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

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Saturday, Dec. 3, 1960 – Pelahatchie, Mississippi

  Steinbeck mails two postcards from Pelahatchie, Mississippi, on U.S. Route 80. One is to his agent, Elizabeth Otis, and one is to his editor, Pascal Covici. They’re the last reliable evidence of where he was and when. He takes U.S. 80 into Alabama and picks up U.S. Route 11, which runs northeast along the Appalachian Mountains toward New York.

  Skipping Jim Crow

  At Vicksburg I caught I-20 and headed east past Jackson. I took a token spin on old U.S. Highway 80, the parallel pre-interstate road Steinbeck would have used. It was somewhere on U.S. 80 that Steinbeck claimed he picked up the young Negro student hitchhiker “with a sharp face and the look and feel of impatient fierceness” who thought Martin Luther King’s peaceful methods were taking too long.

  U.S. 80 was still basically in the same primitive condition it was before being bypassed in the 1960s by Interstate 20. Like so much of the Old Steinbeck Highway, it was a rural, often shoulder-less, two-lane people-killer strung with a few little towns.

  I really didn’t need to risk my life again on U.S. Highway 80. I had driven it in the spring of 2009, when I was chasing the ghost of a Pittsburgh star-reporter. Ray Sprigle’s daring journalism is forgotten. But in 1948, 13 years before the shocking best-selling book “Black Like Me,” Sprigle disguised himself as a Negro and spent 30 days traveling around the Jim Crow South in a car. He didn’t travel alone or pretend to. He was guided by a black man, John Wesley Dobbs, a prominent 66-year-old civil rights leader from Atlanta and Maynard Jackson’s grandfather.

  Sprigle, who was 61, returned to Pittsburgh and wrote a blistering 21-part newspaper series for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His series – an extended opinion piece, really – shocked the North, enraged the South and ignited one of the first debates in the national media about ending segregation. If Sprigle had worked for a New York paper, Spencer Tracy would have played him in a movie 60 years ago.

  Steinbeck saw little of Mississippi, where King Cotton and the apartheid of Jim Crow were solidly entrenched in power. In 1960, as in 2010, Mississippi was the poorest state in the union. It was doubtless the most racist too. Only 5 percent of blacks dared to register to vote in 1960. About 45 percent of the population was black then, compared to 38 percent in 2010, yet its public schools would be some of the last in the country to be desegregated.

  At dusk, 26 miles east of Jackson, I stopped on U.S. 80 to get a picture of the yellow brick Pelahatchie post office, where Steinbeck’s cards to his agent and editor had been postmarked Dec. 3, 1960. Then I rejoined I-20 and drove hard to Tuscaloosa, home of the University of Alabama. While the Crimson Tide football faithful were still crying in their beers over their loss to LSU, I was already asleep in the last Wal-Mart parking lot of my travel career. Ten was enough for any grown man. The temperature overnight fell to 37 degrees, coldest since North Dakota, but I had six good hours of sleep and didn’t even notice whether the parking lot’s lights were on.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Sunday, Dec. 4 to Dec. 6, 1960 – The Home Stretch

  Steinbeck meets U.S. Highway 11 in Alabama and slants through Tennessee and parts of Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland into Pennsylvania at Carlisle. He takes the PA Turnpike to New Jersey and arrives in New York City at the Holland Tunnel. In the book he says he’s denied entrance to the tunnel because of the propane tank aboard Rocinante. He takes the Hoboken Ferry, gets lost in evening rush hour in downtown Manhattan and has to ask a cop for directions to his house. In nearly 11 weeks, he had touched 33 states and driven about 10,000 miles.

  You Can Get Home Again

  Angling northeast on U.S. Route 11, shadowing the Appalachian Mountains, Steinbeck pushed hard for home. He says he drove in a blur, stopping only to sleep for a few hours at a time. The last town he mentions in the book is Abingdon, Virginia, 650 miles short of New York City. Abingdon is where he says his trip in search of America ended in a kind of road-weary amnesia, but of course it had effectively ended seven weeks earlier in Seattle. No matter.

  My best guess is that Steinbeck staggered into New York City on about Dec. 5 or 6. He had been gone roughly 75 days. He had racked up about 10,000 noisy, butt-busting miles in his beloved Rocinante, which he quickly sold. He was out of gas physically and psychically. He had gone in search of America and its people and knew he had found neither.

  My trip, like Steinbeck’s, ended with an almost desperate final push. Sunday was an all-day ordeal from Tuscaloosa, paralleling U.S. 11 on the interstates through Tennessee, Virginia and then north on U.S. 19 and I-79 to my house. The final hours through West Virginia on Sunday night would not end. I blasted my radio and used it as the soundtrack as I videoed the bare black and white highway racing away from me.

  Thirty minutes from home on I-79 I came around a curve at 65 mph and almost crashed head on into a deer standing on the centerline like a statue. At last, at 1:30 in the morning, at the end of a 19-hour and 809-mile day, I entered my dark house and carefully slipped into bed with a sleeping woman I assumed was my wife.

