Cannery Row

When I was in high school I read a book called Grapes of Wrath written in 1939 by John Steinbeck (pictured above) about migrant agricultural workers in California.  I have always held this book up as one of my all time favorites.  Steinbeck’s hometown is Salinas, California where he was born in 1902.  Our work this week has taken us into the Salinas area where farming continues as a major business endeavor.  Fields cover the fertile, flat valley landscape found stretching from just inside the ocean dunes all the way to the mountains that separate us from California’s Central Valley.  Agricultural workers still migrate back and forth between Salinas and Yuma tending to vegetables in each location and spending about six months in both places.  While different with the mechanical advantages available to farmers of today, the workers still tend the fields by hand in many aspects in the same way as in they did back in the 1930’s bending over rows and rows of ripening plants.

Steinbeck also wrote a book called Cannery Row, which was placed in Monterey, California.  The town of Monterey embraces both Steinbeck’s book and the sardine fishing industry operated here by Spanish, Japanese and Filipino immigrants until the sardine population collapsed after World War II.  Now the town is a tourist Mecca and draws crowds for its variety of restaurants, candy and souvenir shops, and of course the Aquarium.  Weekends (especially the sunny ones) draw people to the waterfront and also to the parks along the water.  It is a festive scene on weekends, which we found to be much quieter when we returned during the week.

I am sure there is much more to explore in Monterey, like the history of the people who established this town and lived in buildings like those above.  I would also like to learn the story of who the brass statutes represent but we still have to get down to Carmel and Big Sur so we’ll work in another stop along Cannery Row before we head further north.