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  • The Salinas Valley:Autobiographical, Critical, and Environmental Musings on John Steinbeck and Louis Owens
  • Melody Graulich (bio)

The autobiographical writings will, I hope, provide a context for the critical and environmental musings, and vice versa.

—Louis Owens, "Preface: Crow Love" (xvi)

I think my works are about the natural world and our relations with that world, with one another, and, most crucially, with ourselves. . [E]ach of my novels begins and ends with place itself.

—Louis Owens, "Motion and Fire and Form" (181)

When I first met Louis Owens in 1989 at an academic conference in Coeur D'Alene, I knew nothing about his books on Steinbeck, but I had read his work on American Indian writers, and he knew mine. We talked, awkwardly, about that work but soon found ourselves with nothing to say. Louis was always friendly but also shy, and although he was complimentary about my writing Leslie Silko, I imagine he was a little skeptical about my authority since in those days I still looked like a sun-bleached California girl straight out of a Beach Boys song. But then we discovered that we had both grown up in the coastal foothills that define the Salinas Valley, that both of us most passionately loved rivers, many rivers, but in our growing up years rivers that originated in the Santa Lucias: he the Salinas River, which my bus had crossed every day on the way to school in "town," and I the Arroyo Seco and the Big Sur. Caught up in our nostalgic discussion of the [End Page 33] sensory pleasures of rivers and ranges, without knowing anything about his work on Steinbeck, I found myself telling him that I had spent my solitary childhood wandering the sage- and oak-sprinkled hillsides of the Corral de Tierra, Steinbeck's "pastures of heaven." And then we were off, with plenty to say. Louis shared with me, as he later wrote, that "in second grade [he] would sit uncountable hours on a hillside in the California Coast Range, hidden by tall wild oats, marveling with all the intensity a seven-year-old can muster at the sheer, inconceivable, gut-wrenching wonder of the natural world" (207). Somewhere that during conversation I told him a version of the following story. . .

I was a junior at Salinas High School, his alma mater, when John Steinbeck died in 1968. When someone suggested that the town change the name of its central thoroughfare, the imaginatively titled Main Street, to the alliterative Steinbeck Street, outrage ensued. Then—as now—a company town agribusiness, Salinas was certainly not about to honor the author of In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath (publicly burned in Salinas), especially when the children of farm workers were wearing brown berets to Salinas High. But it was the 1960s, some wanted to claim Steinbeck as a favorite son, and so a compromise was worked out: we could name the (obviously insignificant) library after him. (This compromise, of course, became more ironic in 2005 when Salinas declared it didn't have the funds to keep the library open, and Steinbeck's name attracted national attention, and funding, to save the library.)

These days the elegant Steinbeck Center presides over north end of Main Street, a few blocks from the well maintained Victorian house in which Steinbeck grew up, town leaders having realized the author's value in tourist dollars. There were no such historical markers as I grew up, but Steinbeck himself was a giant landmark in my life, offering me words to articulate my feelings. Especially in the spring, I loved the foothills around my home, textured with purple lupines and orange poppies; I loved to climb the craggy coast live oaks and wondered at the name of the graceful trees of heaven; I loved my deeply flawed grandfather who hiked the hills with me, dunked with me in horse troughs filled by windmills, pretended to hunt wild animals to the gunshot sounds our tires made as we crossed cattle guards, told me that while he never lied, it might be that he sometimes prevaricated. When I first saw it, I knew no metaphor could be so beautifully apt...

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