A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  And that he did. Acres devoted to grains became sugar beet fields. Irrigation ditches were dug. Water was pumped from the Salinas River. A few deep well pumps were sunk on company ranches; by 1924, well pumps were in general use around the valley. When the Spreckels factory opened in April 1899, the Salinas Index compared the five-story redbrick factory to the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower: “the greatest of all undertakings … will stand pre-eminent as one of the wonders of modern achievement.” Claus Spreckels transformed the valley.

  One farmer recalled, “You’d soak the ground in March or April by building borders all around the field and flooding it. Then when it got dry enough to work, you’d knock those levies down and you’d work it all real nice. Then you got your seed, beet seeds, from Spreckels. It came from Germany, most of it. Then you’d plant it and you’d cultivate it a little bit. But you’d never water it no more.”

  For two decades, Spreckels Sugar Company, the largest sugar factory in the world, employed most of the valley’s agricultural workers. “Year round” employees settled in the little company town, still tidy today, community spirit still running high. Seasonal workers, “sugar tramps,” drifted in for the beet processing season, which ran for sixty to ninety days, from July through September every year. Planting, thinning, and topping the beets began earlier, and called for scores of agricultural workers, nearly six times the number needed for beans and twenty times the number needed for barley. When the factory opened in 1899, mostly Japanese toiled in the fields. But, by 1918, when John Steinbeck came to work at the Spreckels plant, Mexican field-workers had replaced Japanese field-workers. East of town, “Little Tijuana” housed these Mexican workers, only a handful of whom were allowed to work inside the factory.

  The Spreckels plant closed in the mid-1980s. Although without its redbrick factory since 1992, the tidy company town, population 500, looks much as it did when Steinbeck worked at the plant.

  Claus Spreckels, the West’s foremost patron of the sugar beet.

  Steinbeck and his father spent long hours working for the Spreckels Sugar Company, traveling on the little narrow-gauge railroad—called the “dinky” because of the small engines—that connected Salinas to Spreckels. The Parajo Valley Narrow Gauge connected Salinas to the limestone quarries near the Alisal picnic grounds (where Cal Trask takes Abra to see the wild azaleas).

  After his feed and grain store failed in 1918, the senior Steinbeck secured a job there as bookkeeper. Charles Pioda, plant manager, and his brother Mason hired Mr. Steinbeck, saving the family from certain economic ruin (the kind gesture echoed in East of Eden when Pioda helps Adam Trask). John worked as a carpenter’s assistant; later he was an assistant chief chemist and a night chemist, assessing the sugar content of beet samples from various fields to determine harvest schedules. During time off from Stanford, he was a field laborer or “straw boss,” overseeing day laborers on company ranches from Spreckels to distant Manteca in the Central Valley.

  Of Mice and Men came out of his time working at Spreckels ranches. In a 1937 interview, Steinbeck said that he had “worked alongside” his model for Lennie, who didn’t kill a girl but “killed a ranch foreman” with a pitchfork.

  As a young man, Steinbeck came to know just what it meant to be a “have-not” in the midst of “haves.” “Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world,” George tells Lennie in Of Mice and Men. “They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake.” Working side by side with young Steinbeck were men who made less than the thirty-two cents an hour he made as a bench chemist; who dreamed only of living “off the fatta the lan’ “; whose identity was stamped by poverty; who knew what being marginalized meant long before the word became politically correct. This perception of the sharp distinction between those who maintained power and those who never had it influenced Steinbeck greatly, and its acknowledgment became his lifelong subject.

  Beyond Salinas: Corral de Tierra

  John Steinbeck loved Corral de Tierra. His Aunt Mollie lived on a farm there, where most farmers raised chickens or grew tomatoes to sell to Monterey canneries. “They raise good vegetables” says the bus driver to his passengers at the end of The Pastures of Heaven, “good berries and fruit earlier than any place else.” At the lower end of the valley, sandstone cliffs rise up, and to a young, impressionable Steinbeck they were King Arthur’s keep. He set one of his most puzzling stories, “The Murder,” at the base of those lofty cliffs.

