This is the seventh in a series of articles by staff writer Chuck Haga, who is retracing the route taken by author John Steinbeck in 1960 that led to the book “Travels With Charley.”
Salinas, the northern California town that calls itself the lettuce capital of the world, finally has grown comfortable with its other claim to fame.
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902, grew up roaming the long, fertile valley and the twin mountain ranges that frame it. His novels and stories were set here, most of them, peopled with whores as well as heroes, with derelicts and fools, petty merchants and mean, grasping old families.
For generations, the scenes angered and embarrassed the local establishment. But time heals. And notoriety sells.
There are many shrines, including Steinbeck’s simple grave beneath a leaning oak in the Garden of Memories cemetery at the edge of town. He died in 1968.
At the public library, now the John Steinbeck Library, first editions of his works, some letters and photographs are displayed, and clerks at the checkout desk sell John Steinbeck sweatshirts. A former Presbyterian church, not his family’s church, is now a restaurant called East of Eden.
In nearby Monterey, Cannery Row is much shrunken and there are no fish, no fishermen, just more of those overly cute shops that angle for tourist dollars. Alvarado St. has been tidied and trendied, and where Johnny Garcia’s bar still stood in 1960, where Steinbeck saw old friends, drank and danced and sang with them but brooded about how you can’t go back, there is now a bank.
“I met him when he came through here with Charley,” said John Bright, 56, a Monterey bartender. “He was standing with Ed Kennedy, the newspaper editor here, and Ed introduced me. Steinbeck stood off and was sort of cold, but Charley was friendly.”
How is the writer remembered today?
“Well, there are two schools of thought. To a lot of people here, he was a great writer who put Monterey on the map. But to others, some of the older folks, he was a drunken bum himself.”
And while his name has been widely exploited — lawyers and real estate agents work in Steinbeck Plaza, a nondescript office block — it’s easy to find people who aren’t sure what the fuss was about.
“I tried to read one of his books once,” the motel desk clerk said. “It was ‘The Wrath of something.’ “
“The Grapes of Wrath?”
“Yeah, that was it. I read about three pages and quit.”
Steinbeck was troubled by his visit home in 1960, and his response was flight. But he did one last sentimental thing before heading east. He drove to Fremont’s Peak, the highest point around for many miles, climbed to the summit and surveyed the lands where he was raised.
His description of that moment included this: “In the spring, Charley, when the valley is carpeted with blue lupines like a flowery sea, there’s the smell of heaven up here, the smell of heaven.”
Then, having printed the place once more in his mind, he hurried away, “away from the permanent and changeless past.”
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I put my back to the Pacific and started east, then southeast, through Fresno and Bakersfield and into the Mojave Desert. If the Crayola people put out a box of only desert browns, buffs and tans, it still could be a box of 64. When the light is right, there are reds and blues in the desert, too.
This was the barrier that was supposed to test whether a westbound man was good enough to make it to California, but it takes little effort or courage to cross it today in a good car. And there are so many vehicles on the highway that there is little sense of what it must have been like for ’49ers or Okies. So halfway through the desert, I pulled off onto a gravel road and drove until I couldn’t see or hear traffic. I stopped, made coffee and listened to — nothing. It was hot, silent and incredibly still, at one moment calming and then almost frightening.
At the Arizona line, I made the first of several deviations from Steinbeck’s route, turning north and following the Colorado River to Bullhead City. I drove through a violent storm, eerie because it came so soon after the desert, and the lightning was like an advertisement for what lay across the river in Nevada: the 24-hour casinos of Laughlin, a long, dazzling row of neon and come-ons – free drinks, brunch for a dollar, win a Cadillac, win a million.
I lost $20 at machine poker, skipped brunch and talked to Regina Troxell, 41, who came to Laughlin with her husband and some friends from Ventura, Calif., to bowl a lot and gamble a little. They were having a good time, but she turned serious when I asked her how the country is doing. She’s been thinking about it, she said.
“I’m doing OK, but then you have to think about the rest. And I’m having a hard time figuring that part, what I should do.
“People don’t want to help other people like they used to, and I’m feeling it in myself. We’re losing the caring, community feeling because everybody is looking after their own. Somebody walks up to you and you’re afraid to talk to them because they might want something.”
