Cannery Row

We're staying a few blocks from Cannery Row, and oh how times have changed in the past 100 years. Here's how Steinbeck begins Cannery Row.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light... a nostalgia, a dream."

The place smelled of 14 sardine canneries. Workers were poor. It was a working town. That said, on a road trip with friends a few summers ago, I still wanted to stop by Cannery Row. It was a short visit however. I hadn't been back until dinner this evening. The restaurant looked out to the shore on one side and Bubba Gump Shrimp on the other. Yet another place overtaken by tourism and and homogenous chains. But it seems there's been a longer march towards this than I originally realized. Interesting reading for this institute shows Steinbeck's wry take on the matter back in the 1950s, when several canneries were still operating.

A number of these buildings still stand. The purchases might keep them as national monuments. Their tendency to rust could be halted by spraying them with plastics. Maintenance of this reminder of our historic past would, however, require that the rocks and beaches be stocked with artificial fish guts and scales. Reproducing the billions of flies that once added beauty to the scene would be difficult and costly. But with strides in chemistry and with wind machines, the odor of rotting fish and the indescribable smell of fish meal could wafted over the town on feast days. Perhaps this era should kept as a monument to American know-how. For it was this forward-looking intelligence which killed all the fish, cut all of the timber, thereby lowering the rainfall.

And if you've never found Steinbeck humorous before, now's the time to check out some of his nonfiction. Possibly for fun, not just for English class.