#1601 John Steinbeck from Somewhere in Maine

Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast. introduction to this week's episode of Listening.

to America. I'm in Bar Harbor, Maine. I'm now in Week 3, just beginning Week 3 of the great John Steinbeck Travels with Charlie tour. Steinbeck said at the beginning of Travels

with Charlie, we do not take a trip, a trip takes us. That certainly is the case, so I've been out for 14 full days, but the first 9 at least were to get to the starting point.

at Sag Harbor. I got to Sag Harbor and touched base there and had a wonderful tour of the grounds and its writing shack, Joyous Guard. It was amazing, thanks to Catherine of Canio's.

bookstore in Sag Harbor. Then, to do this right, you have to take the ferry three times, which.

I did, from Sag Harbor, bounce, bounce, and then a long bounce across Long Island Sound.

to New London, Connecticut. I did that with the rig. It was a little apprehensive, I.

will say. And then went to Kerouac's Grave, which was not on Steinbeck's trip, and I went.

to Walden Pond, which was not on Steinbeck's trip. I'm going to do things that Steinbeck didn't do, because I'm fascinated and I'm on this journey and it's somehow, although it's focused on Steinbeck, for whom I have the greatest respect, it's bigger than that. I.

really see amazing places in America, and so I intend to do it. Anyway, I had a great time at Walden, just spiritual, just amazing. And Kerouac's Grave, I love on the road. It's a book I've read. There are a handful of books I read every couple of years at least.

take a copy of Virgil's Aeneid. He wrote the great epic of Rome. You could take a copy of Virgil's Aeneid and open it at random and put your finger at random on a passage and.

it would speak to you. You would then read it, think about it, meditate about it, absorb it, and interpret it. Your interpretation may vary from time to time and veer from what.

the poet Virgil intended, but that's not necessarily the point. The point is that certain books are so filled with extraordinary insights and provocative and challenging questions that whenever you turn to them at any point in your life, in any mood, they're going to.

speak to you. I think that's certainly true for me of Thoreau's Walden. I think Walden is America's greatest book. Certainly one of the top ten, and, I think, really for me, top one. Not everyone agrees, of course.

This is the second of my conversations with Russ. Russ Eagle, one of my dearest friends, lives in Salisbury, North Carolina. He's a Steinbeck guy. He's writing a book on Steinbeck's.

Cannery Row. He knows Steinbeck's life, biography, the facts of Steinbeck's world. The sequencing.

of his work details that no one else probably knows. Russ is amazing in this regard. He agreed to host some Steinbeck Travels to Charlie tours of me from the Airstreet.

My friends, I'm having the time of my life. I can't tell you just how perfectly grateful I am. Yesterday, I got to see Thoreau's flute. I got to see the green desk. he wrote on.

And today, I've written about Steinbeck and William L. Shirer, who wrote The Rise, and.

Fall of the Third Reich. There's a connection that appears in Travels to Charlie. It turns.

out. they were friends, which I didn't really know until now. So I'm making discoveries.

all along the way. I'm also meeting Americans and others, but mostly Americans, and the casual conversations have been interesting. And in no case have I avoided asking some.

version of, so how do you think we're doing as we get close to the 250th birthday of the?

United States? And people are apprehensive, I can tell you that. But they're not gloomy, but they are exceedingly weary of the situation. You know, an elderly president, a incredibly.

problematic former president, both of them old men, replaying a very old and tired script,

which we've been seeing since 2015,, at least. Most of the country not happy with that choice.

Now things deeply complicated by the protests on our college campuses regarding what's happening on the Gaza Strip. So when you add up all the inflation and the Trump trial over Stormy Daniels, when you add up all the things that are really edgy, the Ukrainian war, the nightmare, the ongoing nightmare of the Trump years, like him or not, the whole business is just so wearying. We're exhausted. We're spiritually exhausted. We're politically exhausted.

want a new narrative. We want to change the channel. Anyway, follow along at ltamerica.org

and at our Facebook, Listening to America site, and at my own Clay Jenkinson Facebook.

site. I'm posting several times a day. I've been doing original drawings, which are being

encouraged. And my friend Nate of Salida, Colorado, has made about a dozen drawings.

of Steinbeck's trip, and they're marvelous. And you'll see the first of them up on the.

Facebook site, ltamerica.

and The Grapes of Wrath. So those are big, bigger books. And then there'll be a couple of smaller pieces, but including Russ's very favorite work of literature, Cannery Row. And then we'll have to go on to wrestle with the big one, East of Eden. But our plan is.

to read through the works of John Steinbeck. I've always wanted to do that. And this seems.

like a perfect time to do it. And I'm learning a lot about Steinbeck by learning a lot about Steinbeck and traveling in his wake and thinking about him now every single day and writing about him every single day and talking with someone who really knows what he's talking about. per this, my friend Russ Eagle. So let's go to the program. Thanks for listening, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I'm your guest host, Russ Eagle. And, as regular listeners to this podcast know, Clay is now on the road pulling the Listening to America Airstream. So this is the second time checked in with him. And I'm going to try to track him down here in a second, see where he is, what he's up to, what he's been doing.

