Long Way Home (25 page)

At Partington Cove, below the ridge where Miller settled, I communed with the redwoods again. He'd given up on cars and pulled a child's wagon to and from the grocery store. Deetjens, still in business, wasn't such a bargain anymore, nor was the vastly expanded Nepenthe, but I meditated on the Pacific anyway, over a cup of green tea.

AMONG JOHN STEINBECK'S
most painful experiences in
Travels
was his return to Monterey. He resented the strangers spoiling what he thought of as his country with their noise, clutter, and “inevitable rings” of junk. Though he understood that his reaction was natural and even predictable, it still upset him, as did the rapidly growing population and its harmful impact on the quality of life.

He visited old haunts like Johnny Garcia's bar on Alvarado Street, lamenting his lost amigos. He quoted Thomas Wolfe and insisted that you can't go home again. The strangers he disliked had taken over the town—rich people with swimming pools, who “plant geraniums in big pots.” He and Garcia were ghosts, he argued.

Steinbeck often rendered a harsh opinion only to retract it immediately, and he did it again in Monterey, accusing himself of nostalgic spite for being so critical of “a beautiful place, clean, well run, and progressive.” He put forth a freakish theory to account for his unease. By reappearing, he'd interfered with how others remembered him, he suggested, as if he'd risen from the dead to confuse them.

“They fish for tourists now, not pilchards,” he commented wryly, bemoaning the demise of the sardine canneries, “and that species they are not likely to wipe out.”

In truth, you can still buy the day's catch on Old Fisherman's Wharf in spite of the purveyors of caramel korn and clam chowder in hollowed-out loaves of sourdough bread, but Monterey Bay isn't so bountiful now. Once it supported each new immigrant group to land on its shore, starting with the Chinese, who harvested salmon and set up camp on China Point in the 1850s.

The Japanese came next. Adept at prying abalone from the rocks, they also fished for mackerel and anchovies, and when some Sicilians muscled in on them, they switched to taking squid by night and burned pine torches in their sampans to attract them. The Sicilians introduced the lampara ring, a round haul net like a purse seine, which significantly increased the sardine yield and led to the establishment of the canneries—a “wetfish” operation because the sardines were processed fresh from the sea.

The canneries, grouped on Ocean View Avenue, finally went under in the 1950s when the pilchards vanished. Ocean View is Cannery Row now, recently renamed, fishless, and another magnet for tourists. It's clean, well run, and progressive, but it leans so heavily on Steinbeck's name and image that he might be angry or embarrassed—or maybe both—to see his life's work appropriated for commercial purposes.

“The only good writer was a dead writer,” he remarked of Sinclair Lewis while in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis's birthplace. “Then he couldn't surprise anyone any more, couldn't hurt anyone any more … And now he's good for the town. Brings in some tourists. He's a good writer now.”

In a decidedly unscientific, wholly arbitrary survey, I asked around Cannery Row to discover what, if anything, of John Steinbeck's the tourists had read.
Of Mice and Men
, often assigned in California schools, topped the list, with
The Grapes of Wrath
second. Nobody had cracked open
Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row
, or
In Dubious Battle
, and only one person mentioned
East of Eden
. The late novels, such as
The Winter of Our Discontent
and
Sweet Thursday
, drew a blank.

Oddly,
Travels
earned just a single mention despite being a bestseller. Readers had forgotten about it, apparently, but they praised it when prompted.

“Oh, yes, the one about the dog!” exclaimed a woman from Lodi. “I absolutely loved it!”

Her response was typical. People loved Charley and the idea of being on the road, but they were blind to the author's acid observations, barely concealed malaise, and outright expressions of disgust.

There's no Palace Flophouse on the new Cannery Row, and no bordello posing as the Bear Flag Restaurant. I combed the downtown for a bar like Johnny Garcia's without success. The wild characters Steinbeck cherished—the paisanos, Jolon Indians, and speakers of
poco
Spanish—had moseyed on or just disappeared. In a sense, it didn't matter. What he really missed was the youthful vitality he associated with Monterey—a loss his rough journey had underscored. In old age, death becomes a fact instead of a pageant, he muttered as he left.

