Steinbeck Country

I had never thought of Salinas as a destination. Perhaps I’d been prejudiced by my mother, who as a young girl first saw John Steinbeck’s hometown in the 1920s from the rumble seat of a Hupmobile, sharing the leather with a canary in a cage beside her. She had an aunt who lived on the Monterey Peninsula.

The road from L.A. back then was dusty and hot, and she’d get dizzy as the car shuddered up the steep Santa Margarita grade outside San Luis Obispo. Their first stop the next day would be King City, where they’d have lunch in a diner that catered to cowboys.

After a French dip sandwich and a Coke, they’d continue, eager for the cool breeze sweeping in from the ocean. Just before Salinas, though, they’d turn left and take the shortcut to the peninsula. The road passed through Spreckels, a cluster of small homes, and crossed the sugar beet fields; if the family got lucky, they’d find themselves on the winding road to the coast behind a lettuce truck, stopping any time a head bounced out.

Salinas was nothing more than a farming town with little interest for a teenage girl who’d rather be walking along the beach in Carmel, or visiting friends.

*

Like most spur-of-the-moment trips, ours had begun with a number of questions and a phone call.

“No,” Anna said. “Salinas really doesn’t have any hotels. They’re thinking of building one, though.”

Anna works at the front desk of the Laurel Inn Motel, just off U.S. 101 on Laurel Drive. She was friendly, so I thought I’d try to learn a little more.

“Can you recommend any restaurants?” I asked, thinking that whatever we’d save in lodging, we’d make up in dining.

“Not really.”

“Well, where do you go when you want a nice meal?”

“Red Lobster. Maybe Dakota Jakes.”

Is Salinas too far to drive for too little? On the morning that my wife and I popped a tape of Steinbeck’s 1936 novel “In Dubious Battle” into the car cassette player and hit the road, it dawned on me that perhaps this was the question I should have asked. The newly opened National Steinbeck Center was our destination, though we had much more in mind for this three-day trip.

*

I was rather surprised to find myself actually enjoying this small ag town. But first, I had to forget everything I had heard about what Steinbeck thought of Salinas and what Salinas thought of Steinbeck. He wrote about what he saw; they burned his books. He left town and never returned.

Except in 1961 with Charley, his poodle. It was his final, sentimental view of the valley that ultimately helped me to see beyond their disagreements and understand how inseparable the writer and his birthplace are. We were finishing up at the Steinbeck Center, a real jewel in the city’s crown, when we suddenly heard Henry Fonda.

“ ‘You wouldn’t know, my Charley, that right down there, in that little valley, I fished for trout with your namesake, my Uncle Charley.’ ”

We wandered over to a TV monitor that showed a rather grizzled gray-haired man, Steinbeck himself, following a dog over some rocks on Fremont Peak overlooking the Salinas Valley. The clip was coupled with a recording of Fonda reading from “Travels With Charley.”

“ ‘And over there--see where I’m pointing--my mother shot a wildcat. Straight down there, 40 miles away, our family ranch was--old starvation ranch.’ ”

“Travels With Charley” was written in 1962, the same year Steinbeck received his Nobel Prize. He was 60 years old; it was a rather difficult year for him. Some critics couldn’t understand why he won the Nobel.

“ ‘Can you see that darker place there?’ ” Fonda continued reading. “ ‘Well, that’s a tiny canyon with a clear and lovely stream bordered with wild azaleas and fringed with big oaks. And on one of those oaks, my father burned his name with a hot iron together with the name of the girl he loved.’ ”

Like his father, Steinbeck burned his name into this valley, and that afternoon after visiting the center, heading out of town for a drive, we felt we understood his passion for people here, for the dark Salinas soil, for the endless rows of produce leading to the foothills that cusp the valley and for the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains to the east and to the west.

When the Steinbeck Center opened in June, it stirred up some old antagonisms. Some people wondered if spending more than $10 million for these fancy props and film clips would do justice to the passion and crusading spirit of the man who chronicled the Depression with such vehemence. Others questioned the appropriateness of doing anything for someone who had so disparaged the community.

“Most of the locals are warming to him,” Gerry Willey, deputy agricultural commissioner for Monterey County, told me the other day. “In his day, some people thought he was [just] a liberal drunk, and the fact that he wrote about the fieldworkers’ plight did not endear him to the people here. He was like a UFW [United Farm Workers] leader. But he’s our boy, and growers have contributed to the center. For better or worse, he is the draw.”

