I walk down the stairs of my house at the beginning of a well deserved Spring Break absolutely famished. After completing a 6+ hour road trip up California from San Diego, I am mentally preparing to finally catch up on the sleep I have been missing during midterm season as I pop some leftovers into the microwave. My dad is watching the local news station, KSBW 8, as I sit down to dig in when I hear it: “...renowned author John Steinbeck”. My head snaps up to focus on the news story on TV. Steinbeck’s old research vessel Western Flyer would be departing to recreate its voyage to Baja California for the first time since Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts sailed in 1940. I am astonished at the coincidence that such significant Steinbeck news would mark the beginning of my bookpacking journey. Looking back it was almost as if the spirit of Steinbeck was giving me the green light to dive deep into the city that he valued so deeply, the same city that both Steinbeck and I call home. I finished my dinner, headed upstairs to my room, sat down, and cracked open Steinbeck’s 602 page love letter to the city of Salinas entitled East of Eden, ready for my week long immersion in the history of the city I have lived in for all my life.
East of Eden is considered Steinbeck’s “second big book” after the Grapes of Wrath, which I can attest to having read many of his books previously. Steinbeck was a prominent figure in English classes throughout my K-12 years, which I never realized was unique to me growing up in Salinas. I liken Steinbeck’s presence in Salinas education to the idea of 4th grade California Mission Projects that every California student has to complete. As a student in California, you never realized that the Mission Project is not nationwide until you interact with someone from out of state. I experienced the same phenomenon on a wider scale when it came to Steinbeck books, especially when I would bring up the absolute struggle that reading Grapes of Wrath was in 7th grade. Being required to read Steinbeck at such a young age gave me a negative impression of his works as a whole; an impression that was partially saved when I read Cannery Row and had a great time reading it in high school. I am a sucker for scientists in media, so Dr. Ed Ricketts from that story single handedly sold the story for me personally.
Going into Eden I was afraid that the monotonous pacing from Grapes would resurface and spoil my reading experience, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the exact opposite. Eden and Grapes compliment each other as sister novels written during different parts of Steinbeck’s life, creating a dichotomy between a story about 1920’s Salinas and a harsh social commentary on Depression Era California migrants. The tonal shift between the novels is heavily connected with Steinbeck’s personal life. Grapes was Steinbeck’s first big hit and was written earlier in his career, while Eden was written later after Steinbeck’s second divorce. I see the two novels as the yin and yang of Steinbeck, and where Grapes was a struggle to complete Eden, despite being a longer novel, was a breeze to complete. Eden was very much a ‘return home’ novel for Steinbeck after a career of global travel and writing, and this frame of reference shows through the Salinas Valley he constructed for the Hamilton and Trask families to live.
East of Eden follows a little something I like to call the ‘Steinbeck Signature’ style of novelization, where there are multiple storylines to follow interspersed with chapters dedicated to the landscape in which the novel takes place. This style of writing was present in Grapes as well, and the landscape chapters being the hardest parts of the book to read through. I will never forget the chapter in Grapes of Wrath about a turtle walking down a desert road in the middle of an intense plot point of the Joad Family’s story. However, I am happy to report that the landscaping included in Eden both complemented the narrative and were some of my favorite parts of the novel. The more I learned about Steinbeck over the course of my bookpacking, the more I realized that his writing process lends itself to the idea of bookpacking extremely well. He consistently travelled to places featured in his books, most notably his attendance on World War II frontlines while writing Bombs Away (1942). Steinbeck's affinity for experiencing locations he writes about is condensed into chapters of pure location descriptions, and when it comes time for him to write about Salinas he pulls no punches by starting Eden off with seven pages of setting the scene of the Salinas Valley.
