#1602 Highways, Byways, and Travels With Charley: A Road Report from Vermont

I'm at a campground just south of Middlebury, Vermont. You know, all your life you read about

Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. Boy, do I understand Green Mountains now. I've seen more

varieties of green in the last 72 hours than I thought existed. Astonishing pastels of green,

darker greens, probably 30 different hues of green at probably at the most fertile moment

of the entire calendar year. Not too many people in this campground. I've spent a second night here.

Last night I had extraordinary joy of spending the evening with Jay Perrini of Middlebury College and

his wife, Devon, who is a psychotherapist. He agreed to be interviewed in the rig, which is

how Steinbeck would have wanted it. We talked for about 75 minutes about all sorts of things. Just

look him up on Wikipedia. He's written a biography of Jesus. He's written a historical novel about

St. Paul. He's written a historical novel about Herman Melville, another about Leo Tolstoy,

who he says wrote the two greatest novels in history, Anna Karenina and War and Peace. He's

written a memoir on Borges, the great South American writer, and he's written a biography

of Gore Vidal, who was his friend. He's extremely well connected. He's written more than 20 books

more on the way. He's a poet. He is extraordinary. I really only knew his work on Steinbeck,

and when I began to look into it, I realized how much more there is. I'm reading the biography

of Gore Vidal now. Vidal is one of the essayists that I most prize. If you've never read a

book by him, I highly recommend you do so. Vidal had an acid wit, extraordinary capacity as a pro-stylist,

and is drop-dead funny. He's really one of the amazing men of the 20th century, and to think

that Jay Parini knew him, and they were close friends, and they spent time together in Italy

is amazing. He knew Norman Mailer. He knows Salman Rushdie. This is really an unusually

interesting man of great, great achievement, and his wife Devon cooked a beautiful meal of

homemade pasta, asparagus that they got from their neighbors who have a little farm.

It was everything that I've wanted from this journey. My intention is to interview as many

of the Steinbeck scholars as I can track down. I've done two so far. Bill Steigerwald, who wrote

sort of a critical book called Dogging Steinbeck, which proved, I think beyond any doubt, that

Steinbeck fictionalized some portions of the 1962 book, Travels Charlie. Now Jay Parini. I hope to

interview Robert DeMott, who's at Athens, Ohio, and Susan Schillinglaw, who's out at San Jose,

and others. So that's part of it, and I don't know what will exactly happen with these interviews,

but I know that we'll find ways to use them. Not necessarily in the podcast, but independently at

ltamerica.org. So it's gray here. It rained yesterday, much of last evening, so I haven't

had a chance to build a fire yet. There's a fire pit right outside my door. If the weather holds,

it's gray, but I don't think it's likely to rain. I'll have my first campfire tonight,

and sit around it and read, sip a little gin and tonic, perhaps, or a glass of red wine. I'm

sleeping well. I'm feeling great. I'm seeing this country. I've really never spent time in

New England before. I've been in every state, but that's not the same as driving through,

and yesterday I drove along the Mad River Gorge, the Mad River Valley in Vermont, and it was

staggeringly beautiful. And then, because I was going to be interviewing Perrini, I saw that there

was a Robert Frost wayside on one of the local roads, and so I stopped there and took photographs

in the rain. Robert Frost is, of course, a great American poet. Strangely, not a friend or really

an acquaintance of John Steinbeck, and that's something I'll ask Russ Eagle about next time

we have a conversation about all of this. But Frost is one of the people about whom Perrini

has written a biography, and in fact, he says that his Frost is probably his greatest biography.

Several of his books have been or are being made into Hollywood films. His wife, Devon,

is really a remarkable woman. She's had a great career. She was on Oprah. She's written a book

about women who are alcoholics. This is what we would call an elite eastern establishment

power couple. In fact, they squeezed me in because they're going next week to London,

and then to Paris, and then to Algeria, because he's working on a memoir about that, too. He went

to Algeria as a young man. He got his Ph.D. at St. Andrews University in Scotland, where my

daughter got her M.A. He also was a fellow at Christchurch Oxford for a time, so we both know

people at Oxford, including my own mentor there, John Carey of Merton College. So it was really

wonderful and so greatly satisfying. So today I've had a big day, so I began getting those files

to the appropriate people to be stored and edited. I had a conversation with Mike McFeely of North

Dakota. He's a partisan Democrat, and we talked about Governor Burgum's willingness to get close

to Donald Trump during his hush money trial in New York City, a source of great disappointment

to me, and I think to many North Dakotans, but such is the politics of our times, and such is

the political ambition, not only, of course, of Doug Burgum, but of many, many, many others. It's

either get behind Trump, or he will mow you down, or simply ignore you. So there was that. And then

I did a Listening to America podcast with David Horton, the one that you're about to hear.

But this morning I did three hours of an interview with Jim Holmberg of the Filson Club in Louisville,

Kentucky. We're old friends. He's a Lewis and Clark scholar, and a very important one.

