"The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay."

- from East of Eden

John Steinbeck claimed not to have much love for the places he wrote about. Yet in books like East of Eden, In Dubious Battle, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, Steinbeck wrote sympathetically and movingly about the people of Monterey County who struggled to survive and find meaning in their own lives. In a photographic homage to Steinbeck, I traveled for a few days with a small group of friends, old and new, to make our visual impressions of Steinbeck Country, beginning our journey at the wonderful National Steinbeck Center, in the town of Salinas, and ending it at the impressive Monterey Aquarium.

Once, long ago, Claus Spreckels owned an enormous amount of land in the Salinas Valley, and he owned the little town of Spreckles, too, where his workers lived and spent their money. From time to time, John Steinbeck works for Spreckels, too. While most of the town is gone, the post office and the market and a few other buildings remain.

Micky walked out of the little store, beer cans discreetly hidden in a paper bag. He had been absent from the Salinas Valley for an indeterminate amount of time, working with his hands in Jackson Hole, and he wore in Spreckels the same hat he had worn in Wyoming. For now, he was home, the prodigal son returned, home in the Salinas Valley, home in the Valley of the World. Friday night might be waiting expectantly for Micky's arrival, but for now he paused in front of the old, faded sign that graces the side of the Spreckels market. He ruminated over the past few months, and remembered the view of the Valley of the World that could be enjoyed from the top of the Gabilan Mountains, east of his rediscovered Eden.

Aron came to Monterey from some unnamed place. He lived alone and had no employment of which anyone was aware. Many in town assumed he had inherited wealth. Some thought he had robbed a bank. Others thought he had lived a long time before in Salins.

Aron walked with a fierce limp and he wore no wedding ring. Perhaps he had been unlucky at war and love. Most of his time he spent in innocent idleness on the old fishing wharf, dressed always in his red parka and jeans, a cap putting his face into shadow. He could often be seen patting the pocket on the left side of his parka, as if he were making sure something that was supposed to be inside was still there.

He was probably nearing 60, and despite his injury, he still moved with an athletic grace, when he moved at all. He preferred to sit for hours, sometimes reading a book at an outdoor table in front of one of the restaurants. At other times, he would slowly and neatly write on a lined sheet of paper that had traveled with him, folded in his parka pockets, from his lodging in a boarding house.

He could be friendly, but he almost never initiated a conversation, and never felt the need to explain himself or his behavior.

After three years on the pier, Aron began to enjoy sitting under it, next to a little floating dock. He liked to watch the collection of sea lions who swam around and under the pier, studying them as the tried to snack on unobservant fish below, or looked for gustatory contributions from the tourists above. He would watch them when they heaved their bulky bodies up onto the little dock, to warm themselves in the sun when it came out, and argue amongst themselves when it was foggy or overcast, which was most of the time. The little dock would rise and fall predictably with the tide and chaotically under the weight of the sea lions. Wherever he was at the end of the day, Aron would tear up anything he might have written, consigning the scraps of paper to the sea.

When he sat under the pier, Aron took with him an ample supply of bottled beer he would secure from Wing Chong's market, which sat unpretentiously amongst the canneries along Cannery Row. He always paid in cash, never with credit, which raised the suspicions of Chong. He often looked over his spectacles with disapproval at Aron, not because Chong knew Aron would soon be drunk, but because he knew Aron would drink himself into a stupor by himself. Inebriation, Chong had been taught, was a condition to be shared with friends, especially if a man didn't have any.

A dominant male sea lion vocalizes his concerns to a collection of females, at the bottom of Fisherman's Wharf, in Monterey, California. How do we know these are sea lions, and not California harbor seals? Sea lions have external ears, the ears of seals are internal.

John Steinbeck, who died of a heart attack at the end of 1968, was interred at the Garden of Memories Cemetery, in Salinas. At one time, the cemetery must have sat on the edge of town. Today, Salinas surrounds the cemetery, yet its spacious grounds still serve as a quiet refuge for those coming to visit a loved one, or to relive a bit of history by visiting Steinbeck's grave site.

The older section of the cemetery, with a variety of unique headstone styles like this one, mostly holds the remains of the Anglos who once were the majority of the town's population.

The Salinas Valley has witnessed some of the richest harvests in the nation: lettuce, artichokes, broccoli, strawberries, asparagus, squash, garlic, cauliflower, carrots, celery, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, and brussels sprouts. Now the valley is one of the major grape-growing regions in California. Lettuce is the king crop, providing 50 percent of all lettuce shipped around the U.S.

As cities and towns like Salinas and King City and Soledad and Greenfield push their boundaries outward, farmlands have given way to tract homes and strip malls. Drive or bike or walk out into the country to travel back through time more hundred years, because the landscape of the Salinas Valley, most of it still covered with earth rather than asphalt, is largely unchanged from the way it appeared late in the 19th Century.

"The floor of the Salinas Valley, between the ranges and below the foothills, is level because this valley used to be the bottom of a hundred-mile inlet from the sea. The river mouth at Moss Landing was centuries ago the entrance to this long inland water. Once, fifty miles down the valley, my father bored a well. The drill camp up first with topsoil and then with gravel and then with wige sea sand full of shells and even pieces of whalebone. There were twenty feet of sand and then black earth again, and even a piece of redwood, that imperishable wood that does not rot. Before the inland sea the valley must have been a forest. And those thing had happened right under our feet. And it seemed to me sometimes at night that I could feel both the seas an the redwood forest before it."

- from East of Eden

The locals work hard, eat well, and are HUGE.

The Esselen tribe of Indians, who lived along the banks of what is now known as the Carmel River, must have had their own name for the water course. That name is lost. History informs us that El Rio de Carmelo was named by Carmelite friars who were part of the Vizcaino expedition of 1603. The river was named in honor of Carmelite friars' patroness, Our Lady of Mount Carmel (the Virgin Mary).

A secluded section of the river, not far from its headwaters, passes through the little community of Cachagua. Here the flat, shallow bottom of the river is loosely paved with stones of green.

Cachagua is a word that may have its origins in either the Esselen or Spanish tongue; again, no one is sure. The Anglo community of Cachagua was established in 1880, and by then most, but not all, of the Esselen people had passed from the scene.

"I've never lived as you do, but I know what you mean. When the night is dark--why, the stars are sharp-pointed, and there's quiet. Why, you rise up and up! Every pointed star gets driven into your body."

- from The Chrysanthemums

These aptly named wildflowers are Holy Shooting Stars, not Chrysanthemums. They put in an appearance when conditions in the mountains are moist. As soon as the land begins to dry out, the little shooting stars begin to fade away. We found clumps of them, both purple and white varieties, in the Santa Lucia Mountains east of the town of Carmel; the were still wet from the previous evening, when a mild rainstorm washed over Steinbeck Country.

The confines of the interior courtyard at the Carmel Mission led themselves to quiet contemplation. On a quiet day, in this courtyard, only the sound of the water drops, escaping with the help gravity from the underside of the fountain, can be heard.