“The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.”
These words that open Steinbeck’s magnum opus are what stay in my head as I make my way up Interstate-5, the main leg of my 5 hour journey north. The ancient, dusty Prius I bought from my brother the summer before struggled to make it over the Grapevine on its dying battery, but now it cruises smoothly across the desolate flatland that is California’s Central Valley. There’s so many fires in the state now that I can’t keep track but some of them must be responsible for the smoke that surrounds me now.
After a few hours I start making my west on Highway 46. The smoke has cleared and the sun that I can finally see shining through my windshield starts setting beneath the golden hills in front of me. There is enough light left for me to notice the construct on the right side of the highway. I park a little bit ahead near a sign for “Jack’s Ranch” and carefully make my way on the gravelly shoulder back. It’s a memorial. It’s the James Dean Memorial. I always knew he died in a car crash but I never realized that this is where it happened.
The memorial is sweet. There’s a dead wreath in the shape of a heart, license plates, beers, flowers, take out, and a DVD copy of Fast and Furious 5 which I personally thought was a little in poor taste. Y’know, considering. The cars behind me are getting scarily close so I start heading back. As the sky pinkens I can see the hills in front of me reflect its hue. I leave the memorial behind me imagining Dean as a sort of gatekeeper, a sentry for Steinbeck’s valley.
Some background on the book would be helpful. East of Eden is, again, Steinbeck’s self-described magnum opus. But what is it actually about? Well, many things. I can split this answer into three parts.
Firstly, and most importantly, this is a novel about the Salinas Valley. Steinbeck repeatedly stated that he wrote the novel for his sons, that he wanted “to describe the Salinas Valley for them in detail: the sights, sounds, smells and colors.” Steinbeck himself was born and raised in Salinas and maintained a great fondness for the place. This was not new for Steinbeck, much of his work was set in Monterey County with Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat taking place in Monterey and Of Mice and Men taking place in Soledad. Rural California was the backbone of Steinbeck’s growth as a person and a writer.
His love for his home shows. Not only the opening of the novel, multiple segments and chapters are devoted to describing a pre-World War I Salinas Valley. I am hesitant to include a quote because no singular one could encapsulate the amount of description Steinbeck includes. He describes the climate, the seasons, the grass, the wildlife, the people, the times, the city, the roads, the smells, the colors, the sounds, everything. Every single place the characters visit in the Valley is rooted in reality and many of the landmarks exist today, a century later. Much of the novel moves at a leisurely pace, a slice-of-life feel. And this is not on accident. Steinbeck purposefully wanted to avoid the “headlong” pace of The Grapes of Wrath and he stated that “in pace it is much more like Fielding than like Hemingway.” Slice-of-life is more accurate than I had intended. In fact, the Salinas Valley is the most realized character of the novel and it is as if Steinbeck is giving the reader a slice of his own Eden to hold and cherish.
“When you came to Castroville Street you turned right. Two blocks down, the southern Pacific tracks cut diagonally across the street on their way south, and a street crossed Castroville Street from east to west. And for the life of me I cannot remember the name of that street. If you turned left on that street and crossed the tracks you were in Chinatown. If you turned right you were on the Row.
It was a black ‘dobe street, deep shining mud in winter and hard as rutted iron in summer. In the spring the tall grass grew along its sides - wild oats and mallow weeds and yellow mustard mixed in. In the early morning the sparrows shrieked over the horse manure in the street.
Do you remember hearing that, old men?”
By the time I get into Salinas it’s nighttime. I had a Starbucks I planned to camp out in to get some work done in but only the drive-thru is open so I sit outside in the cold just within the Wi-Fi range. Some homeless people sit next to me at the tables and it is not long at all before the cops show up and tell them to leave. I start to get up but am told I can stay. Maybe it’s my new smartphone or my J. Crew down vest but I appear to have passed some kind of test.
I’m struck by how much more modern everything looks. Not that Salinas is a particularly modern city. In fact, the city is a far way from the booming expanding hub Steinbeck describes in Eden. The massive amounts of independent farmland are still there, but major expansions in the 50s and 90s greatly increased the share of land held by the city. In Steinbeck’s time, the place was known as a hub for Asian-American immigrants and now Latin-Americans hold the crown as 75% of the population of the city. The White population is down to 46% from 90% back in the 70s.