He didn't discover, but he was right in on the discovery of 55 William Clark letters that were

in an attic in Louisville, and they are really important letters. They're about the death of

Lewis, almost certainly by suicide. They're about Clark's relations with his enslaved body servant

York, which puts Clark in a really unpleasant light, it has to be said. Also a letter that

Clark wrote from Fort Mandan in my own North Dakota during the trip and sent back. These

letters were discovered in the 1990s, 1989, 1990, 1991. Jim Holmberg was able to convince the

family to give those, to donate those papers to the Filson Club, which is a very important national

historical society in Louisville, and then he edited them. The book came out, Dear Brother,

came out in 2002. It's a game changer. We can't think of the Lewis and Clark expedition in

quite the same way after all that. Then he edited the fragmentary Lewis and Clark journal

of Sergeant Charles Floyd, who died probably of appendicitis early on in late August of 1804,

near today's Sioux City, Iowa. He produced a really beautiful facsimile edition and a transcript

of Charles Floyd's diary. He's helped others working on York biographies and trying to

get as many documents per York as are possible. This will be edited and shortened

for We Proceeded On, the journal of the Lewis and Clark expedition. If you're a listener to

this program, and if you are an admirer of what I do, then you should consider joining the Lewis

and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation. Just go type that in, Lewis and Clark, Great Falls, Montana,

or Trail Heritage Foundation. For a small amount of money, you can get an annual membership,

and that includes four of the quarterly issues. Glossy, in part peer-reviewed, really interesting

journal on all aspects of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I'm very proud of my work as the

editor of that quarterly, so you should consider, I hope you will consider, becoming a member and

subscribing, because that's a labor of love for me, and something that I do because I love Lewis

and Clark. In fact, I've been thinking all day, you know, that Lewis and Clark is one of my central,

primary interests, and I have two books on Lewis and Clark that I still want to write, so I had better

get busy here and carve out more time for such things. Anyway, I'm a little fatigued now, ready to

take a little break, take a little walk, maybe start a little fire, do a little reading, and

tomorrow I will head towards Cooperstown, New York. If I get there, then the next morning I will go to

the Hall of Fame. I've never been to a sports Hall of Fame, not really sort of one of my dreams.

It's not on what people call my bucket list, but I am fascinated, and I want to see how it's handled.

I've heard that it's great, so we'll see about that. And then I'm going to go up to Niagara,

because Steinbeck thought he would go through Canada to get to Chicago. He was turned back by

Canadian Border Patrol because they said, you have a dog, does that dog have all of its vaccines, and,

you know, do you have the paperwork, and if not, you might have a lot of trouble getting that dog

back into the U.S., so Charlie was more important to him than a brief foray into Canada, so he did

not go in. I won't either. Please send me your suggestions, your advice. I'm all ears. I want you

to be part of this journey, and please follow along at the Listening to America Facebook site, at my

own Facebook site, and at ltamerica.org, so all of that, and thank you for being my friends. Thank

you for supporting this program, and thank you for listening. Let's go to the show.

serving as your guest co-host this week from Radford University in Radford, Virginia, and

joining me today is your host of Listening to America, Clay Jenkinson, this time from the road.

Clay, can you tell us a little bit about how you are and where you are? Hello to you, my friend

College, a wonderful liberal arts college of about 2,500 students in a community of about

10,000 people. It's as green as green can ever be. You've heard of the Green Mountain Boys.

I did not really understand the full sense of the intensity of that until I traveled through

Vermont yesterday along the Mad River, so people can go to their atlas and look at the scenic

byway along the Mad River. It took all day, but it was absolutely worth it, much more dramatic than I

could have anticipated. And then I got to a campground just south of Middlebury last night,

so I'm doing well. The rig is still intact. My nerves are not yet shattered. I haven't had a bad

day. It has rained a lot, but you know, it's spring. Absolutely, and you know, I'm fascinated

on the website, on your blog, but I'd love to spend a little time today, if we can,

talking about this trip, talking about some of your ideas moving along, recreating this journey

that Steinbeck took, but also the twist that you're taking on it. If you would be so kind,

and often more than once on the Listening to America Facebook site, and then if people go

to our website, ltamerica.org, they will find much more. There's a lot more on the website than

just the Steinbeck stuff, although there's a lot about that too, and I'm writing every day,

in the morning and in the evening. It's been truly one of the most satisfying things that

I've ever done. At the moment, I'm in this campground, and it's spring, so it's not by

any means full. I'm surrounded by trees, so that's one reason I've had a little bit of internet

trouble over the last 18 or 19 hours, but it is so serene, and it's just this kind of a

lovely serenity, peacefulness, relaxation, reconnecting with the country,

reconnecting with nature. That's part of this, and I knew that it would be great, but I

didn't know that it would be as deeply satisfying from a travel point of view as it has already

that you're physically involved in, on the road, on the sea, as you mentioned, in the air, whatever

it happens to be, but there's the journey that your heart and your soul take as part of it, and

it sounds like that's what's enriching you the most, is this journey of the soul as you travel

my friend. So, you know, there's the journey of following along John Steinbeck's 1960 travel route

from Sag Harbor on Long Island all the way around the perimeter of the country and back again. He

did that between September and December of 1960. There's that. Then there's my own journey to see

America in 2024. We should talk about that, but a very, very different country. For example,

we're communicating across space by a device that we call a cell phone or computers. None of that,

of course, was available in John Steinbeck's time. When he wanted to talk with Elaine back

on Long Island, he had to find his way to a phone booth. A long-distance call was a very expensive

and rare thing, and so there are so many fundamental differences. So that's the

second journey, and then the third journey is a journey into self. So, you know, I'm not at the

end of my life, but I'm in the seventh inning, I would say. I'm certainly half is gone, and I think

that's a pretty euphemistic way to put it. So, you know, I'm not 30. I'm not 40. I'm not even 50.