  Except for the furious pace and the low-end lodging arrangements, my trip was remarkably unremarkable. Not counting pit stops in Pittsburgh and San Francisco, I had spent 38 pleasant, sock-free days on the road. The only rain was a two-day deluge in New Hampshire and Vermont. I touched 26 states with my feet or tires and drove 11,276 roundtrip miles – an average of 296 miles a day. I filled every page, front and back, of 10 Professional Reporter’s Notebooks. I took 3,100 photos and several hours of HD video.

  I had joked before I left that to add some thrills to my trip I hoped to be abducted by aliens in Maine. I didn’t get so lucky. But I also didn’t get shot in the boondocks or mugged in the cities. Of course, I never expected to have any trouble from my fellow countrymen and didn’t plan for it. Long after I was home, someone asked what I had taken with me for protection. A handgun? A knife? A baseball bat? Mace?

  It was a shocking question. Maybe it was because I had traveled around the USA so much. Maybe it was because as a journalist I was used to being among strangers in strange rural and urban places. Maybe it was because I knew how badly the news media sensationalize and distort reality, exaggerating the level and scope of crime and making an incredibly safe country seem much more dangerous than it really is. Maybe it just was because I’m nuts. But before and during my trip, I never once gave self-defense or my own safety a thought. The only criminal activity I encountered was my own. I broke a lot of traffic rules and slept in places I shouldn’t have, though I had just one parking ticket to show for my interstate crime spree.

  Meanwhile, my RAV4 performed perfectly, got 24 miles per gallon with a cargo pod on the roof and didn’t have a ding on it. I don’t know what Steinbeck’s luxe quest for America cost him, because he left no records. Maybe the receipts are stashed in the archives at Viking Press/Penguin awaiting some curious retired scholar. Gas was by far my major expense. At an average of $2.80 a gallon, 469 gallons totaled $1,313.

  Sleeping in my car and eating only two meals a day kept expenses down. The tab for 38 days of basic American road food was $760. Thanks to Wal-Mart’s enlightened sleepover policy, what I thought would be my greatest expense wasn't. Of the 36 nights I needed a place to sleep, I stayed in 16 motels for $936. Of course, to get that number so low meant sleeping in the back of my car 20 times.

  So the big three – Gas, Food and Lodging – totaled about $3,000. Throw in another $2,000 for a new smart phone, phone bills, tolls, interest on my credit cards, blackout curtains, road snacks, plus the depreciation of my car, laptop, cameras and me, and you get an IRS-tidy $5,000 – $687 in 1960 Steinbeck dollars. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette paid me $2,000 for nine Sunday travel articles, which means my adventure with Steinbeck cost about $3,000 net and 43 days of my life. A small price to pay for a once-in-a-lifetime joy ride.

  As for my travel-mate Steinbeck, after 11,276 miles I wasn’t too fond of him or his overrated boo
k. I had grown from feeling like his pal and defender to resenting him for his audacious trickery and deceit. I had learned to trust virtually nothing he wrote in “Travels With Charley.” Yet as I ended my easy road trip I had to give him some major props. The lying bastard blazed the Steinbeck Highway. He did his 10,000 miles. He did them in a truck on roads that were narrower, slower, bumpier, more crowded and infinitely more dangerous and less hospitable to travelers than mine were. And he did it with a talking French dog.

  21 – America the Mostly Beautiful

  If I found matters to criticize and to deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself. If I were to prepare one immaculately inspected generality it would be this: For all of our enormous range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart.

  – “Travels With Charley”

  "Big."

  "Empty."

  "Rich."

  "No change since 1960."

  Long after the old farms and new forests of New England disappeared in my rearview mirror, I was still scrawling those words in the notebook on my knee. Big, empty, rich and unchanged – that's a pretty boring scouting report for the America I “discovered” along the Steinbeck Highway. You can add a bunch of other boring but fitting words – “beautiful,” “safe,” “friendly,” “clean,” and “quiet.”

  Like Steinbeck, I didn’t see the Real America or even a representative cross-section of America, neither of which exists in the real world anyway. The ribbon of the country I cut through was skewed geographically, demographically, socially, politically and economically. Because I went almost exactly where Steinbeck went and stopped where he stopped, I saw a mostly White Anglo Saxon Protestant Republican America, not a diverse, politically correct Obama one. Mostly rural or open country, it included few impoverished or crime-tortured inner cities and no over-developed/underwater suburbs.

  Steinbeck was depressed by the America he found. I “re-discovered” the country I already knew existed from having done 35 years of drive-by journalism. America wasn’t perfect and never was. It had the usual ills that make libertarians sick and will never be cured – too many government wars overseas and at home, too many laws, politicians, cops, lawyers, do-gooders and preachers.

  Thanks to the bums and crooks in Washington and on Wall Street who co-produced the Great Recession, a larger minority of my fellow Americans than usual was suffering from too much Big Government in their lives. I felt their pain more than most. Little Government was way too big for me.

  America the Beautiful was hurting. But it was not dead, dying or decaying. The land I speed-toured in the fall of 2010 was not the broken and doomed one described in the daily headlines of the Drudge Report and the New York Times. There were no signs the country was in danger of becoming a liberal or conservative dystopia.

