On the eve of the 1960 presidential election, author John Steinbeck set out in a pickup camper with his poodle named Charley to see what he could learn about America. When he returned, he wrote the classic “Travels With Charley.” Staff Writer Chuck Haga is retracing the route to gauge the mood of the country and how it has changed.
John Steinbeck would have understood. I think Charley would have, too, though he’d be less forgiving.
This journey is less than a week old, but I have wanted to quit several times already.
Once was on the Molly Stark Trail in southern Vermont, near the New Hampshire line. It is a stretch of road that wants savoring, but I was rocketing.
I was aiming for the northern tip of Maine, behind schedule already because I had tarried in Connecticut, then in Massachusetts, and I was listening to the radio news. The news was about forest fires in Montana and Wyoming, and that worried me because I’ll be there in a couple of weeks.
And then the news was about tropical storms building off the Gulf Coast and I worried about them, too, and wondered if they would play out by the time I got to New Orleans. And what about early November snow in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia?
Don’t worry about snow or November or Virginia yet, I told myself. That’s two months away, many motels and campgrounds and miles away, more than 10,000 miles.
The vastness of it made me scowl and feel very alone. I wished Charley were along.
But then I rounded a bend, and there on a side road was one of those covered bridges crossing a stony brook, just like in the postcards. And the brook was running as if this were early summer on the Temperance River in northern Minnesota. There was a hedge of old fitted stone along the road, and beyond the hedge some of the sugar maples had started to turn, just a branch or young tree here and there, a blaze-red preview. I slowed. A village came up, one of those villages that look like democracy, and I stopped for coffee. People smiled, and I felt much better.
And I wished again that Charley could be with me, to share the good and to see what’s the same as when he passed through, and what’s different. But mostly I wanted him to keep me from brooding too much. He was good for that.
Charley was a blue-haired French poodle, actually born in France and responsive, according to his master, only to commands in French. He was the rare dog that could manage the consonant “f,” as in “Fffft,” which was his way of saying he had to step outside for a moment.
Charley died 25 years ago. He was buried under a willow sapling outside the Sag Harbor, Long Island cottage he shared with his master and travel companion, John Steinbeck. It was Steinbeck who planted the tree.
“Charley dog died full of years but leaving a jagged hole nevertheless,” Steinbeck wrote to a friend. “He died of what would probably be called cirrhosis in a human. This degeneration is usually ascribed to indulgence in alcohol. But Charley did not drink, or if he did he was very secret about it.”
In the autumn of 1960, as the nation prepared to choose between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, Steinbeck wandered with Charley through more than 30 states. In a made-to-order camper stocked for comfort and company, he stopped at cafes, bars, campgrounds, churches, along meadows and creeks and deep inside forests. He mostly skirted cities and talked mostly with untitled people.
“I just want to look and listen,” he explained to friends before starting out. “I shall take no polls and ask no questions, except ‘How are you?” What I’ll get I need badly — a re-knowledge of my own country, of its speeches, its views, its attitudes and its changes.”
When he came home, the author of “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men” set down his experiences and observations in an introspective journal called “Travels With Charley.”
On this reprise journey, seven elections later, the book will serve as guide, benchmark, prompter and companion.
It wasn’t so different a time. In the fall of 1960, the presidential election was about jobs and taxes. And it was about our relations with the Soviets. Nikita Khrushchev came to the United Nations, took off his shoe and pounded it on a desk.
Another issue in 1960 was how we got along with each other. In cities throughout the South, school systems were under federal orders to desegregate. Marshals escorted black children into schools in New Orleans through gantlets of screaming, taunting white women who came to be known as “the cheerleaders.” Steinbeck was there, close enough to see and feel the hate.
I want to talk to people about their jobs and taxes, the Soviets, and how we get along with each other. I want to ask people how they are. And I want to ask about their children and see what it is in their eyes when they answer – hope or fear or something else.
According to one of Steinbeck’s biographers, “Travels” was Adlai Stevenson’s idea. The former Illinois governor had lost two presidential races to Dwight Eisenhower, but in 1960 he apparently still felt better about his country’s chances than his novelist friend did. Steinbeck was finishing “The Winter of Our Discontent,” a sour indictment of materialism, and in conversations he often carped about a lack of spirit and principle in the land.
Go see the country first-hand, Stevenson advised. It’s really not so bad.
Actually, Steinbeck always had a grudging affection for America. His was a rough and qualified embrace that may have been honest but wasn’t always appreciated. He acknowledged as much in a later work, a series of essays that he said were “inspired by curiosity, impatience, some anger, and a passionate love for America and Americans.”
It’s a unique country, he wrote, shaped as much by our disagreements as by our shared interests, “complicated, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.”
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Sag Harbor, N.Y., is toward the eastern, less congested end of Long Island, about an hour’s drive from the tip at Montauk Point, where the Atlantic meets Long Island Sound and puts on a show.
It would be a better show if you didn’t feel compelled to watch the beach for discarded hypodermics and other medical refuse, the specialty garbage carried in by tides recently.
Homes in Sag Harbor, built in the last century for whaling crews and costing then a few hundred dollars, sell now for millions. But some have gardens with goldfish ponds and falling water.
The harbor marinas are thick with expensive pleasure boats, double and triple deckers, boats with boats on them. Main Street is a line of chowder halls, antique shops and pubs. There’s a lot of knotted rope on the walls, and people wear rubber-soled shoes and sailor caps.
“This entire village was built on whale oil,” said George Finkenor, 71, the village historian. “But they couldn’t very well stick with something that didn’t pay. This is a frugal place.”
