Five Days on the Monterey Peninsula

Steinbeck Country

“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. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”

We are in Steinbeck country, staying in a hotel three miles from the famous location of the novel by the same name. 

I cannot explain the wave of emotions that swept through me as I stood by the statues on Wednesday afternoon. The characters: Doc, Lee Chong, Dora Flood, Mack, Hazel, and the rest of the fellows at th…