The city still retains its nickname as “The Salad Bowl of the World” in honor of its outstanding agricultural economy. However this economy that made Salinas the city in the US with the highest per capita income is not quite at its same strength today. 1 in 4 people in Salinas live in poverty. Educational standards are below the national average. The city is also a hotbed for crime, birthing many notorious street and prison gangs. A small portion of the population is actually rather affluent. Probably due to the booming AgTech industry that Salinas is actually considered a hub for. Valley helping Valley.
In any case, I’m not sure why I’m so struck by how it looks. I suppose I feel cheated out of the Salinas Steinbeck gave me. It’s like when I learned that Clint Eastwood wasn’t actually around during the time of the cowboys and the Wild, Wild West. I think the Salinas I had in my mind was so formed by Eden, anything even the slightest bit different comes as quite a shock.
I have some time left before I need to sleep so to get out of the cold, I head for a movie. The closest theater is actually on Main Street, the primary artery of Salinas and where much of Eden takes place. I drive over there and the street is nice, much nicer than the rest of the town I drove through. There are some kids on scooters hanging around. One of them is on the phone and he tells his friend to come “meet them near Maya.” Maya’s the theater. It didn’t exist in Steinbeck’s time and now seems to be one of the major landmarks of the city. It’s hard to see too much of the street, so I go in and buy my ticket for Joker. It’s a good movie and as soon as it’s done I head back into my car, find the nearest vacant parking lot, recline my seat and turn in for the night.
The night’s cold and I didn’t bring a blanket but I make it through. This next day is my one day in Salinas and I plan on leaving around evening so there’s a lot I have to do. I first spend my time in the sun, driving around the neighborhoods, getting a sense of the place. I spend almost all of my time in “Oldtown Salinas,” the center of the city. Frankly the neighborhoods are not what at all what I expected. On one side of the street I see these large, gorgeous Victorian style homes. Some of them have signs stating their year of creation - 1806, 1817, 1910. Then on the other end of the same street you have much more modest houses, their well maintained exteriors at odds with the unkempt lawns and rusted equipment found sprawled around them.
Maybe it’s because it’s Sunday, but as I walk around, I’m struck by the lack of people I see on the streets. For being in the city’s heart, it feels somewhat lifeless. Still it’s a gorgeous day and I have a list of locations from the novel that I plan on visiting. Two things are clear as I make my way from destination to destination. First, this city’s bones are still there. It is an odd feeling to look upon a building and now it is the same bank that Cathy Trask (the novel’s villain) walked into to deposit her money at the end of her weekly stroll. It is an interesting feeling to know that Steinbeck himself not only walked these same streets, but towards the same destination. Second, this city has not forgotten Steinbeck at all. His name is on every motel in sight. Murals of him sponsored by the city are on every wall. It heartens me. Something remains of the city I read about, even if it is only in lasting landmarks and remembrance of the author himself. I can feel the history of the place.
Here are the places I visit:
- Roosevelt Elementary School. This is where Steinbeck’s mother, Olive taught. This is also the school that Aron, Cal, and Abra attend in the second half of the novel. If I close my eyes I can see them walking out of the door in front, Cal holding Abra’s books.
- Muller’s Funeral Chapel. It’s a restaurant now but a plaque remains to commemorate what was mentioned in the story.
- As mentioned before, the Monterey County Bank. It’s off of Main Street and is one of many buildings that has been clearly refurbished to maintain a traditional exterior.
- The John Steinbeck Library. It’s not mentioned in the novel but I figured it’s worth a visit. The outside has a statue of the man himself. Inside is a standard issue library. I find a collection of drawers with the label, “Salinas Californian Index.” It’s a list of newspaper headlines by the thousands on notecards. They go back decades.
- All of Main Street itself. Now that the sun is out I can get a better look. It’s definitely the nicest part of the city. A couple of tourists can be spotted here and there. A Tesla drives by. One side of the street is dominated by traditional edifices while directly across, the headquarters of Taylor Farms strikes a more brutalist look. I’m not really sure, I don’t really know architecture. This is the street. This is the street. I try to imagine it full of people and action and it proves impossible. Yet in some ways, things are largely the same. The rise in AgTech, technological solutions to agriculture, brings to mind the scene in Eden where Adam buys a new Ford, prompting the mailman to complain about how often people come for their mail “nowadays.” Things are still here getting faster.
