• In Monterey the people say we feed the lazaroni on caramels and cockle shells and chunks of abalone!
• Some people boast of quail on toast because they think it's Toni! But my big cat gets nice and fat on chucks of abalone!

---the Abalone song, as sung by Jack London, and other California Bohemians (Valley of the Moon)

Picking up our tale in Lake Havasu, a few weeks before our Winter Break was to ensue, in no particular order these events happened:

• One of my "favorite students" (lazy one too) decided to make a gun threat in my class, and also threaten another student. After fully documenting it she was hauled off in handcuffs. I had a week of sheer bliss and no student behaviors to speak of.
• The same day this happened, my Mum called me on the cell and told me Dad was in the hospital with a minor stroke which quickly led to pneumonia. (he has recovered now too, sorta).
• I finally got fed up with the dysfunctional school staff and turned in my resignation. The place had a revolving door on the Science position anyway, who was I to argue with a trend? (I’m not normally a quitter, but you weren’t there and I was. One of the toughest decisions I‘ve ever had to make).

I don’t know how I held it together, but I did for one more week, got the grades done, and basically parked the kids in front of science videos for the final week. The management was really jerky about getting my keys too, luckily I pack fast and efficiently. Mailed a lot of clothing home, dumped other things, and throwing the rest in my car (including my new rat, Miss Mousy Waffles) I headed for home.

During my time in Havasu, I caught up on my reading, a book Beyond the Outer Shores, which was about Ed Ricketts, the guy John Steinbeck wrote Cannery Row about. What a wonderful book! It got me to reflecting how much I loved Sweet Thursday in High School, and how much I wished I had gone into Marine Biology instead of getting stuck teaching doper kids Material Sciences in the middle of the desert.

After reading this, I figured out the real background, Steinbeck had poured a lot of heart and soul into Sweet Thursday after Ricketts died. Joseph Campbell got into the act too, in fact I think they all must have been wife swapping in the 30‘s. The Lovejoys were real people too (I met their grandson once long ago, as a student, and he was a musical prodigy, piano!) so all the people in Cannery Row were real, very talented, and some of the earliest California Bohemians. So going back to Washington, I passed through Monterey, CA (It was on the way, why not?) It was so strange to see and smell the ocean again, revitalizing in fact, after six months in the desert. A blessed winter fog rolled in…. it smelled wonderful.

Steinbeck painted Cannery Row with his words, perfectly. You don’t realize that until you actually GO there. There is something about his descriptions that capture its FEEL and spirit first thing in the morning. The seagulls still sit atop what was once the Hedido Cannery (now the Monterey Bay Aquarium). People unloading crates for the restaurants haven‘t changed, and move to the same slow rhythm that they did in Steinbeck’s day. The chicken walk is now a larger lighted stairway, and the Palace Flophouse is (I think) that scruffy little forgotten shed behind "La Ida’s".

 

The Doc’s lab is still there, 800 Cannery Row. That building is actually the second lab, the first one burned down, along with a lot of Rickett’s early notes, books and stuff, when the cannery next door blew a fuse and overloaded the wiring. As far as I can tell, the Steinbeck trust still owns it, and it’s all locked up, quite tight. There’s no sign on it, but if you know your stuff, you’ll find it quite easily.

La Ida’s used to be the local cathouse, and that too is still commemorated. In the book, it was "Wide Ida’s" or "The Bear Flag" but in reality the ladies "house" was called the Lone Star.

Artists from all over the country have lent their hand to the area, and this was my favorite. It speaks for itself. This cartoonist used to do very cute, naughty cartoons in Playboy back when I was a kid and sneaking peaks into that magazine. Most of the other art was typical California "dreck" but these hookers were just too cute.

There was a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant there too, but I didn’t go in, and they weren’t open yet anyway. Most of the restaurants looked sorta high buck (no shock with Pabble Beach right there in Pacific Grove). I was shocked and thrilled to see a herd of seals (sea lions?) in the Bay itself. That meant the sardines were back, and if I started talking about that I’d been all over the place on food webs and ecological cycles and such, so I won’t. Just seeing the seals, it means so much, that things are going to be ok after all.

The red building is allegedly part of the hook shop too, or variously alleged to be the "China Man’s Grocery" in the book, Lee Chong’s and later belonging to "the Patron". I’ve forgotten who really owned the place (obviously Steinbeck changed some names) but they were all real places and people. I could almost hear Cuacahuete playing his sly brass from the upper windows.

And the shore……… the wave shock, a concept that Rickett’s coined in his research. Rickett’s was one of the first biologists to really look at things in an ECOLOGICAL sense, that is as a tide pool, with all the critters affecting everything else. In the Cliff’s notes for Cannery Row, they draw this parallel that the Row was a metaphor for life, that we all affect one another, that we are all tied with invisible strings to each other. Recognize that from Campbell’s writing, and from John Muir too? Well it all came together in Cannery Row.

I came back to Washington State with a huge scab on the side of my head from chemotherapy, basal cell carcinoma. Applied for a telephone sales job as I sure wasn’t going to get teaching work looking like Frankenstein! (luckily it all eventually cleared up. Modern medicine is a miraculous thing isn’t it?) This Spring, I also did something I’ve wanted to do ever since I read Sweet Thursday, that is signed up for a course in Marine Biology at the local JC. It was WONDERFUL. Marine Bio is going to be the coming thing of the 21st century, along with Eco fuels and alternative energy. I guess the Doc and his gang were just a little ahead of the curve, weren’t they?