This is the last in a series of articles by staff writer Chuck Haga, who is retracing the route taken by author John Steinbeck in 1960 that led to the book “Travels With Charley.”
It was 9:30 a.m. when I pulled into the parking lot at Victory Baptist Church in Maggie Valley, N.C., and asked some men outside when the service would begin.
“You’re just in time,” one of them said. He could have added “for the works.” About three hours later, the Rev. Johnny Swanger smiled through his tears and said, “I’m going to let you go now.”
Nearly every Sunday on this journey, I’ve joined a local congregation somewhere to listen for politics in their songs and sermons, to see what they post in their bulletins and foyers. But such detached eavesdropping is not possible in a Southern Baptist church where the pastor believes his flock needs reviving and he’s brought in an evangelical circuit-rider to do the job.
The guest preacher was Steve Gunter, pastor at Balsam, N.C. His is the cadenced, whisper-and-shout style of the TV evangelists. He paced, threw out his arms and three times fell to his knees, and when he hit his stride he added a syllable to the last word of each sentence: Jesus-uh. Sinners-uh. Everlasting fire and damnation-uh.
If you were with him, you would say he was unusually gifted and certainly filled with the spirit. Even if you held back, distrusting the style, you still would say he was very good. When he finished, much of the congregation was sobbing, and many had come forward at his call to confess and pray with him, through verse after haunting verse of “Just As I Am.”
“Didn’t I tell you he could preach?” Swanger asked, wiping at his own tears.
It was powerful stuff. It was old-time religion. And it was politics.
“In terms of prosperity and material things, we’re doing OK here in Maggie Valley,” Swanger said later. “But like the rest of the country, morally and spiritually we’re way down. We need revival.
“When I was a boy, everything in this community revolved around the church. That’s not the case anymore. We’ve drifted away from God. We need revival in this nation, a spiritual reawakening, or we are going to be in real trouble. Jesus needs to be No. 1 in every area of our life.”
But what of separation of church and state?
“I believe in that,” he said. “But I don’t believe in separation of the state and the moral values this country was set up on. We’ve just carried it so far.”
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Bill Fuchs handed me a bowl and a magnifying glass on a leather strap that looped over my neck, and by a stream that gurgled out of the Great Smoky Mountains above Cherokee, N.C., he explained our field trip mission. “Let’s turn over some of these rocks in the stream and see what we find,” he said.
Fuchs wears the badge and neat green uniform of a National Parks Service ranger. He also wears the whimsical-curious smile of a man who has studied biology and geology and likes to show other people the living undersides of rocks.
After a few tries, I had a bowl full of trophies. Fuchs examined my critters and smiled. “Very good,” he said. “That’s a caddis fly larva and its house. They build little homes of rock or twig and attach them to rocks in the stream, and then they weave nets and hold the nets out with their legs to catch food that comes by with the current.”
There were mayfly larvae and stone fly larvae in my bowl, too, and a tiny bloodworm. “These insects are all good indicators of water quality,” he said. “They can’t survive if the oxygen level in the stream gets too low.”
We had started the evening talking about acid rain, chemical pollution discharged into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels. “It’s a very serious threat to our forest,” he said. Aphids, drought and natural evolution of the forest have cut into the high-elevation spruce trees, too, so it’s difficult to measure exactly. “We don’t know how it will affect the soil and the water, and then the plant and animal life. Water doesn’t pool up here, and that may keep it from concentrating. Further north, you have sterile lakes in some places.”
After his journey through America in 1960, John Steinbeck wondered “whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness.” In 1986, the Environmental Protection Agency said Americans were tossing 133 million tons of garbage a year, more than 1,100 pounds per person. The EPA said that was an increase of 40 percent since 1960.
In Louisiana, a carload of teen-agers dumped beer cans and food wrappers almost at my feet and laughed as they sped away. In Oregon, volunteers on an early morning sweep of the ocean beach told me they collect 25 tons of debris during a fall cleanup each year, plastic bottles and mesh and six-pack yokes that trap and kill birds, turtles, seals.
And there is the litter of noise and garish confusion on our city streets, the unrelenting war tempo of our highways, the ironic stress of traffic jams in our parks. More than 10 million people visited the Great Smokies last year. It’s a big place, but not that big.