  In Steinbeck’s hands, Corral de Tierra becomes the Pastures of Heaven, a place both real and mythic, a valley of hazy beauty and dreams derailed. In 1939, he wrote to biographer Harry Thornton Moore:

  “He saw the quail come down to eat with the chickens when he threw out the grain. For some reason his father was proud to have them come. He never allowed any shooting near the house for fear the quail might go away.” (Needlepoint by women of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Corral de Tierra)

  I have usually avoided using actual places to avoid hurting feelings for although I rarely use a person or story as it is—neighbors love only too well to attribute them to someone. Thus you will find that the Pastures of Heaven does not look very much like Corral de Tierra. You’ll find no pine forest in Jolon and as for the valley in In Dubious Battle—it is a composite valley as it is a composite strike. If it has the characteristics of Pajaro nevertheless there was no strike there.

  At the end of The Pastures of Heaven, a busload of tourists looks into the valley from Laureles Grade Road: “the air was as golden gauze in the last of the sun. The land below them was plotted in squares of green orchard trees and in squares of yellow grain and in squares of violet earth.”

  Beyond Salinas: River Road to South County

  River Road, Elisa and Henry Allen’s route in “The Chrysanthemums,” runs along the Salinas River, still a pastoral stretch of highway. The road hugs the base of the Santa Lucias, passing old barns, ranch houses, a bed-and-breakfast or two, wineries, and fields.

  The Salinas River

  The Salinas River, 155 miles long, is the third longest river in California and the largest subterranean river in the United States—until dams built in the 1950s and early 1960s kept water above ground most of the year. It flows from south to northwest, emptying into two man-made channels that carry water into Monterey Bay. For Steinbeck it was a “part-time river,” a bed that filled in the spring and dried up in the summer. As he began writing East of Eden, he thought that the Salinas River would be his principal symbol, water running above ground and beneath the surface—so much like the virtue and hidden vices of his characters. Although he abandoned the river as an organizing motif, he makes frequent references to water and the river in the novel.

  John Steinbeck and Glenn Graves by the Salinas River. “And then the summer came, and the water in the Salinas River went down until there were only pools against the bank. The Salinas River is three miles from Salinas. We could walk to it or ride bicycles to it. Mary and I rode Jill. We strung ropes to the saddle horn and the pony pulled lines of bicycles to the river. Then, of course, we went swimming.”

  In March each year, the Monterey papers announce the “Season Opener,” as the county harvest begins with artichokes, strawberries, and lettuce. After a four-month hiatus, migrant workers—about 20,000 during recent seasons—return to the valley from Yuma or El Centro (where housing is cheaper) or towns in Mexico. In late March, field workers along River Road insert little lettuce plants into the ground by machine, with 6-8 workers sitting on the wings, filling rotating cones with plants, and another 3-4 performing cleanup work behind. Crews hoe the fields as the plants take root. Larger crews pick broccoli rabe, collecting stems in a little bundle, slicing the bottoms with knives hung from sheaths at their waists, tying the bunches, and tossing each bunch on a conveyor belt packing-machine that moves slowly through the fields. In October, grapes are harvested; fine wines are made
along the “Monterey County wine trail.”

  Mission Soledad: The Lonely Mission

  Mission Soledad, founded in 1791, is now reduced to a few adobe walls, but the rebuilt church provides a cool respite from the burning summer sun, and the little museum features Indian grinding stones, an original mission bell, and a nice walk through the garden. This was never a prosperous mission—summers are scorching, winters are damp, the wind is often unrelenting, and the soil is poor. Few Indians, who theoretically could help sustain the mission with their labor, lived in the region.

  The remains of Mission Soledad.

  San Antonio Valley: To a God Unknown Country

  The general store in Jolon today.

  The San Antonio Valley. “The oaks had put on new leaves as shiny and clean as washed holly.”

  Gateway to this remote, lovely, and relatively untouched valley is the nearly deserted town of Jolon, where fifteen-year-old Steinbeck spent several weeks at a friend’s ranch. Established in 1860, Jolon once boasted eight hundred inhabitants and hosted a fiesta much like the one in To a God Unknown. It is now reduced to an adobe ruin, an abandoned hotel, and an active Episcopal church. On his trip with poodle Charley, stopping in Monterey to have a drink at Johnny Garcia’s bar, Steinbeck spoke the Since 1940, the U.S. military has held this valley. (Visitors to Fort Hunter Liggett should be sure to bring a driver’s license, vehicle registration, and proof of insurance to pass through checkpoints at the gates.)