“The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.” I could write pages on how I reacted to Chapter 1 of Eden as someone who has lived her whole life on the “deep and fertile” topsoils of Salinas. If I had to boil down my impressions of this chapter into one feeling, I would say that reading this chapter was like reading a letter from your grandmother decades after she passed on. I was astonished at how accurate the nature of Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley was to my own experiences. The smells, the flowers, the shifts between dry and rainy years, every sentence felt like Steinbeck was looking right at me and dragging my own memories of the Valley into my mind’s eye. The Salinas River’s floods, which still pose annual inconveniences in the form of the South Davis Road bridge becoming submerged, are still the only times when the river is anything but “fine”, but Steinbeck and I will still boast about it because it is “the only [river] we have” in Salinas and, therefore, is worth bragging about.
As I read this chapter, I had to take a moment to look out the window right next to my bed that looked out on the Santa Lucias in the far distance. I have looked at that mountain range every day of my life, but that was the first time I truly SAW the range the way Steinbeck did. Steinbeck depicts the range as “dark and brooding” compared to their eastern counterpart the Gabilans. While most readers may overlook these statements, as a Salinas native I really understood what Steinbeck was saying. The Lucias really were darker due to differences in their vegetation, either due to the light exposure they get or their involvement in wildfires over the decades. I was taken aback. I felt like my lived experiences were being understood by someone outside of my family for the first time in a while. Over the past few years I have gotten so used to everyone around me not understanding my hometown, to the point where I have had to resort to saying I am from the ‘Santa Cruz area’ when hit with the “Name, Major, Hometown” line of icebreaker questions. Reading Eden was like talking with someone from high school, and I found myself relating to the chapter like I was talking with an old friend.
During the following days of bookpacking, I used the natural landscape of Salinas as the foundation of my stops. My mom and I jumped into the car and made our way from West to East, starting with the Santa Lucias and the neighboring town of Spreckels. Spreckels is an interesting aspect to life in Salinas, as it is a former corporate town built around the Spreckels Sugar Factory. The whole city is the size of a neighborhood in Salinas proper, and the homes are quintessential ‘white picket fence America’ archetypes. The Sugar Factory itself was one of the many jewels on the agricultural crown of Salinas, and while the old building was demolished the newer parts of the factory still stand and function to drive the economy of this small settlement. Spreckels plays more of a humorous role in Eden, as it is the city Olive Hamilton flies over despite being afraid of planes, but it was a good place to start my bookpacking journey. My mom and I came across the Spreckels Emporium, which is right next to the old fire department. My mom used to come out here on the 4th of July with my grandparents to set off fireworks, and the sprawling fields backed by the Santa Lucias created the perfect setting for family gatherings. My mother’s side of the family is where I get my Salinas roots from, with my dad having been born and raised in the neighboring town Hollister. This grants me extra ties to the valley and Steinbeck himself, as he wrote Eden from the perspective of being the third generation of his family to reside in Salinas.
Family is a massive aspect of East of Eden. The novel tells the tales of the fictional Trask family and Steinbeck’s own lineage through the Hamilton family. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to connect the Steinbeck and Hamilton family lines when I began reading, but once I made the connection all of the Hamiltons became much more endearing. These were all real people who lived in a version of Salinas not too unlike the one I know, and I knew I had to go meet them all. As my mom and I head towards the cemetery the Hamiltons and Steinbecks are buried in, which is also funnily enough right next to my dentist’s office, we drive past the fields where the 1955 James Dean movie by the same name of the book was filmed. I remember my grandfather telling me about how, when he was in high school, he and his classmates skipped school to try to become extras in the scenes they filmed here. My grandfather lived in Salinas his whole life, even serving as mayor in the 80’s, and Salinas was the city he chose to grow his family and businesses in. He knows next to everyone in the city, and no one holds a negative opinion of him, so when I walk up to Samuel Hamilton’s grave I can’t help but make comparisons between these two Salinas men. This must have been how Steinbeck viewed his grandfather Samuel. Steinbeck’s grave is a bit of a walk from the Hamilton one, but it is marked by a sign, pinecones, and pencils left on the plaque. It is a humble scene where three Salinas natives, Steinbeck, my mom, and me, take the time to spend in each other’s presence on a March midday; just thinking and discussing whatever comes to mind before moving on.