*

Whether a literary or economic decision, it appears that Steinbeck is good business for Salinas, and the city seems more than eager to put a friendly face on the past. So when we first saw the huge cutout figures standing in the fields at the intersection of California 68 and Spreckels Road, we thought perhaps it was an art project sponsored by the local chamber of commerce.

About two stories tall, the plywood fieldworkers are smiling and brightly painted, a little cartoonish perhaps, as they stoop to pick up crates of lettuce--an interesting spin, we thought, on what seems backbreaking work.

“I don’t see it that way,” said John Cerney, one of the artists who was commissioned by Chris Bunn, the owner of Crown Packing Co., to create them. “They’re real people who work for Bunn. It’s his attempt to pay tribute to them, to thank them for their work.”

The Salinas Valley is the Salad Bowl of the Nation--120 miles long, a quarter of a million irrigated acres, perfect soil, perfect climate. Head lettuce, spinach, artichokes, mushrooms, cauliflower, strawberries and broccoli grow here without even trying. It also is pitilessly flat, so flat that it seems slightly bowed, as if following the contouring of the Earth. Distant eucalyptus rows formed the horizon. Water cast from irrigation pipes played in the silver, windblown sunlight.

The town of Spreckels was on the left. Black-walnut trees line the road leading to its enormous silos. They and the homes on the other side of the road were installed by Claus Spreckels in 1898 for the employees of the Spreckels Sugar Co.; Steinbeck and his father worked at the refinery. The famous icehouse scene in Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” was filmed here.

The town today has 749 residents. Its homes are modest clapboards, some designed by architect William Henry Weeks. The Spreckels plant closed about 20 years ago; sugar beets had become too expensive to grow here. Even so, the town is a scenic throwback to the 1940s. It has a WPA-style elementary school and tree-lined streets; blink once and you’ve missed it all.

We were heading to the Pastures of Heaven, a small valley in the western foothills named for a collection of short stories Steinbeck published in 1932. Like most California schoolchildren, Margie and I had been raised on his early fiction.

A docent at the Steinbeck House had given us directions. Turn left on San Benancio Road, she said, and once we did, we found ourselves alone, winding up an oak-lined road past a number of private drives. The golden hills formed a graceful line against a blue sky, until we came to the top of a ridge that overlooked the fog-covered Monterey Bay, bright silver in the twilight.

We turned left on Corral de Cielo, a cul-de-sac that gave us a stunning view to the south across the Sierra de Salinas, an expanse utterly Californian: amber foxtail weeds rolling knee-high into the distance, a sky so blue it seemed polarized and a scattering of 300-year-old oaks. In the opposite direction, Corral de Tierra Road dropped us into a green valley with five-acre spreads, new mansions and ancient farmhouses. Insects swarmed in the early evening light. Horses and cows ambled home.

Much has been written about Steinbeck and about his place in the pantheon of American writers. Some consider him the quintessential California novelist; others are less generous, finding his characters one-dimensional and too simplistic. But in his finest work, everyone agrees he captures better than most the loneliness of place and the bittersweet ache it creates inside of us.

*

The National Steinbeck Center stands at the beginning of Main Street, a two-story creation of glass and brick in a redevelopment district. It is said to look like a beacon, and at night a banner hanging inside featuring a youthful photograph of the writer can be seen from nearly a block away.

Steinbeck is perhaps our only Nobel Laureate who effortlessly entered the popular culture and can still be found there. Born in 1902, he grew up in Salinas, attended Stanford though never graduated, always wanted to write and returned home so he could. “Tortilla Flat” in 1935 was his first popular success. “The Grapes of Wrath,” which he wrote in 100 days, was awarded the Pulitzer in 1940. He divorced, married again and went to Europe during the war. He saw Hollywood make movies from most of his works; he even wrote a few screenplays, including “Lifeboat.” “East of Eden” was published in 1952. He divorced a second time, married a third and moved to New York. He wrote speeches for Adlai Stevenson. “The Winter of Our Discontent” was his last novel. He traveled to Vietnam in 1966 to chronicle the war, and died two years later.

