The Perils of Small-City Papers

I'm not saying that I disagree with the sentiment, but please tell me that we're teaching our kids media literacy skills to evaluate what they read.
I personally love having the time to relax over a print newspaper in the morning, but this paper came as a shock after being used to the New York Times. Why do we lament the status of newspapers today after firing so many journalists?

Hearst Castle...and elephant seals

It's been longer than I intended, although I'm sure people don't mind waiting a day for a post. I loved visiting Cambria, and the food there might be better than any other place I've ever visited with the exception of Lopez. If you want recommendations for places to stay or places to eat, I'm happy to oblige. Today started at 7am in Big Sur and the final lecture ended at 9:30pm in Monterey.

This is significant because I need to leave at 5:45am to spend a few hours observing tide pools. In particular, I'll be studying strongylocentrotus purpuratus (aka purple sea urchins) in a small group while wandering through the intertidal zone. However, after the cold early morning jaunt, it's off to the Monterey Aquarium. Hurray.

Cambria is close to San Simeon, which is known as being the home of Hearst Castle. Hearst Castle has always seemed like a historical Disneyland to me, and until this weekend, I believed that Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was an accurate representation of Hearst's life. Taking Hearst Castle as a "Neverland" of the 1930s and 40s, it was a fascinating cultural study. Here's a 10 list about Hearst and his famous castle on a hill. It's by no means exhaustive, and I've tried to comb through my notes for items that may not be widely known.

1. Steinbeck and Hearst hated each other. (We actually visited Cambria and Hearst Castle because we were required to vacate our hotel in Monterey. They were previously booked, and this was the only way to secure the rest of our stay.) While we've spent the last few weeks examining working people in California, this allowed us to see a different side of California history.

2. Hearst was actually very liberal in his younger days, and he was head of the democratic party for 14 years at the beginning of the century. He advocated for workers' rights, and he thought he would be a great representative of the working man. He ran for mayor and governor, and he even had dreams of the White House, but he didn't win the elections.

3. Hearst believed (or at least stated) that he was democratic in his selections of artwork and architecture from around the globe because he shared his collections and estates with people who were not able to afford to travel to Europe. Of course, astute observers might argue that this is simply the justification of an obsessive shopaholic.

4. It was considered a scandal that Hearst never officially divorced his first wife, showgirl Millicent Wilson, even though he lived with his mistress Marion Davies for over 30 years. Wilson was Catholic and didn't believe in divorce. (Secret 11. She lived in the estate that inspired Fitzgerald's description of Jay Gatsby's estate in The Great Gatsby.)

5. Hearst was an "outrageous rich boy" at Harvard before he was expelled. He was editor of the Lampoon because his dad could help fund it. He was known to walk an alligator on a leash around campus. He once gave his teachers chamberpots with their names engraved in gold...on the inside.

6. Hearst hired Julia Morgan (another glass ceiling shatterer---look her up) as the sole architect on the project, and she worked on the building and landscape design for almost 30 years.

Customize your own slideshow

7. Hearst didn't want to destroy trees in building Hearst Castle. He moved several oak trees from his patio because he didn't like the way they dropped leaves into his pool. This took many workman, 600 ton cement boxes, and several weeks of time.

8. Hearst had a zoo that he based on the "best German designs of the late 1800's." This meant that the animals enjoyed the luxuries of metal bars and cement floors. Among other animals, his animal collection included polar bears, penguins, lions, and zebras. The Hearst property still has zebra that graze with the black Angus.

9. Hearst had two libraries in the castle, a personal one, and an 80 foot long one that he shared with his visitors.

10. At his death, Hearst left 60 million in the Hearst Foundation to support the arts. He also donated the castle to UC Berkeley. They rejected it because of the cost of upkeep. The state took it instead with the stipulation that they could not sell the artwork. Currently, it's the only CA state park that makes money. (If you watch the slideshow, you'll also see that the state has the odd requirement that all of the fruit from the hundreds of trees that line the property must fall to the ground and be used for compost. The landscaping was beautiful, but in a state with many poverty issues, this seems like an unnecessary mandate.)

Any more you want to know? Other than that the aforementioned elephant seals are in the slideshow.