  America hadn’t been ruined by too many illegal immigrants, too many rich people, too many poor people, too many non-white people, too many imports, too many cars or too many carbon emissions. The U.S. of A., as always, was blessed with a diverse population of productive, wealthy, generous, decent people and a continent of gorgeous natural resources.

  Everyday I was surrounded by undeniable evidence of America’s underlying health and incredible prosperity. Everywhere I went people were living in good homes, driving new cars and monster pickup trucks and playing with powerboats, motorcycles and snowmobiles. Roads and bridges and parks and main streets were well maintained. Litter and trash were scarce. Specific towns and regions were hurting, and too many people were out of work, but it was still the same country I knew.

  I didn’t seek out poverty or misery or pollution on my journey, and I encountered little of it. The destitute and jobless, not to mention the increasing millions on food stamps, on welfare or buried in debt, were especially hard to spot in a generous country where taking care of the less fortunate is a huge public-private industry – where even the poor have homes, cars, wide-screen TVs and smart phones.

  I saw the familiar permanent American eyesores – homeless men sleeping on the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco at noon, the sun-bleached ruins of abandoned gas-stations on Route 66, ratty trailer homes parked in beautiful locations surrounded by decades of family junk. I saw Butte’s post-industrial carcass, New Orleans’ struggling Upper Ninth Ward and towns that could desperately use a Japanese car plant.

  But the country as a whole was not crippled or even limping. The Great Recession was nothing like the Great Depression, when unemployment topped at 25 percent in 1933 and was still at 17 percent in 1939. In the fall of 2010, nine in 10 Americans who said they wanted jobs still had them. The one in 10 who were jobless had 99 weeks of extended unemployment benefits and more than 90 percent of homeowners were still making their mortgage payments.

  Most of the states I shot through had unemployment and foreclosure rates well below the national averages. I didn't visit the abandoned neighborhoods of poor Detroit – future urban farmland where trees were taking root on the roofs of vacant homes the city didn’t have enough money to demolish.

  I didn’t see battered Las Vegas, where 14.5 percent of the people were unemployed and one in nine houses – five times the national average – had received some kind of default notice in 2010. But I spent almost two weeks in the Great Train Wreck State of California, where jobless and foreclosure rates were higher than the national average and municipal bankruptcies loomed.

  America from sea to shining sea was noticeably quiet – as if half the population had disappeared. From Maine to Oregon – despite perfect fall weather – public and private golf courses were deserted. Ball fields were vacant. Parks and rest stops and beaches were barely populated.

  Except for metropolises like Manhattan and San Francisco and college towns like Missoula and Northampton, people in throngs simply did not exist. I went through small towns that looked like they’d been evacuated a year earlier. America’s kids apparently were indoors playing videogames or downloading porn, because they sure weren’t riding bikes or playing ball in the streets or parks.

  Every day I was reminded of a truth that the national media never emphasize or even bother to mention. It’s so obvious, it’s embarrassing to have to write it down: Everyplace I went was unique and different. America is not one big country with its economic or social problems or its ethnic groups – or anything else – distributed evenly from New York to L.A.

  The “America” the national media talks about all the time does not exist. There is no “Average America.” America is many little “americas,” each with their own local or regional realities and problems and strengths and mix of people. It always has been true and always will be.

  Take race, for example. About 12.6 percent of all Americans are black. Yet there is only one state – Ohio with 12.04 percent – that has a black population near that “average” number. And within Ohio, there are no “average” counties, either. Only seven of 88 counties have black populations of 12.6 percent or more. For 26 counties, the figure is 1 percent or less.

  Only 17 states have a black population higher than the national percentage of 12.6 and 33 states – including most of those along the Steinbeck Highway – have 12 percent or less. Of all the states I spent more than 12 hours in, only Louisiana (32 percent), New York (15.1) and Illinois (14.9) had significant black populations.

  And in New York and Illinois, like Ohio and most states, most black people were concentrated in one or two major cities or counties. Upstate New York was as white as the 1 percent black states – New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maine, Idaho, Vermont and Montana, the whitest of the w
hite.

  The Hispanic or Latino population, now 16 percent of Americans, is even more disproportionately distributed/concentrated. More than half live in just three states – California, Texas and Florida. More than three-quarters of America’s 50 million Hispanics live in just eight states, and within those states they are concentrated in cities like Chicago and New York. Of the states Steinbeck and I traveled, those with Hispanic populations above 16 percent included California (37 percent), Texas (37 percent), Arizona (30 percent), New York (17 percent) and the highest of all, New Mexico (46 percent).

  So forget “Average America.” It doesn’t exist and never did. And therefore it is literally true that except for a few macro-things like the declining value of the dollar, there is no such thing as “a national problem.” All problems, like all politics, are local.

  Whether it’s unemployment or foreclosures, murders or illegal immigrants, traffic fatalities or drug gangs, racism, bad schools, water shortages, droughts or floods, heat waves or cold waves, not every region, state, county, city or town suffers equally or necessarily at all. Even in a Great Recession, many places across the country were never touched by an economic cyclone the national media would have you think had flattened every square mile of America evenly.