained, automobile license plates are boring and all look the same – like someone’s Social Security number in the USA. To over-bureaucratized French people, America's 50 colorful state license plates were like works of art and they collected photos of them.

  As Sonia stepped onto her bus, which was bound for the Grand Canyon and then Las Vegas, a fresh load of French tourists pulled into the Bagdad Cafe. They weren’t coming for American road cuisine. They were coming for T-shirts and a chance to worship a part of our rich culture that will never die as long as the French stay French.

  Old 66

  East into the flat wide desert I zoomed. In my rearview mirror 20 more people from France were standing in the middle of the road taking pictures of each other. Except for a million scruffy low dirty-green bushes, a string of skeletal telephone poles and a few cinder mountains crawling low on the horizon, nothing but desert lay ahead. There were no cars to meet or pass. There weren’t even any old U.S. 66 signs. They had been swiped by souvenir hunters or taken down by the highway department decades ago.

  I was officially riding the National Trails Highway, but every four miles or so a fading "Route 66" shield was painted in white on the cracked and rutted asphalt. Not one to miss a photo op or a chance to bend a traffic law in pursuit of journalism, I stopped in the middle of the road and parked. Imitating a French tourist, I used my smart phone to take a portrait of myself standing on a Route 66 logo. With my RAV4 over one shoulder and I-40 and its truck traffic over the other, it turned out to be the signature photo of my trip.

  For 28 miles I rode rough old Route 66 as it paralleled I-40. Sometimes I went 75 mph, sometimes 40, when the asphalt was extra bumpy and crumbly. I had never seen a road surface so strangely eroded before – can asphalt rot in the sun? After 30 minutes, and without encountering another car, my joy ride back in time ended at a Dairy Queen/gas station at the I-40 exit for Ludlow, population 23. Ludlow’s motor courts, cafes and shade made it a popular rest stop until the late 1960s, when I-40 turned the town into one of Route 66’s more photogenic ghosts.

  As the sun disappeared I got back on the interstate. Too bad it was getting dark. At Ludlow old Route 66 veered away to the south, curving across the desert floor for 70 miles while I-40 cut straight through the low Bristol Mountains to Arizona. It would have been interesting to track more of the lonely highway that Steinbeck and the rest of the country had to travel in 1960. Not only that, but Old 66 went past the town of Bagdad – or at least past the empty spot in the desert where it and the real Bagdad Café used to be. Before I-40 was built 10 miles north of it in 1972, Bagdad was more than an oasis for travelers. The jukebox and dance floor of the Bagdad Café reportedly made the town of 600 the hottest entertainment spot between Barstow and Needles.

  A lot of cool and tacky things died along old Route 66 because the interstate came and changed everything. But Bagdad – once a prosperous mining and railroad town – didn’t even have a ghost. There was no more there there. The town, its buildings, roads, houses and palm trees had literally disappeared. All that was left was a small sign standing by the railroad tracks that read “Bagdad.”

  I would have liked to have seen that sign for myself, even in the dark, but I was getting itchy. I had turned the far corner on my lap around the USA and I was headed for home. It was Sunday, Oct. 31, 2010. Sag Harbor was 7,265 miles behind me on the Steinbeck Highway. I had seven days, almost 4,000 miles and two more French people to go. I was running two weeks ahead of Steinbeck’s pace. His search for the heart and soul of America, such as it was, effectively ended when he hit Seattle. Then he went on his West Coast vacation for a month. Other than driving his truck back to New York, his iconic journey was over by California. So almost was his book.

  When he says goodbye to his past from the top of Fremont Peak, it is already Page 184 of a 246-page book. Most of the remaining quarter of “Travels With Charley” is padded with, excuse the French, a lot of finely written bullshit. A lovely but longish description of the desert and its secrets. An encounter with two coyotes he decides not to kill. A dumb conversation with Charley at a dubious campout in a canyon near the Continental Divide.

