A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  No, I’m afraid it wasn’t your man. The prototype of my man was Hudson Maxim, the inventor. When he grew old he took to renting rooms in London near the corner where Salvation Army bands took their station and shooting at the bass drum with a spring gun. Time after time he was apprehended and always promised to reform. But it was a vice with him and he couldn’t give it up. It was a limited vice, however. He only shot at that one thing.

  “The Great Roque War”—Chapter 8 of Sweet Thursday

  Croquet courts on the grounds of the El Carmelo Hotel, 1890s.

  There was no such war, with Greens squaring off against Blues, grumpy elders fiercely defending championship titles on Pacific Grove courts. “The old men got to carrying mallets tied to their wrists by thongs,” writes Steinbeck, “like battle-axes.” No, not quite. But as early as 1900 there were roque courts in Pacific Grove. And in 1932-33 there was a war, of sorts, called in local papers a “showdown fight” or a “battle which cheerfully blazed in the city hall.” Battle lines were drawn after dedication of the splendid Pacific Grove Museum in December 1931: Donor Mrs. Lucie A. Chase, who had lived in Pacific Grove for twenty-nine years, thought it prudent to remove the unsightly roque courts in Jewel Park, across the street from the museum, when Central Avenue was being widened. The Ancient and Honorable Roque and Horseshoe Club of Pacific Grove, however, had other notions. They had long played their game in Jewel Park and they didn’t opt for change. (Roque is a game much like croquet, but four balls are used, fired in succession, in a game lasting 2-3 hours.) “Why don’t these men put their hands in their pockets and buy a cheap little lot for their court?” Mayor Platt suggested. A hostile councilman said they should stay home and play marbles. But in April 1933 the issue went up for a vote, and the town voted 1,220 to 295 to rebuild the courts in Jewel Park.

  In the fall of 1927, John wrote to his family from the shores of Lake Tahoe, “Today I have been thinking constantly of Pacific Grove. The morning started it. There was a low lying mist which made the lake look just like Monterey Bay in the morning. And then I could not get away from thoughts of the cottage and the crabs caught with beef steak and of the sand pile, and how you used to drive us to the beach when we were cross and could not think of anything to do to take up our time. The thing prevailed nearly all day.”

  From 1934 to 1970, Everett “Red” Williams ran the Flying A service station, 520 Lighthouse Avenue, across Fountain Street from Holman’s Department Store. Williams sold Steinbeck the “Hansen Sea Cow”—actually a Johnson Sea Horse—that he took with him on the 1940 Sea of Cortez trip.

  “It was wartime and I didn’t have a new motor to sell him but I had a used one that I said I’d lend him,” Williams recalled. “That’s the last I saw of it. It didn’t run too good, and when they got down there it ran intermittently.”

  Steinbeck mentions the Scotch Bakery at 545 Lighthouse Avenue in Cannery Row, and probably bought one of their old trucks to use when he went on research trips for The Grapes of Wrath. The sign “Scotch Bakery” was taken down in 2005, after a minor community struggle to keep it up failed.

  Red Williams’s gas station, 520 Lighthouse Avenue.

  The Great Tide Pool

  One of Ed Ricketts’s favorite collecting spots was the Great Tide Pool, located along Ocean View Avenue. In Cannery Row, chapter 6 begins, In Between Pacific Tides, Ricketts describes hermit crabs as “pleasant and absurd” the “clowns of the tidepools”—quite similar to Steinbeck’s description of his fictional ne’er-do-wells Mack and the boys, who “ooze” into the Palace Flophouse and make it their new home.

  Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals.

  The Great Tide Pool.

  “Among themselves, when they are not busy scavenging or love-making, the gregarious ‘hermits’ fight with tireless enthusiasm tempered with caution. Despite the seeming viciousness of their battles, none, apparently, are [sic] ever injured. When the vanquished has been surprised or frightened into withdrawing his soft body from his shell, he is allowed to dart back into it, or at least to snap his hindquarters into the shell discarded by his conqueror.”