So it’s tourism that drives Sag Harbor now. “Our population is about 4,000 people, except in the summer it’s about 18,000. We get a lot from the United Nations, and people from the city who own second homes here. They all seem to want to get out of New York City. I imagine it’s kind of a violent area. I don’t know; I never go there.”
Finkenor knew Steinbeck. “He was a very bluff person, but good-hearted,” he said. He accepted taunts about shaking hands with Franklin Roosevelt, and he was willing to help with the Old Whalers Festival, or to sit with World War II veterans and talk about campaigns he covered as a newspaper correspondent.
And Elaine Steinbeck, his widow, still lives in their cottage by the water. She gave directions and permission to walk the grounds.
“It’s where they started from, you know,” she said. “If you’re going to follow Charley’s route, you ought to come out and see where it began.”
The place is a gentle retreat on a bluff, a low-built cottage with a long screened porch and a large, wooded yard that juts into the bay. At the point sits a tiny, ivy-covered summer house where Steinbeck wrote. There is a plaster unicorn in the yard, and a hammock strung between two sturdy maples. It is a place that can’t have been easy to leave in any September.
“I didn’t want to go,” he confessed in the beginning of “Travels.” “As the day approached, my warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desirable and my dear wife incalculably precious.”
But he went, and not only because he needed to reacquaint himself with the country. There was another reason. Almost 60 years old at the time, recently sick enough to be scared about it, Steinbeck needed reassurance that he was still alive, still able to reach and learn and overcome. “I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment,” he explained. Maybe the trip would kill him, or shorten his life. So be it. “I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.”
A friend said his journey was quixotic. So Steinbeck christened his truck Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse. He laid in 150 pounds of books, a mess of tools and a food larder calculated to get him through any emergency. Wanting to be hospitable as he traveled, he left bare some shelves at a country liquor store in Connecticut.
Wanting to be hospitable, too, I stopped at a Connecticut liquor store. But this store was operated by a man who needs to find another line of work.
“Do you have ice, sir?”
“Ice? No. No ice. Can’t make any money on it. They sell it up the road and I can’t compete with them. And there’s no call for ice. I get maybe five calls a year. I’m not putting in one of those machines for that.”
“Do you take traveler’s checks?”
“Traveler’s checks? No. Not enough money in the till. Wasn’t even going to open today. It’s no good, Tuesdays.”
In my car is a good tent, a warm sleeping bag, enough maps to plan a war, clothes for Billings and Biloxi, a deck of cards and all my Bonnie Raitt tapes, a cookstove and a mess kit that’s been supplemented as need arises on the road.
“I’m looking for a knife,” I told the woman at the antique store in Massachusetts.
She brought out an ancient knife that looked like state’s exhibit A, a long, sharp knife with a stag antler handle. It cost $6.
“Do you collect knives?” she wanted to know.
“No, ma’am. I just need something to slice my tomatoes with.”
She thought that was sweet. But it was still $6. I took it, and it does the tomatoes fine.
To get this journey started proper, we have to back up to Long Island.
The road from the Steinbeck cottage meanders through Sag Harbor and half a dozen other villages, all as neatly lush as oversized country clubs. The villages are separated by the occasional cornfield or potato field or herd of dairy cattle, scenes as pretty and tidy as the villages, and sometimes by a long narrow canopy of tall oaks, still a deep green last week.
There is a brief ferry ride onto Shelter Island and another short ride off, then the big ferry across Long Island Sound, an hour and a half on the water to New London and Groton, Conn., where nuclear submarines are built.
Steinbeck watched the submarines from his ferry deck in 1960 and remembered how during the 40s he and other men on Atlantic troopships knew “the dark things lurked searching for us with their single-stalk eyes.” And, he thought, “now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.”
But Peggy Ferrari felt a different sort of terror as she watched the bulging, unpainted hull of a sub in drydock come into view.
“Can you imagine spending months in one of those things, under the polar ice?” she asked. “I can’t stand to hold my breath under water.”
Steinbeck’s question was “How are you?”
Peggy Ferrari is a medical secretary. Her husband, Jim, is an energy consultant. They’re from Portland, Maine, going home after a week’s vacation on Long Island.
They are in their mid-30s, married 10 years, and they have two children, girls 9 and 6. They describe themselves as optimistic, for themselves and for the country. They expect their daughters will go to college “somehow.” But they confess to being confused by politics, worried about the deficit, disappointed that they aren’t doing better.
“We have two incomes,” Jim Ferrari said, “and I’m in the National Guard so that’s another job. But we never seem to be able to set anything aside. If you had told me 10 years ago the amount of money we’d be pulling into our household now, I’d figure we’d be upper middle class, easily. But it just doesn’t go anywhere.”
They don’t know whom they will vote for.
Even though it took him from the comfort and security of home, Steinbeck loved to travel. “Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle… an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder,” he wrote. And all over America that fall of 1960, he saw the desire in other people’s eyes as they inspected Rocinante and reflected on her itinerary.
I’m seeing it, too.
“Jim and a friend did something like that back in college,” Peggy Ferrari said.
He smiled and so did she as he told the story. “It was in 1973. We were a couple of hippie freaks, long hair and an old Volkswagen, and we decided to hit the road and see the country, camping as we went.
“We went out to the Rockies, to California, down the coast, back through the South. We were on the road about 40 days. What impressed me the most about the country was the vastness of it. And the friendly people. Everybody was so friendly.”
The vastness of it. “Monster America,” Steinbeck called it, and when he stopped in Connecticut in the fall of 1960 and took out his maps and saw how big Maine was, how distant California, how deep the South, he wondered what he had done, and if it was snowing in the Rockies yet.