  Steinbeck did only two important things between California and New York City, as far as his book was concerned. He celebrated Thanksgiving at a cattle ranch near Amarillo and he went to New Orleans to witness white mothers protesting outside their newly integrated public school. I was going to visit both places and then bolt for home, as he did.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Friday, Nov. 19 to Nov. 20, 1960 – Flagstaff to Amarillo

  Steinbeck writes in “Travels With Charley” that he drove the last 600 miles to Amarillo on Route 66 as fast as he could. Dejected, he admitted to himself that he was “pounding out the miles because I was no longer hearing or seeing. I had passed my limit of taking in or, like a man who goes on stuffing in food after he is filled, I felt helpless to assimilate what was fed in through my eyes.” He says he camped alone in a canyon near the Continental Divide east of Gallup, New Mexico. It’s possible he spent the night there, but we have only his word for it.

  Racing to Amarillo

  Steinbeck didn’t leave his family cottage in Pacific Grove until Nov. 15, 1960. Elaine flew ahead to Texas. His friend Toby Street rode with him in the truck for four days, then bailed at Flagstaff. Street’s presence is never mentioned in "Travels With Charley." But in 1975 Street told a San Jose State University Steinbeck scholar that his ride-along in Rocinante was far from romantic: “ . . . it wasn’t a very good experience because this trailer … made so much noise. It rumbled so as we went along….”

  Just as Steinbeck raced 2,000 miles from Chicago to meet his wife in Seattle, he raced 1,333 miles across the Southwest to rejoin her in Amarillo. Steinbeck – forlorn and tired of looking for America – writes in “Charley” that he camped out overnight by the Continental Divide near Gallup, New Mexico. If he really did, it would have been the first time he slept in his camper in five weeks, when he was in western Montana in mid-October. He then describes in detail the Thanksgiving bash he celebrated with millionaires at a cattle ranch owned by his wife’s ex-brother-in-law. I hoped to find that ranch when I got to Amarillo, but first I had to traverse the broad vacant states of Arizona and New Mexico.

  At the California line I ignored the night-piercing neon signs advertizing $29.90 motel rooms in Needles, where gas was going for $3.69, exactly a dollar a gallon higher than across the Colorado River in Arizona. I laughed at the $35 motel rooms in Kingman. My goal was the friendly and free Wal-Mart parking lot in Flagstaff, but by 10 I had to give up.

  East of Seligman I pulled off I-40 at Crookton Road, which was also Historic Route 66. Less than an hour short of Flagstaff, I slept like a baby in my RAV4 in a dusty truck turnaround. It was another anti-Wal-Mart parking lot – pitch black except for the flickering lights of trucks hurtling down I-40 and the gentle glare of a few billion stars.

  Sleeping by the side of Route 66 was an American tradition, a lost art. Many a migrant did it on their way to California in the 1930s. So did tourists. An elderly Pittsburgh businessman I knew told me he drove on U.S. 66 to Los Angeles alone as a high schooler in 1935. He took an Army cot with him. When he was tired he just pulled off, set up the cot next to his car and slept in the desert. A zillion other early road warriors did a variation of that kind of “car camping” before Route 66’s commercial amenities caught up with its mostly east-to-west traffic flow. My night by America's most famous road was luxurious by comparison.

  Meteor Crater, Inc.

  An hour before sunrise I crept through downtown
Williams on old Route 66. With two stop signs, a 15 mph speed limit, vintage storefronts and a dozen mom & pop motels, it was another 1960s time capsule. The sacred Number 66 was stamped on everything and glowed from every retail window. I ate my standard egg breakfast in Flagstaff at dawn. I didn’t detour to visit Meteor Crater when I passed its exit 43 miles east on I-40. I had already seen that scary hole in the desert twice. Fifty thousand years old, 4,000 feet wide and nearly 600 feet deep, it’s the best natural attraction on Route 66.

  Amazingly, the crater is not owned by a state, federal or global government. The Barringer Meteor Crater, its real name, is the private property of the Barringer Crater Company, a family enterprise devoted to preserving the site in its natural state, promoting its scientific study and, in the great American custom, making a buck. Anyone disappointed by the magnificent crater – or not suitably terror-stricken by what a 150-foot space rock going 28,600 miles an hour can do to a flat piece of our puny planet – has been on the road too long.

