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| Destiny, Salinas, CA April 13, 2022, Steve Brown |
1.
I grabbed the new, significantly alternator-drained car battery out of our motel room and stepped back out into the parking lot. The morning was glorious. The sun was warm on the skin. Shadows were thrown long and thin, and the sodium air was intensely lemon in the light. One could not have had a better day for troubles. Normally, I wouldn't have noticed that. I hate anything going wrong, and I let small things totally wipe out good days. I become so consumed by my hardship that I fail to notice the world around me.
I don't think I'm alone in that. They write most novels wrong. Traditionally, the mood of the setting reflects the mood of the character. Not all problems occur on dark and stormy nights. I don't even think we turn a blue-sky day stormy in our minds when we're in a bleak place. Instead, our connection with things around us ceases to exist when we get caught in our mind. So, when the character is stuck in him or herself, the setting should be blotted out--absolutely nonexistent. I think that's what happens to most of us. And if it didn't, we'd never get stuck in the first place. We'd realize there's more to life than our current problem.
But I didn't let myself slip into that self-absorbed void that day, or even the entire trip, because I didn't feel I had the time to waste. As I still didn't know the details about my kidney disease, my mortality was front and center in my mind. Our 25th anniversary trip could be our last major vacation together. That fact temporarily softened me, opened me up, made me cherish each moment. I was grateful to have such a wonderful morning to reinstall the battery, and such a great day to deal with what to do next if the car didn't start.
And what glorious day it was. Especially since the car not only started, but we made it to our destination, a small, Hispanic owned garage not too far from The National Steinbeck Center. We had planned it that way. Two days prior, we'd blown a tire by hitting a sharp rock on the Pacific Coast Highway after a brief, intense downpour. We were pleased with the service at a small, Hispanic owned tire shop we found in Monterey. I had no idea if my logic held true or not, but I reasoned that a small, minority-owned garage wouldn't have the luxury of ripping off its customers. I've found that to be true of small-town auto-shops that are not located near the interstate. An auto-shop with a limited, loyal customer-base is honest in its dealings. It has to be, or it soon won't have any customers left. So, when our alternator went out, I looked for a garage I thought would need happy customers. I found a few of them, and then I selected the one closest to the National Steinbeck Center.
If we were going to spend a day stuck in Salinas, I was going to spend it with John. I never met the guy; he died when I was only two; but for writers, that isn't a requirement for a mentor/mentee relationship. One simply seeks out a way of constructing a sentence that feels right. A brush stroke across the sky. A pale, soft light on the Oklahoma horizon. A fragment that contains both everything and nothing at all, all at once. A rotating fan softly humming on the chipped vinyl counter in an old gas station that smells of oil and grease on a hot smack-a-fly-dead day. To a writer, those things matter--and a mentor is whoever makes the young writer first realize what they've already always known: those things matter. An author calls to you, Follow me, my Son, whether you personally know them or not, whether they're alive or in the grave. Words rather than a particular person are the mentor. I have another mentor, the poet Bobby Byrd, who I personally knew well, but that isn't a requirement for mentor/mentee relationship at all. It is the work of the master writer, not the writer himself, that is the teacher. It is the sentences, the images, the phrases.
When I first read The Grapes of Wrath, I knew that if I spent my life trying write something so connected with earth, people, and place, I would never wonder if my life had meaning. I thought my medium would be through poetry rather than prose, but I was passionate about getting there. And then, I don't know, I let something happen to me. I let other voices, including voices of those who I love, dictate where I'd put my focus in life. I don't blame anyone. I don't even regret it. Those other paths all led to good places that taught me things. But it's time to refocus on what I was born to do and who I was born to be. As Wayne Dyre said, far too many of us "die with our music still in us."
2.