We continue on to have lunch at Steinbeck’s house, where the author’s life truly comes to life. The house has been converted into a restaurant, and I order myself some Steinbeck tea while I sit in the front room of the house where Adam comes to visit Olive and Liza Hamilton in Eden. The Hamilton and Steinbeck family photos are still on the walls of the home, allowing me to put faces to the names I had read so much about while I ate. The cellar has been converted into a gift shop, with the newest addition being a fully furnished dollhouse replica of the Steinbeck house. I look inside and see the figures of Steinbeck and his family, and I can clearly picture how this small branch of the Hamilton lineage interacted with one another in the very building I was inside. The ladies volunteering there have dedicated themselves to knowing all kinds of Steinbeck facts, and when I told them I was bookpacking Eden they immediately took me all over the house to learn more about Steinbeck’s life. Steinbeck house volunteers are some of the most passionate people I have ever met; they have Steinbeck facts memorized just because they enjoy working at the house so much. The most notable story was one of Steinbeck having to be driven into Salinas in the bed of a pickup truck because he had upset many of the major agriculture families in writing about their scandals.
Agriculture families in Salinas are like the old oil families of Los Angeles; filthy rich with a suspicious amount of influence over the government. Steinbeck was never afraid to write about the evil he saw in the world, even basing the corrupt Sheriff Quinn in Eden off the real sheriff of Salinas at the time (who I must mention I am related to, at my mother’s insistence). Steinbeck even goes as far to make a whole plotline about Adam trying to ship lettuce cross country in ice, which is exactly what one family does in Salinas. That was how the company Iceberg Lettuce was founded, and it was named after the ice they used to transport their produce. Reading Steinbeck as a local is like sitting at a family Thanksgiving dinner and just listening in on the drama being discussed, and as someone who loves listening to drama I had a blast reading Steinbeck make backhanded statements on Salinas’s agricultural economic practices.
Steinbeck earned himself the nickname of “the local drunk” during his lifetime in the very city he praises throughout Eden because of his affinity for indirect exposes. Most people back in the day despised him for how he wrote about the people of the Salinas Valley, but his legacy has endured as the crown jewel of Salinas into the modern day. Our next stop is the national Steinbeck Center, located dead center in the middle of Salinas at 1 Main Street. I had only been into the museum once before, but returning to it having read more of his work was much more meaningful. I am greeted by the Salinas Lettuce railcar and a Model T Ford (spark up gas down!) as soon as I enter, the immersion is incredible. I am able to get a taste of Salinas history in this brief display where fiction and reality cross the lines. They had book references left and right not only for Eden, but also the rest of his novels. The museum helped me to fully get a grasp over the range Steinbeck had: he really wrote about anything that caught his attention. As my mom and I leave the museum having gotten a sense of 1920 Salinas culture, we embark on our biggest challenge of the day: retracing the walking paths of both Adam and Kate.
Exhibits at the National Steinbeck Center
Street names are a repeating facet of Eden, with Steinbeck naming them off as characters traverse them like the reader has lived in Salinas their entire lives. It was difficult orienting myself at first, as many of the streets had been renamed over the years just as Steinbeck mentioned in Eden. “Castroville Street is now called Market Street, God knows why. Streets used to be named for the place they aimed at.” I walked the same paths that Steinbeck had his characters walk that day, while also taking in the old architecture of the old town area that Steinbeck would have been familiar with. Despite many of the old buildings not surviving the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, which condemned the old Abbott House Hotel on Main Street where Adam stops after Sam Hamilton’s funeral, some of the soul of old Salinas was alive on the street. It was not as lively as it normally is, since I was visiting at 2 PM on a random Wednesday, but I have seen the soul of Salinas thrive here through weekly farmers markets and holiday parades. It was different looking at it now though, knowing the Trask story that played out on these streets. I felt a sense of excitement knowing that I was standing where these great characters were intended to stand; like with each step I took along the paths of the characters I was understanding more and more about who they were.