- Steinbeck House. I turn right off Main Street down Central Ave just as Adam Trask did. One block later and I run into a beaten down liquor store, “Cal’s Central Liquors.” One more block later and I get to the house where Steinbeck was born, raised, and wrote. It actually functions as a historical monument as well as a restaurant nowadays but I’m here on a Sunday so the restaurant is closed. It’s gorgeous, and, along with its Victorian neighbors, entirely out of place.
My final destination is at the beginning of Main Street, seemingly the center of all of Salinas. It is the National John Steinbeck Center. With a dedicated theater and immersive exhibit detailing Steinbeck’s works and life, I imagine it’s in the direction of this building that all Steinbeck-ites (Steinbeckers?) pray to in the morning. The gift shop inside has a Dia de los Muertos inspired display of the man himself, amidst statues and paintings and pictures. The exhibit itself is magnificent. Large props such as cars and sails and forges punctuate sentences upon sentences concerning everything Steinbeck that you could possibly imagine.
This city hasn’t forgotten about Steinbeck, that much is certain. The Center must cost a fortune to upkeep, everything is named after him, murals and landmarks are kept in honor of his works. Yet is this the Salinas Steinbeck described? Is this the Salinas he worked so meticulously to document? Change over time is inevitable and of course cars and paved roads and tractors would find there way here. That doesn’t mean that the soul of the Salinas Steinbeck described is necessarily gone. But it also doesn’t mean that it’s still here. The Salinas Valley is still a “Salad Bowl” but the people who make it up are not the same people Steinbeck knew. The landscape can’t have changed too much but is the life described in Eden even applicable anymore, or just a relic of a forgotten past?
Near the end of the exhibit they have a typewriter - the same exact model Steinbeck used when writing The Red Pony. I’m not sure if it’s the original but I doubt it as it’s free for the visitors to use. Figuring out which way to orient the pages is a struggle but I eventually lock it in. I look down and start writing.
Secondly, Eden is about two families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, and their lives in the Salinas Valley. The Hamiltons were not only a real family in the Valley, they were Steinbeck’s own. Steinbeck himself is the narrator of the novel, making minor appearances here and there as a small child. Samuel Hamilton, the family’s patriarch, was Steinbeck’s grandfather and a man whose “white hair shone with starlight”. Olive Hamilton was his mother, and in fact all members of the Hamilton family portrayed in the novel were real people. The story of the Hamilton’s is secondary to that of the Trasks and primarily follows Samuel Hamilton, a kind, wise, well-regarded blacksmith who settled his family in the worst plot of land the Valley has to offer. Sam helps Adam Trask settle into the Valley and becomes his confidante, as well as a friend to Adam’s Chinese servant, Lee. His death leaves the whole community of Salinas in mourning and his family broken.
The Trasks are the true protagonists of the story. Their story starts in Connecticut with Adam Trask, his brother Charles, and their father Cyrus. Charles and Adam have a complex rivalry with Charles desperate for his father’s love and Cyrus favoring Adam. After Cyrus’ death leaves them both with a suspicious fortune, Adam moves across the country to Salinas. He is accompanied by Cathy, the novel’s pure embodiment of evil who shoots Adam in the shoulder after giving birth to their twins and leaves him to run a twisted whorehouse in Salinas city. Adam remains depressed for much of his life and leans on Lee to raise his two sons, Cal and Aron. The story repeats with Cal desperate for his father’s love and Adam only seeing Aron. Aron grows up virtuous and talented while Cal grows up wild and conflicted. One night in a jealous rage, Cal shows Aron the truth of who their mother is by taking him to the whorehouse. The truth is too
much for Aron to handle and he flees to the army, dying in World War I and sending Adam into a stroke. The novel ends with Cal at his father’s bedside begging forgiveness.
“The wind whistled over the settlements in the afternoon, and the farmers began to set out mile-long windbreaks of eucalyptus to keep the plowed topsoil from blowing away. And this is about the way the Salinas Valley was when my grandfather brought his wife and settled in the foothills to the east of King City.”
I walk into the coffee shop and order a cappuccino. I’m offered my choice of beans and looking over them, I see some called “Steinbeck Beans” that promise special flavor unique to the Salinas Valley. Intrigued, I pick those. When I pick up my order, I ask the barista for the Wi-Fi password. He tells me “You have to buy a drink first.” As I start to confusedly gesture towards my cup he repeats the statement with the addendum, “No caps, no spaces.” I sit and take a sip of my drink. It tastes like coffee.