Is that you, Russ?

That's me.

Well, I greet you. I'm right on the edge of Acadia National Park at Bar Harbor in Maine.

All right. So you made it to Maine.

I made it to Maine.

We haven't talked since you were in Iowa, actually. I've followed you on social media, and I know a few things you have done, but how did you get from eastern Iowa to Maine?

So we last talked when I had left Bismarck on the 27th of April. I went to Minnesota, and then Iowa, and then Illinois, and then Kentucky, and Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and.

West Virginia, and finally New Jersey, and New York. And so we last talked when I was in Iowa. Then I went to Illinois along the Illinois River. But the more important next day was at Big Bone, Lick, Kentucky, which is a state historic site. It's where Jefferson convinced Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and George Rogers Clark, separately at different times, to dig for mastodon and mammoth bones.

at Monticello, so I spent a day there. Then I went on to Pennsylvania, and I had been.

sort of calculating when to go through the city of New York. You recall, Russ, that Steinbeck.

was not a big city traffic guy. He didn't like driving in big cities.

Not at all. In fact, he skipped New York the first time and got in trouble when he returned.

Got lost returning, so he says. Anyway, I believe it. I believe it. Anyway, so then I was in.

central Pennsylvania, and I thought, I'm due at the house at Sag Harbor. It's very complex to get an appointment at Sag Harbor, but worth it, believe me. And I had to be there at 1030 the next day, and I thought, there's no way I can get up in Pennsylvania and get across New York City to the end of Long Island. So I decided to barrel through a day preliminary and change my campsite plans, and then I crossed with Rocinante, with the 23-foot Airstream, the George Washington Bridge, at the middle of the day. And I can tell you this, at times I would not have sworn.

in Los Angeles. I lived in Denver. I lived in Oxford and London. But this was a little.

harrowing, because there was no margin for error. And of course, these are New York and New Jersey drivers. They're not the gentle drivers of my home state, North Dakota. So nothing bad happened. I got through it.

Steinbeck had trouble with that sort of traffic in 1960. Minneapolis. I can only imagine 2024.

New York City. Remember, he says in Travels with Charlie that he wanted to see Minneapolis and he particularly wanted to see Golden Prairie, because he liked the name Golden Prairie. Believe me, I've been there. There's nothing particularly beautiful about it. But he wanted.

to see it and he got all flummoxed in Minneapolis and St. Pawn. He said, I never saw the city.

at all. So you got to Sag Harbor. now. There are really two homes. Steinbeck lived in a number of places, but the two homes that seemed most special to him were the 11th Street Cottage in Pacific Grove, which we'll probably talk about later in the year when we get to the Monterey Novels.

I can't wait for you to see it. It's no longer a fishing house. It's been purchased by the University of Texas at Austin. Same people that take care of the archives where you were doing some Steinbeck research about a month ago. And they paid about $14 million for it.

they've changed a number of things. They've tried to keep it Steinbeckian, but they've added some flourishes. The grounds are magnificent. A lovely bookstore owner who was part of the.

project to get it purchased in this way, Catherine, was our guide. I was with my videographer, Nolan. He's since gone back to North Dakota. It's a wonderful, wonderful house. The house is a little smaller than I had thought, but the grounds are way bigger than I had thought.

And he called it Joyous Guard because he was heavily into this project on King Arthur and.

his knights. He was trying to translate a book from Middle English into Modern English. And so everything was Arthurian during this period. And so he called his boat the Fairy Lane, which is a riff on the Morte d'Arthur, this medieval book. And he called his riding shack Joyous Guard, which was the castle that Lancelot in Arthur takes Gwynevere to.

home castle, which was known as Joyous Guard. So that thrilled me. And I think it would

have thrilled you because you really got a sense of him. As you know, he built it so small that visitors would not really find any comfort in it. And, Catherine, our guide, said that, as you probably know, Russ, that he didn't have it. He didn't have it wired for electricity. So when he needed light, he would string electrical cords, long electrical.

cords all the way out from the house. It's it's 30 yards away. So that's a lot of electrical.

cords. But it was great. Yeah, I think his thinking was he wasn't going to put in phone lines, but he also wasn't going to put in electricity, because that would lead to an.

intercom. He wanted total isolation out there. So it's, it's really I mean, it's. you love to go to these places. I love to go to these places, you know, the graves of writers and.

historical figures that I greatly admire, or the houses where certain things were done. But seeing Joyous Guard, this hexagonal riding shack, where he wrote The Winter of Our Discontent, what else would he have written there? Charlie. Parts of it. Yeah.

set of essays to travel with Charlie. So, you know, he did a lot of writing. They have a little stack of pencils. I got one for you. That was.

been especially congested. So he decided to take the ferry. And so I thought, OK, so there are three ferries. The first one takes you from Sag Harbor to Shelter Island. The second one farther along.