From Main Street I travel to the area where Kate settles after leaving Adam, Aron, and Cal on their farm in Watsonville. It is humorously close to Main Street, making it hard to believe the idea that Adam and Kate never ran across each other even by chance after he moved to Salinas with the boys. That must be why every film adaptation of the book moves Kate’s Place into Monterey. Eden describes Kate like a malevolent shadow haunting the Trasks; an evil that had no motive and no explanation besides the actions she took. Her presence constantly felt through Cal’s struggle defining himself as something other than the evil he inherited from Kate. The business Kate runs reflects herself as a person; beautiful on the outside but harboring darkness. However, with age Kate’s evil becomes so apparent that even wide-eyed Adam is able to confront her and move on emotionally. The location has aged in a similar fashion, and it never lost the reputation it held within Eden as ‘the row of brothels’.
However, change is present in the area. The Salinas Buddhist temple, where I attended a Japanese cultural summer school throughout elementary school, is located in the area. Salinas has a rich cultural history, with many different nationalities making up the city’s population today, specifically when it comes to Japanese migrants in the early 20th century. Families from a town called Ichikikushikino in Japan travelled to Salinas to grow flowers, and their presence has been foundational to the city ever since. My family, thanks to my grandfather, has been involved in maintaining Sister City relationships with Ichikikushikino for decades now; sending groups of students to Japan and hosting students from Japan on alternating years. The Japanese culture within Salinas has seen its share of struggles over the years, especially during World War II when the local Rodeo grounds were converted into an internment camp for Japanese Americans. The discrimination they faced was all too similar to what Steinbeck recalls Mr. Fenchel, the only German in Salinas during World War I, having to endure. However, the culture has since regrown and is constantly bringing life to Salinas through festivals at the Temple.
It is through cultural spirit, both ethnic and not, that Salinas thrives today. The Japanese and Hispanic populations within the city give it a spice of heritage intermingling over the foundational flavors of the city. But what else is Salinas, this seemingly booming city according to Eden, known for besides Steinbeck and lettuce? Well the city takes notes from Annie Proulx’s Close Range in the form of our annual Rodeo, which is THE BIG event of the summer. It takes a small army of volunteers to make sure ‘Big Week’, as Rodeo week is called, goes off without a hitch. I have been volunteering with my dad and grandfather since I was 16, but I have attended the Rodeo literally since I was born (I was 3 months old for my first Rodeo). The California Rodeo Salinas is around 120 years old now, and the Rodeo Ground sits across the way from the old airfield Olive Hamilton took off from. The Rodeo brings energy into Salinas that I believe to be the nature of the city Steinbeck captures in Eden. The city becomes bustling and truly alive again for a week; which is a side to the city that many outsiders tend to miss during any other week of the year.
Steinbeck’s original intention with Eden was to have it centralized around the Hamilton family, but over the course of the year it took to write the novel Steinbeck phased out the Hamiltons in favor of exploring the Trasks. And I can only applaud him for that, because the story of the Trasks elevates the quality of this book to the greatness it is. Eden draws heavy inspiration from both the Creation Story and the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis, with the latter being repeated generationally between Adam and Charles, and later on with Cal and Aron. However both tell the story with unique dynamics between the two sets of brothers.
Adam was always depicted as a dreamer. As soon as he inherited his father’s fortune, he grew aspirations to move to California and build a life for himself away from Connecticut. He resented the militaristic regime that dominated his childhood, pushing him away from his father’s admiration. Charles’s story opposes this; having resigned himself to working his father’s farm after a childhood of always being second to Adam in Cyrus Trask’s eyes. Charles loved his father. He loved him more than Adam ever could have, but Cyrus left Charles on the farm as soon as the opportunity arose. “I [Charles] took six bits and bought him a knife made in Germany!...You [Adam] bought him a mongrel pup...That dog sleeps in his room...And where’s the knife? ‘Thanks,’ he said, just ‘Thanks.’.”. This favoritism between siblings brews a biblical form of jealousy unlike any other, and Cyrus’ rejections of Charles come to a boil when he strikes Adam down in the street with the ultimate intention to kill him. Between this and the first initials of the siblings being A and C, the Cain and Abel parallels were more than a little on the nose.