A 1950's Religion and Status Quiz

I don't know if I'll have Internet this weekend for our weekend to Cambria, Big Sur, and Hearst Castle, so if you don't hear from me until Sunday evening, that's why. In the meantime, here's a fun game that we played in the classroom on Tuesday. As a group of adults traveling from all over the country, I'm sure that we all have different political and religious beliefs. This isn't something that it's normally acceptable to discuss, but the American Studies professor who was leading the session had a backwards way of getting us to talk with each other about these potentially volatile topics. We were split into small groups and asked to rank the 6 Christian and 3 Jewish sects in order of socioeconomic status in the 1950s. This was one of cultural historian Packer Vance's studies. (I think his readings will have me covered for the next few months. You all know that I'm a closet sociologist.) Our group didn't come up with the correct answers, although my own guesses only had a few switches, but this quiz got us talking about our backgrounds and our religious beliefs in a way that would have been impossible without the prompt. Here are the sects.

-Baptist -Conservative Jew
-Catholic -Orthodox Jew
-Congregationalist -Reform Jew
-Episcopalian
-Lutheran
-Methodist
-Pentecostal
-Presbyterian
-Unitarian

Karen, you asked about the popular culture of the 1940's. We briefly discussed how Steinbeck buffered the "4 pound books" of the 1930's and 1950's with the "1 pound books" of the 1940's, but the professor who worked with us talked exclusively about the 1950's. I'll try to find some of my more interesting notes to post.

Caption Contest-Doc Rickett's Lab

This seems perfect for a Friday. It already has one caption, but don't you wonder what?

Cannery Row and Writing Skills

We spent a half hour this morning discussing the first sentence of Cannery Row. Once, when Susan was lecturing to nursing home residents in Florida, someone told her that Steinbeck was a bad writer. She used this sentence as an example. Susan (and our group) disagrees, but it's more interesting to delve into why we disagree. Here's the sentence.

"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 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 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."

I can share our thoughts, but I'm curious to read yours.

(The former Wing Chong grocery store on Cannery Row. Note the subsequent development.)

This afternoon was a tour of Cannery Row, ending with a small party in Doc Rickett's lab while listening to an audio recording of Steinbeck reading The Snake.

(Listening to The Snake in the front room of Doc Rickett's lab)

(Back of Doc Rickett's house. You can see the cement holding tanks in the foreground.And the Intercontinental hotel on the right.)

Tonight is the Cannery Row movie, a 1982 adaptation billed as 'the best love story of the year.' (Did they read the book?) It stars Nick Nolte and Debra Winger. I plan to be entertained.

(Example of the size of an average Monterey sardine.)

Monterey and Chesapeake Bay Comparisons

As an update to yesterday, having grown up near the Chesapeake Bay, I took part in a follow-up discussion with the presenter yesterday that compared revitalization of the Chesapeake and Monterey Bay regions.

People in the middle of the 20th century knew that the water quality of both had diminished, yet the Monterey Bay has been rehabilitated in a way that the Chesapeake Bay has not. Dr. Pulombi offered several potential explanations for this.

Looking at the geography, the Chesapeake Bay is shallower, and there's a higher density of people who live in the areas immediately surrounding the Bay.

The California coast is regulated by laws in the state of California, and the California Coastal Commission is quite strict. In contrast, the Chesapeake Bay runs through several states. Agricultural runoff regulations are not uniform and are not regularly enforced. In terms of blue crabs, Maryland has stopped winter harvesting of females to protect the population, while Virginia has not.

On the human side, the technology industry benefited the California coast because of the vast profits associated with it. A few individuals with substantial funds could pay to clean up the bay and found the aquarium and research institute.

Finally, and significantly, the marketability of the keystone species play a role. "Sea otters are furry and cute, while oysters are very, very tasty." I can tell you with certainty there's an "aawwww" factor around here with sea otters that doesn't occur with oysters.


So, no real answers, just some observations.

Sea Life of the Monterey Bay

Oh Seth, you had to ask to learn more about sea life in the region. Today started the biology section of the institute. Little did you know that I'm way over my head in marine biology terms at the moment. Things like the differences between "lottia digitalis" and "siphonaria maura," for example. Or looking at the effects of "Pacific Decadal Oscillation" on pelagic communities. We're working with a holistic biologist** from Stanford, the director of Hopkins Research Station, and a senior scientist from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Understanding that the majority of teachers aren't science teachers, we got some interesting comparisons such as acrea based on "universality of niche" to Tom Joad's final speech in The Grapes of Wrath, and a line of poetry to the jelly(family) food web.

