All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

Wonderful strange stories from around the world

Life in Steinbeck's Country

I'M A LUCKY FELLOW. The folks in California are lucky folks. Heck the world is pretty lucky. If John Steinbeck were born in London or Glasgow he would probably have been lost in the masses of the great British writers who graced many a page of fine literature. Luckily John Steinbeck was born and raised at the turn of the century in the fertile farmlands of the “Salad Bowl of America”, the Salinas Valley.

The Salinas Valley is located in Monterey County on the central coast of California. He attempted college life at Stanford University but never graduated. Thereafter he moved to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and took a summer job at Fallen Leaf Lake, which fed Lake Tahoe with the pristine snowmelt from the vast and remote Desolation Wilderness. When winter arrived and the Fallen Leaf Lake Lodge became inaccessible due to the high snow his job ended and he moved to Lake Tahoe and worked as a house sitter for a large estate. He used his time while he was snowed in to write his first novel, “Cup Of Gold”, a swashbuckling tale of pirates and adventure. This was the start of a literary career, that many people feel, myself included, overshadows all other U.S. born authors. The Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes for literature leave no question he definitely was one of the best.

I'm very surprised to find a few well-read European readers have found it difficult to enjoy his works. I think it may be because his earlier and more famous books such as “ The Grapes Of Wrath”, “Cannery Row”, “Tortilla Flat”, “Of Mice And Men” and “The Pearl” were in some people's minds very simplistic in their portrayals of the common man. Steinbeck championed the causes of the common man and the under-privileged in a society that was in turmoil prior to World War II. These simple everyday emotions, actions and stories that are intrinsic in any culture or society were the things that made Steinbeck's portrayals so enjoyable and famous. Any person reading his stories, in any language, could relate easily to many of the characters and even see their own human experience being reflected in the thoughts and actions of these people. It is true that many of the characters were simple everyday people, in so many ways, yet their actions and emotions and that simplicity, were the common thread that connected them to readers worldwide. His non-fiction also makes great reading, “The Log From The Sea of Cortez”, “A Russian Journal” and “Travels With Charlie” gave great insights into the man and his perspective on a diverse realm of subjects. For pure pleasure “The Acts Of King Arthur And his Noble Nights” is a delightfully lyrical rendition of tales we know so well.

His novels brought great notoriety, success and acclaim in literature and many were turned into successful motion pictures by Hollywood. Unfortunately post-war America had an agenda and Senator Joseph McCarthy, Ronald Reagan and many other cowards who hid behind their so-called patriotism disgraced The Constitution of The United States and created an infamous witch-hunt in search of the dreaded “Commies”. Hollywood, unions, Steinbeck, his friends and many other creative and compassionate people were victims of this ugly, and regrettable piece of American history. Fortunately Steinbeck proved more resilient than others and was able to persevere and didn't see his life destroyed as so many others did during this debacle.

In 1960 Steinbeck purchased a new V-6 GMC pickup truck with a self contained camper and partnered up with his giant poodle Charlie and headed out from the east coast to travel the width of the United States and documented his observations in one of his last novels “Travels With Charlie”. The America he found left him with many concerns of where his once proud nation was going as he recorded his insights and observed what he felt was the beginning of the disintegration of many of the things that had made America great. His “King Arthur” book was published after his death in the late 60's and it showed his amazing versatility as a writer extraordinaire.

It was only after his death that his home town, Salinas, started to recognize his greatness and started to call him a favorite son. The “Commie”, the sympathizer for the poor and unfortunate was forgiven, and much was forgotten as they now could profit from his world wide fame and they would try to ride his coattails into respectability and out of the shadow of being a backwards thinking, big farm, small minded city. I guess all he might do is laugh if he were still around because the last thing I remember reading about the city of Salinas was that they closed their library because they said they didn't have the money to keep it open anymore. You have to laugh, otherwise you would end up crying. What a disgrace! I think closing the library should make the place much more famous than the claim that John Steinbeck was born there. I wonder if the farmers there think that irony is a fertilizer similar to magnesium.

Many of his earlier works didn't have a “Hollywood Happy Ending” (this could be one of the reasons he is a hard read for some). They show us the real world in California before and after World War II. These were not the best of times for many, but if you have read “The Grapes Of Wrath” and remember the end of the book there is no other novel that could possibly have the impact and feeling that was delivered by what has to be the most powerful and compassionate ending of any novel ever written. The Nobel Prize he received is almost insufficient in regards to the power that he was able to deliver with those final lines.

If you have read most of his works there is one book that most people I have met have not had a chance to read and enjoy. It is called “Steinbeck: A Life In Letters”. It was published by his sister Elaine and is a compilation of many of the letters that he wrote to his friends. From being snowbound in Lake Tahoe, to the Nobel Prize in Sweden, this book of letters is an enjoyable journey into the mind of one of the most intuitive writers of the human spirit and emotion. It is also a good chronicle of a broad expanse of time in a very volatile and changing America.