IN ELIA KAZAN'S
East of Eden
, James Dean shuttles between Monterey, played by Mendocino, and Salinas by hitching rides on top of boxcars. When I looked at the traffic backed up on Route 68 the next morning, I wished a train would roll through so I could jump on it like Jimmy and reach the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas without any further delay.

Faced with a long wait, I pulled a swift and probably illegal U-turn and headed south toward Carmel, a city Steinbeck demeaned as a “community of the well-to-do and retired.” For someone who made a fortune on his books, he showed an odd distaste for the wealthy, but maybe we all cling to a more virtuous image of ourselves than exists in actuality.

Though it's true, as he noted, that Carmel doesn't welcome starveling writers and unwanted painters anymore. I saw no inklings of boho culture on the streets Clint Eastwood once ruled as mayor. I didn't see much of anything, really, because the fog had wrapped up Carmel in several layers of wool and obscured all but the red beacons of stoplights.

Yet when I turned inland the fog began to lift, receding like the last wispy filaments of a dream to reveal more tawny Coast Range foothills interlaced with ranches, resorts, and golf courses. Carmel Valley was so dry you could almost hear the grasses about to crackle and disintegrate. At this time of year, the locals lived in terror of the carelessly discarded cigarette or the shard of glass poised at an angle to start a blaze.

The road, almost deserted, swung into Steinbeck's beloved Salinas Valley eventually. To the west lay the Santa Lucias, and to the east the Gabilan Range, where buzzards and red-tail hawks glide about on the big winds—
gavilan
, Spanish for sparrow hawk.

Only a snippet of
East of Eden
was shot in the valley, but what Kazan captured in 1955 hasn't altered much. Spring is the prettiest season here, when the bright-orange poppies and purple lupine burst into bloom. The air has a clarity it loses when the heat comes on. By early summer the ground is baked hard, and you breathe dust, dust, and more dust.

In Steinbeck's boyhood, the cattle barons were the valley's gentry, as respected as English royalty, with the Spreckels and their sugar beets next in line, but lettuce is the “green gold” now. Strawberries and artichokes also are valuable, and you'll never hurt for broccoli, tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots, or fennel. The vineyards are rooted along the Salinas River. Some forty thousand acres of Monterey County are planted to wine and table grapes.

My idle loop took me back to Highway 101. From Soledad I barreled straight to Salinas. Steinbeck remembered it as a “little little town” of about two thousand, with a general store and a blacksmith shop, where he sat on a bench listening to the clang of a hammer against an anvil. The new subdivisions and cookie cutter houses, all “clustered like aphids,” repelled him, as did a TV relay station that lunged toward the sky from a hill where the coyotes used to sing on moonlit nights.

The population of Salinas in 1960 was about 80,000. It hovers at about 145,000 now and looks like most other western cities, its distinctive qualities stamped out over time and buried under the usual sprawl. Oldtown is the obligatory historic district, with the National Steinbeck Center as its anchor. Some businesses from his time still remain—a card room, the Greyhound station, the Traveler's Hotel, and Sang's Café with its brag, “Steinbeck Ate Here.”

Chinese-American cafés were once staples in Salinas, reliably feeding huge meals to field workers at a price they could afford. Sang's menu, nearly as long as my arm, favored traditional blue-plate specials over chop suey and chow mein—meatloaf, short ribs, chicken-fried steak, and a prime rib lunch that Wednesday for $11.95.

“Good choice,” my server said, scratching on a pad. “Prime rib will be sold out pretty soon.”

I couldn't resist asking, “Did Steinbeck really eat here?”

“Yes, sir. Ed Ricketts, too.”

They must have had serious appetites, because Sang's doesn't scrimp on the extras. The soup, a rich blend of beans and ham hock, came in a bowl, not a cup. If the salad failed to do justice to the valley's lettuce, the beef compensated—an inch-thick cut cooked medium rare, with some broccoli and spuds on the side. Dessert was an idea I refused to entertain.