Here are two creatures from the Monterey Bay that I can almost guarantee will be new to most of you.

The first is the vampyrus (vam-pyro-tooth-us) infernalis. Even though of you without a strong Latin background might notice some similarities to modern English words.



It's a "living fossil." When it's threatened, it assumes a pineapple posture to protect it's mantle by placing its arms in a protective posture. As if that weren't enough, it also squirts bio-luminescent particles from its arm tips that create an enormous and distracting display around itself.



The second was only discovered in 2007, and it was given the name "chetopterus pugaporcinus." You're welcome to translate, but I'll hint that the name is based on the appearance.




In the last 15 years, Humboldt squid have shown up in great numbers from more tropical climates due to rising water temperatures, reduced oxygen in the water, reduced competition, and reduced predation. They're depleting the hake fish population. I don't know if they're considered an invasive species, but the researcher used the word "invasion" to describe what's happened.




It's late, and we need to read The Tragedy of the Commons and several responses for our morning sessions tomorrow. Feel free (except Seth) to skip the next part. It's taken directly from my notes.

When European explorers arrived on the California coast in the 18th century, fish and wildlife were plentiful. Grizzly bears fought on the coast over sea life that washed up on the beaches, and condors ate from the sea as well. Between 1789-1811, 39,173 sea otter pelts were taken. Each pelt could be sold to the Chinese for 30 dollars at a time when 90 dollars bought you a house in San Diego. But, otters play an important role in the ecosystem. They protect sea kelp forests by eating sea urchins and abalone who eat kelp. Because the California waters are cold and sea otters lack blubber, every adult sea otter ate approximately twenty pounds of seafood each day. The kelp forests were devastated. This set a pattern where people hunted animals to extinction, altered the ecosystems, and found new animals to hunt. In order, they hunted otters, whales, seabirds, and abalone. (I'm not including the sardines and canning industry. I could.) Meanwhile, in the early 20th century, Julia Platt, Ph.D., fought against the pollution of the canning industries. She broke glass ceilings all over the world, and she even became mayor of the town of Pacific Grove when she found out she would have the power to create a marine conservation area and wildlife refuge if she did so. Onto the 1930s and sea otters were thought to be extinct. While building the Bixby Bridge on US1, a colony of 30-50 was discovered. Fishermen wanted to shoot them because they ate abalone, but some were moved to Monterey Bay. The otters liked the marine area, and soon the kelp forests began to rebound. With the kelp forests came more fish and with more fish came the seals. The seals brought tourists as well as the interest of Julie Packard (of Hewlett-Packard money) who helped conceive of and fund the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It's one of the best research facilities for aquatics in this country, and it's also increased tourism to the area. (Tourism is now the second largest industry behind agriculture. There's more wildlife viewing than wildlife processing, and maintaining a healthy ocean has become part of the economic model.

*I'm pretty sure this is obvious, but I wanted to make sure people knew that these aren't my photos. :)
**Holistic biology is really interesting. It started for the non-science majors at Stanford because they were overwhelmed by the science focus of the school. It encourages students to examine systems and communities (as Ed Rickett's recommended) as an integrated whole.
***If you want to learn more, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has an excellent website at http://www.mbari.org/
****I saw my first two sea otters out in the bay this evening. They're just as cute as I expected. It was even better because it was a chance occurrence that I walked out back during the 5 minute break.

Random Musings and a Teacher Request

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass


This Ezra Pound poem is one that, for me, fits the term 'pocket poem.' I know it by heart, and I 'have it in my pocket' to recite to myself whenever it seems appropriate. Days are so busy, and the trip's already almost half over. If you have any poem you use similarly, I'd love to hear it.

Here are some Sunday photos.

Make your own picture slideshow

The Chinese language professor I stayed with the other night pointed out wryly that she works for the government's "Defensive Language Institute." According to the wesbite, the school offers 40 languages to pre-deployment Naval officers. In listening to people around here talk, the only two that are discussed are Arabic and Chinese. Couldn't we think of a less "loaded" name, say the Modern Language Institute or the World Languages Institute?