She used to be more involved, she said. Now she picks her causes more carefully. “We had a raffle at our bowling center to help a boy who had been burned. And after I volunteered, it all fell to me. Nobody else wanted to get involved. I’m glad I did it, and I hope it helped with all the surgeries. But no more. And I think that happens a lot. People who are really valuable get turned off, because if they act eager and willing they get stuck with the whole thing.”
What will make the country better, she said, is more people taking more responsibility for themselves and their children. Concern for others will follow naturally.
“What you get from your parents stays with you. Abuse, drinking – you learn what you’re brought up with. I was brought up in a loving family, but a lot of people weren’t. I didn’t know that until fairly recently, when I saw a lot of my friends not being able to cope. More of my women friends, for example — they need emotional support because they’ve lost spouses or they aren’t what they thought they’d be, or they aren’t what TV and everything tells them they should be. And they don’t have that inner strength to cope with that.”
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Near Kingman, Ariz., in an adobe Mexican restaurant with straw hats on the walls and lots of rr’s in the food, Jenny Dominguez wanted to talk about self-respect. I had asked her about the proposal on the state ballot to make English the official language of Arizona.
She speaks Spanish and English, and now she’s studying German in high school. “It’s sort of a high English,” she said. “I really like it. And they have such an interesting culture.”
She is 16 and wants to be an interpreter. There may be good reasons for encouraging everyone to learn English, she said, but she sees the ballot proposal as cultural chauvinism, damaging and mean.
“Most of my Chicano friends don’t speak Spanish in school,” she said. “They’re embarrassed to. Afraid to. And I don’t understand, because it’s what we are.”
Sometimes she refers to “Americans” and means “them,” even though she was born a U.S. citizen. “I am an American,” she said. “But I am Mexican, too. My parents came from Mexico, and my brothers were born there. We have relatives in Mexico still, and I’ve gone there to visit them and see where my parents lived. I liked it very much.
“That’s my heritage. But sometimes I feel rejected by my teachers by the way they treat me, or ignore me. There’s a lot of prejudice here. Americans always have to be No. 1.” She smiled. “My mom is making bread,” she said. “You want some?”
I took the round, flat loaf with me to the Grand Canyon. Arriving after dark, I made camp, had a supper of sweet bread and coffee and listened to my neighbors. Some spoke German. A bunch of others sang along with the soundtrack from “The Big Chill.” And at the site next to mine, inside a tent, a man and a woman took turns reading stories to a baby.
The storytellers were Judd and Melanie Thompson of Los Angeles. Their 4 month-old daughter, Malindi, was named for a town in Kenya, where the parents met as Peace Corps volunteers in 1979. Now he’s an engineer, she’s about to finish medical school, and they wonder what happened to the time they used to have to look beyond themselves.
“You get busy with your own life,” Melanie said. “You’re a couple, and then you’re a family, and you get real jobs. When we were in the Peace Corps, we used to scavenge for a Time magazine, anything with news about the States. I’m feeling disappointed with myself now for how little I pay attention.”
“It’s like letter writing,” Judd said. “I used to write letters all the time, six or seven a day, and I would get so upset with people who didn’t write back. What does it take, I wondered, to write a letter? But now I can’t find the time.”
He has felt his politics change, too, with his fortunes.
“I’m a registered Democrat, and I was always a liberal. But the more I work, the more I make — I don’t know, the more entrenched I get. Sometimes I hear the conservative side and I think, well, yeah, I can see that. Sometimes that bothers me. But sometimes it doesn’t.”
I sat on the South Rim of the canyon and watched hawks and ravens soar hundreds of feet below me as the morning light painted the canyon walls bright and then paler shades of apricot and peach. I read about canyon wildlife I wouldn’t see because I couldn’t stay long. I saw mule deer and a spotted skunk, but no Kaibab squirrels, none of the fat-bellied lizards called chuckwallas.
My detour took me now into the Navajo Nation, where I found more people lamenting the loss of ideals and old ways. “It’s more than clothes,” said June Nelson, 28, who wore a mixture of native and cowgirl dress to the Western Navajo Rodeo in Tuba City. “The kids don’t know how to speak Navajo. I’m worried for my mom. She doesn’t know English, so my children aren’t going to be able to communicate that much with her.”
You still can see much that is traditional in Navajo country: round, ceremonial hogan dwellings, old women in colorful robes and turquoise jewelry, men in sturdy black hats banded with silver. Shepherds like Frankie Shorty, 45, use rope and dogs and soft words to nudge sheep and goats through the cedars and scrub oaks of one pasture to another, trying to keep the animals out of wet arroyos where they pick up burrs, watching for strays, watching for coyotes.