In the mid 1960's I started to read his works and took many of my steps in the same places as the characters of his novels. He had a way of putting a picture into your mind with just a few words. Heck if he was born in Texas people would probably have known hundreds of ways of describing flat and desolate, and they all would have been interesting and intriguing. Luckily he wasn't a Texan and when he talks of sitting under an oak tree next to a wooden farm house in the middle of 400 acres of pinto beans, or next to the Pacific Ocean as the sardine ships bring in their catch you can feel the fertile earth and smell the kelp beds when the tide is out.

As a kid of 16, with my first wheels, my friends and I started taking trips to Monterey and the Cannery Row of Doc Ricketts, “Sweet Thursday” and “Tortilla Flat”. I realized that these were the places that inspired his fertile imagination, and they inspired mine also. I felt I had some sort of connection with many of his characters and scenes as I explored the then deserted fish canneries and an infamous little flat topped marine laboratory that were built on pilings in the inter-tidal rocks of the Monterey Bay on the Row. We always felt Doc Ricketts, a renowned and still published, marine invertebrate biologist, was a hero. Steinbeck used Doc's persona to create some of his interesting characters in a few of his books. When we went to his lab on the Row we would polish a little circle in the dirty windows and look in and see the cluttered lab and the equipment just as it must have been the day that he met his unfortunate demise at an unsignalled railroad crossing one night driving from the Row in the late 1940's. The lab was an anomaly in many ways and it was evident in the way that the little 15 foot tall by 40 foot wide building sat dwarfed by the massively tall football field size canneries that surrounded it.

“Cannery Row” was the story of the bustling activities and characters that a lucrative fishing industry had created around the canneries that lined Cannery Row in the port of the Monterey Bay in the 1930's. By the early 1940's the greed of war caused the fishermen, canners and wholesalers to catch virtually all the sardines that had existed in and around the Monterey Bay. What was once a bustling beehive of activity, revolving around the canning industry for the many huge canneries, turned into a virtual ghost town almost overnight.

To kids of 17 and 18 years old, this ghost town in 1970, was alive with the images of storybook characters. Our minds would run as wild as our spirits as we recreated imagined scenarios and searched for lost treasures that the magical world of literature had given us. Doc's lab was sacred and we never set foot inside, but the abandoned canneries were ripe for the pillage and plunder of our fertile imaginations and our strong and agile young bodies. At low tide, my cousin Dave and I, would slip and slide through the broken storm drains to the kelp covered rocks and rip rap under the old canneries and find one of the lower pilings and boost and shove our way up through a broken wooden floor plank and into the vast nothingness of these abandoned relics. As we surveyed the dirty unending emptiness we found what remained after thirty years. Creditors, bandits and vagrants had accomplished what we had hoped to do, and that was to find some treasure, anything of value. Every hope or thought of this grand accomplishment was dashed and forgotten in seconds. Everything, and I do mean everything, of any value was gone, there wasn't a stick of furniture, a vehicle, a tool or even any of the machinery left to be salvaged from these now huge mausoleums. The only thing that remained was the garbage of an industry that had been devastated. Boxes upon broken boxes of old sardine tin cans, lids and labels were scattered across the football field size open floors. We did our share of adding to the clutter as we kicked open some of the still intact cardboard boxes hoping to find something of value other than the useless rusting cans and labels that we were surrounded in. We had been robbed! Our dreams were crushed like the rusty tin cans, the treasures of our imagination destroyed. We were insulted, even the labels didn't say sardines on them; “Pilchards” was the word that was used to describe the picture of the fish on those bright red labels. We slunk away feeling gutted.

Gone was the proof of another existence, a place in time when different men lived a different life. Still these men had thought the same thoughts about many of the same old things, life and living, enjoying and giving, pain and sorrow, loving and losing, failing and winning. It's always the same, and it's constantly changing. Only a few people are good enough to take us on a journey in our minds, through the creative magic of words, to enjoy worlds that we may never physically visit. They allow us to become part of these worlds as they take us with them into a story that may have been told a hundred times before, by a hundred different people, but with them, we can become part of it. My cousin and I left that day knowing this story had been told and probably retold and we would have nothing to add to it as all the gold that was at the end of our rainbow would only be in the words that Steinbeck had given us in his books, and definitely not in our pocket books.

Cannery Row is about eight to ten hours from San Francisco by boat and a person can make it there in about two hours by car. If you would create a radius from those two points and swing an arc of just 90 degrees from San Francisco you would probably encounter nearly 100 colleges and universities. Three quarters of a century after the “Grapes Of Wrath” that area could probably be called the “Educational Bowl Of America”. Hopefully from this well educated and ethnically diverse group of people will come another writer similar to Steinbeck with the ability to tell tales of real people, simple people, as we all are. Now is a time when America, and the entire world especially, needs an author who can go to the roots of the common modern man, in common everyday situations, and show compassion, hope, good will and truth, so we will have a reason to have faith in the common good of all, and the better world that it can create.