Orient all the way across the Long Island Sound to New London, Connecticut. So I made.

sure that they could take a twenty three foot RV and figured out the cost of that, made a reservation. So I had a lot of. I have to say, Russ, I had some apprehension about this.

I just had the. I just had a kind of nightmare that something could terribly go wrong here. But, you know, the first day somehow I forget to put the parking brake on and the airstream goes to the bottom of the sound. I thought maybe of going around again all the way out through New York City and then up to Connecticut. But in the end, I wanted to be true to Steinbeck.

doing it in Steinbeck's fashion. All right. So from Sag Harbor, you next hit the land.

in where? New London. New London, Connecticut. Remember, and he writes about it in Travels with Charlie because he he sees a submarine. It's one of our big submarine bases then, and.

now. And he, he, you have made the case a number of times in our conversations that his his period of reporting World War Two, both in North Africa and in Europe, scarred him, and.

maybe gave him a kind of a PTSD. I think that some of the best evidence is in Travels with Charlie when he says when he saw those submarines, he had kind of a visceral revulsion because.

he remembered ships of soldiers and just innocent people going down in the Atlantic and worrying, when he crossed the Atlantic, that a German submarine might torpedo those.

boats. So it kind of did a PTSD flashback for him. And he and he hated the Cold War.

anyway. As you know, he even talks about it a little bit in his Nobel Prize speech. Right.

And in Travels with Charlie, he describes the bodies of soldiers pulled from the oil slicks for ships and taken down. So, yes, that that had a huge effect on him. So I think.

that that's part of this. And I'm you know, I talked with lots of people on the ferry and I said, is it always this calm? And they said, oh, no, no, no, no. You have no idea how wild this ferry ride can get. And then we went over something called Plum Gut.

about Plum Gut? And I said, no, what's that? She said, well, that's kind of the Bermuda.

Triangle of Long Island. Lots of boats have gone down there. So now I'm shaking. It was really extraordinary. But it got across.

Massachusetts. And my goal for that night rest was to deviate a little from our man Steinbeck, because I wanted to go to Lowell, Massachusetts, up at the top of Massachusetts, for the purpose of visiting the grave of one of my other heroes, Jack Kerouac. And that.

was truly a truly a wonderful and moving experience.

I'd like to hear more about that, but we need to take a short break right now. This is Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson, and we'll be right back.

Jack Kerouac is one of my heroes. He wrote On the Road. It was published in 1957.. He.

wrote a whole series of other books, but that's the one that made him famous, and that's still the most famous of all the books that he wrote. It's a young man's travel book. He hitchhiked.

and he rode the bus, and he slept in bus stations and city parks.

frightened, toes sticking out of the front of your shoes. So to be beat was really to enter a period of severe voluntary poverty and see if you could use your wits to cross the nation. Of course, then there's the search for the American dream and also the search for women, who play a huge role in it. The book is really a book about Neal Cassidy, the famous Neal Cassidy, who in the book is called Dean Moriarty. But anyway, I've taught it many times.

more to, I think, a young man than to a senior citizen, but I've always wanted to go to his.

grave, Russ, and I taught him this last year and did a lot of work on him. So I knew that.

it was in Lowell. I found it and it's like Steinbeck's grave. You and I have been there a couple of times. in Salinas. It has pencils that people leave and lighters and cigarettes.

and badges and little notes and so on. There are some literary pilgrims that go there.

And so I don't think Steinbeck really knew the work of Kerouac. Do you have any sense?

of that? I don't. I don't know that. I think Steinbeck would have admired him. I'm not.

sure he would have liked him, right? Right. I think he would have said, oh, get a life, or, you know, I think he would have found it self-indulgent and I think he would have been a little, you know, he was a pretty open-minded man about lots of things, but I'm wondering if he would have admired the kind of precipitate prose with no punctuation and just writing on a continual scroll and just sort of, you know, what Truman Capote said of it, you know,

that Kerouac claimed, I think it's true that he wrote it on one long sheet of paper and then he rolled it up in the end and took it to a publisher and that he had written it like in a 30-hour high on bennies, on some sort of uppers. Most of that is true. But when Truman Capote heard that he had written Stream of Consciousness without punctuation on the continuous roll, Capote said, that's not writing, that's typing. But I love, I was glad to go and it's surprisingly moving. It's not a very, it's just like Steinbeck's grave in Salinas.