Shorty speaks only halting English. He wasn’t aware of the plan to make it Arizona’s official language, but it didn’t seem to concern him, and the sheep even less.
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Still angling northeast, I left Arizona and entered New Mexico. And Utah. And Colorado. Four Corners is a national monument, the only place where the borders of four states converge, but once you have taken the four steps, or stood in two states and leaned over to put your hands on the other two, there isn’t much to do but pick a state and go.
So I turned into New Mexico, past Shiprock and Rattlesnake to Gallup and back onto Steinbeck’s route, the old Route 66, then east to Albuquerque, a handsome city from a distance, framed by the Sandia Mountains at sunset.
Up close, it’s as cluttered and strung out and congested as most. Some of the quaint old cities of New Mexico are having growing pains. Agriculture is hurting and so is mining, but the state attracts a lot of defense work. The climate and the setting appeal to affluent people fleeing more urban, faster-paced regions, and they are buying homes and building adobe condos.
I camped a night on the Rio Grande north of Albuquerque, next to Pete Brady, 30, who has been living with his wife out of a 1979 Volkswagen bus for six weeks and storing his go-to-interview suit in an Albuquerque locker. He tried Florida and he tried California, and now he’s looking for work in New Mexico, maybe as an insurance investigator. He might do all right, too. He asks a lot of questions.
In the morning, I walked through the ruins of Kuaua Pueblo, once a city of adobe structures six and seven stories high, and read about them from the 1610 journal of Gaspar Perez de Villagra, one of the Spanish conquistadores. “They are quiet, peaceful, of good appearance and excellent physique, alert and intelligent. They live in complete equality, neither exercising authority nor demanding obedience.”
A few miles away, Zia Pueblo was sacked by Spanish troops in 1689, but it survives. About 680 people live on 120,000 acres, so clustered in a main pueblo that looks much like Kuaua Pueblo must have appeared: simple homes of pine beams threaded with aspen and covered with adobe, outdoor bread ovens, strings of flaming red chiles hanging and drying in the sun.
“We have land, we have water, we have wildlife,” tribal administrator Peter Pino said. “I have traveled to Los Angeles, to New York and Chicago, and seen the suffering there. In those cities, if you have no money, you have no other recourse. You can’t go into your back yard and kill a rabbit.”
Federal grants support tribal education and social services, but they have diminished during the Reagan years, he said. Unemployment is 38 percent, and the tribe wants to develop some industry nearby – but not so close it interferes with pueblo curfews, a tough no-alcohol policy and other, tradition-minded restrictions.
“Some of the older people went through a time when it was embarrassing to be Indian,” Pino said. “But the younger people are together, to help them know who they are and what they should want out of life.”
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I drove northwest to San Ysidro, then angled northeast through the Santa Fe National Forest and onto the high mesas to Los Alamos, once an isolated boys camp, then the birthplace of the bomb, now a busy center of research on everything from the life sciences to “Star Wars.”
The official word on the Manhattan Project is posted at the entry to the museum: “The laboratory was founded in 1943 for the sole purpose of developing nuclear weapons to end World War II. Today, nuclear weapons serve as a deterrent to global conflict….”
Beth Mendoza, 36, came to see the museum with her father, T.D. Parkhurst, 71. They reacted differently, and in their reactions they reflected the complexity of defense issues.
“I feel such emotion here,” she said. “It frightens me, the magnitude of these bombs. And this was just the beginning. I can’t imagine any of them realizing… but they must have realized what would be the result of their work.”
Her father was in the Navy during the war, stationed in the Pacific. “Our next operation was to move onto the mainland of Japan,” he said. “What they did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a million lives. I was eternally thankful.”
Beth Mendoza listened, then said, “Maybe I would have felt the same way then. But I don’t feel the same way now. I have three children, and… there is no possibility of anybody winning if any of these are used again.”
About 64,000 visitors tour the museum each year, watching documentary films, touching replica casings of Thin Man and Fat Boy – the only atom bombs ever put to use. Many sign their names in a visitor ledger and make comments. “Incredible,” many of them write. “Interesting. Cool. Amazing. Educational.”
In the pages of comments, I found one that could be called negative. It was a simple plea that there be no more Nagasakis, no more Hiroshimas. It was signed by Masahiro Misumi of Ibarako, Japan.