This afternoon, we're getting a tour of the Naval Postgraduate School, which is located that the former Hotel del Monte. The hotel was first built in 1880, and it ushered in widespread tourism to the Monterey region. It was known for elaborate parties in the 1930s through 1941 when it was converted to a space for soldiers.

By all accounts, Salvador Dali's Surrealistic Party in 1941 was one of the most extreme ever held.

Surrealist night in an Enchanted Forest was a benefit, proceeds going to European refugee artists. 'It is requested that you come in costume, preferably in a costume copied after your dream, or in a costume of a primitive animal or of the people of the forest,' read the invitation. To create the effect of a grotto, 4000 gunnysacks filled with two tons of paper were suspended from the ceiling. Two thousand pine trees were brought in, twenty-four animal heads, twenty-four store window mannequins, and dozens of animals from the zoo in San Francisco - monkeys, a lion cub, and a giraffe. A wrecked car sat in one corner, and beside it, a nude model who had been drugged for the evening (to keep her immobile). Dali's wife, Gala, 'Princess of the Forest,' sported a horse's head and reclined on a huge bed throughout dinner, cavorting with a tiger cub. A long table extending from the bed was decorated with squash, pumpkins, dried corn, melons, and fruit; along it strolled 'an impassive porcupine.' The planners wanted diners to feel like they were feasting in bed with Gala. Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Alfred Hitchcock, and the Vanderbilts attended. Alas, since excessive funds were spent on decorations and preparations, little money was raised for refugees.

This is a great video for an overview of the party and a 1940s newsreel.

I finally looked at my stats page yesterday, and I see that I'm getting 23-34 readers each day. So, is there anything you want to know about Steinbeck, California, aquatic animals of the Monterey Bay (although we haven't gotten to that yet) or the early 20th century? I have the perfect opportunity to ask the experts.

Someone emailed and asked how to make comments. It's easy. You just go to the bottom of the post where it says #comments and click. You write your comment in the box, and then choose whether you want to sign in, leave your name, or write anonymously. Click publish your comment, and you're done.

Finally, while I'll love getting comments from any reader (that way I know what to write more about), I have one request specific to Saint Stephen's teachers. I need to create a lesson plan based on some aspect of this program. It could be anything even remotely related to Steinbeck, and I have ideas for some of the less obvious lessons on topics like agriculture, poetry, or 1950's Populux culture. I only need to create one assignment for this program, and it's something that can be developed collaboratively after I return, but I'd like to share my newfound knowledge with as many students as possible. Because the library uses flexible scheduling, I need to find some happy collaborators. Please let me know if you're interested.

Did you know...Steinbeck edition

For all I've written on all manner of subjects, there's been surprising little about Steinbeck. We've been weaving together information about his life, his writing, and his family, but most of it hasn't transferred to my writing. Here's your next 10 list, and it's by no means exhaustive.


-Steinbeck's work had very few crossouts. When he starting writing, he felt the words stream from his thoughts. According to his first wife (Susan says she's a reliable source), he lost his first copy The Gift, part one of The Red Pony. They found it a year later when they moved; it had fallen behind a couch. 6 words differed between the first copy and the copy that he rewrote from memory.

(Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol, lived in this home in Pacific Grove during the 1930s. His sister later lived there, and it's now owned by her granddaughter, Steinbeck's great-niece. She doesn't live there fulltime, but she showed us around, and she'd like to fix it up. For those of you worried about the condition of your old home, this one isn't in great shape. It was built without a foundation, and it has 'single-plank' walling, meaning it's like a fence. This is the room where Steinbeck lost the manuscript, although I imagine it's a different couch.)

-Steinbeck wrote all of his works longhand. In early years, his wife typed for him, and in later years, he mailed his manuscripts directly to the publisher. The one exceptions to this is The Wayward Bus, where he used a dictophone.

(Primary source of Steinbeck's journalistic writings from WWII. He generally wrote in ledger books like this one.)

-Steinbeck liked to work with his hands as a contrast to the 3-5 hours he spent writing each morning. Among other activities, he spent two winters caretaking a property on Lake Tahoe, he built his own fireplace in his Pacific Grove house, and he carved a Timshel box for his East of Eden manuscript.

(The fireplace Steinbeck built in the Pacific Grove home.)