  Painting the Pastures of Heaven: David Ligare

  David Ligare was drawn to Monterey County by the writing of John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers. “The view from the ‘Pastures of Heaven’ where I live and work,” he writes, “is one of oak-studded hills speckled with grazing cattle, bordered by the ‘corral’ of mountains and the blue bay.” In Steinbeck’s fiction, Ligare finds a “compelling dissonance between the loveliness of this landscape and the longings and sufferings of its inhabitants.” Stories in The Pastures of Heaven and The Long Valley tell about inhabitants’ loneliness, isolation, and lack of fulfillment.

  Ligare’s own Salinas Valley landscapes are less about dissonance and more about pastoral serenity. Central to his work is the notion that the gentle beauty evoked at a particular time is a fleeting moment of serenity, peace, and escape. Correct light is essential—fading daylight, approaching night, golden light, or what Virgil called the “mortal serenity of evening.” Clouds are low in the sky, as they often are in Monterey County. Grasses and flowers convey a particular time of year, as is true in Steinbeck’s work: seed heads ready to burst, lupin in bloom, oak leaves bright green.

  Both Steinbeck’s and Ligare’s landscapes possess a mythic quality. Archetypes are envisioned as part of a place—like Joseph the seeker in To a God Unknown or Ma the earth mother in The Grapes of Wrath or Samuel the prophet in East of Eden.

  Mount Toro figures in Steinbeck’s work, and Ligare has painted it a number of times. “It looks so large, especially in Pacific Grove, at Lovers Point, or covered with snow.” Yet in photos it is a “tiny little thing.” When Ligare paints Mt. Toro, he increases the height of it. “Fictionalizing it makes it more true.” That could be said of Steinbeck’s work as well.

  Landscape with Mt. Toro, by David Ligare.

  poco Spanish of my youth. There were Jolón Indians I remembered as shirttail chamacos. The years rolled away. We danced formally, hands locked behind us. And we sang the southern country anthem, “There wass a jung guy from Jolón—got seek from leeving halone. He wan to Keeng Ceety to gat sometheeng pretty—Puta chingada cabrón.”

  Cut by streams and protected by the high coastal range, the San Antonio Valley looks much as it did when early European explorers camped near the Nacimiento and San Antonio rivers. The 1769 Spanish expedition led by Portolá was the first—traveling by land from San Diego in an attempt to find legendary Monterey Bay.

  Mission San Antonio.

  Two years later, the Mission San Antonio was established a few miles further into the valley. To a God Unknown is set here. In Steinbeck’s hands, this is contested land emblematic of California’s early history. A mission, an Indian village, and a white homestead each has a claim on the heart of this valley, and the book’s central thrust is concerned with land use—be it for profit, consecration, mystery, or enjoyment.

  Steinbeck’s hero in To a God Unknown rides into the valley on nearly the same route used today.

  Nuestra Señora, the long valley of Our Lady in central California, was green and gold and yellow and blue when Joseph came into it. The level floor was deep in wild oats and canary mustard flowers. The river San Francisquito flowed noisily in its bouldered bed through a cave made by its little narrow forest. Two flanks of the coast range held the valley of Nuestra Señora close, on one side guarding it against the sea, and on the other against the blasting winds of the great Salinas Valley.

  To a God Unknown explores the untamed in man and nature: “The endless green halls and aisles and alcoves seemed to have meanings as obscure and promising as the symbols of an ancient religion.” Madrone trees “resembled meat and muscles. They thrust up muscular limbs as red as flayed flesh and twisted like bodies on the rack…. Pitiless and terrible trees, the madrones. They cried with pain when burned.” The novel resonates with the mystery of place.

