My Salinas Valley
There is always target practice waiting for me and a train that keeps coming. But I have my Gabilan mountains. I have the sweet-butter smell of California poppies I picked anyway, damn the State law.
On the west side of the Valley, the Santa Lucia Highlands cut blunt against the sky. Jagged, black-green peaks gave way to an innocence of a lighter green, now farms, now shadows that took their shape from clouds. Below, the Salinas River flowed underground so I settled for planting a toe in the weed-choked sand of the riverbed. Settled for broken Manzanita branches and turpentine-scented thyme.
My stepbrother learned how to shoot a rifle across the dry riverbed. Our dad set up a warped tabletop on the opposite bank, placed empty Coors’ cans in a crooked line, and said, “Fix your site on the target, son. Take a slow breath. Hold it. Now pull the trigger real slow.”
Me, I never learned to fire a gun.
My rage lived most of the time in the damp cellar basement stocked with cobwebs and canned peaches for our family in the event of the Great Disaster. Sometimes, I found peace in the dim crawl space next to the cellar, where our Siamese cat nursed her newborn kittens, slowly schooling them in the rules of daylight.
Up a cement step, into the sagging porch of a turquoise home without a living room, my blended family of seven watched the Brady Bunch eight on a black-and-white TV set on the kitchen table. Outside, the too-familiar smell of Bugle tobacco. Outside, too tall, too crazy, this supposed harmless family friend smoked his hand-rolled cigarettes in our front yard.
I thank the wind now. Thanked it then for saving me.
Every afternoon at three, it broke strong and clean. Weeds tumbled past the hungry grace of lettuce and alfalfa and migrant workers delivered from muddy buses at the crack of dawn. Past Gonzales, Soledad, Greenfield and King City. It rustled in all of those pepper trees. Rinsed away the stench of cow manure that made my eyes tear up some mornings. Scrubbed the Valley of the metallic-lemon odor of pesticides men called fertilizer.
There was the Southern Pacific freight train, too. Sometimes three, sometimes four times a day, it barreled into my town. At night, my bedroom pane rattled and the house and the earth underneath it shook. Some nights, the tracks hummed long after the train had gone. I still feel the impossible weight of it. It pulses and presses against the sage-pocked fields way down in San Ardo where giant metal insects sucked oil from the ground.
Nothing can hurt me on the east side of this Valley, far from the jagged granite peaks, the river that refused to give, and my once-green innocence. There is always target practice waiting for me and a train that keeps coming. But I have my Gabilan mountains. I have the sweet butter smell of California poppies I picked anyway, damn the State law.
I once thought John Steinbeck owned the East. It turns out my body knows Eden better than any man.
God, so achingly gorgeous.
Understated, poetic and so powerful.