-The original title of Of Mice and Men was "Something that Happened." This fits with John Steinbeck and Ed Rickett's ideal of nonteleological thinking, which is essentially describing "life as lived" rather than asking why or drawing conclusions. There are three general threads that appear in most of Steinbeck's work. The first is the importance of place to the setting. The second is a distrust of the dominant culture. The third is the element of homes and domesticity. They weren't generally traditional homes, but people banding together in a domestic way. (A fourth, less important, strand is physical labor.)

-Keeping the previous statement in mind, Steinbeck wrote very little about happy marriages or about communication between spouses. Rather, he modeled strong male friendships. Steinbeck forged a new path in American literature. There's a history of male fiction that values individualism. Men go out on their own, and they conquer an internal or external foe. (Moby Dick, Call of the Wild, Huck Finn, etc.) Women stay in the home in parlor novels. If you consider The Grapes of Wrath, and in particular Tom Joad's story, it's one of an unrepentant murderer westering...with his mother, and gathering around the hearth of the truck.

(Family photos on the wall of the Pacific Grove home.)

-Many of the places, characters, and events of Steinbeck's stories were drawn from real life. For those who are particularly familiar with Steinbeck's work, this includes the lynching in The Murder, Johnny Bear mimicry abilities, the male rattlesnake request in The Snake, Olive's terrifying flight reward in East of Eden, and the suggestion to put bells on the toilet paper rolls in The Grapes of Wrath.

(Jamie looking into the castle from the story Flight. It stands on someone's front lawn, and it's still standing through "benign neglect." Note the castle rock from the story in the distance.)

(Ironically, the Pastures of Heaven is now a gated community. We snuck in behind a car that belonged. One of the houses in it was on foreclosure for 1.3 million.)

-John Steinbeck thought greatly about the pacing for his novels. He purposely created slow epics with factual intercalory chapters (good vocab word, right?) for East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath. Susan suggested that we notice different things when we slow down, and asked how many people pay for yoga for just this purpose. The pacing creates a heft to the novel that is impossible in short stories, even those with sentimental plots.

-Steinbeck generally was happy to let others adapt his work, and he was hands-off in letting their creative visions shine. This includes Broadway plays and movies. Even works that substantially differed from his original ideas were fine by him. His was "a household name" in the 1940s largely due to film adaptations.

-The one work that he was embarrassed to be associated with was Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. He thought that others took his story treatment and created a caricature of a black man.

(Steinbeck's family home in Salinas. Volunteers have preserved it and now serve lunch there.)

-Steinbeck never wanted children; he said his books were his children. His second wife, Gwen, had two children, named Thom and John. He was "loyal to them, but didn't quite know what to with them." When Thom was 5, Steinbeck told a reporter that he couldn't wait to teach him to drive a jeep. He wasn't thinking indefinitely in the future.

Edward Cullen's predecessor

James Dean as Cal Trask in Elia Kazan's East of Eden is the original Edward Cullen.

Pale, thin, and beautiful. Check.
Superhuman running and jumping abilities. Check.
Awkward love triangle. Check.
Mysterious and brooding. Check and double check.

Time to give back.... What's adaptation would you say is farthest from the book or more moralizing than tolerable?
Hint. My thought is that East of Eden will make that list. :)

Caption Contest-Sunday Edition

I love it. In fact, I could even use my sticker-maker to copy it when I get back.


What should it be called?

Sunday on the Road

Addendum to yesterday’s post of my road travels. You recall my concern about whether the car would make it over some of the steeper hills, the ones with 15mph speed limits and bright yellow truck warning signs. This morning, I headed back to the park of bobcat fright, I mean the open space preserve, meaning I re-tackled about 20 miles of the same road. During that time, 4 cars crossed my path heading downhill, but there were 57 bikers! Mostly men, but a few women, and one kid who looked to be about 10. It was my own miniature version of the Tour de France. Also, wasps don’t make pleasant passengers, but luckily the one that flew in seemed just as happy to fly out the passenger side a few minutes later. Sorry you weren’t so lucky on your trip to the field, Dave.

Onwards to Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Point Lobos, Carmel, and Marina, my final destination for the evening.

