America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Read Online Free Page A

Pascal Covici, “I get the old sense of peace and wholeness” (Benson 784).
    Steinbeck’s essays on the places he cared about serve as a kind of memoir, testimony to one of the most endearing qualities of Steinbeck’s prose, his attachment to place.

Always Something to Do in Salinas
    EARLY MEMORIES of Salinas are so confused in my mind that I don’t know, actually, what I remember and what I was told I remembered. I am fairly clear on the earthquake of 1906. My father took me down Main Street and I remember brick buildings, spilled outward. Our own wooden house was not injured, but the chimney had completely turned around without falling. And my sharpest memory is that a phonograph we had obtained by subscribing to the San Francisco Call for two years—our first talking machine—leaped from a shelf and destroyed itself. There were two thousand five hundred people in Salinas then, but boosters confidently predicted that it would someday be a metropolis of five thousand.
    Tradition was strong in Salinas and my town never forgot nor forgave an injury. For example, in the Fourth of July hosecart race in 1900, run against Watsonville, the Salinas team ran out its hose smartly and with a substantial lead, then found to its horror that the threads of the coupling had been filed smooth. They could not couple up and get water and so lost the race. Watsonville had obviously cheated. For a decade after, a man could get a fight in a bar at any time simply by bringing up the subject. I thought of Watsonvillians as foreigners and cheats. I wouldn’t have thought of trusting them.
    The old Camino Real, the royal road that threaded California together, moved up the valley and did not come near Salinas for a very good reason. The place that was to become Salinas was a series of tulegrown swamps, which toward the end of the summer dried and left a white deposit of alkali. It was this appearance of salt that gave the place its name. The stagecoaches on the royal road stopped at Natividad, a pleasant little town on the higher ground of the Gabilan foothills, free of fog and swamp and mosquitoes, protected from the fierce daily winds which funneled up the valley center. Natividad had a small college, perhaps the first in California.
    There is no understanding the impulses of humans. Someone built a blacksmith shop in the swamp and houses clustered around it: Main Street went in, and little bridges were built over the dark and noisome swamps. On this least likely site, Salinas grew while Natividad died. The adobe college lost roof and windows. The royal road became a country lane. By the time I came along much of the swamp had been filled in, but there was plenty left so that the night roared with frogs. I was pretty big before I learned that silence was not made up of a wall of frog song.
    Salinas was never a pretty town. It took a darkness from the swamps. The high gray fog hung over it and the ceaseless wind blew up the valley, cold and with a kind of desolate monotony. The mountains on both sides of the valley were beautiful, but Salinas was not and we knew it. Perhaps that is why a kind of violent assertiveness, an energy like the compensation for sin grew up in the town. The town motto, given it by a reporter ahead of his time, was: “Salinas is.” I don’t know what that means, but there is no doubt of its compelling tone.
    As the swamps were drained and the black odorous mud exposed, it became known that this land was rich beyond belief. And Salinas became rich, the richest community per capita, we were told, in the entire world. I suppose this was true. Certainly we Salinians never questioned it even when we were broke. It was a town of wooden frame houses, the trading center of the valley, the social center of the whole world as we knew it.
    The social structure was a strange and progressive one. First there were the Cattle People, the First Families of the Salinas Valley, gentry by right of