John Steinbeck - Cannery Row

Cannery Row, in Monterey, California lies between Castroville and Carmel.Castroville, the “artichoke capital of the world” once crowned a young Marilyn Monroe “the first California Artichoke Queen,” in 1947. Carmel once had Clint Eastwood as mayor. Back in the 1930s, where John Steinbeck set his novel of the same name, Cannery Row once had sardines - millions and millions of them swirling around just offshore waiting for the Chinese and the Sicilian and the Portuguese immigrants to fish them out of the Pacific. Eventually they would fish them out of existence and the “stink and the grating noise” of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row would disappear. But before then, the 1962 Nobel Prize winner had a tale to tell.


“To open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves,” says John Steinbeck in the opening chapter of. He is telling the reader how he plans to set down his story of life on Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, California, the row of sardine canneries and fisheries that would eventually name itself after his book. He is comparing this subtle capture of a story with the capture of certain delicate ocean flatworms that will break if touched and must be allowed to “ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife.”
Subtlety and delicacy are not the first words that come to mind on today’s Cannery Row. But woven in among the shopping malls, the amusement arcades and the seafood restaurants are a handful of wooden buildings that contain the dramatic history of the short life and death of an industry. Better still they contain the story of the life and work of one man. “Doc,” the collector of all the lovely animals of the sea in his little wooden laboratory overlooking the Pacific. “For Ed Ricketts who knows why or should” says the enigmatic dedication at the front of this book. Ed Ricketts was Steinbeck’s friend and mentor and Ed Ricketts was “Doc.” “Half-Christ and half-goat” was how Steinbeck described the man who would write"Between Pacific Tides" and introduce to marine biology the, then revolutionary, concept of ecology -that you can’t understand an organism unless you understand where it lives and who lives with it. Ricketts’ Doc, is working quietly away at this major task in the background of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. In the foreground of this story is a compassionate loner “a fountain of philosophy and science and art,” who loved good beer and Bach, and “true things.” And who by being faithful to those “true things” automatically made the people around him each aspire to be a better person." Among the people around Doc in Cannery Row were the prostitutes in the two bordellos, the group of drifting young men who settled in the Palace Flophouse and Lee Chong the owner of the Chinese grocer’s across the street. Of the two bordellos, the Bear Flag Restaurant (in reality the Lone Star Café) was replaced by a concrete warehouse in 1942. But La Ida’s is still standing. This was where Eddie,one of the boys at the Flophouse, would drain the remaining drinks to take back to the others. There are no more trips upstairs but the café is still in business, run these days by Kalisa, an exuberant Latvian. The ceiling is still papered with the same Chinese newspapers that grew yellow from the smoke of Steinbeck and Rickett’s cigarettes.The fictional Lee Chong’s grocery was based on Wing Chong’s Market next to La Ida’s. Whether his store had the same extraordinary stock of the fictional “miracle of supply” in the novel, where “he never had a sale, never reduced a price and never remaindered,” we cannot know. Recently the owner of what is now a gift store opened up access to the old 1930’s ice box where Ed Ricketts and Steinbeck would have bought their beer.Running through these interweaving tales of all the teaming life along the Monterey shore, is the ongoing story of a surprise party to be held for Doc. The drifting boys at the Palace Flophouse are somewhat in awe of him and conceive confused and often boozy plans to “do something nice for Doc.” His old home and laboratory where the resulting disastrous party is held was later burned down by fire but rebuilt and purchased by the City of Monterey. The Palace Flophouse is long gone. A new life has come to Cannery Row. There is excellent jazz at Sly McFlys where the locals go. And those same locals dance the two step up at the Blue Fin café and stop for cigars at the Cool Cat cigar shop. Neighbour Clint Eastwood filmed the bar scenes in “Play Misty for Me” at the bar of The Sardine Factory Restaurant. The task that Doc performed with such dedication goes on now opposite La Ida’s old whorehouse at the magnificent Monterey Aquarium. But to go where Doc’s spirit still lingers, read Steinbeck’s loving and magical description of the Great Tide Pool at the opening of chapter six - I guarantee that after a few lines, the page will seem to undulate and shimmer like the mysterious underwater world it is describing. Then turn your back on the shopping malls and souvenir shops and walk through Steinbeck Plaza down to McAbee Beach and Ed Rickett’s beloved ocean beyond.