You know, Steinbeck essentially chose his grave to be part of the family cemetery, you know, the Hamilton family from east of Eden. There's one tombstone there that pretty much reads, like, you know, the cast of the book or the cast of the movie. But he also wanted to have that view of Fremont Peak from his grave.

It wouldn't have surprised me if he had been cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific.

Ocean. It wouldn't have surprised me if he had been scattered up on Fremont Peak. His being buried in the family plot in a cemetery in Salinas tells you, in the end, how deeply committed he was to his genealogy and to his family.

And interesting, Kerouac, I think, late in life, retreated out to Steinbeck country and.

spent time in Big Sur.

Tried to dry out in Big Sur. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another one of my heroes, if you've never read his book, The Coney Island of the Mind, great book of Ferlinghetti's poetry, very accessible poetry. Ferlinghetti also owned City Lights Books in San Francisco. I go there every time I'm in San Francisco. It's still an amazing place.

Sur. You know, you've been on that road where that incredibly elegant bridge crosses a chasm.

right there. Amazing bridge.

Bixby Creek Bridge.

Right. And right up that creek was Ferlinghetti's cabin. By now, poor Kerouac was a very serious drunk, an alcoholic, and beginning to make a fool out of himself often and out of creative.

juices. And so he decided to try to dry out by going to Ferlinghetti's cabin. And he lasted about eight days. Then he hitchhiked into San Francisco and did a lot of binge drinking.

with his pals.

Speaking of your heroes, I noticed that you also made it to Walden Pond.

Russ, I've been to Walden many times, but I wanted to go again. You get so close. This is going to be a problem. I think you can sense this. I have so many different interests.

I walked into the interpretive center, and the guy at the desk said, how are you doing?

I said, great. It was a beautiful day. And he said, I think you're that guy. And he recognized my voice from Ken Burns' films. And so it was great.

of Henry David Thoreau. But, as you know, I love Thoreau, and I regard Walden as America's.

greatest book. So I went there and wrote about it. It's on Facebook. And then I've written.

four or five dispatches for the website ltamerica.

Every day, just before we began talking, this is the 11th. And, by the way, it's dusk.

here in this KOA campground in Bar Harbor. There are dogs here tonight and families tomorrow's Mother's Day. And the northern lights may or may not appear here. They were worried about clouds, but it's actually now cloudless to the north. And so maybe I'm in for a spectacular display of the aurora.

Deer Island. I chose not to because he went there sort of as a favor to, as you know,

to his agent, Elizabeth Otis. And it didn't seem to me that it was central to my mission,

but I'm close. So anyway, Thoreau's Walden was fantastic. I went to see Emerson's house. The museum in Concord actually has Thoreau's desk and his flute. So that was another great.

literary pilgrimage. But now I'm back in Steinbeck country, and I'm heading, I'll stay another.

day because I want to see Acadia National Park. You know, he's surprisingly quiet on.

the national parks. He has that one bad experience in Yellowstone when Charlie went nuts over the bears. But that wasn't his focus. And Steinbeck's focus wasn't going to literary.

graves or sites. He was really traveling the roads of America and trying to figure.

out in roadside culture, the mood of America in 1960.

how successful all of that was, but I could see that it would be very easy to lose focus, because there are literally scores of places I would like to see in Maine and New Hampshire alone. And at some point I've got to get on the road West.

Well, just there in Concord and Lexington. I mean, every time you go around the corner, you know, there's the Alcott house or there's the Emerson house. It's just one thing after another.

Yeah. And I did not know about the Concord Museum, but I, when I was at Walden Pond.

Interpretive Center, this man, Kyle, said, Oh, you need to go there. They've got his.

furniture. So I'd never, I didn't know that. It was absolutely, it's first rate, the museum anyway, but his furniture is very, very moving, including an Aeolian harp, which is a stringed.

instrument that the wind plays automatically. The romantics love this because it sort of said that nature is in itself creative and musical. Anyway, that was, that was spectacular. I went to North bridge and watch some school children being told about the shot heard around the world on April 19th, 1775.. Yeah.

Grapes of Wrath was always described as Emersonian preacher. Casey's lines about, you know,

one big soul and that sort of thing. I talked to my daughter, who's in Oxford today, by FaceTime and I was telling her about Concord. She said, well, I hope you went to Louisa May Alcott's house. And I said, well, no. So she browbeat me for a while and then said, how about Emily Dickinson?

is just to keep diverting from the mission. Right. And I can see you ending up sort of.

like a chubby chase and vacation. You get somewhere and you've got 30 seconds to look.

at it and then you've got to hit the road. And when he says to his kids, quick, back in the car, it's only 400 miles to the world's largest ball of twine. One thing that I saw.

on one of your posts, your visit to Walden Pond was a drawing. In fact, there've been several pieces of artwork. This is one of your talents. I was not aware of. I think, the.