For my final night on the road, I’m staying with a Navel Postgraduate Institute Chinese professor. I had planned to stay in a hotel or hostel, but the weekend’s rodeo and grand prix motorcycle races drew thousands of extra tourists to town, so rooms were either unavailable or out of my price range. As a solo female traveler, I was wary about couch surfing, but willing to try the next step up. Based on location, reviews, photos, gender of host, and general feeling about the profile, I found a match on airbnb. The way it works is that I request to stay at someone’s house (without knowing the exact house number) in her spare room, and that person accepts or rejects me. Then I pay the site and receive the host’s direct email (not through airbnb) and address. If you arrive and feel that the house doesn’t match the description, you can call airbnb support and receive a refund. The woman’s house is decorated with all sorts of Chinese handicrafts, and it’s spotless. I’m worried that I offended her because it’s a shoe-free house. When she saw my feet (after wandering towns and beaches in flipflops most of the day), she asked me to shower immediately. I can’t deny that I was a little dirty, but it’s not the best introduction. Oh well---she knew my plans for the day, and I didn’t mind showering. I don’t have any idea whether most people spend their time talking with the host or staying in their room. Being that all of the reviews of this woman’s place said that she was quiet (and clean), I chose to catch up on reading and postcard writing in my room.

More Steinbeck in the morning.

Do you know my favorite Disney ride?

(No. It's not a photo from this trip. Meaning, yes, I had it in stock.)

In an entirely different pace than my recent days of class and conversation, it's been a busy day and a half. Next weekend, the institute continue its studies, but we were given this weekend off. After visiting John Steinbeck's Pacific Grove home yesterday afternoon and fueling up at Trader Joe's (oh, how I miss Trader Joe's when I'm in Florida), I headed to San Francisco to meet up with the lovely Nadia Watts and Dominique Craft. They were in town for the AP conference. Barring the final hour of the drive, which covered the last 1.8 miles, everything went smoothly. As I've been traveling in and out of the coastal region, it's been interesting to watch the foggy microclimates appear and dissipate; there's almost a 15 degree temperature difference. We had a tasty dinner at an authentic Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of Chinatown. We did not try the 'hot and numbing' or 'explosive pepper' dishes, but we were wowed by the green onion pancakes and crispy garlic eggplant.

In case you had any doubts about my dorkiness, have no fear. I was thrilled to get up early this morning to impersonate one of our teachers (nametag and all) in the AP Conference exhibition hall. Tempt me with free books, and I just can't stay away. (To top it off, later in the day, in my driving tour of Silicon Valley, I visited the Intel museum. This picture gives you a pretty good sense of it. I felt more sciencey than I usually do.)
And on to the crux of my email. I flirted with the edge of my 11am parking garage pickup deadline (more farmers' market---post soon), but pulled out of the garage in the supercute silver M2 hatchback rental at 11:01. As a background for the invisible reader, it's pertinent to know A. I'm not the world's most comfortable driver B. I drive infrequently C. Whenever I'm on a car trip, I navigate and Seth drives D. Personally, I prefer the human role of navigator (compared to GPS) and exercising my hippocampul region E. I compulsively change radio stations F. As a passenger, I try not to gasp or visually respond during any surprising car activity on turns or quick stops, but I'm not always successful at staying quiet.

So, in the driveway of the parking garage, I pull the map from the seat and have about 30 seconds to decide which way to go. Even though this was my 6th visit to San Francisco, I haven't visited my of the west side of the city. I thought I'd drive southwest in the general direction of Half Moon Bay. While navigating a narrow winding street of a grade that seemed to defy upward movement, I questioned my decision. Out of nowhere, this beautiful rocky park appeared. Here's the video of the view from my hike around the park. Incredible!

Afterwards, I wound my way downhill, having no idea that the real fun driving challenges lay ahead. I traipsed through Half Moon Bay, Pacifica, and Pescadero in between driving along Highway 1. I still can't believe that they built a highway that close to the cliffs and the sea. Anyone have more information about the construction? (I know I could look it up online...) Pescadero was the best little town, mainly because it seemed untouched by the tourist traps that seem to plague most coastal towns, but also because it reminded me of Cicely, Alaska, which means that I guess it really reminded me of Roslyn, Washington. The whole time, I was listening to some of the best NPR Saturday programs I've heard in months---Wait, Wait (of course), but also one on the brain's reactions to breakups, one on plagiarism and ethics, and one on "extreme motivation."