And so the question is, first, why am I doing this crazy thing? But secondly, what am I learning

about myself? What am I learning about life with a capital L? And, of course, it's early. I've only

been at this for two and a half weeks so far, but I've been doing a lot of, I suppose, what you'd

call soul-searching. I'll just give you an example. Today, I did a three-hour interview with an eminent

Lewis and Clark scholar who's retiring. His name is James Holmberg of the Filson Club in Louisville,

Kentucky, and he published a really important book in 2002 of letters that were discovered by

William Clark written to his brother Jonathan, and this is one of the major discoveries in the

history of Lewis and Clark studies. Those letters talk about Meriwether Lewis's death, which Clark

immediately assumed was suicide. They talk about his relations with his enslaved manservant, York,

which soured after the expedition into a way that makes us cringe now because Clark turned out to be

a pretty stereotypical white racist slaveholder, and also about Clark's adventures on the journey

and after the journey, how he himself processed the greatest exploration adventure in American

history. When I got off the phone, I was so thrilled by the interview. I thought,

what do I really know in this world? I know John Donne, and I know Jefferson, and I know Theodore

Roosevelt, and I know Robert Oppenheimer, and I know the works of Thoreau, and I could go on in

this list, but what do I really, really, really know? Right at the top of that list is Lewis and

Clark, and I've got a couple more books in me about Lewis and Clark, and so then I naturally thought,

you know, what am I even doing here? I should be in the study. I should be on the fifth floor of a

rare books library somewhere. I should be churning out that kind of scholarship, and so I'm not going

to abort the trip, of course, and I'm not having second thoughts about it either, but this is the

very essence of the question you're asking. So, you know, when you have a lot of time on your hands

and you're away from your routine, so you know when you go check the mail at home, and you know

when you need to gas up the car, and you know, you know, whether you're going to watch the news

or listen to NPR or whatever it is, when you're out here, time in almost some mystical way opens

up to you, and you suddenly have more time to reflect than you have, than I have had for months

in my routine back in Bismarck, North Dakota. So, that third journey, you know, I guess I'd put it

this way, David, if I am not changed by this journey, if I come back the same old guy,

then I will have some serious questions about the usefulness of it. Well, I don't think you will. I

and probably find a lot of ways to refresh your creative spirit, which that's one of the biggest

challenges, I think, when you are in that routine of daily life, is reigniting the you that's inside

of you, that can do all these amazing things. So, I'm excited for you, but I'd like to go back

just a little bit, if we could, at what point in your life, having read Steinbeck, having read of

this probably many, many, many years ago, at what point of your life did you say, this is something

I want to do, and how did it get to today, where you're actually on the road doing it? Another

was Jack Kerouac's famous book, On the Road, published in 1957. Hitchhiking, greyhound buses,

not knowing where you're going to sleep, or not knowing where the next meal is coming from,

hopping trains, that sense of the endlessness, you know, just the amazing endlessness of America.

Remember, in the novel, On the Road, Kerouac says, in a famous line,

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? And so, that spoke to me profoundly

then, but of course, Kerouac and On the Road are young man's, a young person's book. I'm not going

to hitchhike, and I don't want to be down and out to the point where I don't know where the next meal

is going to come from. About that same time, at the University of Minnesota, I read Robert

Peircing's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is another really interesting

road book. He goes on a motorcycle journey with friends and his son Chris, and that's definitely

a journey story into self-discovery. But I'm not a motorcycle guy, and I've never been interested in

that. That's not even one of my fantasies. And then, a little bit later, I read Steinbeck's

Travels with Charlie for the first time, and it appealed to me in all sorts of ways. You know,

if you have to choose between Charles Carrault and John Steinbeck, you immediately choose

Steinbeck. It's a beautifully written book. It's a lyrical book. It's a book of extraordinary

maturity. This is an older man approaching the end of his life. He's in uncertain health.

Everyone's a little worried about him. He's afraid he's losing his virility. He's afraid

he's losing his independence as a grown man. And so, he goes on this journey with the dog,

with the poodle, Charlie, to try to rediscover America and to prove to himself and maybe to

others that he still has, I suppose, what we would call the right stuff. And so, I've read

through the literature, and I'll just add one more, William Leastheed Moon's Blue Highways,

which is also a journey of self-discovery. So, I've read the literature and much more than that,

and all of this informs what I'm doing. And in some sense, I'm trying to place myself in that

matrix of American journey stories, which, by the way, of course, also includes the Lewis

excited by this stuff, intellectually excited. At what point did you decide,

I'm going to go on the road, I'm going to make this happen, make it a reality for me?

newspaper in Western North Dakota called the Dickinson Press. I was the chief photographer

and the darkroom manager. And I thought I would become a famous photojournalist traveling for

the Associated Press, you know, from one hotspot to the next. But that's how long ago this journey

came. And I've had the great good fortune, David, to travel this country a lot by automobile,

particularly in the American West. And when you get out there into the middle of Wyoming

on a July afternoon, or you're driving through Idaho, and it's getting on towards dusk,

and you see the endlessness of this country, you see the magnificence of the scenery of America,

you see how many different Americas there are, how many different landscapes, how many different

geologies, how many different regionalisms of accent and food choice and so on. You just fall

in love with America with a capital A. And I've always wanted to have the luxury of being able to

just go do it. And so now, thanks to good friends and the encouragement of our audience, I'm able

to do this in a really structured way. And, you know, it fulfills an ancient dream of mine. And

so far, you know, it's like some fantasies when they come true turn out to be not quite what you

quick break right now. But when we come back, I would love to talk more about you charting this

journey, particularly the map that you're using primarily to get from point A to point B. I think

it'll be a fascinating story for all the listeners. This is Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.