THE STEINBECK CENTER,
an imposing glass-fronted museum, is a short stroll from Sang's. No other modern American writer—not Faulkner, not Hemingway—has been accorded such imperial treatment.

In spite of Steinbeck's complaints about Salinas, his patrons there and beyond have made his legacy secure. The multimedia exhibits, arranged in chronological order, lead you through room after room of manuscripts, letters, photos, and first editions until you come to a room devoted to
Travels with Charley
, where a reconditioned Rocinante takes up most of the space.

From my reading, I expected Rocinante to be larger and more cumbersome, the precursor of an RV, but it's an ordinary quarter-ton truck painted forest green and fitted with a custom-built Wolverine camper shell. For a big man with a dog, it must have been confining, Steinbeck's testimony to the contrary. He probably couldn't stand up inside without grazing his head on the ceiling.

Though Steinbeck heaped praise on Rocinante and spoke of it in endearing human terms, just as he did with Charley, he sold it at auction to a Maryland farmer right after he got home, as if to put the trip out of his mind as quickly as possible. His quest had failed, after all. He would not be reborn, nor did his contact with America refresh or replenish his creative juices.

His journey, meant to engage, had turned into a withdrawal, even a defeat. Rocinante became his isolated retreat as Elizabeth Otis had feared it would. Steinbeck's attempt to find the truth about the nation also fell short, at least by his own lights. The only generality he risked was that “an exact and provable” American identity exists.

“This is not patriotic whoop-de-doo; it is carefully observed fact,” he asserted. “California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than apart.”

The last few pages of
Travels
are harrowing, with Steinbeck so anxious to get back to New York he “collapsed into a jelly of weariness” when a policeman blocked his entry to the Holland Tunnel because he carried a tank of butane. Instead he had to cross the Hudson on the Hoboken Ferry, only to lose his way in lower Manhattan during rush hour. Jittery and laughing uncontrollably, he begged another cop to set him straight.

“And that's how the traveler came home again,” he says, slamming the door shut without any further reflection.

The door kept swinging open, though. The fate of America obsessed Steinbeck, and he pursued it until the end of his life. His impressions from the road ultimately coalesced in a series of essays published as
America and Americans
(1966) in company with photographs of the country. This would be his last work, issued two years before his death.

Didactic and often humorless, the essays probed the themes he touched on only obliquely in
Travels
. The final one, “Americans and the Future,” began by revisiting the ideas first expressed to Pascal Covici. America suffers from a subtle and deadly illness, Steinbeck said. Immorality doesn't describe it, nor does lack of integrity or dishonesty.

What's been lost, he went on, are the rules—“rules concerning life, limb, and property, rules governing deportment, manners, conduct, and rules defining dishonesty, dishonor, misconduct, and crime.”

He compared the behavior of Americans to highly bred, trained, and specialized bird dogs cooped up in a kennel rather than allowed to hunt. In a short time, the dogs become “quarrelsome, fat, lazy, cowardly, dirty, and utterly disreputable and worthless, and all because their purpose is gone and with it the rules and disciplines that made them beautiful and good.”

For millions of years, he continued, our purpose was simple survival, but we had all that we needed now, including the terrible hazard of leisure.

“I strongly suspect that our moral and spiritual disintegration grows out of our lack of experience with plenty,” Steinbeck wrote, and further, “A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half-remembered glory … When the greatness recedes, so does belief in greatness.”

Americans were not a dying people, he decided. They hadn't lost their way at all, but the roads of the past had come to an end, and they had not yet discovered a path to the future.

“I think we will find one, but its direction may be unthinkable to us now,” he concluded.

F
ROM SALINAS, I
took the scenic coast road to San Francisco. Again the fog was heavy, covering the artichoke fields in Castroville. The ocean looked gray, too, and the little beaches along the strand were deserted except for some wishful surfers in wet suits, waiting for a swell. Around Santa Cruz I drove, then past Swanton and Davenport to Pescadero, where I stopped for coffee at Duarte's Tavern and smelled the crab cioppino simmering in the kitchen.