Despite Charles only playing a minor role in the novel, his dynamic with Adam only makes the relationship between Cal and Aron deeper. Cal and Aron unknowingly follow the same beats their father and uncle did. It is almost like Sam Hamilton, Lee, and Adam jinxed the brothers on their naming day when they read through the entire Genesis story. Cal struggles with being the lesser loved brother, whether it is because he reminds Adam of Kate or because Aron is more like Adam himself is never really explained, but the neglect is palpable. I could not imagine the pure agony that comes with making 15,000 dollars (in 1920s money) for my parents only to be met with rejection and the notion that I would have to return the money to “the farmers I robbed”. This was the ultimate rejection, pushing Cal to destroy his ‘good’ brother by taking him to the whorehouse Kate was running. Cal resolved himself to fall into the ‘bad’ he saw himself as because that was all Adam had ever raised him to believe. It is only on Adam’s deathbed that he gives Cal the reassurance he has needed all his life, finally breaking the cycle Charles and he started a lifetime ago to give Cal the chance to embrace his own ‘good’. The message that Cal could still redeem himself after all the bad he had done was Adam finally understanding the idea of Timshel, “thou mayest”, that Sam Hamilton had tried to teach him. Each person can choose their own destiny in life. Some embrace evil like Kate, but others can look that evil in the eye and reject it to become a better version of themselves, like Cal.
I concluded my day driving across Salinas how I began it; with a mountain range. My mom and I set off driving to the Gabilan Mountains through the Eastern part of the city. East Salinas is the part of the city I am least familiar with, as it is the hot spot of the city’s crime and gang activity. Driving there, you can feel the shift. Not only is the area separated from the rest of the city by agricultural land, but the styles of housing change drastically from the styles in Old Town or South Salinas. I can liken the area to a nicer version of South Central LA, but the impact the area has had on Salinas’s reputation runs deep. Salinas’s gang populations earned the city the title of “Teen Murder Capital of California” several years back. Homelessness is also a widespread issue the city faces; it is impossible to travel through Downtown without seeing at least three individuals struggling with homelessness. Sam Hamilton was right when he described the Salinas Valley as a place of “great richness” with “an old ghost haunting it.. [with] a troubled air of unhappiness”. Salinas is radical in its highs and lows over the last century, and 20th century Salinas has developed into a shell of its former glory. These realities of Salinas are a far cry from the version Steinbeck creates in Eden, and I cannot help but wonder how he would feel to witness his dear city fall from grace after all the progress it made in its golden years.