Welcome back to Listening to America with your host Clay Jenkinson, who is on the road in Vermont

as we speak. I'm David Horton. I have the honor of serving as co-host this week from Radford

University in Radford, Virginia. And Clay, one of the fascinating things of this trip that I have

been really excited about following is the way that you're mapping your journey. Can you tell

us a little bit about the atlas that you found and how you're using that to plan where you're

America. That's the passage of the Interstate Highway Act, which is co-existent with my birth

in the 1950s. And this was Eisenhower. He had seen the Autobahn system in Europe,

especially in Germany, and he realized that from a national security point of view,

we needed a first-rate, fast-moving system so that we could transport troops and ICBM missiles and

tanks and whatever else we might need in the event that we ever have fought a war on our home front.

And so that's one of the greatest public improvements in American history. It ranks

with the Panama Canal and the Erie Canal and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge

and the St. Lawrence Seaway and so on. I'm not afraid to take interstates at certain points,

but it's not really the spirit of the thing. And so how do you know what to do? So I went

onto eBay and found a 1960 road atlas, ran McNally, and ordered it. And it's here. It

smells musty. And somebody has done some annotation of it with a highlighter and so on.

I'm using it as a way of seeing what the country looked like before the great advent of the

freeway system of the interstate highway system. I should say I'm not following Steinbeck's route

100% because I don't want to be locked in to some sort of mechanical fidelity to his daily grind

and so on. I'm sort of letting the journey take me. You know, he famously said,

we do not take a trip, a trip takes us. And that's certainly true. So I have that. And every night I

consult it. And then I decide, you know, if I need to catch up a little bit, I might get on

the interstate a little in New Hampshire or Maine or Vermont. But basically I'm on the back roads,

what William Leastheat Moon calls blue highways. And there's a funny story about this, David. I

was down in Arizona and our scout, this great fellow that I know named Frank, is helping. And

so he'll call ahead and book a campground for me or advise me on hotel accommodations when I need

them. We had atlases spread out in the ground floor of this Holiday Inn Express. And I think

two or three atlases and some guidebooks and campground lists and folding maps and so on,

and a copy of Travels with Charlie. And at the end of the day, this woman in her early forties

walked through the lobby with her two daughters. One was nine or so, and one was six or so. And

they went by us. And the older girl turned and looked at us and smiled and said, old school.

And at first, and then I realized for her, two old men and silver hair looking at an atlas

is like looking at Leonardo da Vinci or the mapmaker Mercator or some medieval technology.

And I smiled back. And then her mother, in the way of all mothers, kind of shooed her and the

other child away. And I wanted to stop them and say, come and look, Frank had a geometric compass.

So instead of doing distances on the iPhone, like how far is it from Phoenix to Scottsdale,

he was using his compass and tracing it. And I thought, oh, come on, Frank. Now you're just

laying it on thick. But he was quite accurate by using that very old school technology.

definitely a talent to orienteering with a physical map. So I'm an Eagle Scout and we

spend a lot of our times hiking and exploring, utilizing physical maps. This was, of course,

in the pre-cell phone days. But even today with cell phones, you want to have that basic skill.

I think the other thing that it does for you that sometimes a cell phone or a digital map doesn't

do is it gives you that freedom to explore a little bit differently. Sometimes a map can be

too precise to take you from point A to point B. That's not always the part of the journey that you

want to focus on. It's all the little side things that you might explore, or I wonder where this

little path goes, or this road looks interesting. Have you seen some things in this atlas, or as

you have been traveling, trying to recreate some of this journey, that you've sort of said, well,

I'm just going to head down this way a little while and see where it takes me? Absolutely.

down Maine towards New Hampshire and Vermont. And for the first time, I was really solidly on an old

blue highway and the trees were encroaching right up to the side of the road. There was hardly any

shoulder on either side. It was a little too narrow for modern traffic. Because of that, a point that

William Lee's Deep Moon makes in Blue Highways, those roads are essentially empty because

all of the serious traffic goes to the faster routes. But here's the difference. And I was

talking about technological differences between Steinbeck's time and our own. First of all, the

roads are much better. And I'm not just talking about the freeways. All roads are much better

today. I mean, probably infinitely better. And also something that probably did not exist much

in his time. Even on these two lane roads, as often as they can, they put in a passing lane.

So I'm very conscious in driving a trailer, and in this case, my Airstream, that, you know, I don't

want to annoy a stack of 20 cars behind me that are cursing the day I was born. So as soon as I

get to a place where there is a passing lane, I pull over to the right. And sometimes I pull over

onto the shoulder, if there is one, just to make sure that the cars behind me know, go ahead and

pass. You know, I'm not, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to hold you up. So road safety is dramatically

better now. You know, we have seatbelts. Didn't then. We have airbags. Certainly not then. We have

shoulder straps. We certainly didn't have them. You're probably too young to remember, but the

vehicles back then, including Steinbeck's truck, had metal dashboards. And so if you hit your head

on the dashboard, it's like hitting an anvil. His seat didn't recline. The springs in his truck

weren't what we have today. He had power assisted steering, which was like phase one of what would

become power steering. If you want, no air conditioning, of course, only an AM tube type

radio. If he wanted to open the window, he had to crank it open. Not that that's a great burden,

but if you think of the discomfort of driving a GMC pickup in 1960 on pretty poor roads through

America and then driving any vehicle today on those same roads with all of the road improvements

and then dramatic improvements in our vehicles, the reliability of cars don't break down much

anymore. They routinely broke down in Steinbeck's time. In fact, he carried, I think, 300 pounds of

tools with him because he just assumed he would be doing important repair work on his truck.