The date was October 31, Halloween. I'd have known it without a calendar. San Franciscans like to dress up for the occasion, even on the job. At a bank on Market Street, one teller wore a bumblebee costume—yellow cap, waggling antennae, the works. She was cashing a check for a vampire with fake blood dripping from his plastic fangs and his Dracula collar turned up against the chilly breeze outside.

Some critics accuse San Francisco of growing its own eccentrics, but it isn't true. They come from all over America, the misfits and refugees from Vincennes, Indiana, say, or Flora, Kansas, tired of pretending to be somebody else and aspiring to explore their true identity in a city that not only tolerates but encourages self-expression.

I met a private detective friend for lunch. Among his investigative specialties is digging up sensational food at bargain prices. He held his beleaguered head in his hands as he described his ordeal of the night before, a caper worthy of Philip Marlowe that involved huge chunks of beef and gallons of red wine at a Peruvian restaurant he'd recently discovered.

The story sounded tawdry at first, another tale of excess and folly, but it gained momentum with each Singha beer he drank until it began to shimmer and glow. The blood surged back to my Marlowe's face. He was enthused, revivified. We'd all have to share a Peruvian meal before I returned to Dublin, absolutely—a big gang of us! To do otherwise, he implied, would be a crime.

He gave me the keys to a mutual friend's flat. She was traveling in England, so Imelda and I would have the place to ourselves. How odd it felt to unlock the front door, climb the stairs, and enter the living room, a stranger no more. That's how
my
trip ended—abruptly, in a flash. Insofar as anywhere qualified as my home, San Francisco probably was it.

No trick-or-treaters called that evening, no skeletons or fairy princesses. I collapsed into bed early and had no idea where I was when I woke. Take a quick shower, grab some clothes, pack up, and hit the road—that routine was history. Instead I'd gone back to the starting point, lingering over a newspaper. The World Series was over, so there were no box scores in the
Chronicle
and no further mention of Tomoji Tanabe, either.

The Focus begged for a thorough cleaning before I left for the airport to meet Imelda. I filled a garbage bag with flotsam and jetsam—a shard of sandstone, some calcified french fries, a flyer for Luray Caverns. Dust and grit coated the dashboard so thickly I could have inscribed notes to myself with an index finger.

Imelda's flight from Ireland, scheduled to arrive around noon, ran late. I paced and fretted. Six weeks was time enough for a woman to come to her senses, after all. When the plane landed she wasn't the first through the gate, nor the fifteenth or the thirtieth. My anxiety spiked until she emerged from the crowd at last, and my world felt whole again.

Thrilled to be in California for the election, she told how the Irish bookies, certain of a Democratic victory, had already paid off any bets on Obama. That was good news for San Franciscans, who overwhelmingly supported him. In Timberville, they might throw a parade for George W. Bush, but here they'd more likely toss a shoe. Obama posters, banners, and signs decorated every corner. The city that needs no excuse to celebrate prepared to do it again.

Even so, San Francisco—for all its upbeat atmosphere—was not immune to the recession. Here, too, were vacant storefronts and long lines of the unemployed, soup kitchens and flophouses for the homeless. The bedraggled multitude of outcasts around the Civic Center, once a sight so familiar I accepted it as normal, horrified me now. You rarely see such apparent indifference to human misery anywhere in Europe.

If I'd finally set aside
Travels
, I was still reading some Steinbeck, mainly the essays in a book of selected nonfiction I'd bought in Salinas. In “The Golden Handcuff,” he carried on about his affection for San Francisco, always the City with a capital “C.” As a child, he got too excited to sleep on the eve of a visit, and spent part of his scruffy apprentice years by the bay, fondly recalling the dumps he rented during his “tour of duty as an intellectual bohemian.”

The dumps had one thing in common, he wrote. They were small and cheap. He remembered a dark little attic on Powell Street with unsheathed rafters and pigeons walking into and out of a dormer window, and a cave in North Beach “carpeted wall to wall with garlic,” but his poverty never compromised his ability or desire to have fun.

