On a mild, rainy night in the spring of 2018, I patted the mattress of the bed in the dog-friendly inn where Albie and I were spending the night in Bennington, Vermont. Albie is the soulful yellow Lab and golden retriever mix our family had adopted six years before, when I was fifty-eight and he was, our vet surmised, about three. Albie hopped up on the bed and laid his head in the crook of my arm. As I had every night during our travels, I gently stroked his head, told him where we were, where we would be going tomorrow, and what a good guy he was. This night I told him we would, after nearly six weeks on the road, be going home. And I told him I loved him.
He looked at me with his deep, dark brown eyes, rolled slightly on his side to rest his body against mine, and sighed. I knew he didn’t understand. I could have been reading him “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, or sections of the Internal Revenue Code, it didn’t really matter. He also didn’t know where we were or why. What mattered was the sound of my voice, that he was safe and sound, and that we were together.
The safe and sound part is important. Albie had been picked up as a thin and frightened stray, a lost soul, on a country road in rural Louisiana in February of 2012, and impounded at a shelter where nearly nine of every ten dogs are “euthanized,” a bland euphemism for “killed in a gas chamber.” Against all odds, and thanks to a shelter volunteer who took a shine to him, Albie survived for five months until we found him online and vowed, without ever laying eyes on him, to set his world right.*
That night in Bennington we had nearly 9,000 miles behind us and just a couple of hundred more to go. The next night, after a stop in southern Maine, we’d be sleeping in our own beds, reunited with my wife Judy, and our two other rescue dogs, also from Louisiana, Salina and Jambalaya (Jamba for short).
During the nearly six weeks we’d been on the road, Albie and I had watched a full moon rise over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, snow showers sweep across the Grand Canyon, and bison walking along the road in Yellowstone. We’d driven by massive stockyards in the Texas panhandle, through endless orange groves in California’s Central Valley, and alongside vast fields of onions in eastern Oregon. Travel around America and you’ll see where most of your food comes from.
We’d stood on the spot where the great explorer Meriwether Lewis took his life along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, spent time in front of the hardware store in Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis’s mother bought his first guitar (for $7.90), and walked up and down the streets that shaped the conscience of Woody Guthrie in Okemah, Oklahoma. Albie had posed for pictures standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and with curious Chinese tourists in Yosemite Valley. We’d driven through sun-splashed corridors of wild rhododendrons and dogwoods blooming along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, in rain so heavy it was bringing down trees in Mississippi, and along remnants of old Route 66 in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. And along the way we’d met many characters, each of whom enriched our lives in some way: restaurateurs, politicians, veterans, musicians, shopkeepers, and itinerant travelers also in search of America.
So—why did we go and how did we get to Bennington on this rainy spring night?
In 1960, as he was approaching the beginning of his seventh decade, the writer John Steinbeck hit the road with his French poodle, Charley. Steinbeck was the acclaimed author of some of the greatest works ever penned by an American writer—Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden to name just a few. But in the twilight of his life he “discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir . . . I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about.” Steinbeck deemed this lapse “criminal” and set out to right this writer’s wrong.
So, he mounted a small camper on the back of a pick-up truck, called the rig Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse, and, with Charley as his wingman, spent three months driving from his Long Island home to his native California and back. Among his provisions were the tools of his trade. To a modern-day writer most sound downright quaint: “paper, carbon, typewriter, pencils, notebooks and not only those but dictionaries, a compact encyclopedia, and a dozen other reference books, heavy ones.” Oh, and maps, the old-fashioned paper kind you spread wide on a table and then attempt, in frustration, to fold back into their original form.
The result of Steinbeck’s wanderings was a widely beloved book, Travels with Charley, which became a number one New York Times best seller. By the time Steinbeck died in 1968 it had sold more than two and a half million copies, including one to a teenage boy from Paramus, New Jersey. At ninety-five cents, it was a bargain for a trip that would take me, or more precisely my imagination, through dozens of states along backroads, byways, and highways. During the summer of 2017, at age sixty-three, I reread that very same copy of Travels with Charley, yellowed with age, barely intact, and held together with Scotch tape.
Over the years, the veracity of some of Steinbeck’s account has been questioned. Though his wife is barely mentioned as a road companion—she met him briefly in Chicago and again in Texas for Thanksgiving, he wrote—she apparently joined Steinbeck for several weeks during the journey. He purportedly spent many more nights in fine hotels than one would be led to believe. Some of his encounters along the way were with people who were more likely the product of his fertile imagination than of biological parents, or composites of several people. The introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Travels with Charley cautioned readers not to take the book too literally; Steinbeck was first and foremost a novelist.