So my point, David, is that we live in a time of great improvement and luxury. And even so,

on some of these narrow two lane roads, I really get the sense of the back roads of America. And

William Lee Steed Moon is right about that. There's a magic to them. You have to have a lot

of patience and you have to slow down any sense that you had of rushing or you just can't enjoy

it. And it actually took me a few days to relax into it. And now yesterday, when I was driving

across Vermont along the Mad River, which is just spectacular, I realized I was only going about 48

miles per hour. And that seemed perfectly fine. I mean, I didn't feel like, well, this is going

take forever or I wish I could speed up. I could have. I could have probably gone 65 or 70 on those

roads, but there was just kind of a natural rhythm. And I think that's sort of one of the points of

Virginia, in the summertime, you have lots of fruit stands and food stands and vegetable stands

and people with a truck on the side of the road. And that's kind of a neat part of any trip that

you're on is stopping and sort of stopping to smell the flowers, so to speak. Have you found

some nice little side journeys just based on that? Yes, a few. But as you say, it's early in the travel

come June, we'll be at 80 or 90 percent. There's that. There have been roadside stands mostly at

the moment there for firewood. And here's what's so interesting about it. They're all honor systems.

And so you come by the bottom of the road and it says firewood. And if you stop, it'll say, you know,

five dollars a bundle or ten dollars a bundle honor system or eggs. I've seen eggs displayed.

And almost every one of these is done on the honor system, which really redeems my love of America

that people are honorable. And I have I have a Starlink satellite system, an antenna that I

needed to get because I need to stay connected for the purposes of interviews like today. And

I was in a KOA campground a few nights ago and every night I would when I went to bed, I would

I would pack it up and put it away because it would be so easy to steal. And this guy at the

next camp slip watched me and he said, why are you doing that? And so I'm just don't want to give

anyone incentive to walk off with this. And he said, I don't think you understand. That's not

going to happen here. You need to trust people more. People are people are really respectful

of each other's property. Look, you can see generators. You can see the sewer lines. You can

see the electrical cords. You can see bicycles that are not locked up. You don't understand the

culture is a culture of trust. And so, you know, I'm still kind of wrestling with that, David,

because I also think, yeah, well, what about the four percent that you can't trust? You know, like

that's what that's what will happen. But it's you know, this world of the roadside stand Steinbeck

saw and he admired it. I've seen a lot in Maine for blueberries, although they're not yet in season.

There will be strawberries, although they're not quite yet in season. But I love the idea that

people just decide to do a little home financial enterprise, but they don't want to sit out there

like at a lemonade stand all day, nor do they need to. And they assume that people are basically

trustworthy. And I'm sure that they get bitten a little by the wrong element of people. But

most people seemed when trust is offered to them, most people seem to rise to trust back,

this is being waxing poetic a little bit, but it's almost like time traveling that you've gone back

to another more simple era, another time where maybe people did respect their neighbors just

a little bit more and wouldn't even think about taking without paying. And I think that's a

beautiful sentiment, both for the folks that own the property that's out there on the side of the

road and those that might come upon it and say, wow, they're trusting me, they're trusting us.

That's kind of a refresher in this world with locks and guns and everything else on many stores.

250th birthday on July 4th, 2026. And I have to say, I'm pretty worried about the future of this

country. Our massive national debt, our porous border, our off again on again yo-yo foreign policy,

what's happening in higher ed, the culture wars, inflation, and the sort of the way in which this

hyper-partisanship is now so violent and so vicious. And so I'm worried. I'm more worried

than I've ever been in the whole course of my life. And one of my purposes out here is to go

see if I'm getting the wrong signal, if I'm getting distorted signals from CNN and MSNBC and Fox and so

on. And the answer seems to be yes, that there's a, that America is much better than we think.

And, you know, I've been out now for almost 20 days and I get into conversations every day and I

sort of lead people into a conversation about America, but I try to do it really informally.

And so no one wants to talk about this. No one wants to talk about Trump beat Biden. No one wants

to talk about MAGA. Nobody wants to talk about Stormy Daniels or Hunter Biden. And in fact, the

people that I've met, and this admittedly is a, it's not a representative sample of the country,

but the people I've met have all said the same thing. We're just so sick of it. We're so exhausted.

We're just enough already that we can't affect it. It is what it is. We've been bombarded and

overstimulated. We just, we're out here to get away from all of that. And sure, you know, if we

really want to talk about it, we can, but they just, I think all of us, I think you will agree,

just feel a deep national spiritual exhaustion from whatever happened to our politics. And,

and I think that a lot of it frankly has been exaggerated or hyped by cable media and that

if you're very happy in life, if you're very comfortable, you don't feel compelled

to have to tune into every second of the news. If you think things are generally okay,

you're probably not going to be as obsessive about checking out who said what and what's

occurring in this part of the nation, this part of the world. I think that's part of the challenge

because media has so many hours to get eyeballs, to get ears. And as someone who is involved with

some local government here in my community, one of the things that I've had to teach myself and

had to learn is there's always going to be something. This is going to be a very serious

moment for A, B, C, whatever it happens to be. And it will feel in the moment that it's

unprecedented, that it is critical and something that you can't turn away from even for a second.

But in perspective, I think people tend to find that these things are a process and an evolution

and 50 years from now, there will be a whole list of challenges. Some may be the same,

some may be totally different, but we will be facing something. I kind of take this back to

our good friend, Thomas Jefferson, where he talks about the agrarian lifestyle and what's really

important in the world and focusing attention on being with nature and the focus of the day

and things along that line. It feels very different at times when you can step back.

And I think that is one of the blessings of this journey that you're being offered.

at 250 or just about 250. And the underlying issues really do need to be addressed. So who's

an American? How many immigrants do we want? Where do they come from? Should we protect our border?

