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| Dave Wyman | profile | all galleries >> Galleries >> Steinbeck Country | tree view | thumbnails | slideshow |
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- 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.
The woman stopped at 130 Central Avenue, in front of a Queen Anne-style two-story turreted home. She didn't speak much English and none of us spoke Spanish with any assurance. Still, we managed to communicate well enough. A good sport, the woman willingly posed for a few minutes for her portrait, in front of the house that was Steinbeck's when he was a child. And though she was poor in material possessions, on a late afternoon in the town of Salinas, this woman was crowned queen for a day.
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 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.
After that meeting, Doc would sometimes wander over to the pier, to try to pry from Aron what he knew about the the massive pinnipeds. Doc usually didn't have much luck, even though Charles knew a great deal about the the creatures he studied so casually.
Doc's friend, John Steinbeck, would occasionally come to the pier, specifically looking for Aron. Steinbeck, a writer, knew a bit about Aron in the moment. He noted the man's lined face and calloused hands, one finger sporting a Stanford University ring. The writer wanted to know the story behind the callouses and lines. As often as not, though, with just a few seemingly casual questions of his own, Aron managed to find out more about Steinbeck than Steinbeck discovered about Aron.
"There's a story inside that man waiting to be told," Steinbeck said to Doc one afternoon, as the two of them sipped their own beer, staring at a recently dissected echinoderm.
"Maybe the story, John, is that there is no story about that man," Doc said, his eyes beginning to water from the formaldehyde pickling the fat worm laid out on the lab table. "Maybe some people have stories that just shouldn't be told."
Steinbeck would think about Aron, hunched over a table on the dock, writing away about something. Something.
One afternoon Steinbeck wandered out onto the old wharf to look for Aron.
"He must be under the pier again," someone said. "He's already liquored up."
Steinbeck wandered down the rickety steps that led under the pier. The perpetual barking of the sea lions had grown suddenly louder. At the bottom of the pier Steinbeck found the red parka that Charles always seemed to be wearing. A small photograph of a young woman and a folded sheet of lined paper sat atop the parka. Steinbeck reached down and put the picture in his pocket.
Aron himself was in the water, crushed between the pier and the floating dock, which, jammed with seals, weighed at least a few tons. Steinbeck thought he looked a bit like the fat worm Doc had dissected a few days before. He thought he would soon wander over to Wing Chong's market, and pick up something with which to pickle himself and Doc.
The story of Aron, at least the story of his death, made the paper the next day, and rated two paragraphs. Only two men came to his funeral. That same afternoon, an old photograph of a young woman and a lined sheet of paper with neatly written words, each torn into pieces, were ceremoniously dropped off old pier, and Aron was given an invisible salute by Doc and Steinbeck.
"You got your story, after all," Doc said, watching the antics of the sea lions below.
"No, you were right, Doc," Steinbeck countered. "There was no story to tell."
Nothing more of Aron ever surfaced in Monterey.
(Photo suggested by Charles Hamilton.)
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.
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.
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