When I first read Travels with Charley, I did take all of it literally. When I reread it nearly half a century later I was a little bit more the wiser, but it didn’t dim the experience. Maybe the gumption and imagination required to undertake such an odyssey are the same qualities that cause the journeyman, or woman, to embellish from time to time. After all, an epic journey is supposed to be the stuff of legend and no one wants to come home empty-handed.
I am no stranger to the traveler on an epic journey who takes liberties with the literal truth. From 2003 to 2007, I labored to resurrect the long-lost story of my great-grandaunt, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, who from 1894 to 1895 endeavored to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world by bicycle. A married mother of three and traveling under an assumed name (“Annie Londonderry,” adopted from the first of her many corporate sponsors),† she left Boston alone carrying only a change of underwear, a pearl-handled revolver and a hyperactive imagination. She was, quite simply, a fabulist with a casual relationship with the truth.‡ Though she cycled about 9,000 miles, many of the things she claimed to have done and seen were conjured while safely ensconced in the cabin of a steamship or the sleeping compartment of a train.
Like my own Aunt Annie’s partly apocryphal tale, Travels with Charley may not be literally true in every particular, but it remains a beautiful, witty, evocative, and quintessentially American story. A story need not be literally true in whole or in part to contain Truth.
As I reread Travels with Charley at age sixty-three, it occurred to me how I should spend at least part of my year at sixty-four: traveling America, roughly along Steinbeck’s route, with Albie.
When we adopted him, Albie, at about three years old, was a canine teenager. But because dogs mature on a different timetable than humans, by the time I had turned sixty-four we had arrived on the cusp of old age together. Both of us were squarely in the autumn of our lives. Perhaps, I thought, we two aging gentlemen should, like Steinbeck and Charley, reacquaint ourselves with America.
“A dog,” Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, “is a bond between strangers. Many conversations en route began with, ‘what degree of dog is that?’”
Like Charley, Albie would be my calling card. I would count on him to attract passersby and ease me into conversations with strangers without them thinking I was deranged, dangerous, or slightly daft. He proved to be very much up to the task, endearing himself to countless people with his winsome good looks and his willingness to be touched and petted by everyone and anyone.
One goal of the trip was to rediscover the country I’d lived in for more than sixty-four years, but one that seemed to have slipped its moorings and drifted into dangerous waters. My intention in writing about the experience was not to embellish, as Steinbeck occasionally did, or conjure stories out of whole cloth as my great-grandaunt Annie often did, but to render a faithful accounting of my travels with Albie and what they revealed—about the country, about myself, and about my ever-deepening bond with Albie. There was no particular agenda, and there were no specific questions to answer. The premise, really, was no more complex than that in the old children’s ditty about the bear that went over the mountain. We went over the mountain, metaphorically speaking, to see what we could see.
I had last crossed the country by automobile in 1977 with my brother, Michael. Elvis died while we were somewhere in the wide-open spaces of Wyoming. More than forty years later, as for millions and millions of us, the romance of the Great American Road Trip still beckoned.
In a September 2, 2017, piece in the Wall Street Journal, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux recounted the origins of the Great American Road Trip beginning with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s experience in 1920, a trip that resulted in F. Scott’s The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.§ In my more ambitious moments I hoped to write a book as avant-garde as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, as laugh-out-loud funny as Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent, as meditative as William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and as enduring as Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley—all Great American Road Trip books. I’d also like to play basketball like LeBron James, baseball like Babe Ruth, football like Tom Brady, and golf like Arnold Palmer. In my more realistic moments I just hoped man and dog would return home in one piece (well, two), and with enough material for a good book.
Though, like Steinbeck, I wanted to better understand and know the country, this was not a mission to discover some verity about Donald Trump’s America and what had led us to this peculiar and precarious moment in our history. Many other writers and pundits have taken a serious swing at those questions, and it’s been discussed and argued about ad nauseum in the media and over kitchen tables for nearly three years. There wasn’t much to add that would be new or revelatory, but one could not travel America in 2018 and not brush up against those questions at some point.
When there were discussions of politics, and it was inevitable, they happened organically. When it came up, usually I was not the one to raise the subject, something my family and friends might find downright unbelievable. And there were moments that shed some light for me on what was afoot, politically speaking, in the country. I wasn’t going to avoid the subject, not on the trip or in my book, but it wasn’t the core mission. As a news junkie who has obsessively followed national politics for decades, frankly, I needed a break from the headlines that were delivering me into a state of greater and greater despair on a daily basis. Indeed, within a couple of days on the road and with less exposure to the daily onslaught of dispiriting headlines (and Facebook) I began to relax and found my relative news blackout copacetic and mildly therapeutic.
