Inspired by an image of the famous author in an old poster, and after years of searching, Listening to America’s Russ Eagle, with the help of intrepid friends, discovers the remote spot in the hills near Salinas, California, that John Steinbeck, his dog Charley, and the truck camper, Rocinanate, visited on their 1960 journey.
About thirty-five years ago, I acquired a print of a poster created to promote the 1991 Steinbeck Festival in Salinas. It wasn’t the typography or the design that caught my eye — it was the photograph. John Steinbeck sits on the shoulder of a dirt road with his poodle, Charley, at his side. Behind them rests Rocinante, the green pickup with the white camper that carried them across the country in 1960, the journey that became Travels with Charley.
Only a handful of photographs exist from that trip, and none that I’ve seen compare with this one. Steinbeck and Charley sit in the filtered light of an afternoon beneath a gnarled oak tree. The land slopes down below a rudimentary barbed wire fence and into rolling green hills scattered with valley oaks. The road curves away and disappears behind Steinbeck and Charley. I’ve had that poster framed and hanging in my basement now for more than three decades.
It was in early November that Steinbeck and Charley had rolled into Monterey County. He visited first with one of his sisters, Esther, in Watsonville, before joining another, Beth, in the family cottage in Pacific Grove. That cottage had been the crucible of his early career — his parents let him live there rent-free from 1930 to 1936, years that turned him from an obscure writer into a national voice and leading literary commodity.
During that 1960 visit, Steinbeck revisited many of the places that made him: the bars of Monterey, the dry brown hills above Salinas, the spiky granite crest of Fremont Peak. He repaired things around the cottage, argued politics with his sisters, and took Elaine to see the places that once shaped his imagination. I tend to believe that the photograph — him, Charley, and the truck under the oak — was taken during one of those small pilgrimages. Elaine, unlike John, tended to carry a camera.
For years, the image lived quietly on my wall. In the late 1990s, however, I started spending considerable time along California’s Central Coast. Driving the backroads of Monterey County, I’d sometimes catch a glimpse of a landscape that felt eerily familiar. At some point, I began to consciously wonder if I might find the exact spot where Steinbeck and Charley had sat together all those years ago.
But Monterey County is enormous — nearly 4,000 square miles of ridges, ranches, and winding roads that weave through some of the most beautiful country on earth. It was a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. I questioned locals, and they all had their theories: Carmel Valley, Fremont Peak, River Road, Arroyo Seco, and so on. All plausible guesses, but in the end, all wrong. Eventually, I gave up the search. The poster went back to being simply a cool thing hanging in my basement.
Then, in July, everything changed. My friends John and Christina McPherson — both from Salinas — joined us for Clay’s annual Lewis and Clark trip along the Missouri River and the Lolo Trail. John serves on the board of the National Steinbeck Center, and we talked endlessly around campfires and hiking trails about Steinbeck Country. After I returned home, it struck me that if anyone might know the location of that photograph, it was John. I sent him a snapshot of the poster. His reply was brief: “I don’t know, but I’m on it.”
And so he was. A week later, an email arrived with a simple subject line: “I found it.” Attached was a photo. The angle was slightly different, the color faded, but there was no mistaking it — the same curve of the road, the same long slope of the pasture, the same solitary oak. “Where?” I wrote back.
“Somewhere you’d never find,” he replied. “But I’ll take you there when you come to town.”
And so he did. A few weeks ago, on a September Saturday morning, John made good on his promise. And he was right. I’d never have found it myself, though it turned out to be in the most fitting place imaginable: deep in the Pastures of Heaven.
It took a while to get there. John and Christina filled us in on local history as we headed into the Corral de Tierra. About seven miles after leaving the highway, we left the pavement and began to crawl along a narrow ranch road. About a mile in, we eased our way through an S-curve, and there it was — the same rolling bottomland, the same winding fence, the same tree, the same livestock trails. Sixty-five years had passed, and yet almost nothing had changed. The oak still leaned over the road, broken by storms and time but still recognizable. The grass was no longer green — it was September, the end of California’s dry season, and the hills were tawny and brittle, but the shape of the land was unchanged.
We lingered for quite some time, marveling that we had such a landscape all to ourselves. There were the requisite photos, of course, and the opportunity to pick a few leaves and acorns, but mostly we just sat, trying to establish and inhabit the time and the place. The oak, it turned out, was a valley oak, a tree native to California’s inland hills. Their lifespans can stretch beyond five centuries. For all we know, the tree is now only approaching middle age.
John looked around before making an astute observation. “You don’t end up here by accident. Steinbeck must have been looking for this place.” He was right. The landscape called to something private and enduring — a place of memory as much as geography. The oak, the road, the quiet: it all felt like the perfect embodiment of Steinbeck’s California. The trunk of the tree had grown firmly around one of the old fence posts. It made us wonder: How many more years — hundreds, perhaps — can this fence, this post, this oak, hold each other in place along this lonely dirt road?
Steinbeck wrote that his “memory myth repaired itself” as he stood with Charley atop Fremont Peak and surveyed the country of his youth. That made sense now. Sitting beneath that solitary valley oak, I could sense that repair — the past and present aligning for a brief but thrilling moment.