word talent is perhaps a misnomer, but I've never been a drawer. But I thought, how do you learn how to draw? I mean, if you're not a natural, how do you learn how to draw? Well,

you learn how to draw by drawing. And I thought it would be fun to draw some of the scenes that I've been seeing. They're sort of like a cross between drawings and political cartoons.

because I add text and commentary and so on. So I've done one that I haven't yet shared with you on Theodore Roosevelt's home, on Sycamore Hill, on Long Island. And I've done one on Thoreau, the most complicated of them. I've done one on Kerouac and I've done.

several others. And I don't know if these are any use to the people that come to the Facebook sites or to ltamerica.org, but I'm having a lot of fun with it. And however primitive these are, they matter in some sense because they're another kind of journaling for the experiences that I'm having. And maybe I will gain some very, very, very limited capacity.

to draw. Well, I'm calling it clay sketchbook. Yeah, exactly. And I do see a book at the end of the trip. So I do think you need to keep these up.

all in a special tablet, like a drawing tablet. First, I only had like, when I started, I bought these in, I think, Fergus Falls, Minnesota. And I thought, I probably shouldn't spend.

more than about five dollars on the colored pencils, because I'm sure to quit after three.

days. Then yesterday I was at a Target somewhere in New Hampshire and I bought the 120 pencil version. So now I've got the whole panoply of colors and I'm into it. So people can go.

to the LT America, Listening to America Facebook site or just as easily go to the website ltamerica.

on Facebook. You know, it's just amazing. More than I could have anticipated. And people.

are sharing it. And I'm thinking that this could really maybe have some appeal beyond,

you know, the little world that I live in. These drawings may lead to a gallery show.

when you. I should hope so. You know, I know if you ever do draw at all. No, I would love to be able to draw. Have you ever tried?

in New York. And so Flo decided that she wanted to be a concert violinist until she realized.

that that would require something called practice. That's how you know, if you practice, if you.

practice, you're going to get less bad at almost anything. You were recognized. You.

said it. That was at Walden. Yes. Kyle recognized me by most people that I've talked to, including some people who are in the Steinbeck world, have said they've never heard of me. So that's.

always putting you back in and in a real perspective about the ripple effect you've had on the.

universe. Have you been recognized on the road yet? No. You know, I'm almost and I've shaved my head. You know, I look like a convict.

welcome. I said, that's great day. And he said, I've heard that voice. And you are up.

there in the world of Ken Burns in that general area. So it's just, I was just interviewed.

for my seventh film back in Bismarck the day before I left on Thoreau. And so I went to.

Walden and while, and the interview in Bismarck was great fun. So when I got went to Walden, I had a little video made of me saying here I am at the like the mothership. I quoted a piece from Thoreau and I said, I'm begging, I'm begging, I'm begging for a second interview. And I sent it off to the Ken Burns people. So I think there'll be an injunction against.

me here shortly. And you are. have you slept every night in the camper? Yes, sir. I have.

You know, I haven't told you yet about the trap that Bill Steigerwald tried to get me into. So, as you know, Bill Steigerwald is the bad boy of Steinbeck studies. He wrote this investigative journalism proving that Steinbeck made some stuff up and embellished.

some stuff and slept in hotels more often than he wants to admit and was with his wife more often than he wants us to know. And that the dialogue is probably largely embellished or invented, et cetera. As you've said before, there's nothing particularly new in all of.

that, but he published a book called Dogging Steinbeck in 2012.

a little bit over the years, but we're kind of friends. And so I wrote to him a few months ago and said, if I come, will you enter, will you be interviewed by me? He said, sure. So he came to this, I was in this horrible campground in Bethany, West Virginia, next to a coal fired power plant, and the little RV park, which really wasn't an RV park that I was in, looked like it was a meth lab, but I didn't want to come into town because it would be so inconvenient. I wanted to interview Steigerwald in the rig like Steinbeck would.

than he was when he published the book. I don't know what that spirit was all about. He didn't really like Steinbeck and he didn't like Steinbeck's politics, and he didn't like Trousa Charlie. And he realized that Steinbeck was, you know, just shaping, shaping the journey a little bit for the book. And he finds that unforgivable, but we had a good time with that.

scholars. And, uh, you should have taken him along with you to Walden Pond and pointed out that Thoreau took some liberties with his narrative as well. I truly don't think.

that Bill Steigerwald understands that Steinbeck wasn't attempting to write a reporter's hour by hour, day by day, location by location notebook about his travels, that he had always intended to write a book, a piece of literature. And I think that Bill is an investigative reporter, good credentials. He's done really important work for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune, among others. He was in LA too. When he tells you about his career, it's pretty amazing.

Steinbeck's trip. This was 2010.. And I don't think he really thought about it until he.

got out there and then he realized, Oh my goodness, it doesn't all track. And he hasn't ever been able to think, well, that's sort of what you would expect from a famous national writer and novelist. At no point, as you know, Russ, at no point in the book, does Steinbeck.

pretend that this is precisely what happened.