By taking you on this journey with us, my aim is to offer a bit of a respite from the dark and depressing state of our national politics—to share a more lighthearted, heartfelt, and dog-friendly tour of America and, in the process, remind us what remains wonderful and grand and good about it, even as it seems the country is coming apart at the seams. I didn’t come home more hopeful about the future; our divide seems to be growing, not retreating, and the breakdown of civility and democracy seems to be accelerating. But I did come home feeling that most Americans, wherever they live, are fundamentally decent and less at each other’s throats than one might believe from spending time on social media or watching television where the extremes dominate our national conversation. Perhaps we will one day leverage this common decency to restore a sense of national unity. There are no easy answers for what ails us, but I did, I think, gain some insight into lives very different than my own.
Not every trip we take is life-altering or results in a profound epiphany. But an observant traveler—observant not only of what is around him (or her) but of his own feelings and responses to what is seen, heard, and experienced—can’t help but be changed in ways that may be subtle and small but nevertheless meaningful. Our journey fell squarely into this category. When we returned home, I didn’t walk into the house and announce to Judy and the dogs that we were moving to Maui to seek enlightenment through meditation or psychedelics, decide to become vegan, or resolve to buy a camper so we could drive to Alaska and gaze at the northern lights, though I would someday love to see them. I did, however, become much more aware of the biases, preconceptions, and prejudices I had packed like my toothbrush and razor. And, I came back with a better understanding of why so many Americans feel left behind and forgotten in a fast-changing world and are susceptible to the appeals of demagogues who promise to make them winners again and provide them with convenient scapegoats.
Ultimately, however, our journey was simply a personal one, no more and no less. I wanted to take in the country one more time in a single big sweep, to regain a measure of its staggering grandeur and breadth and to do so in the company of Albie, a genial and loving canine companion. That boy makes my heart leap every single day. Not only was he a passport to conversations with strangers, being with him twenty-four hours a day for six weeks forced me to be more attuned to what he was experiencing as the miles went by and to try to appreciate the world a bit more as he sees and feels and smells it.
More than mere curiosity about what lay over the mountain animated the journey, however. Though in good health and feeling no different really than in 1977 when I last crossed the country by car, this trip, I thought, might be a kind of last hurrah, a curtain call, a victory lap (celebrating what victory is unclear), a final big adventure, if not for Albie then certainly for me. Who knew if I’d ever get another chance to undertake a grand tour of America?
Born in 1953, I am squarely in the middle of the baby boom generation. We are the generation that was supposed to remain forever young. But now that we are staring down the barrel of our own mortality, who is there to sue for breach of that contract?
We try to escape the reality that our days are numbered but know we cannot. It is a time in life when we are forced to reckon with the inevitable, to take stock of our lives and the measure of our days. Each is a piece of valuable currency precisely because the supply is finite.
Perhaps the trip would help me, once and for all, wrestle to the ground, or at least to a draw, a dread of mortality that has gnawed at me for as long as I can remember, simmering like a low-grade fever. My feelings about mortality are, somewhat paradoxically, a bit like those of Samuel Hamilton, one of the principal characters in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, who rapidly descended into old age after the death of a daughter:
Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, but he really didn’t believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, were immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he thought he could always argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick.
Expecting to come home completely at peace with the reality that there was far more sand in the bottom of my hourglass than the top was probably unrealistic; I just hoped it might help a little. Just months from signing up for Medicare, perhaps something about dropping out of my day-to-day routine, rarely seeing a familiar face, and living with nothing but my own thoughts and Albie for company would lead to a place of acceptance about aging. Albie would be there not just to pave the way for social interaction but also as a constant source of perspective and no small amount of joy. I am pretty much convinced that dogs cannot contemplate their own mortality. They may sense and react to threats and fight for survival if need be, but they don’t navel gaze as humans do. That’s why dogs are very present in the moment and why their joy can be so complete. I aspire to be more like Albie in that way and hoped that after spending several weeks on the road alone with him some of his sangfroid would rub off.
