In the fall of ’66 I entered Monterey Peninsula College as a freshman, and one of the first things I remember doing was quickly make my way to Ocean View Avenue and the Row to buy my first copy of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. The first sentence is astonishing; every time I read it, I can smell the salt in the air:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and the scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants, and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.”
Call and Response 