merry christmas, cannery row

[kalechipskid]

  You see I am experiencing an emotional crisis right now due to the fact I am listening to a very good song and thinking about a very nice boy I like quite a bit. I sent him the song and typed “This song makes me feel warm and sentimental and would like to listen to it with you” very fast so I wouldn’t second guess myself. I’m thinking about all the things I like. Next to me is a teetering bookshelf I routinely clear out that contains books I love but have scanned through so many times I can hum the words as I read. We have a nice garden and since the weather has been getting so warm lately I try to sit out with a cup of green tea and read on the bench by the overgrown wisteria until I seriously have to get work done. Picking out a book is irritating. I’ve read them all. I’m afraid that one day I’ll hate them due to the overfamiliarity– It’s a bad trait of mine, hating things I know too well. So when picking out a book I make an effort to set aside my negativity and enjoy it like I'm coming home again. The book I pick up the most on blistering hot mornings is Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, a rambling meandering story of scoundrel and grifters and the Doc they love very much.

 

  

The Grapes Of Wrath is considered Steinbeck’s greatest work and I certainly can’t argue with its importance, but I will always say Cannery Row (and Sweet Thursday, by extension) is his best. It’s a work that could have only come about by great affection and observation and community. It’s a 123 page love letter to the very lowest of Monterey, California. It’s a portrait of a place where every dirt path and pebble is soaked through with nostalgia. There are long stretches of the book (and even more so in the sequel) where the author will simply describe the town and its quirks, no plot forwarding to be had. Lee Chong’s grocery. Palace Flophouse. The laboratory with the record player singing into the late hours of night. The most common complaint against the book is that there is no plot and that the characters aren’t especially deep– But must they be deep? Must Mac and his boys – The Virtues, the Beatitudes, the Beauties– have some grand mission or tragic backstory driving them forward? Must every man hide a secret complexity or is it just enough to enjoy their company with the clouds changing shapes overhead? Isn’t it enough to just be?

 

  There is a segment where Hazel, a well-meaning, innocent bum, and the beloved Doc are gathering specimens at the ocean for a university when they start talking about stink bugs. The stink bugs stuck their bottoms into the air but neither of them can figure out why.

  Hazel turned one of the stink bugs over with the toe of his wet tennis shoe and the shining black beetle strove madly with floundering legs to get upright again. “Well, why do you think they do it?”

  “I think they’re praying,” said Doc.

  “What!” Hazel was shocked.

  “The remarkable thing,” said Doc, “isn’t that they put their tails up in the air– the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we’d probably be praying– so maybe they’re praying.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Hazel.

  A character that shows up often in Steinbeck’s books is “The Doctor”: Jim Casey in The Grapes of Wrath; Doctor Winter in The Moon Is Down; Doc Burton in Dubious Battles; and of course Doc in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. He’s usually portrayed as an almost Christ-like figure, a man who is greatly serious and troubled but at the same time spiritual and capable of great joy. Always an intellectual, but always willing to speak to those who live in the mud. These characters are written with immense reverence because Steinbeck clearly revered the man they were modeled after, marine biologist and beer-sipping philosopher Ed Ricketts, who was his friend and mentor until his untimely death in 1948.

  In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a book written by the two friends together, they offer a bit of scientific advice: 

  “It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”

 

  The story insists on the beauty of the town and its inhabitants. Just about every action taken by the characters is considered sacred, the tone offering a wry smile and shrug whenever Mac and his boys repeatedly fall victim to their vices. If Mac, the notoriously golden-hearted scam artist, and his gaggle of similarly saintly hoodlums didn’t cause destruction everywhere they went, they wouldn’t truly be themselves. The ecosystem would fall out of whack. Cannery Row cannot be if Old Tennis Shoe beer isn’t swiped from the grocery shelves, if the Doc’s house isn’t torn to shreds by unruly party-goers who think nothing less than the world of him. So much of the affection given in Cannery Row is met with pain simply due to the fact imperfect people are seeking imperfect people. Somehow, that little dirty town by the shore is locked forever in an unchanging summer of happy painful days. Everyone is preserved with their troubles as if they were holy artifacts in a vault of nostalgia.

  In a chapter near the end, Frankie, a devoted assistant to Doc, has committed a crime and is being put away due to some kind of developmental disability. His family is neglectful and despite the pleas, there is little chance that any judge will parole the boy to Doc. In a final goodbye, this happens:

  “...but maybe he had a reason. Frankie.” He said, “why did you take it?”

  Frankie looked a long time at him. “I love you,” he said.

  Doc ran out and got in his car and went collecting in the caves below Pt. Lobos.

  I think I was always going to like a story like this because I grew up in poverty on the ocean surrounded by a lot of troubled people who were keen to lend a hand when we ran out of bread or when the boards above my sister’s bunk were leaking and black with mold. The truth is, those times were nightmarish and it felt like my soul was being worn away by the cruelty of others. But I can’t help but look back on that particular period of my life with overwhelming affection because there was such a strong sense of community around me. I love the drunk preacher docked beside me who would repair anything wooden as long as you offered him hard cider; I love his wife, who recounted her mortifying cases at the morgue where she worked in great detail; I love the austere old man with the fog of loneliness around him in his half-rotting boat and his invitations for liquorice tea and fig cookies with a good ol’ fashioned Peanut jazz spinning on the record player. I was a troubled and evil child with a loud mouth with a cruel streak but I knew that because of my eagerness and energy I was loved; because I lived there with all those troubled people, I was loved very much. And I think that with the book beside me and the song I like playing and the memory of that time I’m getting a bit emotional because something like that can never return to me again.

  It was very foggy and chilly today so I did not go into the garden to read, instead I drank tea and washed the kitchen because my ceiling started leaking right from the lights last night. If it was warm and bright I would’ve gone out by the wisteria and my roommate would’ve told me we needed to trim it; I would’ve put off work to read and drink. I would’ve picked up Cannery Row out of all the others. I’m afraid one day I will hate it when I read it because familiar things make me feel too seen, too known– But for now, I love the memory of the place that no longer exists, from a person I’ve never met.