It didn’t. But I did come back with a much keener appreciation for home, both in the literal and figurative sense, and that’s no small matter, as anodyne as it sounds. I had missed all the little things—the garden, the white picket fence, the climbing hydrangea that grows more than fifty feet up the large oak, the way the sun sets over the backyard—and the big things—my good-natured, bighearted wife; the other dogs; our rather large village of down-to-earth, warm, and caring friends; and the old stone walls and craggy coastline of New England. Having radically altered my life and Albie’s for six weeks, I came to appreciate more keenly the life I had, rather haphazardly, managed to create by age sixty-four. And maybe that is the best we can hope for in coping with mortality: to do things that enhance our appreciation of the here and now and to be mindful about living in the present without dreading the future. Much easier said than done. Much.
Like Steinbeck, I brought notebooks along. (I take notes the old-fashioned way.) But we were otherwise differently equipped. Steinbeck had his typewriter and typing paper; I had my laptop. My cell phone served as my stereo, my reference books, my camera, my navigator and, oh yes, as my phone. One of the big advantages of Google Maps is that they don’t need to be folded. I brought a road atlas and referred to it several times, but those maps are not nearly detailed enough to help you navigate when you end up well off the beaten path because of a road closure or because you missed a turn and didn’t realize it until miles later. With Google Maps, if you have a network connection, you know exactly where you are within a matter of inches. But you don’t always have a connection, hence the road atlas.
When Steinbeck and Charley made their trip, the Interstate Highway System was in its infancy, but Steinbeck made a keen observation about these roads he called “thruways.” “When we get these thruways across the whole country,” he wrote, “it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” Albie and I traveled as much as we practically could along secondary roads, for there is little to be seen, heard, or learned at a rest stop along Interstate 90 in Ohio or Indiana that can’t be seen, heard, or learned at a rest stop along the same highway in Massachusetts or Montana. I wasn’t so much interested in driving across the country as I was in diving into it.
We drove some of the country’s most scenic roads. Some I’d driven before, such as Virginia’s Skyline Drive, which runs down the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains and above the Shenandoah Valley. But others were new to me, such as the Natchez Trace Parkway, which runs from just south of Nashville for over 440 miles to Natchez, Mississippi, and U.S. 20, which took us across much of Idaho. With a few deviations, some for practical reasons (I couldn’t afford to be away long enough to noodle around northern Maine and New Hampshire for two weeks as Steinbeck had) and others sentimental (I wanted to see the Oklahoma birthplace of my childhood hero, Woody Guthrie, and had arranged for Albie to have a reunion with the two women in central Louisiana who saved his life), we mostly stayed true to Steinbeck’s route with Charley. Steinbeck rarely identified the specific roads he traveled, but his approximate route can be plotted by the place names he mentions. However, unlike Steinbeck, who traveled west through the northern part of the United States and then east though the southern states, we reversed the order because of the time of year. Steinbeck traveled in autumn and we traveled in spring. For Albie’s sake, I wanted the weather to be as mild as possible, not too hot or too cold, for as much of the trip as possible and that meant heading south first.
Any road trip, of course, traces a single, very narrow line, and none can lay claim to taking you anywhere near the entire country, even one that covers more than 9,000 coast-to-coast-to-coast miles. You’d have to drive up and down and back and forth like you were trying to fill in an entire Etch A Sketch to do that.¶ But by driving over 9,000 miles you can acquaint yourself with much more of the country than you can by flying or, aside from walking or biking, by any other means.
Though my travels with Albie were inspired by Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, our aim was not an authentic re-creation of Steinbeck’s journey with Charley. What would be the point? Steinbeck had already written that book and done a damned fine job of it, too. Even if we had wanted to, no journey can truly be replicated, for every journey, as Steinbeck himself wrote, is one of a kind. Had Albie and I left Boston one day earlier, or one day later, we might have met an entirely different cast of characters. Instead of arriving at the Grand Canyon and finding several inches of fresh, wet snow on the ground and dense fog obscuring the view, we might have arrived on a perfectly warm, sunny day. It would have been a similar, but different, trip.
There were still other differences. Steinbeck’s conveyance was a camper and ours a convertible. By the time he made his trip, Steinbeck was married to his third wife; I am still married to my first. Steinbeck was nationally famous and worried he’d be recognized wherever he went (he wasn’t); to say I had no such concern would be a vast understatement.
Even if we had tried to faithfully re-create Steinbeck’s journey in every possible detail, someone would surely have chimed in, “But Albie’s a Lab and Charley was a poodle!” So, the goal wasn’t a re-creation of Steinbeck’s trip, but to use his journey as a touchstone for our own.
We went over the mountain just to see what we could see, and this is what we saw.