  Asilomar

  People stroll and dogs cavort on lovely Asilomar Beach. The Asilomar Conference Grounds, the “refuge by the sea,” is across the road. Built in 1913 as a YWCA conference center on land donated by the Pacific Improvement Company, Asilomar’s stately lodge and campus were designed by Julia Morgan, architect of Hearst Castle.

  Morgan designed Asilomar in the Arts and Crafts style, using local materials and stressing harmony with the environment. Since 1956, Asilomar has been a state conference center, and rooms are also available to the public. Public wooden walkways wind through the dunes, which have been replanted with native grasses, “little trailing plants which slow up the pace of the walking dunes.” In Sweet Thursday, Ed Ricketts meets the seer near Asilomar Beach (before the dunes were transformed into Spanish Bay resort): “In the dunes there are deep little creases where the wind-crouching pines have made a stand against the moving sand, and in one of these, only a hundred yards back from the beach, the seer had his home.”

  Set back in the woods at 800 Asilomar Boulevard is a little house, now on Asilomar grounds called the Guest House. In the late spring of 1941, John Steinbeck, separated from his wife Carol, stayed at his sister Esther’s “house in the woods in P.G.,” as he called it. Here he wrote part of Sea of Cortez.

  Asilomar State Beach.

  El Carmelo Cemetery, where Steinbeck’s sister Esther is buried, is at 65 Asilomar Boulevard. This is the “pretty little cemetery where you can hear the waves drumming always” mentioned in Cannery Row. Ed Ricketts’s funeral was held here in the Little Chapel by the Sea on May 12, 1948. (He is buried in El Encinal Cemetery in Monterey.) After the ceremony, the mourners walked to the Point Pinos Lighthouse, located on the northern tip of the peninsula.

  Dating to 1855, Point Pinos Lighthouse is the oldest continuously working lighthouse on the West Coast. The building, lenses, and prisms are all original. For Steinbeck’s characters, the lighthouse is a somber, contemplative place. Several walk from Pacific Grove out to the lighthouse, among them the bouncer William in Cannery Row, sad and isolated. Suzy in Sweet Thursday, in love with Doc, “mooned away on the path that leads along the sea to the lighthouse on Point Pinos. She looked in the tide pools, and she picked a bunch of the tiny flowers that grow as close to the ocean as they can.” In Sweet Thursday, Doc, working in his lab, hearing voices of loneliness, “would leave his work and walk out to the lighthouse to watch the white flail of light strike at the horizons.”

  Point Pinos Lighthouse.

  Lovers Point

  On any given summer weekend, a wedding is held at Lovers Point. And who can blame couples for selecting this lovely spot? Some say it was named for its romantic associations, not for the “Lovers of Jesus” who came for outdoor meetings. At one time there was a Japanese tea garden here, serving cakes and tea. From the beach below, tourists could float in glass-bottom boats and gaze at intertidal life. In the 1930s, these boats were still “well patronized,” noted the WPA guidebook.

  Lovers Point, circa 1915.

  The “Picturesque and Odoriferous” Chinese Fishing Village

  The Chinese fishing village in the 1890s.

  Today, Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station stands where a Chinese fishing village once tipped toward the sea. Some fifty or sixty Chinese men and women came to this beach in the 1850s to harvest abalone. Later, they bleached and sold sea urchins and caught and dried squid. Drying and shipping squid proved to be the most lucrative enterprise, an industry that netted tidy profits at its height in
1930. During his years on the Peninsula, Wing Chong became the local squid boss, his store a clearinghouse for all local fishermen. Drying squid, however, also created a much-noted unpopular odor. One late-nineteenth-century observer described the Chinese squid boats:

  They go out at night and burn fagots attached to the sides of their boats. The squids are attracted by the light, and come to the surface and are fairly ladled up by the fishermen. The catches are brought ashore and skillfully and quickly cleaned and put out in large fields to dry. They are packed down in sacks by tramping them with the bare feet, and shipped to China as delicacies.