And if so, how can we do it in a humane and civilized way? What do we do about undocumented

people from other countries who are here technically illegally? So there's that question,

and we're going to have to solve that question. I think that question actually could be quite easily

solved, but the parties have shown, especially the Republican Party, not particularly eager to

do it. Second question is, what's America's place in the world? And this has been a perennial

question in American history. We rocket between isolationism and engagement. And every time we've

been isolationist, we've paid a price for it, because whether we like it or not, America is

the world's hegemon, certainly one of the most important countries in the world. And when America

turns away from the world, we lose, they lose, everybody loses. So there's that question. Right

now, we're in kind of a neo-isolationist moment. Both Barack Obama was moving in that direction,

certainly Donald Trump, even Joe Biden is also in that sense. And of course, there's the fundamental

perennial problem of race relations in America. That one just won't go away. Every time we think,

you remember when Barack Obama was elected and people thought we might be moving into a

post-racial country. Well, we certainly found that wasn't the case. And then, of course,

there's the issue of America's love affair with violence. I was in Maine, and I went to Lewiston,

where there had been a mass shooting. I had completely forgotten about it. It happened

in the fall of 2023. And this bowling alley where it occurred reopened, and I think with great sense

of resilience and a belief that life must reassert itself in normal ways. But I read about

it then, and it was the largest mass shooting in the history of Maine. And it didn't even register

with me until that moment. We've now gotten to the point where mass shootings are so regular

that they cease to be the lead on the evening news. And then just one furthermore, you know,

is our government in any meaningful sense representative of the will of the American

people. And so there are other issues too, but those issues are deep issues, and they don't go

away. What's interesting to me, David, is how poorly we're addressing them. And I don't just

mean that Congress isn't doing its job. That's true too. But we need a national conversation

that is reasonable, thoughtful, evidence-based, mutually generous, mutually respectful,

that understands that these are intractable problems, and they can only be addressed by

consensus, or at least compromise. And that's not the mood that our power players are in,

or our major institutions. And so I'm alert to that, but I'm also realizing that that can't be

the sole focus of what I'm doing, because then I may as well just stay home and watch cable news.

which I think you're helping to stimulate again by going around the nation and talking to people

and engaging with different communities. You know, it is all challenging. And I do think that

what you're doing as an example is a great way for us to begin to maybe think about how we connect

and communicate with each other. And we need to take a very quick break, but as we come back,

I would like to go back to something you mentioned about Steinbeck's vehicle and a particular device

that helped him connect with where he was at the time. This is Listening to America with Clay

Jenkinson. Welcome back to Listening to America with your host, Clay Jenkinson, who's on the road

this week in Vermont. I'm David Horton. I have the honor of serving as guest co-host, and I'm coming

to you from Radford, Virginia in Southwest Virginia. Clay, my friend, we've been having

lots of good discussion about some of the things you've been experiencing on the road,

some of the unique elements, but also Steinbeck's original Travels with Charlie, Looking for America.

And one of the pieces that you talked with me made me really want to explore a subject.

When you were describing his vehicle and the fact that he only had a little AM radio inside of it,

and of course, you have a world of communication at your disposal. AM radio was one of my very

favorite things growing up to listen to. I had a radio that I kept at the head of my bed,

and at night I would listen to stations in Chicago and Atlanta and New York, Clear Channel,

but I would also, anytime I went to a new community, I would check out their AM radio dial

and listen to some of what was going on in that locality. Have you been listening much

so I remember when I was a child, just as you do. I bought this old tube-type console radio,

and on a Friday or Saturday night, I lived down in the basement of my parents' house. I painted

all the walls black. I had black lights, and I listened to Woodstock and Abbey Road and had band

posters. You can imagine, this was the 1960s, the second half of the 1960s, and I had a reel-to-reel

tape recorder, but I would turn on this radio, and people today will have a hard time remembering

this, but tube-type radios took 30, 40, 50 seconds to warm up, and then the signal would kind of

and then you'd hear, live from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, or all these stations,

the Chicago blowtorch stations or stations down in Baton Rouge or Texas or Oklahoma City

or Salt Lake City, because they would skip, the way that the atmospherics worked, that the signal

would skip very long distances. I'm from North Dakota, which is way, way out in the boondocks,

even compared to Virginia, and it was like listening to faraway worlds, and there would

be that kind of sense of the signal that felt almost like it was being routed through Jupiter

or something, and the signal would kind of climb and come down.

You'd then adjust the dial a little bit and so on, and I love to listen to AM radio on the road,

because you get the local swap meet, you get someone say, oh, there's a dog running down

Main Street, I don't know whose it is, but it's black, it's a Labrador, so if you call in, if you

know whose it is, and you get that whole kind of world of the clunky DJ who's kind of full of

himself, but in a wonderful way, and all the local news and the crop report and so on, I just

love it, and it's so much better than the automatic signal you get today, so people forget that the

signals we get today are pure. That wasn't true back in the days of AM radio, and that's all that

Steinbeck had, and if you really want to get a flavor of the country, at least then, that's the

you did it, and I also buy the local newspaper, wherever there still is a local newspaper, and

read it cover to cover, just to get a sense of what's going on in these towns and villages that

I'm passing through, so I do some of that, but I want to do more, and you had the experiences with

station here in Radford, and my shift was on Sunday afternoons, and the radio station at the

time would sell a half an hour or an hour to a local broadcaster as part of their community service,

community outreach, and they would allow a church or an individual to purchase time on the air

to preach, to sing, to do a lot of things. I've had folks faith heal on the air. They put your hands

on the radio, and I will say a prayer that will make you better, and it was truly an experience to

go through that. One of the neatest parts about it is it showed me a part of the world, even in my

own backyard, that I didn't necessarily know existed, and that's something that I think

AM radio can offer, especially even if you don't agree with what is being stated on the other side.