A short drive later and I’m at my final destination for the trip. Gardens of Memory Memorial Park. Steinbeck’s final resting place.
I pull in and am immediately met with the view of a sea of red white and blue. The cemetery is large and it seems as though almost every single grave stone or marker is accompanied by an American flag. I forgot, it’s Veteran’s Day tomorrow. I see families here and there all clustered around a particular marker, sweeping it clean and neatly arranging flowers and other offerings. I park my car and start walking around. I come across a row of markers and as I bend over to read them, I realize they all share the same first sentence: “Born and Died on this date:”.
After three minutes of walking I see the Hamilton grave stone in front of me. It’s large but it doesn’t really stand out from any of the others around it. The stone reads out the names “Samuel Hamilton, Elizabeth Hamilton, Thomas Scott Hamilton, Dessie Hamilton, Euna Hamilton Anderson.” My eyes start to tear up. Here they were. Samuel and his stalwart wife Liza, lost to age. Dessie who moved into the old family farm with her brother Tom and was inadvertently killed by him when he administered the incorrect medicine for her stomach ache. Tom who could not take the grief and killed himself a few years later. Euna, the light of Samuel’s life who died far from home in a loveless marriage. Though Steinbeck claimed that his account of the major events in the Hamiltons’ lives is entirely based in reality I can never be certain. Still, there’s a sort of magic in seeing this grave marker in front of me. Who knows who the people buried beneath my feet really were? Who knows if Steinbeck’s account was accurate? But right now, in this moment, in front of me are the people that I read about and came to love. And while it’s amazing to finally be able to meet them, it still hurts to see.
I keep walking and am having trouble finding my next destination. Luckily, a comically out of place sign knows where I’m trying to go and points me in the direction of Steinbeck’s grave. He’s buried with his mother, father, and siblings. There appear to fresh flowers placed at the foot of the plot and around Steinbeck’s marker specifically (it’s rather small) there are rows of pens and coins. I get my own offering out of my backpack and weight it down with a nearby rock at the top of the marker. It’s a letter I wrote with the typewriter in the Steinbeck Center and it says, “To John, Timshel. And you did.” I turn around and walk back to my car.
Finally, this is the story of Genesis, retold. While tracking his writing of the novel, Steinbeck wrote that “it is the first book” and that “there is only one book to a man.” It is a story of Original Sin. The parallels are numerous and explicit with Charles and Adam and Cal and Aron standing in for Cain and Abel. Adam himself plays many roles - Abel, the first man he is named after, as well as the Father to Charles and Aron, imagining creating a “garden in the flat land” of the valley. At the end of Part Two of the novel, Samuel, Adam, and Lee sit down and discuss Genesis. Adam states that it makes him feel better as human “guilt is absorbed in our ancestry, what chance did [he] or any other human have?”. He sees the presence of Original Sin as an “excuse” for the evil Man acts out. Yet the story of Original Sin is not what the novel is most concerned about. It is concerned with the second of the “two stories that have haunted us and followed us from our beginning”. The story of Cain and Abel.
This is the universal story Steinbeck is referring to. Wherein the brother Cain has his offering to God rejected and in his anger strikes down and kills his brother. Lee points out that despite Cain being branded and exiled by God, the mark was made “not to destroy him but to save him” and that “we are Cain’s children”. Lee answers that the story is the “best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story”. Lee posits that “the greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears”. It is this rejection we see Cal suffer when Adam turns away his gift of money and asks him to be more like his brother and it is this rejection that Steinbeck theorizes runs through us all.
So if we are all the children of Cain and we all bear the Original Sin, is there truly nothing we can do, as Adam implies? Lee disagrees, bringing into play the central concept of the novel - timshel. Timshel being the hebrew word for ‘thou mayest.’ The idea here is that when Jehovah speaks to Cain, he is not telling him “thou shalt rule over sin,” he is telling him “thou mayest rule over sin”. The word “gives a choice,” it “says the way is open.” It is what “makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win”.
