Steinbeck At The Bay
He had more faith in biology than spirituality. Oblivion after the fact, he wrote his doctor shortly before his candle flickered and dimmed, an intuition “deep in his bones” that he, perhaps all living things, would not survive physical death.
He noted once in the Saturday Review that a reader, incensed at something the author committed to print, ended an excoriating letter with the warning: “Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.”
When his own final state arrived, December 20, 1968, from occlusion of the main coronary arteries, John Ernst Steinbeck’s physical remains were incinerated. The modest urn containing his ashes was interred at the family plot in Salinas Cemetery. He rests between the dark and brooding Santa Lucia mountain range and the Monterey Bay that he loved so much eight miles west. In the winter the high-gray flannel fog from the deep and mysterious bay closes off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from the rest of the world.
February 25, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I have stopped at that otherwise undistinguished cemetary to visit that unremarkable plaque many times—almost every time, in fact, that I’ve passed it on the 101 during daylight hours. I don’t know what good it does to visit gravesites, especially as I know cemetaries all too well to be sedated carnivals of magical thinking, but it nonetheless feels good to honor the ghosts of ghosts…
Even so, there’s been some value…you know what is great in Salinas? Just better than anywhere else? Think, then give up, and I’ll tell you in a paragraph…it’s so obvious…so sneakily obvious…
Every bar has one…once Lynn and i stopped on the way, and i said, You gotta have one of these and she was not only impressed but felt as though she were getting to know the State a little better…
[brackets...drama...ellipses...]
What’s great in Salinas: the BLTs.
The lettuce is better there, of course, than anywhere else in the country, as freshness is the key to lettuce. And it’s really lettuce that makes the BLT, because you can have bread and you can have bacon anywhere…
February 25, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Six degrees of John Steinbeck through a BLT. I like it.