Long Way Home (24 page)

“They try to get at the mucus in the eye corners. The child seems to have the reactions of a baby much younger. The first year he had a little milk, but he has had none since. He will die in a very short time …”

Steinbeck developed a keen ally in the saintly Tom Collins, who ran the Weedpatch camp in Arvin for FDR's Resettlement Administration. Every other week, Collins sent a report to Washington as detailed as an enthnographic bulletin. He recorded oral histories, songs, and snippets of the Okie dialect, and granted his new compatriot access to it all, an invaluable contribution to the novel already brewing.

If any descendants of the Okies still live in Arvin, I saw no trace of them, although I've met people from Bakersfield and Oildale whose ancestors knew the horrors described in
Grapes
. You could easily mistake the streets in town for Mexico—bodegas,
carnicerias
, and lots of taquerias. There were plenty of children around, too, and young mothers escorting broods of two or three little ones, often with another babe in arms.

Migrants continue to show up for the harvest, some legally and others on the sly, about six thousand every season. Arvin provides some trailers for temporary shelter, but most laborers prefer to bunk with relatives or comrades, flopping at a dumpy apartment and parceling out the rent among six or eight or twelve men.

A fair number still choose to rough it as the laborers did in the '30s, sleeping in their cars or even among the oleanders along the highway, all to save a few more precious dollars to take home when they cross the border again.

The air was awful that afternoon, almost as thick as the blinding tule fogs that cling to the valley floor in winter, an amalgam of fumes, both diesel and gasoline, spewed by farm machinery and the ceaseless traffic between L.A. and Bakersfield on I-5 and Highway 99. Located between mountain ranges, Arvin is an ideal trap for the smog. It fails to meet the federal ozone standard about seventy-five days a year.

The region faced a deadline of 2012 to comply with the federal standard, but the valley's air-quality board had voted in 2007 to extend the deadline by eleven years in spite of the fact that childhood asthma and allergies are epidemic in Kern County. Activists accused the board of not caring about poor Hispanics, a charge with deeper roots than any orange grove in Arvin.

At a central restaurant—more of a cantina, really, in the hour or so before dinner—several men were drinking beer and listening to a Flaco Jimenez CD. I asked for a can of Tecate, probably because a busty babe in a Tecate T-shirt crooked a finger at me from a poster, and when a woman brought the can with a basket of tortilla chips and two kinds of salsa, red and green, I squeezed some lime juice on top and sprinkled it with salt.

“Hey, you did that right,” said a gregarious, dark-skinned Mexican at an adjacent table. Young and long-haired, he'd already put in a hard day's work by the look of his clothes.

“Thank you, I guess,” I replied with a shrug. “It's not exactly rocket science.”

He hadn't heard that old cliche before. He thought it was hilarious and moved over to my table. He'd lived in Arvin for three years and found much to like about it.

“You can make good money, even buy a house sometimes,” he said.

“Do you own a house?”

“Nah, it's too early for me. I still spend it on fun.”

“Fun in Arvin?” I didn't see much around.

“Some,” with a wicked leer. Fun obviously involved muchachas. “But there's more in Bakersfield. Real good nightclubs, man.”

“You go there often?”

“Often as I can.”

I stared out a window at the bleak sky. “Doesn't the smog bother you?”

He thought that was hilarious, too. “Ever been to Mexico?”

YOU WERE NEVER
far from Mexico in the San Joaquin. Lamont, Old River, Valley Acres, Buttonwillow, they all resembled Arvin to a greater or lesser degree. On every side road a little market sold
chicharones
,
masa harina
,
queso blanco
, many types of peppers, and always the coldest beer, but the customers shunned such imports as Bohemia and Corona for the novelty and cheaper price of Bud. They wanted to be Americans, although not forever.

Sometimes the markets also sold homemade tamales, the corn husks still warm, and
aqua fresca
and
horchata
that smelled of cinnamon. The salsas were delicious, especially those heaped with cilantro and finely chopped serranos instead of jalapeños. On weekends the restaurants served
menudo
, the tripe stew favored as a hangover cure. I'd seen it in action once, a stuporous man bent over a steaming bowl of offal suddenly jolted back to life.

