Steinbeck Country

01 & 02 April 2024

I hop back to take another look at Solvang and it really is delightful, in a slightly gussied-up tourist way and nothing wrong with that. Definitely worth a return visit but I’m mystified why Sideways wasn’t shot here. Maybe it’s just too pretty as a backdrop for such bittersweet, reflective material.

US101 goes north, skirting the Los Padres National Forest. It then bends west, kissing the Pacific at Pismo Beach and opening up some great views of the Californian coastline. I’m now convinced the best San Francisco to Los Angeles route is Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) to Pismo, then the roads I’ve travelled on this trip. PCH south of Morro Bay just isn’t worth it, trust me. Santa Barbara is rather special, but in a wholly unattainable, nose-pressed-up-against-the-window way, along with Naples and Telluride.

US101 then soars off east again, over a low mountain range before depositing me in the Salinas Valley: Steinbeck Country.

Orange groves and vineyards stretch out on either side of the road. The rich, loamy soil and climatic conditions are perfect for growing both. They are also the source of the wealth and inequality so indignantly described by Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. Being April, the fruit is only just on the vine and trees, but a rich, citrusy musk prevails.

The simple, vivid descriptions of the valley in East of Eden are most telling as the landscape appears essentially unchanged. Farms dotted either side of the highway; rolling hills, sprinkled with random trees; the functional grimness of King City… It’s testimony to the power of his sparse, direct prose that the images created over 60 years ago still resonate today.

Arriving in Monterrey, the Arbor Motel, is an individual, beautifully maintained property at well under $100 a night. Ever since leaving the bland Blanding and before that, nasty New Mexico, all overnight stops have been somewhere on the continuum between ‘Perfectly Acceptable’ to ‘Really Nice’. This is probably the nicest so far in a very nice town indeed.

Cannery Row in Monterrey would no doubt have evolved into the slightly trashy magnet it is today, with or without the Steinbeck connection. Two books are set here. The first donated the name to the street and not the other way around as It was called Del Monte Avenue when the book was written. The sequel, ‘Sweet Thursday’, written at the request of friends who begged for something less thunderous and gloomy than the epic novels that made his name, is less-well-regarded but at least ends on an optimistic note.

Like Shakespeare in Stratford (and less obviously, Hemingway in Pamplona as he only set one novel there), Steinbeck’s image is everywhere. There is even a sculpture where he is - literally - top of the heap of other characters from Monterrey’s history and his books.

The Row itself is a collection of industrial buildings on the quayside. They no doubt just cried out for restoration and that’s what’s become of them. Not always with any great sense of sympathy or taste. One seems to have been kept authentic: number 800. Pacific Marine Laboratories, home and workplace of ‘Doc’, the principal character from both books. I’m the only tourist showing any interest in it.

On his death in 1967, Steinbeck’s relationship with the town of his birth, Salinas, was ambivalent at best. After leaving to attend Stamford University, he returned only once. The local farmers and bankers still resented the good kicking they’d been given, 35 years previously, in the Grapes of Wrath and opposed the opening of the family home in 1974 to the public.

I know all this and more as it now functions as a restaurant. Open for lunch, 11:30 to 15:00, Tuesday through Saturday each week, it’s staffed by highly knowledgeable volunteers.

I get an advanced three-on-one tutorial on the great man’s work. Robyn, a bossy retired teacher, explains the fireplace I’m sitting by is the one featured in the photograph of the family above it. Steinbeck took it using the new, self-timer feature on his much-prized, then state-of-the-art, Box-Brownie. The lady who serves me a Club Sandwich and salad explains the role that nature and landscape played in his work and the origins of these fascinations.

A silver-haired, academic-looking, gentleman and I discuss the inspiration of his characters. I learn most are based on people Steinbeck met. He told the source if he liked the character. The ones he did not, he kept private. The inspiration for Kathy Ames, the femme fatale from hell in East of Eden, for example, went with him to his grave as did many others.

After lunch, Robyn takes me on a conspiratorial tour of other parts of the house, closed to the public. One is the sitting room where he wrote 'Tortilla Flat when with his mother in her final days on that last visit.

All the volunteers refer to him as ‘John’, like a loveable but errant son who is no more. As a three-times married college drop-out and legendary boozer, it may well be pretty much what he was. But there is a lingering sadness about the house as the genius in his genes, definitely natural rather than nurtured, is now lost forever.

He left his two sons from his second marriage $50,000 each. $450,000 today, so a decent start in life, but the remainder of his $1 million legacy went to his third wife, Elaine, with whom he had no children. Epic legal squabbles followed and both sons also died childless.

There is no chance of him being forgotten. The impressive National Steinbeck Center nearby, will see to that and his work remains on the US schools curriculum. The lovely people at the house are the only ones keeping his personal memory alive, though, just as a family might.

‘Travels with Charley’ is a travelogue that starts in Montauk, Long Island and goes anticlockwise around the USA, over three months and 10,000 miles. Steinbeck wrote it, in 1962, when he was certain he was on the way out and wanted one last look at America. He wasn’t, as it turned out, and soldiered on for a further seven years but it’s still poignant. In ‘Travels’, he paid a final visit to Fremont Peak, the highest point in the Salinas area to take one last look at the land he had made famous:

"I printed once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love."

So I followed in his footsteps, although I have no intention of going anywhere, anytime soon. The last hundred feet are hard. Skinned knuckles, raw hands, palms tacky with coagulation are required to scramble up the last section but I’m not coming all this way to give up now. Steinbeck couldn’t have been that frail to have made this climb. Like me now, he was sixty at the time. But to save you the effort, here are those views, in order as written:

At the top, I realise - faintly - why people climb mountains. The sense of achievement when you’ve scrambled up to the top, planning every toe-hold and point-of-purchase on the unyielding rock for those last hard yards is pure exhilaration. But I’m about thirty years beyond this and have never had the wiry build of a climber in any case. I pick my way carefully down and get on to San Francisco.