The uneventful, slow, and quietly dangerous Salinas is the one that I grew up knowing. My relationship with the city of Salinas has never been the strongest. After experiencing the fast paced life of a college student in the heart of Los Angeles, having to return to the slow life of Salinas for every break during the school year was always something I dreaded. Salinas is the least ideal place for anyone under age 30. It is a small city with around 160,000 residents that has always been lacking in activities for its youth. I could list locations Salinas youth spend time at with one hand, and most of the time people travel to nearby cities such as Monterey to hang out with friends. Long gone were the days when people like the Hamiltons could jump into their carriages and race off to dances at Salinas High, and I lived most of my life feeling trapped by the mountains lining the valley. Ironically, I found myself relating to Adam after he was first discharged from the cavalry and slowly making his way home to the farm in Connecticut. “He didn’t want to go home and he put it off as long as possible. Home was not a pleasant place in his mind.” After travelling outside of his family’s circle and hometown to experience the world on his own, Adam developed a negative view of his own home because his memories of living there were not particularly bright. Adam wanted to take his newly inherited fortune and chase his dreams out in California, and I wanted to experience the world within an environment tailored to young adults and not retirees. Salinas was like the itch I could always scratch but never get rid of, and the more time away the more critical I became of the small city’s social environment
With a gap year becoming more realistic I was grappling with the dreaded idea of having to live in Salinas for at least a whole year when it came time for me to backpack Eden. And, in the spirit of the Biblical theme the novel follows, I can safely say it was a miracle what that book did to my perspective of Salinas. I noted my thoughts during my sightseeing around town using the typewriter at the Steinbeck Center. I wrote: “Steinbeck showed me that Salinas isn’t the worst place ever, even if it’s past its heyday by decades. The town I see today I am more comfortable with, and I never thought that Steinbeck would help me to love Salinas like he did.” I find it almost funny how the book designed to sell a wider audience on the agricultural oasis that was 1920s Salinas worked in reverse for me. Typically those who read the novel then travel to Salinas are disappointed to find few remnants of the bustling city Steinbeck portrayed in Eden. I was already familiar with Salinas’s downfall, so the most shocking aspect of reading Eden was seeing Salinas for what it used to be. It gave me a sense of pride for my hometown for the first time in my life; leaving me feeling more confident not only in my upcoming year living there, but also being able to claim Salinas as the city I was from, flaws and all.
Leaving East Salinas and driving along the base of the Gabilan Mountains, this was where we once again encountered names from Eden, as the Silacci Family ranch was located along the foothills of these mountains. This ranch is where Cal and Abra travel to collect azaleas towards the conclusion of the novel, which I found notable because I recognized the family’s name. Silacci is one of the two names associated with the go-to flower shop in Salinas Swenson and Silacci. Making this connection helped to bring the fiction of Eden closer to the real world for me. I could almost see myself, or maybe some ancestor of mine, walking around the Salinas streets at the same time as Cal or Adam. And this was not just from how well Steinbeck captured the valley and city within the novel, it was from how he was able to capture the people of Salinas. Salinas is a city full of people obsessed with their own business; everyone knows everyone else somehow through some bloodline or acquaintance of an acquaintance. It would not be too far out of my imagination that the Hamiltons and my family could have actually interacted at some point in the past, but that is just how Salinas works. It never quite grew out of that small up and coming town from Eden in its mindset; something forever present within the mentalities of the city’s locals.
Before I knew it the end of my week in Salinas was upon me. It felt like I had just barely gotten home and now I had to fly back down California, but luckily for me the flight is only 50 minutes, making it preferable compared to the 6 hour drive. As the plane ascends out of San Jose, I look at my copy of East of Eden. I bought the book from the Steinbeck house, it felt fitting to purchase this “modern retelling of the Book of Genesis” from the house it was all centered around. All of the characters had touched me more than I ever thought they would, especially Cal. The story of a sibling constantly striving for validation from a parent, never quite feeling like they are living up to expectations set by an unknowable force. Cal was seemingly doomed by the narrative to fail, just as Charles and Cain had in the stories that echo his own. It was only with Adam’s help and Lee’s guidance that Cal was able to forgive himself in the end, and seeing Cal overcome the sins of his maternal heritage was truly epic. And having a story set in my hometown? It was like the cherry on top of the world’s best literary sundae.
I look out the window onto the Salinas Valley. I can see it all from up here; Watsonville to Monterey to Santa Cruz, with Salinas dead center to it all. That’s where Samual Hamilton chose to settle. That’s where Kate shot Adam and abandoned him with two newborns. That’s where Cal was finally able to find peace after betraying Aron. Salinas is the city that supplied the nation’s agriculture for decades, lying at the heart of a Nobel Laureate’s literature empire. Despite it having objectively fallen from the grace it used to hold, Salinas still has traces of its spirit from long ago. It is just different on the surface, but that does not mean the features that make Salinas SALINAS haven't been washed away. East of Eden helped me to see through Salinas’ rough exterior into its rich core, and it’s made me appreciate this unique little city quite a bit more. Salinas is not just Steinbeck’s city; I can proudly say that it is also mine.