“My God! How beautiful it was and I knew then how beautiful,” he raved. “Saturday night with five silver dollars laughing and clapping their hands in your pocket. North Beach awakening with lights in a misty evening … long tables clad in white oilcloth, the heaped baskets of sour bread, the pots de chambre of beautiful soup du jour, then fish and meat, fruit, cheese, coffee, 40 cents.”

I decided to show Imelda some dumps from my own youth, first the abysmal studio apartment on Cole Street where I landed in '69. The neighborhood dope fiends burgled me twice in three months, stripping me of my TV, stereo, records, radio, and only good coat. From there I moved to a railroad flat overlooking Kezar Pavilion, where the vicious Roller Derby matches always ended with bottles breaking and bloody fistfights among the fans.

The pungent aroma of eucalyptus came roaring back to me in Golden Gate Park. I used to buy my records at the New Geology Rock Shop and my marijuana from a fuzzy-haired dealer named Roger. The rack of little magazines at City Lights, martinis at Persian Aub Zam Zam, riding a cable car up Nob Hill, the free love I never got any of—I, too, was poor but dazzled.

Like Steinbeck, I adopted North Beach as my playground. Our evenings often started with dinner at the Gold Spike, Italian fare served family-style—ballast, we called it. What the food lacked in quality it made up for in quantity. There were tureens of minestrone, big bowls of pasta, roast chicken or osso bucco, vegetables, dessert, coffee, and wine—“and that means lots of wine,” as Steinbeck put it.

Afterward we raced from bar to bar with an eye out for famous poets, the only type of celebrity that mattered to us, and argued ceaselessly about writing, art, music, politics, and what we knew of life—not much—reveling in the brilliant future destiny had in store for us. I was still riding the zephyr of optimism that had carried me West, and I believed, as we all did in those days, that anything was possible.

One morning, I took Imelda to Sonoma County, where my old trailer, long since scrapped, once stood among the vineyards. Along the Russian River, I regaled her with tales of steelhead glory, and she did her best not to nod off. In a meadow on Chalk Hill Road, the wild mushrooms called “pinkies” still grew, and over there, by a ramshackle barn, was the big oak that had sheltered a pair of Bullock's orioles so many years ago.

THE IRISH BOOKIES
seldom get it wrong. At precisely 8:01
P.M.
on election night, right after the polls closed in California and the rest of the West, the TV networks declared Barack Obama the new president-elect of the United States. San Francisco predictably erupted with backyard flares and Roman candles, while champagne corks bounced off ceilings and ricocheted off walls.

Obama's sober demeanor was better suited to the occasion. He understood the formidable challenges ahead and the obstacles to be surmounted before the current torpor might lift—and there was no guarantee it
would
lift. Already certain forces were allied to try to prevent his success. I knew this from the road.

I thought about
Travels
during the broadcast, of course. If John Steinbeck had sounded overly dark at times, perhaps because of his failing health, his analysis still contained a large measure of truth. He recognized the need for the country to rise above the ordinary when history demands it. Whether Americans had the capacity and the will to do so would be answered soon enough.

Steinbeck expressed his doubts in 1960, and I shared them to a degree. Almost fifty years later, our citizens were frequently lax, soft, and querulous, and they sometimes capitulated to a childish sense of entitlement that, once thwarted, turned into an equally childish disappointment. So many lived in a bubble, too, especially in isolated rural towns, and found their satisfaction in “past greatness and half-remembered glory.” They cared not a whit about the nations beyond Main Street.

Yet I also felt more hopeful than Steinbeck, maybe because I'd done more listening. Whenever my faith wavered, as it often did, I met someone who helped to restore it. The young were particularly useful in that regard, less concerned about the economic freefall and as breezily dreamy as I was in my optimistic prime. All across America, I encountered people who weren't threatened or cowed and still ardently believed in the bright promise of the future.

