Shadowing Steinbeck, With a Dog in Tow

The title for Lauren Hough’s upcoming “Monster of a Land,” published by Pantheon Books, stems from a John Steinbeck quote: “This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm of me.”The publisher describes the travel memoir as “an update” of Steinbeck’s classic “Travels with Charley” filtered through Ms. Hough’s perspective as a lesbian, Air Force veteran, and a writer concerned with life on the margins of American society.Ms. Hough was born in Germany and raised across seven countries, as well as in West Texas. She worked a wide range of jobs — bartender, bouncer, construction laborer, driver and barista — occupations that surface in her writing. In 2021, she became a bestselling author with “Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing.” The essay collection explores her unusual and often difficult upbringing in the Children of God (The Family International) cult and the lasting effects of that experience. In her new book, she admits she didn’t want to write about herself anymore: “I had enough of me.” She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a writer at all. But an editor at the magazine Texas Highways convinces her to travel to Shamrock in Wheeler County, Texas, a small town with less than 1800 residents. It was there, her grandfather had said, that Bonnie and Clyde had once hidden in his family’s barn. Her grandfather was in his 90s and suffering from Alzheimer’s, when he recalled the story, but true or not, it was a good enough reason to take the trip. Instead of finding traces of the bank robbers, Ms. Hough finds her dog, a three-quarters Siberian husky and one-quarter pitbull, she named Woody Guthrie. “So much for travel, I thought,” she writes. Woody liberates her, one could argue, to embark on a journey she had long dreamed about but was never free enough to take. “I’ve always loved road movies and road songs and road books. I’d devour them, dreaming of taking that epic trip of my own — open road with a dog riding shotgun,” Hough told People magazine in an interview. “But it was never the right time. Until it was, or maybe I just needed the right dog.” “Monster of a Land” opens with an aphoristic observation: “There are trips you plan your whole life and never take.” Through her list of excuses for not taking that trip, we learn about her life: “You leave for the Airforce and your friend goes to college in Oklahoma… You call home one night, a few weeks before your tour of duty in Saudi ends.” She tells her readers that it has been close to a year since her “soul mate,” an Akita called Teddy, who was no fan of traveling, has died, and she still doesn’t know, “how to sleep without hearing him snore.” She has resisted the urge to get a new dog, but in that Shamrock motel room, she falls “off the wagon.” “Blame the single dog hair trapped in my keyboard,” Ms. Hough writes. “Blame the loneliness. Blame the fly beating itself against the window, I opened the rescue website and scrolled, and there was a dog’s face smiling back at me.” Back in Austin, she unpacks boxes in her new apartment and comes across a copy of Steinbeck’s book. She admits that she has tried reading it a few times, but never actually got to finish it. Now, with the new dog snoring beside her, she finally does and is so inspired, she decides to take her dog on a road trip across the U.S. and write an homage to the travelogue classic. Two years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1960, the author of “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men” found himself with the “incurable” itch to write a travel novel. It wouldn’t be his first. He had published “A Russian Journal” in 1948 about his travels through the postwar Soviet Union with the photographer Robert Capa. Then, in 1951, he published “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” another kind of travelogue, where he accompanied his friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts on a six-week specimen-collecting expedition in the Gulf of California. For “Travels with Charley,” Steinbeck turned his attention back to the United States. “For many years,” he writes, he had “traveled in many parts of the world,” but at 58, he realized he didn’t actually know his “own country.” “I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light,” Steinbeck wrote. “I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country in twenty-five years… and it seemed to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal.” He set out on a three-month-long journey across the country with his dog Charley, a French “gentleman” poodle, in a custom-built pick-up truck with a camper top “like the cabin of a small boat.” He called it Rocinante, the name of Don Quixote’s horse. For Steinbeck the French poodle was somewhat of a Sancho Panza character, being old and “very bad at fighting.” Steinbeck takes him along as a companion and Charley triggers the random conversations with strangers that lonesome travel writers seek and simultaneously dread. The dog is a literary tool and secondary to the actual trip. He writes that “we don’t take a trip, a trip takes us… In this a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” Ms. Hough approaches her journey differently. Her husky plays a weightier role and her trip is dog-led in its very origin. While Steinbeck sets out to rediscover his country, Ms. Hough seeks to immortalize her dog. Lauren Hough and her dog Woody. Karl Poss IVShe writes: “Then the delusional part of me- the hopeful part, the part of me was still heartbroken over the loss of a dog who’d been my soul-mate, the part of me that reaches out for a dog without thinking, to touch his fur, to feel his chest rise and fall, the part of me that could once again listen to a dog snore as I drifted off to sleep – that part thought: A dog who survives a book lives forever.“She buys a 2021 Dodge Ram van “that looked like it belonged to a retiree or a meth cook,” and refurbished it with new brakes, a kitchen, a bed she builds herself, and a sink. “The plan was,” she writes, “to live mostly in the van while I drove around the country, along the approximation of the route Steinbeck took when he wrote ‘Travels with Charley.’” The minor difference being that Steinbeck started his trip in Long Island and Ms. Hough started hers in Austin, Texas. Ms. Hough’s style is captivating. It’s hard to put the book down, and one is glad she takes us on her journey, even if she can’t quite quit the habit of writing about herself.

Shadowing Steinbeck, With a Dog in Tow

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