Are you sticking to the blue highways?

That's an interesting question. Yes and no. I mean, even the blue highways are so much better now. They're often four lane and, and you wind up on some freeways, and you know what, I'm okay with that. Sometimes you just have to get somewhere.

would ever be on a freeway for any purpose. But now that I'm out of New York and away from Boston, the roads get more local, less, there are fewer interstate highways or there.

are ways around the interstate highways.

All right, Clay, we need to take a break. When we come back, maybe you can give us some idea of where you're headed and also maybe we can talk about our Steinbeck book club. This is Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson, and we'll be right back.

I've never been to the National Parks, the eastern side of the United States, except Great Smoky Mountains. And that was back when I was at university in Vanderbilt, in Nashville. So I don't think I can go by, Katie. I'm only about 12 miles from it. So I'll go through.

that in the morning. It's Mother's Day. Plus, I'm going to try to find a church. I'm going to try to find a steepled white church. But I'll certainly find a church and go to a service tomorrow, because that's something that Steinbeck wanted to do more of.

Russ, that Steinbeck had his famous encounter with the Canucks, which was the term he used for French-Canadian people who were sort of across the border and back with his Canada and were potato pickers. And he invited them to come visit him at the rig at his camper.

And they did. Up to nine of them, he says. And he had cleared everything and tidied up. He said, it's amazing how much work you'll go to for a party. And he had some whiskey.

for the older people. He had cognac. Yeah, you're right. Cognac. And it was a special bottle of cognac.

And again, people like Steigerwald say, well, did that even happen at all? And here's my view. And I'm going to send this to you. I wrote about this today. But my view is that.

everything happened. Maybe not exactly as it seems in the book, but I don't believe.

there's a single incident in Travels with Charlie that didn't, in some sense, occur.

in some way on that 11,500 mile journey. I do not agree with those who say, well, some story from earlier in his life. And there was a lull in the action. So he kind of incorporated.

it here. Or others that say he made up whole incidents. I don't think that's true at.

all. And I'm really certain that there was a Canuck encounter. Why would you make that?

up? And so when I was talking to Steigerwald, who's the number one skeptic, but not alone, I said to him, why would he make up that story? What does he gain by making up that story? And he had no real answer for that. And then later, in the famous story about the itinerant actor in North Dakota, I said, why?

Steinbeck was there for the potato harvest. Right. That harvest won't be coming for months. And Maine is no longer a big potato producer. But I want to go there because I think that's.

a very important.

absolutely central. It's where he really establishes his style that, you know, as he gets to a place, he lets the dog out. The dog gets into trouble or starts barking, or who knows what.

gets in a garbage, can. Steinbeck comes out to rescue the dog, apologizes to whoever else.

is there. They say, oh, what you doing in that rig? And he said, why don't you come?

by later and I'll give you a cup of coffee. And one or three, or in this case, many come.

by and he gives them coffee and they sit around. And then at some point he says, mind if I.

sweeten that a little? And then he gets out his brandy or his whiskey or whatever. That was his M.O. Using the dog as bait. He wanted to have a little parties.

don't have a dog, but I will go to Calais and I would hope that I would love to have.

an encounter with some French Canadians? if that were possible. What is your M.O. for?

meeting people? I'm not great at that, you know, because I have no dog, for one thing.

So I walk it when I'm in a campground. I walk around at about 5 p.m. with a gin and tonic.

If I saw some people with an interesting looking RV or a sign, I'm hers. She's mine. We're the Smiths, that kind of thing. You know, the love you take is equal to the love you're making. The other signs that are everywhere.

Dakota. They travel all the time in their RV, and so on. What have I learned? I've learned that people are all too willing to talk. On the ferry, I'm sitting with three or four different people in the course of an hour and they all talked.

had ideas, had stories, of course. I would ask them, timing was right, you know, I'm.

working on this because it's the 250th birthday of America. How do you see things now? And?

of course it's been a tiny sample, but so far everyone has said, I'm just so sick of.

this. I'm just so sick of the whole, I'm just sick of the whole prolonged public crisis.

that we're having. I'm just, you know, basically they said a pox on all their houses. I haven't.

met a single strong Bidenite, although more people that I've met want him than the other guy. And I haven't met a single strong Trumpite. It's been, people are really are weary, I think, and just wishing this, this nightmare that's been going on since 2010, at least, and really from 2015,. they wish this nightmare would end and they don't really want to talk.

about, about politics. And I think that was maybe part of your motivation for this trip. You suspected that there was more to people than this left-right dichotomy. It's amazing.