To the south of Cannery Row is undeniably one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. If you go about a mile south of the aquarium to the point of the bay, you will hear the roar of the waves, seals and sea lions in the large rocks that abound in sea-life. At that point you are in Pacific Grove, an eccentric quaint seaside town that borders the Del Monte Forest that encompasses the famous areas of Pebble Beach and Carmel. Along the next almost 100 miles of coastline is a wilderness almost completely devoid of man. I am sure that there is no place on earth that is more beautiful, just as I am sure that there are many places that may be just as beautiful, but this southbound route is a picture postcard every few minutes.

A testament to the ruggedness of this terrain is the fact that the cork-screwed two lane road that clings to the sides of the hills and mountains almost never allows you to drive anywhere near the level of the beach. Being in the passenger seat as you go south allows you to view the ocean crashing against these abutments as an Arctic storm comes crashing down from the north. That same seat may offer a view of a sleek lion racing across the road and up the steep and heavily forested mountains while almost 500 feet straight down is that same ocean as calm as a lake with acres of kelp bobbing in sun drenched water sparkling like diamonds. There are few places someone can lodge along this stretch of Highway 1, or as we call it, the “Coast Highway”. When I talk about a “few” I'm not talking about using the fingers on both my hands to count. Esalon is the name of a world famous retreat centre that is situated on this very untravelled and unknown part of the world.

Today, 2005, Cannery Row is a “Conney Island” or a “Blackpool”, well maybe not quite, but with over-priced restaurants and wall to wall shops selling trinkets and curios and cotton candy at three times the price of a county fair you would have to say it is a full fledged tourist trap. It does have a redeeming world-class marine aquarium built with money donated from the fortunes of the inventors of the first American computer (Mr's Hewlett and Packard). Millions of people have and will continue to visit the Row looking for the magic of the Steinbeck tales of the past. If you get a chance to visit definitely stroll about a third of a mile east down the Row from the aquarium and see if that little flat roofed marine lab is still standing. If it still is, hopefully it will help you imagine a different time, a time in the past that Steinbeck immortalized. Maybe it will make you remember another time, almost four decades ago, when a couple of kids searched the bowels of the abandoned canneries searching for adventure and some sort of treasure only to come up empty handed amidst rusting and moldy debris.

I think it was about 15 years ago when I decided to bite the bullet and go back to the modern, spiffed up Row and have a look at this new world class aquarium and see what remained of my cherished old dilapidated Row. Yes, things had changed, for the better, I couldn't say. There are expensive hotels nearby and fancy restaurants are now perched on pilings over the bay. It costs big bucks just to park your car if you can find a place. I stopped at what is now one of the many tourist traps, an old wooden store built on solid ground at the base of a hill that rises out of the Row. It is nearly a hundred years old and was once owned by an old Chinese man who did a healthy trade and it was now more prosperous than ever selling all the typical tourist trinkets you would expect to find.

There is gold in the written word, there is gold in having dreams. There is gold in the imagination of kid's minds as they explore the magic that some people's literature creates, but much much more than that, there is GOLD, yep, gold I said, green gold in that old Chinese market. 15 years ago they were selling, for five dollars each, those old red “Pilchard” (???) canning labels that we kicked across the floors of those broken down canneries.

Oh the hopefully soon to be forgotten memories. Boxes and boxes of tin cans and lids, 10's upon 10's of thousands of labels and lids and more, boxes and boxes, dirty and dusty, filthy and rusty, stinky and musty, 15 years, 35 years, a lifetime of diamonds and rust and gold and dust, could it be just..... FIVE DOLLARS!!!! It couldn't be!! FIVE DOLLARS 5 5 5 for each and every one, five-dollar bills all boxed and bundled as we were stupid and bungled then off we had stumbled.

Dave, it was good that you at least grabbed a fistful of labels, even though you can't find them anymore. I wonder who now owns my old ‘57 Cadillac El Dorado Biaritz convertible with the metallic blue leather interior, if only we filled that fancy trunk (if Steinbeck were born in Glasgow he'd call it a boot) up with those labels and parked it in the barn, if oh if if.

Well there is no “Hollywood Happy Ending” here either. Maybe, just maybe, if Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck are looking down at all that is happening around the Row, maybe they might say, it doesn't matter what people are looking at, just as long as they are looking.

By Tom Duzanica

Prior | Tell us what you think | Next

Add to Your Social Bookmarks: Del.icio.us Digg Furl Reddit Simpy Spurl Y! MyWeb - StumbleUpon