Clay visits John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor home on Long Island where the noted author began his 1960 cross-country journey, immortalized in Travels With Charley.
A journey in the wake of John Steinbeck’s 1960 Travels with Charley trek has to begin at Sag Harbor on Long Island. Steinbeck lived there off and on beginning in 1955.
So I drove my Airstream, Rocinante, from Bismarck, N.D., to the end of Long Island to do it right. (And learned some RV lessons along the way.)
I was delighted to be shown around the property by Kathryn Szoka of the Sag Harbor independent bookstore Canio’s Cultural Cafe. The bookstore is hosting a marathon public reading of Travels with Charley on June 7. Last year they did Melville’s Moby Dick, compared to which Travels with Charley is a mere pamphlet!
Steinbeck set off on his transcontinental journey from Sag Harbor on September 23, 1960, in a new pickup camper, with hunting and fishing equipment, more books than he could possibly read along the way, a well-stocked supply of liquor, and his giant French poodle Charley.
He drove the perimeter of the United States, 11,500 miles. And then wrote a superb account of his travels, published in 1962.
I’ll write more about this, but for the moment just a few comments:
1) The house at Sag Harbor is smaller than I had expected, but the grounds are larger, with magnificent old oak trees that have just begun to leaf out.
2) The dock is still there in the bay. It was the scene of a preliminary drama, when Hurricane Donna swept through and threatened to crush the Faire Elayne (the boat) against the dock. Steinbeck rescued the boat, anchored it safely, well away from shore, and then swam back through the flood tide. It was a dangerous thing to do and Steinbeck’s wife Elaine was both relieved and scolding when he straggled back to shore.
3) His writing hut, Joyous Garde, is quite far from the house, right on the edge of the bay. He had it built small enough so that he would not be beleaguered by visitors while he wrote every day. He strung electrical cords from the house to Joyous Garde when he needed electricity.
4) The Steinbecks divided their time between their place in New York City and Sag Harbor which is more than 100 miles from Manhattan and traffic in our time can be congested.
So now I have touched base at the embarkation point. Tomorrow I will take the ferry to Connecticut and begin — first up to the top of Maine (which he insisted upon and partly regretted), then to Niagara, down along the southern shore of the Great Lakes to Chicago, and from Chicago through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and eastern North Dakota, where Phase One of my great journey ends around June 6.
Special thanks to Kathryn Szoka and Canio’s Cultural Cafe, an excellent bookstore where, of course, I bought a couple of books.
I was deeply moved, grateful, and inspired to wander the property and sense the contentment (and privacy) one of America’s greatest writers enjoyed “far from the madding crowd” of New York City.
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