because so we're, we're going past gut punch or gut, plum, gut, whatever. it is, the, the burying ground. And this woman was talking about it. And then the guy next to her said,

that's not true. And he, and he said that it was once like our Wuhan, it was our, where we did biological and chemical testing, and that Mrs. Clinton had run for the U? S Senate in New York, almost exclusively to get rid of it. And she was able to do it.

lab at Wuhan? He said, of course, a thousand percent, everyone knows that. So, I mean,

it's just like people have, people have their views and their opinions and their stories and the, and certainly strong feelings about a lot of different things. But I think their strongest feeling is we American people are not being served well by our political system and by the, especially by the two elderly men who are the standard bearers for the Republican and the Democratic party. And that this nightmare is not over yet because one of them is going to be president. There's a very good chance that the next vice president, one of the two.

vice presidents, whoever they are, will become the next president of the United States or become a president during the next eight years. So I think everyone realizes this, this needs.

to end. and it's just not going to end. It's just, we're going to be living through this for four or five more years at least.

Yeah. Steinbeck, I know you're in the early stages of your trip, but he found, you know, he was on the road and weeks and months headed into the election of 1960, but he, he found it difficult to get an opinion from most people.

So people didn't want to talk about it. You know, he had to push them. I don't think that's true anymore, but I'll tell you what else I've learned, Russ. There's a whole, I don't think Steinbeck could have seen this, because it's came much later, but there's a whole.

RV world out here now. I met a couple tonight who spent part of the year in Florida and.

then they just wander around the country and they're Winnebago. They have no home anymore. I met somebody the other day who lives in a modified van that he bought. Everywhere I go, there are, there are, you know, really three types of RV sites. There's, I mean, within a single campground, people that come for a night or two.

But if the oil boom ends, or whatever, they, they can pick up and move to the next place.

where there's work. And so that's a whole world. RV people are similar to what Steinbeck was saying about the mobile home people, sort of like he was on the, you're on different ends of a, of a trend. You know, he talked about the moving to where there was work and having their own neighborhoods and their own media and so forth. And he was invited.

into several of them. Yeah. Dinner with a family, a couple, but remember, he thought that people could really move mobile homes. That doesn't happen anymore. Now, you know, people leave their mobile homes and move to another mobile home park somewhere.

promise that people were just going to pick up and move, they're too big. It's too much.

bother. There's too much stuff in them by the time you want to move. And so it's been.

the RV. that turns out to be the thing he was anticipating. Steinbeck met a lot of people too, uh, at breakfast, he said. And then, and you just talked about having dinner with people. How are you feeding yourself on the road?

I had, I had a lovely sandwich tonight, a baguette and a piece of cheese and a piece of salami. And I'm now having a glass of wine. that's now officially dark in Bar Harbor,

Maine. And the Northern Lights have not made an appearance yet. Things quiet down pretty quickly in these campgrounds. You know, people come in at about four, they spent an hour and a half setting out their carpets and their tiki lights and their private flags and their public flags and getting the dogs settled and leveling the rig and hooking up water and hooking up sewer and hooking up electricity, and then going to the shop to buy whatever. That takes a long time for some people.

sometimes eight. They're probably mostly asleep right now. And then in the morning, if I get up at eight, almost everyone's gone. They've, they've packed up and left. So it's a whole different clock from the clock that I'm used to using.

I'm meeting are really nice. And I met a couple last night in another part of the Northeast and he was a successful contractor. Uh, he decided to retire and see America. He bought.

an RV. He met the woman he's married to now, somewhere in Arizona. They, they've traveled.

the country. Sometimes they park the rig and go to Hawaii for a month. And there's.

a lot of wealth in America now. People, I think are, you know, Tocqueville was right.

when he said the American people are inherently restless. But I think that for a lot of people,

the idea of getting out on the road, especially if you can carry a luxury home with you with.

three television sets and so on, they like the idea of nomadism. And I haven't met anyone who didn't seem happy. As to the larger question of where do you meet people? I've been cooking for myself mostly, you know, for the first two weeks I was moving pretty fast and now.

I'm trying to slow the pace. And so tomorrow my plan is to get up, drive a couple of hours, find a roadside diner, go in, order America's greatest meal, you know, two eggs, sourdough, toast, bacon, orange juice, um, fried potatoes or hash browns. Um, that Steinbeck said you.

can't wreck that one. But I think, you know, I've, I've also noticed, Russ, that if you wanted to, you could travel from Monterey to Long Island without ever doing anything.

but eat at McDonald's, especially east of the Mississippi. Every 20 minutes there's.

a McDonald's. Fast food really didn't exist in Steinbeck's time. Just the very, very, very beginnings of it. And he's not too happy about it when he sees it. But today I think you're most likely to get a good morning conversation if you go to a McDonald's or a Burger King or an Arby's or somewhere where the local men come and sit around together.

if they say something that I find I can actually get in without being a jerk, then I might.

say, Hey, I just heard you say there's a submarine base here. You know, tell me more.