  Central north Arizona is geographically challenged. No wonder Steinbeck had nothing to say about it in “Charley.” Eighty-seven miles east of Flagstaff, 98 miles west of Gallup, 5,000 feet above the sea, it was like I had taken a wrong turn and ended up on Mars.

  At 75 mph I was inching across the world's largest tabletop. Kansas is level, but at least Kansas tilts. North Dakota is big and barren and bad, but at least it had gullies, cows, grass and a third dimension. The brown, endless plateau was so huge its horizons had no mountains. It also had no humans. No water. No soil. No agriculture. No trees. No life. No view. No billboards. Not even a decent stretch of old Route 66 to sell signs and “Welcome to Mars” T-shirts on.

  Traffic was light, but the number of people on I-40 at any given time still had to be far greater than the local populace. It figured that empty/useless north-central Arizona was Navajo Country. Other than a burning star in a cloud-free sky, there were no natural resources to exploit except petrified wood and rocks, which are the same thing.

  It was obviously land nobody else wanted to buy or steal, which explains why the poor Navajo nation got stuck with it. I didn't see any sign of Indians – OK, persons of a non-white color who happen to be Native Americans. But I was a believer in justice, or at least irony and revenge. As I left their plateau I wished the Navajo well. I hoped there was 10 centuries worth of oil and natural gas deposits locked into the shale under their property. And that no government agency held the mineral rights.

  Gritty Gallup

  My journey through the flat high desert ended at Gallup. I was old enough to remember when I-40 just disappeared outside town and all trucks and travelers were forced to run the gauntlet of cheap motels, bars and eateries on old Route 66. That was 1974. Gallup’s main drag didn’t have two McDonald's then, but it does now, plus four interstate exits.

  Steinbeck and Charley hurried through Gallup and the rest of New Mexico on their way to Amarillo. It probably was about five days before Thanksgiving. In 1960 they wouldn't have seen a McDonald's or half of the familiar places I saw, including Sonic, Papa John's and the ubiquitous Subway. Gallup had 14,000 people then. In 2010 it had about 22,000. The city has sprawled west and east into the desert along four-lane Historic Route 66 – not that that matters much when empty land is as cheap as the dry air.

  Most of the traffic and trucks stayed on I-40. Yet gritty Gallup's streets and parking lots were surprisingly busy – almost franticly so. Many were locals. But many travelers also were obviously threading through town – a 10-minute ordeal on old Route 66. Or they were shopping at the Indian jewelry and art stores or grabbing meals at Garcia's or El Rancho, indigenous eateries that will never be confused with a national chain.

  Lodging-wise, Gallup offered several miles of choices. The El Rancho Hotel & Motel, once a getaway for Hollywood actors and their upscale bunkhouse when shooting Westerns in the area, dates to 1937 but has been restored. Its guests no longer include the Marx Brothers, John Wayne and presidents Eisenhower and Reagan, but the traveling masses. Along with Days Inn and LaQuinta were sketchier independent places like the Thunderbird, a roadside dump whose alphabetically disabled sign could only manage an “M” and half an “O” in “Motel.” At $19.95 a night, it still looked overpriced – if it was really open.

  I'm sure the city of Gallup, whose population is a third Latino and a third Native American, had good homes and neighborhoods hiding on its side streets. But there were some awfully shifty-looking trailer homes a block behind Historic 66. And on several sprawling empty lots the desert grasses and shrubs were doing a poor job of hiding years of trash and junk.

  Nothing rusts or biodegrades in the desert. And nothing old or dead seems to get torn down and taken away, just vandalized or ignored. When I stopped at a graffiti-decorated, fairly new gas-station/Indian Market complex on old Route 66 outside Gallup, it was impossible to tell how long ago it had been abandoned. Its plate glass windows and interior had been smashed and re-smashed and bushes two feet tall were growing from cracks in the parking lot’s sandy asphalt. Unless someone burned it to the ground or blew it up, it was another victim of the interstate, slow-cooking in the sun forever.