Now, how much of it you can take, that's up to you as an individual, but I challenge all of our

listeners out there on Listening to America to explore their radio dial as much as possible,

and certainly come back to the station that presents the things like this program and others,

but explore that radio dial, and I'm so glad you're doing that. I was hoping that you might

tell me one of the more interesting stories that you might have heard on local AM radio, because

it can be a wild, wild west out there, many times because it is not the profit center that it once

was. A lot of station owners give free reign to the local radio hosts to basically say,

you got to fill two hours. You go out there and just share, talk. I love the local radio. One of

package is piped in, and then they broadcast it locally, and it's top 40, or it's country music,

or whatever, and so you lose so much in that way. I want, you know, I love the days when all local

radio was all local radio, and there was one disc jockey after the next, and they all had

personalities. They often had handles. Up in North Dakota, we had a man on KFYR, a 50,000-watt

blowtorch station, whose handle was the Old Reb, and he played a Southern Unreconstructed Confederate.

Be harder to get away with today, and in the morning, he would wake us up with a rebel yell,

and I was part of the Old Reb fan club, you know, but, you know, I've been, as I've been listening

now, you know, you hear the sports talk, the local sports talk, and it's, you know, that someone says,

we're having Coach Cletus on here, and Cletus, I'm sorry to say, you know, the team fought valiantly

last week, but they were defeated 72 to three. What do you think went wrong? You know, and then

the coach says, well, you know, my boys are, they're good boys, and they're working hard, and

you know, it was, it was, if you think about it, it was a closer game than you, than the score suggests,

and you know, next week, I think we'll be doing better, and then he says, you know, I know a lot

of people think that just because my son is the quarterback, that's why he plays, but it's not

true. I would play him in any place in the world. He's just that good, and so you get that kind of,

that flavor of America that's no, you know, if you call into, you know, the Rush Limbaugh show, or

Hannity, or Glenn Beck, or any of them today, the caller doesn't have much of a chance. It's really

just to set up the host. You just feel good somehow about the innocence. There's a kind of

magnificent innocence at the heart of rural life. But one of the interesting things with going back

and I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about that, because I think that's an important piece

of this, but also some of the criticism and some of the speculation that maybe this wasn't fully a

non-fiction story of a trip, and a documentation of a journey, but more of an idealized version,

and perhaps the conversations that Steinbeck wished he would have been able to have on the

road, but because he was the author, could make come into life. Can you speak to that just a

and biographers, and writers around the country, and so far I've had the honor of interviewing two,

and I make them come into the rig here, into the Airstream. Let me say it's a formica table,

and some beautiful brown fake leather, and there are windows, and I'm sitting next to a refrigerator.

You're hired. Exactly, and I've got a wonderful rug on the floor that was given to me by a friend,

a runner, but I asked them to come in, and both have done it. First was Bill Steigerwald,

who wrote a book called Dogging Steinbeck, which was a kind of a nasty investigative book in which

he showed that Steinbeck didn't always stay in the van. He often stayed in not just motels, but

hotels, sometimes luxury hotels, and his wife Elaine was with him more than he wants us to know,

and that he, some of the details don't add up, and some of the dialogue has to have been either

embellished or invented, and maybe even some of the incidents were fictionalized, and so,

and I've, he and I've crossed swords. We had a wonderful interview about this. We're friends,

and he was a good sport, so that interview will not be on a podcast, but it'll be up

soon enough on our website, ltamerica.org, and then last night, I had the extraordinary honor

of interviewing Jay Perini, who is an endowed professor of literature here at Middlebury

College, and he wrote a 1995 biography of Steinbeck, which is very well respected, and so,

he came into the rig, and we spent 75 minutes, and he said, you know, we both know Bill Steigerwald's

work. Everybody in Steinbeck country knows, and it's kind of upset by what Bill Steigerwald tried

to do to kind of debunk Steinbeck, and so, he said, look, every, you know, any literature scholar

knows that every book is a, every memoir certainly is a shaped thing. He said, the genre is really

called auto fiction. It's autobiographical, but of course, Steinbeck didn't have a recorder.

The dialogue has to be remembered, and in some cases, invented, or at least embellished, or

filled out, that he may have taken a couple of small incidents and melded them into a larger one.

At times, he might even be remembering an incident from another time in his life.

There's truth in everything he writes, and his insights are all there, but it would, we would be

naive, and literalist, and fundamentalist to say, if there were a Steinbeck cam, how many of these

incidents occurred exactly as Steinbeck writes about them. He said, no, no reasonably well-educated

person thinks along those lines. We all get it, that, that a book is a shaped piece of narrative,

and that stories require drama, and beginnings, and middles, and end, and Steinbeck himself

says several times in the course of Travels with Charlie that, that he is recreating these things,

and that, and they're not exactly as camera, or a tape recorder might have remembered them,

and so on. You know, I've heard from two of the leading writers about Steinbeck of our time. I'll

be talking to more as I go into phases two and three of this journey, about five more people

that I want to interview, and I'm asking them all about this book, of course, but I also asked them

to place this book, and the insights that are coming out of their mouths are remarkable, and