One of the most famous or most quoted lines from Travels with Charlie, you see it on posters and greeting cards and everywhere is we do not take a trip. It takes us. So to what extent is your trip taking itself?

I have that statement on my little whiteboard. My Airstream came with a little whiteboard. And the first thing I did was to print it out with a dry, erasable black marker, because.

I believe that we do not take a trip. A trip takes us. So you've heard me say, you do not.

write a book. Eventually the book writes you. It tells you how it's going to end. I found that true. It's a little unusual.

be much more cautious. You, you can't just stop on a dime to take pictures. You, I'm.

constantly looking in the rear view mirrors and making sure that I'm driving defensively because there's not a lot of room for error. The whole thing is about 48 feet long with the pickup. And so then you can't just park anywhere. You have to sort of have a strategy, and you know, you live in fear of entering something where there's no egress and you're 100 yards or 30 yards. And so, so it doesn't lend itself to, you know, spontaneity too much.

easier as I go along, but I'm discovering a lot. And so that what's, what's happening?

to me, the method that the trip is taking me, in that I think, if I'm this close to Walden.

Pond, I'm going to Walden Pond. If I'm on a literary pilgrimage, I'm going to see Kerouac's grave. Steinbeck says, and I've been, he says that one night, after he had a conversation with a local farmer, um, he sat down and he, and he read a little of Shire's Rise and.

Fall of the Third Reich. It's 1249 pages. The problem with the story is that Steinbeck writes about this in September of 1960, but the book wasn't published until mid October.

of 1960.

here, right? One is that, um, he has an advanced copy. He knew Shire. Shire knew him. They were friends.

had an advanced copy. The second possibility is that he bought the book somewhere down the line on the trip. And later, when he was trying to recreate it, he mistakenly put it before the actual publication date. And the third possibility is that he's just making.

it up, but I don't think that's possible to you. No, I mean, it gets back to your earlier.

statement. What reason does he have to make that up? Um, and we've talked about this before and I don't remember if it was in a podcast or not, but, um, Pat Kovici also loved, uh, sending Steinbeck books. Certainly there in New York, he could have, he had the connections.

to get hold of a copy. So. At your suggestion, I looked at Benson. So I have a copy of the.

definitive biography of Steinbeck with me. I wish it were an ebook, as I know you do.

too. And I looked in there, a couple of references to Shire. They were friends. I did not know this. They met, they were friends.

more to it than we know. And I know you're trying to get a, um, a copy of a, of an interview.

between Jackson Benson and Shire. that's in the Stanford, um, archives. So I'll be eager.

to see what you find from that. But, uh, so, it's quite possible that there's more to this.

story than we know, that they saw each other in New York from time to time. And that of.

course, Steinbeck would have been aware of this book. He might've said, can you find a way, Pat, or can you find a way, Shire, to get me an advanced copy? Uh, we just don't.

know. So I'd like to solve that tiny little mystery. It's not of great importance, but that's why I went to co-college, because Shire graduated from there in 1925.. And so it was a connection. And I went, and unfortunately, even though he's their most famous alum, by.

far, they don't even have a plaque. They don't have a portrait. They don't have a photograph. They don't have a shrine. So I, I, I lobbied them to make more of this.

what an empowerment story this is for students that he was poor. He barely was able to go to college. He was the editor of the local newspaper in the college, the Cosmos, the president of Co, read his columns and his editorials, thought he had talent, called him in on the day of his graduation. And the president gave Shire a hundred dollar bill and said, this is a loan. Now go live your dream.

Reich. That's a student empowerment story. And so I'm pushing them to, to maybe do more.

with him. And I'm going to try to at least donate a beautiful framed portrait of Shire that should go somewhere in the library. But that was, you see how much I'm straining this.

So I go to co-college, because Steinbeck had a copy of the rise and fall of the third Reich.

But Hey, it's one of the few books he mentions, isn't it?

It is. And speaking of books, you know, we've run out of time. Uh, we didn't get to talk about cup of gold, but you and I, and hopefully listeners out there have finished Steinbeck's first book, cup of gold. And we have moved on to, to a God unknown, which Steinbeck wrote second but published third. But I think that's the one you should read second.

agreed to read all Steinbeck through this year. And so we've begun and I read cup of.

gold, his first novel, published in 1927, you read cup of gold. And I believe you're going.

to catch up with me, maybe in the middle of America a couple of times. So we'll see about that. I'm looking forward to that rest to all of our listeners. I hope you're enjoying.

this follow along, go to your Atlas, go to Facebook and go to lt America.

to post. having the time of my life. I'm not weary. I'm ready to roll. I'm not lonely.

I'm kind of loving the. All right. Thanks. We look forward to that. And we'll, Clay, we'll be back next week with another edition of listening to America.