Clay and sidekick, Russ Eagle, spend time hanging out in John Steinbeck’s historic truck camper, Rocinante.
Well, Russ Eagle and I, scoundrels both, talked our way into John Steinbeck’s truck camper Rocinante last week to record a Listening to America podcast. Our trusting friends at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, pulled down the Plexiglas fence at the back of the rig and let us slip in in stocking feet for two hours of giddy chatter.
What an honor. It was a NIMBY moment as all get-out. The minute we slipped back down to Earth, we urged the Steinbeck Center folks to “never again let a couple of knuckleheads into the camper.”
Steinbeck had the rig built for a 1960 6-cylinder GMC pickup. He said he wanted it to be like the cabin of a boat. It arrived at Sag Harbor in August 1960. Steinbeck left Long Island on September 23 with his French poodle, Charley, and returned sometime before December 13, after something less than three months on the road. How many nights he actually slept in the camper is a subject of some controversy these days. My friend, the investigative journalist Bill Steigerwald, the bad boy of Steinbeck studies, wants it to be about three, and true Steinbeck lovers say “nearly every night.” Still, I suspect the truth is closer to Steigerwald’s end of the spectrum than to the myth of Steinbeck roughing it. Steinbeck wrote his account, Travels with Charley, over the winter of 1960 — 61. It turned out to be one of the public’s favorite Steinbeck books, the one in which he revealed himself — and his insecurities — more candidly than ever before. Then he sold both pickup and camper unceremoniously. Trip over, experiment complete, no plans for further RV adventures.
From the inside, Rocinante looked like every other truck camper I have ever been in. I owned one for two years a while back and found traveling in it delightful. Steinbeck’s rig was lined inside with dark paneling of the sort you saw in people’s dens and basements in the 1960s. It had a propane furnace, a gas stove, a gas refrigerator, a sink, plenty of storage, and an unspeakable chemical toilet in a very tight closet. No shower. The bed could only be accessed by pulling out a strut and collapsing the dinette table onto the bed frame.
I am sorry to say the seats around the Steinbeck dinette table are more comfortable than mine in my much more luxurious Airstream. I plan to address that problem before I venture out on the road again, as I need to spend four or five hours a day at my work desk. I cannot speak for the bed because the ornery folks at the Steinbeck Center declined to let us spend the night in the rig. We were planning to order clam chowder, sloppy joes, juicy enchiladas, lime Slurpees, gumbo, and eggs Benedict from DoorDash. They threw us out when I was finishing my call to Domino’s for triple cheese pizza with plenty of ranch (and bleu cheese!) dressing.
The day before the podcast, the excellent archivist at the Steinbeck Center, Lisa Josephs, handed me the original keys and keychain for the pickup and the camper. “What a fabulous gift,” I said, and attempted to slip the keys in my pocket. I reckoned Russ and I could make a break for it at the end of the podcast, and if we had to barrel through the front doors of the Center to get away, well, we reckoned front bumpers were made of sterner stuff back in the 60s. We planned to drive over Tehachapi Pass and on into Mexico, but we were pretty sure ICE would never let us back into the U.S. While we fantasized escape routes, Lisa explained that the pickup engine had been drained and disabled, so we decided to go to Plan B. We put in a call to our mutual friend Joshua Jay, the magician, to see if he could help us make the pickup disappear. He reminded us that he is a sleight-of-hand magician and he would be happy to help us abscond with any pack of cigarettes, pack of cards, pack of condoms, or pack of chewing gum, but nothing so large as a pickup camper. He gave us the number of David Copperfield in Las Vegas, but after leaving 17 messages without response, we desisted.
I love Joshua Jay, but what good is he in a pinch?
Despite these minor setbacks, Russ and I left the Steinbeck Center on cloud nine. We ordered a bottle of champagne for dinner with Russ’s excellent wife, Liz, the Gumbo Despot of North Carolina. The server at one of Monterey’s finest steakhouses asked us what we we’re celebrating. We told him we spent the afternoon gabbing in a 12-by-8-foot aluminum container. He lost interest in us immediately, suggested we share entrees, and urged us to buy a much cheaper bottle of champagne.
Now, a week later, our adventure in Rocinante feels like one of those things that maybe never happened. But we have photographs and audio tapes and video too, and they only patted us down twice as we left the building. Russ got through easily; for some reason, they didn’t fully trust me, and I was subjected to the full cavity search. I guess I now know what Steinbeck Center’s John M. meant when he told me back in August, “You can bet your ass I’m going to get you two into that camper next month.” We must suffer for our art.
The Rocinante adventure was the final highlight of a wonderful week in Salinas and Monterey. It was magical in every way. And if my friend Josh had only dreamed bigger years ago, Russ and I would be in Acapulco sipping fru-fru drinks and hoping to run into Lucy and Desi at the cabana.