I would go as a veteran newspaper journalist and won’t-get-old Boomer, not a Pulitzer-winning novelist. My trip down the Old Steinbeck Highway would be nothing like his.
As closely as possible, I’d retrace the idiosyncratic route Steinbeck and Charley traveled during the months when Khrushchev was banging his shoe at capitalist America in the United Nations, the Pirates and Yankees were slugging it out in the World Series and Kennedy and Nixon were debating to see who’d be tough enough to be the next boss of the Free World.
Wherever Steinbeck and his poodle companion Charley went half a century ago, I will go. I was only there because John Steinbeck himself climbed to this exact spot in the fall of 1960 during his 10,000-mile counterclockwise spin around the country that became “Travels With Charley.” In six and a half months I will repeat Steinbeck’s road trip. I flew, drove and hiked 2,737 miles to get to Fremont Peak, but I didn’t come for the fabulous view. D-Day +196 and Day Two of my extreme research tour of the part of the world Steinbeck made famous with his books and which now bears his name. Everything Steinbeck is down there somewhere in the awesome panorama before me – the house he grew up in, the statues and libraries that glorify him, the places and characters he made famous for eternity in “Of Mice and Men,” “Grapes of Wrath,” “Cannery Row” and “East of Eden.” It’s why they call it “Steinbeck Country.” But they’re both out there somewhere under the glare of the dying California sun as it slips into Monterey Bay 25 miles from where I sit. I can’t see Steinbeck’s grave or his ghost from up here. Just lucky me, my official Reporter’s Notebook and a head full of thoughts about John Steinbeck and the long journey I was going to take with him. No other ex-journalists with dogs doing books about “Travels With Charley.” Just my voice when I put my back to the flaming western sky and turn my camcorder on myself to prove to the rest of the world that I was here.
Except for the pushy west wind and the drone of a stray private plane, I have had the rocky top of this dizzying little peak to myself for two hours. Fremont Peak, elevation 3,169, population 1.
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