  “Amazing people, the California Chinese,” Steinbeck wrote after he left the state. Steinbeck’s fictional tribute to the Chinese may be philosophic Lee in East of Eden or savvy Lee Chong in Cannery Row or perhaps the mysterious Chinaman in Cannery Row who shuffles to the sea at dusk, returns at dawn, regular as the tides. The Chinese fishing village figures in several of Steinbeck’s recollections, this one in 1948:

  The wind is ashore tonight and I can hear the sea lions and the surf and the whistling buoy and the bell buoy at Point Joe and China Point respectively. China Point is now called Cabrillo Point. Phooey—any fool knows it was China Point until certain foreigners became enamored of our almost nonexistent history.

  Cabrillo may or may not have first sighted this point, but them [Chinese] raised hell on it for fifty years, yes, and even buried their people there until the meat fell off and they could ship them cheaper to China. Mary and I used to watch them dig up the skeletons and we stole the punks and paper flowers off the new graves too. I used to like that graveyard. It was so rocky that some of the bodies had to be slipped in almost horizontally under the big rocks.

  And, in 1957, writing for the Monterey Peninsula Herald, he noted rather cynically that Cannery Row redevelopment might consider re-creating the “old old” on Cannery Row.

  I remember it well, shacks built of scraps of wood, matting, pieces of tin. The district known as Chinatown, a street free of sewage disposal and very romantic. In it the Chinese kept alive the arts of gambling, prostitution, and the opium pipe. I remember the night the whole thing burned to the ground. We felt that a way of life was gone forever. The purchasers [of Cannery Row land] could re-create this pylon of the past with the help of Hollywood scene designers.

  On the back of the photo is written, “The Chinese fishermen supplied Monterey with freshly caught fish—delivering them while still flapping in baskets slung over the shoulders with bamboo pole.”

  Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University

  With his lifelong passion for science, it’s not surprising that Steinbeck had a close association with the Hopkins Marine Station. John and his sister Mary attended summer classes here in 1923, both taking general zoology and English composition. Both Steinbeck and Ricketts knew Hopkins scientists. Director W. K. Fisher let John and Carol park their boat overnight at the “no parking” zone and drop nets for fish.

  Hopkins is nearly as old as Stanford University. Timothy Hopkins, treasurer of the Southern Pacific Railroad, was on the Stanford University Board of Trustees. A man of vision and scientific curiosity, he had “visited Dohrn’s Marine Station at Naples,” writes David Starr Jordan, the university’s first president, “and was very much impressed.” Hopkins and Jordan wanted a marine station for the newly formed Stanford University, where students could study marine zoology and botany. A site at Point Aulon—now Lovers Point—and $500 were donated by the Pacific Improvement Company; another $300 was given by the town of Pacific Grove; and an additional $1,000 was donated by Hopkins—who later gave more money for buildings, books, and equipment. The Hopkins Seaside Laboratory of Stanford University opened its doors officially in 1892 with thirteen students: “It proves a perfect paradise for the marine biologist,” wrote a founding professor. Many women came to Hopkins in the early years, schoolteachers whose only avenue to biological study was the marine laboratory.

  First marine laboratory, 1890s.

  When the station moved to its present location in 1917, the remarkable Dr. W. K. Fisher became director, a post he held for twenty-six years. His ecological, holistic approach to marine biology was progressive, and it was perhaps this quality that drew both Steinbeck and Ricketts to the station and to the man in the 1920s and 1930s. Fisher wrote a statement in 1919 that heralds the station’s ecological interests: “It is within the scope of a marine station to find out everything possible about the animals and plants of the ocean, as well as about the physical characteristics of the ocean itself…. One phase of the instruction at the station will cover the relation of all these facts to the welfare of man.”

  Certainly this would be the direction that Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’s ecological and holistic thought turned in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1919, Fisher suggested that the sardine population “bears a very definite relation” to plankton levels—another insight that would take decades for scientists and fishermen to fully appreciate. The Monterey Bay sardine, caught directly in front of the station, engaged Hopkins scientists who conducted a “little known research project,” a local paper reported, and concluded in 1941 that sardines in the bay were decreasing in size.