  Mission San Antonio de Padua: Mission in the Wilderness

  Mission San Antonio, called by early padres the “mission in the wilderness,” was founded in 1771 and remains one of the most remote and untouched missions in California. It was also one of the most successful. Franciscan fathers brought in European agricultural methods, planting olive and grape vines, designing aqueducts, and turning fields for grain. Indeed, mission flour was celebrated in the region. Traces of aqueducts and fields remain. Today’s visitors can stay near the mission at the Hacienda Lodge, William Randolph Hearst’s former “hunting lodge” designed by architect Julia Morgan, or at the mission itself. Naciamento Road winds through the mountains to Big Sur and Highway 1.

  King City

  South on Highway 101 is King City, where Steinbeck’s grandparents, the Hamiltons, ran cattle on bone-dry land—the “old starvation ranch” Steinbeck called it. Although Sam Hamilton died in 1904, when John was two, John’s favorite uncle, Tom, lived on the ranch when John was a boy, and his grandmother continued to spend time there until 1912. Tom’s gentle spirit is captured in what is, in fact, his eulogy in the pages of East of Eden, including this marvelous notion: “He needed not to triumph over animals.” It was Tom who taught John to fish, Tom who left gum under young John’s pillow, guilty Tom who is Uncle John in The Grapes of Wrath. In 1912, at age fifty-two, he shot himself on a remote road near the ranch—a story also told in East of Eden.

  That same year the ranch was sold to the Grab family, who still own the arid acres where Sam Hamilton in East of Eden scratches out a living. In 1948, Steinbeck wanted to buy the ranch:

  I would love to have the old place to go to for a few months of the year and let the boys find out about animals and horses and grass and smells besides carbon monoxide…. I do not want to run it as a ranch. Just to go to live in the old house and to walk in the night and hear the coyotes howl and the roosters and to see the rabbits sitting along the brush line in the morning sun.

  Steinbeck never did buy that ranch, never again lived in the Salinas Valley once he left home at age seventeen. But the smells and sounds and sights of his home valley never left him.

  Hamilton Ranch.

  Elizabeth Hamilton.

  Samuel Hamilton.

  Chapter 4

  Moving Around

  A Restless Decade

  Memorial Court, Stanford University, circa 1900.

  “What I do know is that it takes ten years to learn to write.”

  —Steinbeck, letter to a friend, 1939

  John Steinbeck, age 18.

  John Steinbeck spent an unsettled decade on the move with one steady goal: to master the craft of writing. Storytellin
g was his passion. As a boy he told ghost stories to awed friends: the human skull he kept in his bedroom, backlit in blue, undoubtedly added to the effect. But that blue light is also emblematic of Steinbeck’s later dramatic flair as he broke out restlessly, trying to find his artistic voice—while also making a living.

  At seventeen, liberated from Salinas and his mother’s stern eye, he went off to attend Stanford University. In 1919 the school was free to deserving young men and women. Never keen on a earning a degree, Steinbeck attended classes off and on for six years, taking courses that piqued his interest, leaving once when he fell ill, another time to sell radios door-to-door, and for several quarters to roam from one Spreckels ranch to another. Seventeen-year-old Steinbeck surely knew that to be a writer, he must experience life beyond insular Salinas and get away from the sleepy Monterey Peninsula. He spent his twenties living on little money, taking jobs in New York City, Lake Tahoe, and San Francisco; swinging from experience to experience; testing out urban life; and absorbing what he might need in order to become the man he envisioned, a published writer. His internal compass—a steely determination to write, formed when he was barely in high school—kept him on course.

  Stanford University: 1919-25

  When John Steinbeck showed up for classes in October 1919, Leland Stanford Junior University had been open for nearly thirty years, growing from 555 students in 1891 to nearly triple that number in 1919. From its inception, the university had been coeducational. Founders Jane and Leland Stanford believed that women should be offered the same academic program as men. (When women threatened to overwhelm the male population in 1899, however, Mrs. Stanford capped female enrollment at 500, in force until 1933.) Located a mere forty miles from the state’s academic jewel, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford readily proved early skeptics wrong: an eastern newspaper had quipped on Founders’ Day that another institution of higher education in California was about as necessary as “an institution for the relief of destitute ship captains in the mountains of Switzerland.”