The Mexico of the San Joaquin stretched all the way from Arvin to Salinas, Steinbeck's birthplace, but I'd stop first in King City, where his grandfather ranched, and Monterey, whose sardine canneries had provided the material for
Cannery Row
.

Route 33 cut between the California Aqueduct and the Temblor Range—from
temblor de tierra
, Spanish for earthquake. The aqueduct irrigates the valley, and allows crops to flourish in what would otherwise be an unproductive desert. There were fields of cabbages and romaine lettuce, and more vineyards stripped clean of their fruit after the harvest. Stands of eucalyptus formed windbreaks for homesteads down hard-packed, two-track dirt roads.

Outside Lost Hills, I took Route 46 northwest, a lovely ribbon of twists and turns that would foil anybody in a rush. At its junction with Route 41 in Cholame, a sign marked the spot where Donald Turnupseed crashed his 1950 Ford Tudor into James Dean's Little Bastard, the Porsche 550 Spyder that Dean acquired while shooting
Rebel Without a Cause.

Beyond Cholame, in Whitley Gardens and Estrella, grapevines covered the hills in spritely green rows, the leaves just beginning to wither and die. Paso Robles used to be a buckboard town where the cowhands from Templeton and Santa Margarita whooped it up, but now it's “authentic California,” another destination resort with bistros,
enotecas
, and dozens of nearby wineries.

I chose Eberle Winery at random, and met an old friend at the tasting room—a bronze replica of Porcellino, the boar who presides over the straw market in Florence.
Eberle
comes from
eber
, the German for boar. I rubbed Porcellino's snout for luck and tossed a coin into a fountain, then sampled a robust Sangiovese and learned about the harvest. For the third straight year, the yield per acre was smaller than usual, as were the berries and clusters.

“We didn't have much rain this winter.” The fellow doing the pouring topped up my glass. “There was a frost in April and another earlier this month. That's how it goes. The grapes came good, anyways.”

Late afternoon sunlight flooded the Coast Range as I left, feeling exceedingly mellow after the wine. Chet Baker used to sing a ballad with the refrain “I fall in love too easily, I fall in love too fast,” and the lyrics ran through my head just then. Though I'd already forsaken Jeff City for the Colorado Rockies, I was about to transfer my affection once again and surrender to the inescapable allure of an old flame.

For ages, writers have described the Coast Range in autumn as “golden,” but the color is more subtle than that, richer and warmer and difficult to pin down exactly. Once you've seen it, it stays with you forever. Almost forty years after my first glimpse of those mountains and foothills, they still spoke to me with the same ardor and directness—“a surge of emotion, a soaring sense of possibility,” I scribbled in a notebook as I passed San Lucas.

The Salinas River, almost dry so late in the year, ran on the west side of the highway. Cattle grazed on bunchgrass in Crazy Horse Canyon at the edge of King City, once the domain of Charles King, who bought thirteen thousand acres of Rancho San Lorenzo, a Spanish land grant, in 1884 and planted about half of it to wheat. King raised pigs as well, with such efficiency and in such numbers that his spread was referred to as Hogtown.

Here, too, Sam Hamilton, an Orangeman from Ballykelly in Northern Ireland, bought a farm in the 1870s. Initially, Hamilton had settled in Salinas, but he wasn't cut out for town life. His daughter Olive, ambitious and headstrong, taught school near King City where, at twenty-four, she met John Ernst Steinbeck, who managed a flour mill. They were soon wed and moved to Salinas.

John Ernst hired on at the Sperry Mill there, only to lose his job when Sperry folded in 1910. He lost his savings next on a doomed attempt to open a feed store, but a fellow Mason helped to bail him out and set him up as an accountant at Spreckels Sugar. As fraternally inclined as Babbitt, John Ernst later relied on his Masonic ties to secure a position as the Monterey County treasurer, an office he held until his death in 1936.

He owned a fine Queen Anne Victorian on Central Avenue—“an immaculate and friendly house, grand enough, but not pretentious,” his son John would write in
East of Eden
. Yet John Steinbeck's attitude toward Salinas was not entirely positive. The town, never pretty, sucked a darkness from the swamps, he claimed, and it wasn't a “gay,” meaning happy, place. The wind beat on your nerve ends every day, and there were months of high, sad, gray fog. A blackness—a feeling of violence—lurked beneath the surface, too, he said.