  In 1945, Steinbeck struck a deal with Hopkins, and in August, McIntosh & Otis drafted an agreement: John would donate $6,000-$9,000 for a proposed John Steinbeck Aquarium, provided that Hopkins would lease Ricketts, for one dollar a year, about a third of an acre for a new lab. The aquarium, Steinbeck wrote, would be “largely for scientific purposes (research and teaching) and secondarily for public attendance.” Director Lawrence Blinks loved the idea, as did, apparently, Stanford University. Blinks wrote the president, “Quite aside from the aquarium aspect, Ricketts is a good scientific worker and his expeditions with Steinbeck will probably yield many valuable specimens for the Marine Station, so the tie-up would be desirable in any case.” To fund his part of the deal, Ricketts had to sell his Cannery Row lab for at least $18,000 to finance the new lab building; apparently the cannery that had offered to buy his lab, acknowledging the end of sardine runs, backed out of the deal. The John Steinbeck Aquarium never came to be.

  Sea Otters

  Sea otter mural, Pacific Grove bike trail.

  For almost a century, the southern sea otter, slaughtered for its thick fur, was thought to be extinct. But in March 1938, a small herd, heretofore known only to locals, was reported in a Big Sur cove. Scientists at Hopkins Marine Station told local papers that only two other herds of sea otters were known to exist at that time: one in the Aleutians and one under Japanese protection in the Kurile Islands.

  Due to the remote location of the Big Sur coast, a few otters managed to survive centuries of slaughter—living on the fringe in a de facto refuge. Protected today by the Endangered Species Act, the otter population has recovered, and the plump creatures can readily be seen floating, bellies to the sky, as they crack shellfish, urchins, and abalone along the peninsula shoreline.

  Today, in an era of genetic research, the Hopkins Marine Station still funds holistic investigations into tuna and squid as well as interconnections among pelagic creatures and their environment, carrying on the work of Fisher and many other dedicated scientists.

  Chapter 7

  New Monterey

  Water-Gazers

  - Cannery Row today.

  ”As everyone knows meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

  —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  New Monterey is liminal space on the peninsula—not Spanish Monterey, not Methodist Pacific Grove, but the shoreline and sloping wooded hills between these places, where fishermen and immigrants established roots. It’s a place between two communities with clearly demarcated boundaries and histories. In New Monterey, industries took hold, flourished, and vanished, only to be replaced by other ventures, much like waves of ecological succession in the rich waters just offshore. The Chinese dried squid in New Monterey. Sicilian fishermen came here. Beginning early in the twentieth ce
ntury, canneries and reduction plants were built in New Monterey, and the area supported the region’s lucrative sardine industry until the industry collapsed in the late 1940s. In 1945, John Steinbeck put this in-between land on the map, so that the fame of Cannery Row would eclipse that of all other peninsula locales.

  Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.

  Cannery Row made a hero of Doc, the novel’s central character, who was, in life, Edward Flanders Ricketts, a marine biologist who operated a small marine biological lab in New Monterey. He was John Steinbeck’s closest friend for eighteen years, and their friendship was essential to Steinbeck’s thinking and his art. Beginning in 1930 when they met—either in a dentist’s office (Steinbeck’s version) or at a Carmel party (more likely)—Ricketts was a touchstone for Steinbeck. “Everyone found himself in Ed,” Steinbeck wrote, and that everyone included Steinbeck himself. It was arguably the most vital connection of Steinbeck’s life—fulfilling some deep psychic need more completely than any other relationship, including those with his three wives. In nearly every one of his novels, a male character offers to another male solace, wisdom, insight, and the “toto picture,” to borrow a favorite phrase of Ed’s. These men, always solitary but generally embedded in a social maelstrom, are intimate friends and mentors to Steinbeck’s protagonists. Their significance is relational, for the bonds forged are marked by honesty, commitment, companionship, even love. Male friendship is more deeply satisfying, more complex, and more significant than any other union in his fiction.