  Gallup had its own prominent Historic 66 eyesores. A few boarded-up gas stations and restaurants. The burned out hulk of a large cheap motel sitting naked in its parking lot. But if you looked beyond the crappy and the new, you could see Gallup was a living museum, another frozen slice of a travel era everyone imagines was romantic but probably wasn’t.

  Though it would never be called charming, it still had great examples of 1950s/'60s business architecture you'll never see again. It was kind of like what happened in Cuba with 1950s American cars, only in Gallup it was heartless capitalism that had saved the old stuff from destruction, not loving socialism. Despite the “Historic 66” signs, Gallup was a place a stranger didn't feel like staying in too long. It seemed like it could use a good two-day rain, but that was probably true every day. Yet it deserved some credit and respect. It had adapted pretty well to 50 years of change. It was still clearly making a living by pleasing long-distance travelers, which is nothing to be ashamed of.

  On the east end of Route 66, I stopped at a jammed McDonald’s for a hit of coffee and free Wi-Fi. I was the only adult willing to brave the playroom, where dozens of revved-up kids under four were racing around in circles trying to shout each other to death. I lasted half an hour in McScreamland before I broke and headed for Albuquerque.

  In “Travels With Charley,” after Steinbeck "rushed through Gallup in the night," he says he camped overnight in a canyon on the Continental Divide. Steinbeck writes about how bummed out he was that night. Rocinante's little kitchen was a mess. For the last several hundred miles he had just put his foot to the floor and deliberately avoided people. He knew his long trip in search of America and its people had not gone well. He knew he hadn’t been seeing enough, hearing enough, learning enough. "Why," he asked himself, "had I thought I could learn anything about this land?"

  Half an hour east of Gallup, elevation 7,245, I exited I-40 to look at the raggedy and unloved "Official Scenic Historic Marker" for the Continental Divide. It was located near the ruins of what apparently was once the Continental Divide Trading Post. Busy and prosperous when Steinbeck passed by, it had become the overgrown anchor store of another little Route 66 ghost mall.

  As the sun died in the flaming sky behind me, it lighted up cliffs on I-40 that were redder than it was. Running through big dry empty valley after big dry empty valley, I passed Grants, New Mexico, and saw the best state highway sign of my trip – the philosophically ambiguous, “Gusty Winds May Exist.” After it finally got dark, I sailed over the rim of a hill and looked down into a broad valley. Instead of the usual New Mexico nothingness, it was filled with a million lights. It was Albuquerque, a mile-high Route 66 town of 201,000 in 1960 that had since exploded into a city of 545,000.

  Burned in Albuquerque

  I got greedy. Or stupid. And I paid for my mis
takes. During my 150-mile desert cruise to Albuquerque, I did a Hotwire search and found a $56 deal for an unnamed four-star hotel in Albuquerque's Old Downtown. I had visions of staying at a Spanish-style Ambassador East or St. Francis Hotel, the wood and marble joints John, Charley and Elaine Steinbeck favored. Instead Hotwire gave me the modern and sterile and cold Hyatt Regency, which I quickly learned specialized in nickel-and-diming its guests into bankruptcy.

  After sleeping where I had been sleeping, I hardly qualified as a freelance lodging critic for Lonely Planet. But it seemed like I got burned. My Hotwire bargain price didn't stop at $56. First came $13 worth of surcharges and local hotel taxes. Then there was the $16 overnight parking fee, plus a $4 tip to the attendant for parking my car and listening to me gripe.

  Hyatt also charged something like $10 to hook up to their house Wi-Fi. I didn’t need it because my smart phone had a mobile hot spot, but the charge was particularly galling since every mini-mom & pop place I'd stayed in so far included Wi-Fi for free. “Free Wi-Fi” is the “Free TV” and “Free HBO” of the digital age. Less than $90 for a night at a full-service hotel was still a good deal for any normal adult traveler. But I wasn’t normal or adult, plus I was spending my own money not my company’s.