(Pescadero Main Street)

From Pescadero to Menlo Park/Santa Cruz/Palo Alto, I experienced a driving experience unparelleled by any other I've had. While I should I noticed that only two roads stretch across a 40 mile swatch between the regions, and while we've been talking in class about the role of coastal mountains in Steinbeck's fiction, I didn't put two and two together. You would think the name Alpine Road might have been a hint. It was exhilarating in a positive way, and it's one of the most beautiful quiet stretches of road I've seen. I actually preferred it to highway 1, which had a steady stream of cars. Some favorites on this 30 mile drive that one had one cross street: a windy arrow with 5m written underneath, followed by a sign in a mile with a windy arrow that had an extra bend and 6m written underneath, followed again a mile by the original windy arrow and 5m. When I finally got out at the summit where there was an open space preserve, before I even reached the trail, there was one warning for rattlesnakes and 3 for bobcats. I decided that was reason enough to limit my walk to about a half mile.

(The road was empty. I stopped the car while I took this. I'm not clicking and driving.)

Then the Intel museum, and finally a tour of Stanford and more Trader Joe's. My plan is Santa Cruz, Watsonville, and Point Lobos tomorrow.

The Red Pony and The Red Pony Ranch

I've been too embarrassed to admit it to most of the teachers here, but I hated The Red Pony the first time I read it. For years, I actually thought I hated Steinbeck because of how much I hated The Red Pony. In fact, I chose to share this truth in my application essay, and they still accepted me. Perhaps because Steinbeck later became one of my favorite authors even though I wasn't expecting it. Here's my opening...

In crafting this essay as a response to your “Dear Colleague” letter, it seems only right to begin with Steinbeck. “A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.” Why begin with such a foreboding answer? It is impossible to understand my love of Steinbeck’s work and my respect for his principles without knowing how I felt about Steinbeck during the spring of seventh grade. Allow me to set the scene. There were eighteen in the class, counting my middle-aged English teacher, and twelve of us were suburban preteen girls of the early 1990s. We had just finished Where the Red Fern Grows, a maudlin story about coon hunting, competition, and a boy whose love is unable to save his dogs. It was the first time I hated something I read for English class. We immediately cracked the spine of a book whose cover showed a boy, a horse, and a pasture: The Red Pony. While my adult self recognizes the reasons for teaching these books consecutively, my middle school self did not. I didn’t want to read about drought, a dead horse, or buzzards---lots of buzzards. Suffice to say, this was not the best introduction to Steinbeck. Flash forward two and a half years to the summer before tenth grade. East of Eden was on my list of assigned summer reading. At least The Red Pony was a short, quick read. The fat book with the distinctively “Steinbeck” orange spine was thrown in my backpack before a family vacation to the Bay Area, my first experience visiting anywhere west of Texas. I was awed by the Redwoods on the way to my family’s hotel, then most of the rest of my memories of the trip are lying outside, mountains in the distance, devouring the saga of the Trask family. I was particularly impressed with the character of Lee, and Steinbeck’s facility at using Lee to weave philosophy through the story. I rooted for Samuel’s optimism to pay off for him, and I dreaded the moment when Aron was going to realize that his mother was a prostitute. Even though I’ve always been a prolific reader, it’s the first time I remember paging through a book and taking notes to try to make sure I was understanding it correctly.

I included the East of Eden transformation because you can learn more about why I came to like Steinbeck, but the fact remains that The Red Pony is a dark book. While other teachers were thrilled that we were going to visit ranch from the book, I was ambivalent. I like seeing new places, but was I really interested in a desolate ranch where boys torment animals and horses die? However, (you knew that was coming, didn't you), in rereading The Red Pony for this institute, I was touched by its desperation and poignancy. Reading as a child of Jody's age, I sympathized with him. Or, more accurately, because I didn't sympathize with him, I didn't connect to the story. It's a story of the west, of loneliness, of masculinity, and of nurturing. As an adult, Carl and Billy Buck's competing notions of male nurturing take center stage, and Jody seems like a petulant schoolboy. The sense of loss of childhood by witnessing death and by learning that adults lie to children seems more realistic from the other side of the equation. (By the way, I'm referring to books 1-3 here. Leader of the People is sometimes included in The Red Pony collection, but not always. I think that's a better story all the way around, as it has all of the worldly sadness of The Red Pony but none of the buzzards.) Neither are fun stories to read, but that's not always the point. I understand now why we read it, and I'm glad to have visited the ranch.

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