However, it is Steinbeck’s humanity, more than the details of his life, that the center best re-creates. We stood beside the open boxcar that Mr. Trask filled with ice to ship his lettuce back east. We saw the chrysanthemums that Elisa Allen grew by the roadside, stepped inside a Hooverville shantytown and reached into Lenny’s pocket to touch the mouse he had so ingenuously befriended. We watched children comb the red pony’s mane, families sit down to watch a clip from John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” saw a father try to crank a Model T.

By the end, we felt as if we had shared a whiskey with the writer, smoked a Chesterfield, even sat in the back of Rocinante, the GMC camper that took him across America back in 1961.

At the end of our tour of the museum, we ducked into the writing room and spent a half-hour playing with the magnetic poetry board, surfing Steinbeck cyberspace and adding our comments to the notebooks left for visitors to fill. Margie, who teaches first grade, left wishing her class could see all that we had seen.

Catch both the center and Steinbeck’s birthplace in one day, and you have a pretty good crash course in the life and times of Salinas’ most famous son. The classic Queen Anne house, with gables, turrets, a widow’s walk and sunburst patterns above the doors, sits on Central Avenue much as it did 100 years ago. Apron-clad docents of the nonprofit Valley Guild met us in the front yard at 10:30, collected a $5 entrance fee and broke the ice among the visitors, asking where they came from. One couple was from Germany, another from Glendora. Carol Robles was our guide.

The home was built in 1897; Steinbeck was born in the front bedroom. He wrote “The Red Pony” and “Tortilla Flat” upstairs. When he was a child, Salinas had 2,000 residents, most of whom would stroll or ride down Central Avenue on the way to Main Street. The interior is as lovely as the outside: quaint rooms with high ceilings, tulip-shaped glass light fixtures, gorgeous William Morris-designed wallpapers.

As we walked through, listening to Carol, other volunteers in the kitchen were preparing lunch. The living room, parlor and bedroom were filled with tables, set with cloth and crystal. The meal was delicious: gazpacho, salads with a poppy seed dressing, crusty water rolls, Carmel amber ale and Steinbeck tea, a zesty combination of iced tea and lemonade. Dessert was a rich Kahlua cake.

*

The Garden of Memories stands near the outskirts of town at the corner of Romie and Abbott streets. Used-car dealerships and a Denny’s are nearby, but as we entered the front gates, we were suddenly taken back in time, as so easily happens in old cemeteries. Steinbeck is buried in the Hamilton plot, named for his mother. His plaque is beside those of his father, mother, sister and uncle.

It took a moment, but before long he joined us, and, strange to say, he sounded just like Henry Fonda:

“ ‘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.’ I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west and north, and then we 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.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Travels With Steinbeck

Getting there: Take Interstate 5 north to California 46, west to U.S. 101, north to Salinas.

Or you can fly from LAX to the Monterey Peninsula Airport daily on United Express, telephone (800) 824-6200; American Eagle, tel. (800) 433-7300; or Skywest, tel. (800) 453-9417; restricted round-trip fares begin at $88.

Getting around: Four rental agencies operate out of Monterey Peninsula Airport: Hertz, tel. (831) 373-3318; Avis, tel. (831) 647-7140; Budget, tel. (831) 373-1899; and National, tel. (831) 373-4181.

Where to stay: Laurel Inn Motel, 801 W. Laurel Drive; tel. (800) 354-9831 or (831) 449-2474. Rate: $76 double. Best Western/John Jay Inn, 175 Kern St.; tel. (831) 784-0176. Rates: $74 weekday, $90-$150 weekend. Holiday Inn Express, 131 John St.; tel. (800) 465-4329 or (831) 757-1020. Rates: $78-$120.

Where to eat: Salinas Valley Fish House, 172 Main St.; tel. (831) 775-0175. Dinners about $9-$15.

Windfall, 228 Main St.; tel. (831) 758-6452. Dinners $10-$20.

Mi Tierra, 18 E. Gabilan St.; tel. (831) 422-4631; dinners $5-$8.

Chapala, 438 Salinas St.; tel. (831) 757-4959; dinners $6-$13.

Casa Sorrento, 393 Salinas St.; tel. (831) 424-7311; dinners from $7.

For more information: Salinas Chamber of Commerce, tel. (831) 424-7611; Internet www.salinaschamber.com. California Division of Tourism, tel. (800) 862-2543 or (916) 322-2881, fax (916) 322-3402, Internet https://gocalif.ca.gov.