John Steinbeck's Love for California

This past Valentine's Day weekend, I had two gigs in Monterey. The band leader put us up in Salinas, about 30 miles from Monterey, so I brought my family and we went to the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, author John Steinbeck's birthplace. It's a very nice museum, and it achieves a difficult goal, which is to take an author's words and visualize them with artifacts and rooms that follow his life and collected works.

There were far too many things I did not know about Steinbeck -- though I can't say I completely absorbed the exhibits as my kids were acting like winged monkeys on the loose. I finally forced my older son to listen as I read many of the passages from Steinbeck's works to him, and he started to get involved. However, the take-home point for him was that Steinbeck loved Edgar Allan Poe as a child; he kept asking me about the "horror stories" afterwards and seemed to be under the impression that Steinbeck had written them.

I did not know that Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for literature, nor that he had written so many novels, nor that he'd traveled extensively in Mexico, working on The Pearl, a Mexican film that received widespread American distribution. He learned fluent Spanish and also worked on a film about Emiliano Zapata and my husband's birthplace, Cuautla, Morelos.

What I found most memorable was the fact that Steinbeck set his stories and their global, human themes in California's central valley. Though he eventually traveled the world as a war correspondent and journalist, he never suffered the disease so many do, of despising his rural, small-town origins. I can't find it right now, but that reminds me of a thought by Abraham Maslow that the greatest journey is in one's own backyard, not in trekking the world. It resonates for me because I can't seem to leave the Bay Area, even though my parents and siblings have. When I feel bad about this fact my husband reminds me of how spectacularly gorgeous it is here.

It's human nature to devalue the places we leave behind to justify our move elsewhere. But these gently folded hills, redwood forests dotted with forget-me-nots and salty Bay air are simply a part of me. Maybe some day I'll leave them. I did briefly when I went to college in Pennsylvania, where I suffered physical homesickness for the natural environs I'd known. I had to get back, so I left after two years.

At the end of the museum exhibit there's the old Chevy truck and camper Steinbeck used for his journey around the U.S. with his dog, documented in Travels with Charley: In Search of America. I smiled in recognition -- I had a beautiful old '64 Chevy for years that looked just like it.

Here are some quotes I scribbled down on the back of my show set lists while I was there at the museum:

"I think I would like to write the story of this valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world," Steinbeck wrote in a letter to his friend George Albee in 1933.

"If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And here I make a rule -- a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last." -- Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on a couch searching for a soul."
--Steinbeck, letter to Adlai Stevenson, 1959

"I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a 30-year cycle... And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."
--Steinbeck, East of Eden