People may care deeply about waste and poisons and the loss of tranquility, but their own economic interests are more likely to decide their votes. Mike Ogden, a computer technician for the Tennessee Valley Authority in Chattanooga, said he worries about acid rain and whether his 2-year-old daughter, Melissa, will enjoy the mountains as he has. “There’s a coal-fired steam generating plant not far from here that they say is the second-worst polluter in the country,” he said. “That goes right into the Smokies. It doesn’t seem that they’re doing anything about it.”
But Ogden strikes a different tone when he explains why he will vote for George Bush. “Everybody around here is in pretty much an entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. He supplements his paycheck by making woodcrafts at home, and his wife, a systems analyst, “has a little business on the side, hiring out word processors. A lot of the people we know have something on the side. We don’t want the Democrats or the government coming in and imposing even more regulations and taxes on us.”
People want to be left alone, either to thrive or to try to survive. In Rising Fawn, a hamlet in northwestern Georgia, store clerk Lane Tatum, 25, sounded almost eager for hard times. “If we had to go through a Depression, I think people in Rising Fawn would do real well,” he said. “Everybody knows how to hunt. We had 40 hogs when I was growing up. I learned all that first-hand.”
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Steinbeck traveled at a time when Nikita Khrushchev was banging his shoe on a United Nations desk, blustering and threatening. Americans were tired of always reacting to the Soviets, always being on the defensive. When I asked how our relations are – people rarely brought it up themselves – there have been two basic responses.
“When I was in the eighth grade, I made a science project that was a little bomb shelter, built to scale,” said Peesy Ferrari, a medical secretary in Portland, Maine. She laughs about it now, how it had “little bags of flour and sugar and stuff,” but she remembers feeling scared as she built it. “I’m probably still distrustful of their government, but I’m very sympathetic to the people. They’re caught in the middle just like we are.”
Fred Eason, a Chicago steelworker, union member and Democrat who voted twice for Ronald Reagan, hadn’t decided in late September whether he would return to his old party. “I’ll say this about Reagan,” he said. “He got the Russians – I won’t say scared of us, but he got the Russians to where we could deal with them. I mean, the Russians destroying missiles? Wow.”
Whether we are more or less secure today from Soviet attack or bullying, the signs of our internal insecurity are everywhere. A sampling from my log: In Maine, the state police traded in their six-shot revolvers this fall for 9 mm semiautomatic pistols to defend themselves against criminals with increasingly sophisticated weapons. Near Cleveland, two people were shot in separate incidents when guns concealed in women’s purses accidentally discharged. In Detroit, a man recovering from a gunshot wound was shot again and killed as he lay in his hospital bed.
When I was in Seattle, somebody fired shots into a crowd of fans outside a rap concert. When I was in New Mexico, a man pulled up to a Santa Fe woman’s car and shot her in the face with a shotgun. In Arizona, I picked up a hitch-hiker, a young man who said he was fleeing violence in Los Angeles. “It’s too wild for me, man. Last night I was at this carnival and they started shooting. The gangs, you know? The Crips and the Bloods. I could hear the bullets go by me.”
Maybe we make too much of it. Tim Fogarty, one of three law students from England whose passage across America intersected mine at a Montana cafe, said the country isn’t nearly as frightening as he expected. “We get all these documentaries – ‘The American dream: Is it over?’ We thought that any time you walk on a city street in America, you’d be attacked by drug addicts.”
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We are one nation, Steinbeck observed in 1960, a new breed despite our disparate origins. And the engines of sameness have continued to work and shape us in the years since. Navajo kids in Arizona wear the same T-shirts and drink the same sugar waters as youngsters in Ohio and Vermont — and draw the same dismayed looks from their grandparents.
“You can drive across the country, coast to coast, and eat the same thing every day, sleep in the same place every night,” said Ed Sedwick, of Jeffersonville, Ind. He was camping in the Great Smokies with his son, Marc. He said it with mild disgust. For others, it is a great reassurance to know where the light switch is, how the cheeseburger will taste.
But you still can find regional diversity in food, manners and language, and in what matters. The sea is important in Seattle, the range in Montana, history in historic towns like Abingdon, Va., where the Civil War doesn’t seem so long ago. In San Francisco, they brought Mayor Cesare Compart of Genoa, Italy, over to ride in the Columbus Day parade, but the best part was the St. Mary’s Chinese Girls Drum Corps.
