John Clayton's Blog

"We go to press tomorrow," the editor emailed me at ten minutes to 5:00 that night. "And I have one question. Did Steinbeck travel over Homestake Pass or Pipestone Pass?" I'd written that the author John Steinbeck, in Travels with Charley, stopped at Montana's Continental Divide, "presumably on Pipestone Pass near Butte." But Interstate 90 travels over Homestake Pass. Almost nobody goes over Pipestone Pass, five miles south.

"It's a small item, but I don't want some Buttian calling up pissed off," the editor said. Let me say here how much I love writing for the Montana Quarterly. They notice things like this. Because they have readers who notice things like this. Some of those readers live in Butte, which has a reputation for directness.

There was a moment of panic because I didn't have proof handy. Steinbeck just called it the Continental Divide. Bill Steigerwald, whose wonderful book Dogging Steinbeck I quoted, didn't mention the pass. "I believe I saw a map," I emailed back right away. "Let me see if I can find it."

It took a while to find. But I did. And I was glad. Because it makes a difference.

One of the main points of my article is that road-tripping was different in 1960, when Steinbeck and Charley crossed the country. There were very few Interstate highways. And so on back roads, Steinbeck got a different, richer feel for the landscape and culture he was traveling through. Today the Interstate catapults you over Homestake Pass as fast as your transmission will allow.

But soon after arriving in Montana, I made a point of driving over Pipestone Pass. It was a Blue Highways kind of experience, one I've never forgotten. It helped me envision what Steinbeck had seen, that we don't see today. That's what I tried to capture in the article, and maybe by mentioning the backwater pass I could inspire one or two of our readers to go have that experience themselves.