EAST OF EDEN

We traveled over some really humpy bumpy roads to get to our new spot in Prunedale. The bad roads put Betty and me in a really bad mood so we complained to each other the whole way. This sucks. Can we hit all the bumps? Who’s in charge of fixing the roads? I need to use the bathroom. I’m hungry. Are we there yet? WTF?

We stayed at a park in Prunedale, which is a small town just a few miles north of Salinas. The Salinas Valley is among the most fertile locations in California and local authorities advertise it as the “Salad Bowl of the World.”  If you were to drive through here, you will see broccoli, cauliflower, celery, peppers, vines, strawberries, tomatoes, and spinach growing in the area.  According to californiaagtoday.com, California is the world’s fifth largest supplier of food, cotton fiber, and other agricultural commodities. California is the nation’s number 1 agricultural producer and exporter. Specifically, California is produces 99 percent or more of many specialty crops grown in the U.S., such as almonds, artichokes, dried plums, figs, garlic, olives, persimmons, pistachios, pomegranates, raisins, and walnuts. According to agamerica.com, over one-third of U.S. vegetables and two-thirds of U.S. fruit and nuts are grown in California. Now you know.

If Salinas rings a bell for you, you may have read some of John Steinbeck’s work. He was born in Salinas and spent a lot of his younger years in Salinas, Pacific Grove, and Monterey.

In Salinas, we visited the Steinbeck Center and Museum, which is very well done and very informative. In the museum, we saw "Rocinante," the pickup truck and camper in which Steinbeck made a cross-country trip and described in his book, Travels with Charley. Seeing that little camper made me really grateful for our trailer.

Steinbeck used Salinas and the Salinas Valley as the setting for several of his novels. In particular, his novel East of Eden is set primarily in Salinas and the surrounding area. It was interesting to see some of the streets he mentioned like Gabilan, Alisal, Monterey, Front, Central, and Main. We walked by the Steinbeck house where Steinbeck grew up. Steinbeck’s family was comfortably middle-class for the time; however, as he grew up, he spent a good deal of time hanging out with the people who are still the backbone of our society - the field workers, cannery workers, migrant workers, and manual laborers. He witnessed the suffering of the people, and the indifference of the government. He was an independent thinker, which made him a complicated and contradictory man.

Hollywood liked Steinbeck’s writing - eighteen movies were made based on his works. Not everyone liked Steinbeck’s books. According to the American Library Association, Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States. I guess it comes around every so often that government and the moral police wants to dictate what schools can and can’t teach and what people can and can’t read. I think we’re in the middle of one of those times. Disgusting.

Salinas has a pretty laid-back vibe in the downtown. It so happened that the farmers’ market was set up while we there, so we picked up some strawberries. Yum.

Okay then,

Buster

The Steinbeck Center

The Steinbeck House

Downtown