Public radio hires the same bright but slightly goofy sort of announcers everywhere, I found, but it was in California where a woman said, “Well, like, here’s some Renaissance stuff. OK?” For sure.
And I had just learned to say sure – pronounced shoe-wah – for yes on Long Island when I had to switch to ay-uh in Vermont. I learned not to blush when waitresses in Louisiana called me sugar or baby, but I’m still not over being called dear – pronounced de-ah — by older men in Maine.
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All the way, I have wished Steinbeck could be by my side to measure change, and especially in the South. “I faced the South with dread,” he wrote. “When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not welcome witnesses.”
Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s was a tough, sooty steel town, pretty much unknown to the rest of the country until the pitched battles of the civil rights era, and then it was a city of police dogs, fire hoses, church bombings and hate. “We have a pervasive desire to shuck off the image from the 1960s,” said Tom Bailey, 41, managing editor of the local paper. “People here still feel it. They want more than anything else for it to go away and never reappear.”
There has been white flight to suburbs, he said, and school populations reflect that new imbalance. Segregation persists in some private clubs. But the mayor and a majority on Birmingham’s City Council are black, and they work closely with a predominantly white business establishment. Commerce is wholly integrated.
“When you’ve seen how bad it can be, it gives you a special desire to see that it never happens again,” he said. “And it is a different place today. I’m not like my father, and my son isn’t like me. There are racists here, certainly, just as there are any place in the country. But the people by and large have come to an accommodation. You will see things that, if you were to see them with the mindset of the 1960s, you’d think you were in the wrong town. Black and white people do come together socially, and amicably. There are true friendships.”
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People have been remarkably open and friendly. Most of the people I approached had opinions and were willing to share them. I don’t know how to quantify it, but I felt more hope than despair.
But there are deep and disturbing divisions among us over abortion, welfare, the public role of religious faith, the handling of people who break the law. The mood of the country is righteous indignation: Conservatives are feeling righteous, liberals indignant. People in both camps seem too cynical and resentful to move closer together anytime soon.
I drove up onto the Blue Ridge in Virginia and took the parkway north, and there it was full autumn, still pretty but turning cold and bleak fast. Steinbeck pretty much packed it in here, taking the turnpikes home because he was tired and depressed and not seeing anymore. I know the feeling, but I wanted to see Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home.
“My confidence in my countrymen generally leaves me without much fear for the future,” Jefferson wrote in his old age. But Americans walking his grounds last week were skeptical of the people who would lead them into the future. It’s probably unfair, they admitted, but Bush and Michael Dukakis both suffer in a comparison with Jefferson.
Kenneth Mcintyre, a retired college professor from North Carolina, blames Reagan for such cynicism. “We no longer believe that we ought to have intelligent, competent leaders in this country,” he said. “Reagan has talked about government as if it’s a dirty word. He spent eight years talking about getting government off our backs. It’s been eight years of psychological warfare.”
The cynicism extends to the media. At Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., members of the national press corps loitered, visited and read each others’ papers the other day as they waited for Bush to depart on a campaign swing.
How have people reacted to them as they follow the candidates? Mike Sprague, a news agency photographer, cringed at the question. “At one stop, I was standing on a platform and suddenly I was getting hit with pennies, hard candies, whatever people had in their pockets,” he said. “It was like being at a hockey game.”
The vice president arrived at Andrews, shook a few hands and left in Air Force Two for Milwaukee after a boarding as efficient as an Indianapolis 500 pit stop. The national press, about 90 of them, followed, somewhat less efficiently, and i set course for New York and a flight back to Minnesota.
The trip’s statistics: 36 states in 62 days, 11,842 miles, conversations with close to 400 people, one minor accident, no speeding tickets, two parking tickets, no fights, many wrong turns, too many hamburgers, not enough gumbo, three wineries, no jails, lots of laughs, a few tears, many regrets. Chief regret: not having time to linger, to get to know the good people and the best places better, to find out how Jump Off Joe Creek in Washington got its name.
“It’s a formless, shapeless, aimless thing and it is even pointless.” That’s how Steinbeck described “Travels With Charley” to a friend, and I take some consolation in that.