“I was a stranger in Salinas and always felt alien,” he once confided in a letter to Elia Kazan.

As a boy, Steinbeck's true Eden was Sam Hamilton's ranch. His grandfather was a “really great man, a man of sweet speech and sweet courtesy,” and John dogged his footsteps and learned many practical skills by doing so—an ability to fix things, for example, and a fondness for tinkering, both evident in
Travels
. The ranch may well have represented the idealized version of America whose disappearance he mourned.

For all his vivid imagination, he couldn't have pictured the changes in King City a half century later. His grandmother used to put out milk for the leprechauns, but the Irish had no purchase in town anymore.

On Broadway, hard by the railroad tracks, the restaurants declared their geographical affinity within Mexico—Sinoloense, Michoacán, Guadalajaran. I ate a big bowl of Siete Mares soup at a cash-only café, where the server's English was confined to the terms on the menu. After dark, King City made me uneasy. Youths loitered on corners, often dressed like gangbangers. Maybe this was an affectation, but I had no desire to find out.

FROM KING CITY,
I backtracked to San Lucas and negotiated a series of unmarked roads not much wider than goat trails before going over the San Antonio River and the Santa Lucia Range to hook up with the coast highway just above Prewitt Ridge. Ahead lay Monterey, but first I'd pass through Big Sur, Henry Miller's spiritual home, a haven some three thousand miles away from the dread Holland Tunnel.

“It is a region where extremes meet,” he wrote, “a region where one is always conscious of weather, of space, of grandeur, and of eloquent silence.”

Miller discovered Big Sur in 1944 on a tip from the artist Jean Varda. I discovered it in 1969 shortly after I began my exotic new life as a hippie. To pay the rent, I worked as a stock boy for a book wholesaler, not a job for the materially inclined, although I was granted library privileges and studied more than I ever did in college.

I read Miller's
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch
, and also Kerouac's hallucinatory novel about his stay in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin, so when a friend proposed a road trip, I was quick to accept if only to enhance the measure of cool I'd been trying desperately to master. This friend, steeped in the lore of the Beats, knew an inn where we could stay cheaply—Deetjens, built by its Norwegian owner from scrap redwood salvaged on Cannery Row.

The inn stood in a grove of redwoods directly across from the ocean. It was incredibly rustic, its roof covered with pine needles and smoke issuing from several chimneys. A bearded gnome might well have been sitting by the hearth inside and puffing on a clay pipe. The rooms were dusty but comfortable, and nobody seemed to care how many of us piled into one as long as we kept the noise down.

I slept poorly in those days, troubled by what I hadn't yet accomplished and probably never would, but Deetjens soothed me, at least for a couple of nights. The fog softened all sounds except the steady drip of the mist, and the stoical redwoods created a protective sense of enclosure to keep the dark spirits at bay.

The Pacific was gone in the morning, hidden behind a thick gray barrier, but by ten o'clock a shaft of light shot through, and by noon we sat on the deck at Nepenthe sipping green tea, admiring the ocean view and the waitresses—all blonde, braless, barefoot, and beatific—and listening to recorded koto music. Koto music! I'd actually made it to California.

There was a story behind Nepenthe. In the 1940s, Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, then married, stopped for a picnic in Big Sur and became so enchanted they bought a log house on a bluff for $167, but they soon split up and never spent so much as a night there, selling the property instead to Bill and Lolly Fassett, who opened a café where Henry Miller sometimes played Ping-Pong.

The Fossetts called it Nepenthe from the Greek. In the
Odyssey
, an Egyptian queen administers a drug called
Nepenthes pharmakon
, possibly an opiate, to Helen to help her forget her sorrows. Certainly, I felt drugged and free of sorrows that afternoon, breaking out of the trance only when my friend remarked, “Maybe we'll see Kim Novak. She lives around here, you know.”

Impressed, I kept a close watch for Kim. I imagined her as a more mature and voluptuous incarnation of the ethereal waitresses, but she never showed up. Months went by, in fact, before I saw my first movie stars in action—Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort filming
Harold and Maude
at the old Sutro Baths in San Francisco—and advanced a little farther in my quest to become a true Californian.