Steinbeck blamed our debatable “spiritual and moral disintegration” on the lack of experience with plenty, and that's not entirely inaccurate. The older European societies are quieter and gentler, more sophisticated and adult. Americans are friendly, well-intentioned, good-humored, kind, and generous, but also loud, aggressive, clumsy, gullible, and poorly educated on the whole. Poetry matters very little to us, and the same could be said of romance.

Some of the problems that bothered Steinbeck probably can't be fixed. The trashiness of the landscape, the pernicious malls and ugly subdivisions, and the uniform blandness of our mass culture are here to stay barring a cataclysm. At the same time, he missed so many positives—the huge tracts of wilderness we've saved, for example, and the potential rewards of new technologies—that he often comes across as an old fogey stymied by what he failed to comprehend.

America can do that to you. It gave me fits for 5,943 miles, alternately grand and awful, sublime and stomach-turning, both a riddle and a paradox. You could no more capture its quicksilver essence than catch lightning in a jar. The fifty states, each with its own mores and set of priorities, don't cohere except on paper. There's no proper instrument to calculate the real distance between Denton, Maryland, and Gunnison, Colorado. If a common American identity once existed, “exact and provable,” it doesn't anymore.

One wants to sing the country's praises, but it isn't easy when we have the highest rate of incarceration anywhere, and spend so much on defense that our schools, the ultimate engine of democracy, go begging. Nobody would shout “Hooray!” over our gross obesity or polluted watersheds. Our unsurpassed talent for living on credit merits no fanfare, either, nor does our indulgence of the divisive talk-show pundits or the way we've devalued—and even become suspicious of—the pursuit of excellence.

Still, Americans had just awakened from their long slumber to cast a vote for change. The previous eight years might yet be looked on as an aberration, as if a strange virus had infected the body politic and caused it to go haywire. Change involves risk, though, and rewards only the noble, heroic gesture. To create a unifying vision, the pioneer spirit must triumph again. That may require an imaginative leap, the ability to believe we can be better than we really are.

MY MARLOWE MADE
good on his promise. He rounded up a boisterous group for dinner at Mi Lindo Peru in the Outer Mission, an even dozen celebrants who devoured empanadas and
lomo saltado
, yucca and plantain, fried potatoes and boiled rice, all washed down with sangria, beer, and that dangerous red wine.

The idea of leaving San Francisco while the air still throbbed with hope and abandon made Imelda and me a little sad. No city accommodates its idlers so readily, or so enthralls them with its beauty. Our last two days in town were treacherously seductive—mild and sunny, light-filled. We tried to do and see everything, stuffing ourselves with California against the cold Dublin winter ahead, walking for miles in any and all directions.

The old Italians had mostly disappeared from North Beach, but you could still get a strong
doppio espresso
at Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store and a game of boccie on the courts behind the library. Ducks still hung by their feet in the Chinatown markets, and the condemned fish still stared at you bug-eyed from their tanks. Budding writers still ransacked the little magazines at City Lights, palpably aching to be published. The bay did its job and glittered.

Would I ever move back to San Francisco? My friends asked that question. I told them I thought about it all the time. Imelda's sons were young men now, finished with school and living independently, so we had more freedom to roam. We'd enjoyed our stay and the loaner flat and especially the supercharged atmosphere of the moment. Anything could happen, really. I told my friends that, too.

They asked about my trip as well, eager for the details. They weren't surprised that certain aspects of America had displeased me—they had their own laundry list of complaints—but they knew nothing about the Virginia Gold apples of Flint Hill or the heavenly setting of Salida, the big trout in the Arkansas River or the juicy melons of the Eastern Shore.

There's still a lot to love about America, I counseled my Marlowe, bequeathing him my copy of
Travels
, fallen apart now and split down the middle at page 123.

The world is what we make of it, although John Steinbeck phrased it differently. External reality has a way of being not so external after all, he suggested. It's tied more closely to our feelings than we care to admit. As the hardships of the road began to fade, I dwelled instead on the incidents to be cherished—a ten-buck haircut in Jeff City, say, or Father Urnick's uplifting sermon in Laughlin. Often I recalled Clifford Dewey's belief in the long view and kept my fingers crossed.