I'm recording them on video and audio, but what's even more interesting, David, is they're sitting

across from me at this little dinette, and they're in the rig as, as Steinbeck wanted it to be. So

when he met people, he sent the dog out to, as kind of bait, and then he would go fetch the dog,

and say, sorry, he always tries to get in people's garbage, or whatever, and then he would invite the

persons to come over to his camper van, and when they sat at his little dinette, much smaller than

this one, he would say, I have a cup of coffee for you, and they would drink a cup of coffee, and then

he'd say, I've refilled your coffee, but would you mind if I sweetened that a little, and then he'd

get out a bottle of whiskey, and pour a little whiskey, or brandy into that coffee, and pretty

soon, they're really having a conversation. So when I write to Steigerwald, or write to Jay Parini, I

say, you don't have to do this, of course, but if you're willing, I would love to interview you in

the rig, and they both said, absolutely, and it just makes it more lovely, makes it more romantic,

makes it more authentic, it gives me enormous joy, and I set up a camera, and some, a tape recorder,

and that's part of the sheer joy of the thing, and so I think that, I think Steigerwald did an

important thing with his book, Dogging Steinbeck, because he did prove beyond a shadow of a doubt,

that you can't take verbatim everything that Steinbeck says happened, and quite the way he

says it happened, but that that's really not the essence of what he was trying to do at all, and if

people want to, they can go to my site, ltamerica.org, and I have an article about Sag Harbor, where I

started the journey, and in it, I talk about my methodology for understanding Steinbeck's way of

having the adventure, and writing about the adventure, and I think that sort of says, that's

kind of a consensus view of what Jay Parini's calling auto-fiction. It's non-fiction, but

there are fictional elements in it, of course. But that's kind of the neat part of this. I do have a

you have a unique opportunity with this, to do just what you're doing, where you can share

your thoughts as you travel. We have, of course, this program, this podcast, Listening to America,

to be able to share some of the thoughts as you go, but what kind of end product do you envision

at the end of the road, at the end of this journey? Another great question. So, there'll be a book,

some video diaries, and so I'm really recording my impressions as I go, and that's another

revolution. You know, in Steinbeck's time, you had to sit down with a piece of paper. I can be driving

down the road, and turn my audio recorder on, and record impressions as I go. There's just so many

better ways, and I can, you know, he had to stop to find a pay phone, to call his wife Elaine, or he had

to send a letter, or he had to store up notes for later. So, a lot of things slipped his memory,

of course, as they do, before he got to the actual writing phase of this. So, I have that

advantage, although I think the loss of writing actual physical letters, by putting a stamp on

them, and putting them in an envelope, and putting them in the mail, and somebody receiving them four

or eight days later, is one of the great losses of our time. I keep trying to convince my daughter

that letters still matter, and it seems odd to me that since she got her Ph.D. and her M.A. on the

correspondence of the Renaissance, that she seems indifferent to this, and thinks that a, you know,

a text message is just as good as a four-page letter. But at any rate, so I've been recording

all this. There'll be a book, of course, but there might even be a documentary film. So, I'm recording

these interviews with Steinbeck scholars, with high-quality equipment, and I can see that coming

about. There are video modules that you can find on ltamerica.org. So, if anything, I'm over-producing,

but I'm having the time of my life. And so, that's one, that's one result. The second result, David,

is that this is not the end. So, this year, it travels with Charlie about 11,000 miles around

the perimeter of the country, if things go well, and I think they will. Next year, I'm going to

follow the Lewis and Clark Trail from Monticello all the way to Astoria in Oregon, and back again.

And then, the third year, I'm going to pursue Theodore Roosevelt's America, his conservation

footprint, the places where he dedicated things, or gave famous speeches, or made a difference in

the world. So, I've got, I've got a huge agenda, and the stories, the framework, in this case,

travels with Charlie, is more than just, it's the focus of what I'm doing, but it's also a

frame on which I can hang a lot of other things. So, for example, I went to Jack Kerouac's grave

to pay respects in Lowell, Massachusetts. I went to Montauk at the end of Long Island to see the

place where Theodore Roosevelt and his rough riders were quarantined after their heroics.

In Cuba, I went to Walden Pond. Steinbeck doesn't show any particular interest in Thoreau, but

Thoreau is my favorite American writer. And so, I'm using the journey as a way to do some other

things, too, because some of them I've never seen. I've never been to Kerouac's grave. I'd never been

to Montauk. I'd never been on a ferry with an airstream before, and that's a bit of a harrowing

experience. And so, I'm trying to pack in as much as I can without diluting the main focus.

have you already planned where you will be on July 4th in 2026?

some other nationally important mark, or if there was a place that you thought would be inappropriate.

be able to give a report about what I have learned from all of this. But one of the things I've always

wanted to do, David, and I hope I get the chance to do it, is to see a naturalization ceremony on

the 4th of July at Monticello. If you've ever been to a naturalization ceremony, they're deeply

moving. These recent new Americans have had to pass tests. They know more about our civics than

we do. Their appreciation for this country is extraordinary. So, I would like to end it there.

But, you know, it could be the Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park. I could be in Yellowstone.

But I know that I want to be somewhere that has symbolic significance in addition to being kind of

one of the beautiful things about LT America, the website, and listening to America, the program,

and the podcast. I think we're all excited to explore vicariously through you and to see the

me advice. And so, the more suggestions I get, I can't promise to do all of them, but they really

help me. I want people to be on the journey with me. And secondly, I didn't know you were an Eagle

spread the wonderful world of advocacy for scouting in America. I bailed out at Weblo.

Well, you've made up for it. You're getting your merit badges on the road now. And as you travel

and learn and journey, you will fill that merit badge sash full. I want you to send me some badges.

else has too. But really, I want feedback from our listeners and from people at the site,

on the radio. Thank you. Thank you. This has been Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.

I'm David Horton. Good day.