Travels With Cleo

When writer John Steinbeck set off with his poodle, Charley, on a 10,000-mile road trip around the United States in 1960, it was to rediscover a country he believed he had lost touch with in his years as a high-flying literary mega-celebrity. When I set off with my poodle mix, Cleo, to recreate the Texas leg of Steinbeck’s trip—in honor of the 60th anniversary of his bestselling book Travels With Charley: In Search of America—it was to better acquaint myself with the state I had moved to only a year earlier. To honor both Texas and Steinbeck, I intended to greet every step of the journey with the warm heart, open mind, and sturdy stomach of a seasoned traveler. Still, I didn't expect to find myself in the middle of a bayou discussing Bigfoot’s anatomy.

Ron Hollomon, a riverboat captain and co-owner of Captain Ron’s Swamp Tours near the town of Karnack in East Texas, relayed the story on a cool, bright day in October. As Ron expertly piloted his pontoon boat through shallow waterways flanked by columns of bald cypress trees and lacy curtains of Spanish moss around Caddo Lake, an area supposedly crawling with Bigfoot (Bigfeet?), he talked about the annual Bigfoot Convention in nearby Jefferson. Apparently, a couple of years ago, one of the men behind the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film—the grainy clip that shows a large, ape-like creature striding across a clearing in Northern California—attended the event to show an early, unedited version of it. Aversion