Adam chooses to bear his sin, living a life of regret and sorrow. While Cal faces a struggle for much of the novel as to why he does bad things, why he is unworthy of father’s love, whether or not he is fated to bear his mother’s evil, he embraces timshel and tells his mother, “I’m my own. I don’t have to be you”. Yes, he still doubts himself all the way to the novel’s end. Yes, he still inadvertently causes Aron’s death by driving him to join the army. Inside Cal is the capacity to do evil, but it is his choice. With the capacity to do evil comes the ability to choose good. Adam, stuck in his idea of original sin, has no such choice in the matter. When Adam cruelly rejects Cal’s offer of the money he earned, Lee attempts to console by telling him Adam “couldn’t help it.” That “that’s his nature. It was the only way he knew. He didn’t have any choice. But you have. You have a choice”. The Original Sin was not of Eve eating the Apple, it was of God rejecting Cain. That is the Sin we all carry with us - not some ancient guilt, but the capacity to reject and do harm to each other. Cal has no control over his father’s love or whose blood runs in his veins but he can control who he loves. He chooses to love his father and Aron and Abra and Lee. That is what redeems him and allows him to go, as Cain did, to a promised land.
“But the Lord said to him, ‘Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.’ Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”
Salinas is in my rearview mirror as I begin the 5 hour journey home to LA. Driving alone doesn’t afford me the opportunity to do much other than think so that’s what I do. I think back to my visit as a whole. Was it disappointing? No, seeing the Steinbeck Center and the cemetery were powerful experiences I won’t soon forget. Was it disillusioning? Perhaps. It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t what I expected. I know that’s an unfair pressure to place on an area that has gone through a century of change, but still. Salinas is not doing well. It’s impossible to say as a visitor of less than 48 hours but there did not seem to be as large a sense of community as Steinbeck laid out in his novel. Maybe that’s Salinas, maybe that’s America, I don’t know. It just disappoints me, the idea that this author I look up to poured so much of himself into a tribute for a place that isn’t there. I look to my left as I start to head east out of the Valley now on Highway 46 and see Fremont Peak, so often mentioned in Eden.
That’s when I realize. Fremont Peak is still there. King City is still there, the Valley itself is still there. The city itself has changed, of course. However, the land hasn’t. The land remembers and not just the land, but the people. Steinbeck’s idea of this novel being the first novel makes sense to me now. He wrote Salinas as he knew it, captured it in a moment of time. That time is gone now, living only through Eden and similar texts. But just as the topography of the Valley itself has remained immutable, so too has the struggle of the people within it. No matter the change in material condition, the base struggle that every person in this Valley grapples with is where the true universality of Steinbeck’s novel lies.
I think back to the cemetery. Men and women enlisting in the army as Aron did. Were they running away from something as he was? Were they running towards an ideal they deemed worthy of chasing? Did they go in hopes of protection or conquest? The notorious street gangs. Are they filled with people who were never given a chance to succeed, or kids who delight in holding any power they can? All of the Tesla drivers expanding the AgTech industry. Are they here to improve agricultural output or profit off a desperate workforce? Babies born and dead without a chance to choose who they should be.
Whether it’s the people buried or the people on the streets, Salinas faces the same issues, the same questions now as it did then. It’s a question we all have to face every single day. There is no such thing as Original Sin. No such thing as an innate darkness that we must work to overcome. In the same breath we must acknowledge that there is no innate goodness. We choose. We have to choose. Every single day the kind of person we want to be. We are not the product of our parents or our ancestors or any higher being. We are who we choose to be. It’s freeing and at the same time an enormous amount of responsibility. But is there any other way to live?
I stop my car on the side of the road. The sun is setting yet again but this time it’s behind me. I walk up to the memorial I visited no more than 24 hours ago. I learned something else in the Steinbeck Center. The East of Eden movie adaptation was a wildly well-received film. It forwent much of the novel in favor of focusing on the latter half of the story, specifically the troubled relationship between Cal and Adam. And who better to play the handsome, brooding, tortured, rebellious Cal than this up-and-coming kid from Indiana called James Dean?
I walk up to the memorial and take out a second message I had typed out with the typewriter back at the Center. I place it down underneath some flowers. It’s fitting, in a way, that Cal should find his final resting place East of Steinbeck’s Eden with the grass and hills and fog and rabbits and cattle. It may not be Nod, but I can think of worse places to end a journey. I don’t know James Dean, and he didn’t have too much time to get to know himself. But I hope he chose to be good.
The sun finally disappears behind the hills as I crest the ridge and turn south.