The garage was located in a long, corrugated metal building just off the 101. We had to circle the block because a U-HAUL lot was up-front, and a chain-link fence divided the gravel parking lots edged with dry, short grasses and littered with straws, plastic lids, and bits of foam cups. Three rolled-up garage doors were open to black interiors as I slowly eased our Camry over three massive potholes. We got out into the still, slightly chilly morning, and I headed towards one of those black openings looking to see if anyone was inside. I found Joe, and also found Joe was very busy, and that it would be a six hour wait. As that would give us time to go The National Steinbeck Center, we didn't think that was a big deal. The only question was how to get there--bus or foot?
Across the street from the garage, right next to the on ramp to the 101, was a Carl's Jr. So, we headed over there to get breakfast and think. I remember looking out at the stark morning light through their dark, tinted windows, which somehow, even though it cuts out the light, increases your attention on the difference between light and shadow--much like being under the strange, orange light of an eclipse. I can't remember what we ate, but I do know I had a lemonade and enjoyed the cool sensation of it sliding down my throat. We asked about busses and found out one stopped nearby. But, when we looked at the map, we simply decided to walk. It was only a mile.
3.
East Market Street is a four-lane road lined with dusty sidewalks, palm trees, chain-link fences and corrugated metal buildings. The sun was hot and intense, but the air cool--the type of day one side of you is sweating and the other chilled. Fortunately, we were headed west, so our faces were in shadow, and all was well.
A couple blocks past Salinas Smog, you have to make a left turn at a traffic light to stay on Market Street. So, we did. That takes you downslope to cross under the railroad tracks. It's prettier here with flowering groundcovers typical to California freeways growing up the banks of the road.
After the tracks, the road slowly rises back up to ground level, and the wide green banks of groundcover disappear as the road curves back into the original town grid. It is here we encountered an enormous homeless camp right alongside the railroad tracks. I remember how the stark morning light caught every fabric, cardboard and plywood detail perfectly. I was shocked by how much 2022 California looked like Great Depression California. This was not the California I knew from the 1970s. But it also could have been Salt Lake or Boise in 2022. I wasn't sure what was happening to our country, but I knew it wasn't good. Somehow, as a Nation, we were slipping back in time to a period I only knew from books and scratchy film footage. The writer in me wanted to go investigate, to squeeze through the space at the end of the chain-link fence and talk to some people. If I would have been alone, I would have done exactly that. But it was clear Marci was getting nervous. Although I'd never seen a camp that size before, having lived a few blocks from the border in El Paso, walking among the homeless was not new to me. I knew generally there is nothing to fear around people down on their luck. But it had been some time since I spent an afternoon in a littered vacant lot overlooking I-10, the railroad tracks, the Rio Grande, and the concrete block houses across the series of chain-link fences that is the border. So, I too was nervous. I would have pushed myself past that fear and went to say "Hi," but I didn't want to push Marci to do that. This was both our vacations. And of course, one always feels awkward interacting with the destitute: "Hey, let me drop in on your misery and chat for a bit." As bad as that is though, I still think it's far better than walking by and pretending you don't see what you clearly see. To ignore someone's existence just so you can avoid reality cannot be a good for either them or you.
Unfortunately, we did do that. But before we crossed the street to avoid the camp, we saw a sight that I think needs to be shared here. A man stepped out of the black rectangular door hole cut in his particle board hut and started sweeping the dust off a piece of plywood he had set down on the ground as a porch. He had two, fold-up camping chairs sitting on it and an awning of cloth over his porch. Had he had some rose bushes and had his house been made of brick, it would have been a scene out of any neighborhood from the 1940s when front porches were king. If you are looking out on homelessness and seeing only needles and trash and despair, you are seeing real details, but you still aren't seeing reality. Just like in any neighborhood anywhere, there are those who have given up and don't care, and there are those sweeping off porches and doing everything they can to make this day better than yesterday. In whatever neighborhood, the hopeless and hopeful are most likely the same people on different days. We have our days when we gallantly defy the odds, and we have our days when we sink hopelessly into despair. What bothers me about when people look out on homelessness is that they somehow filter out everything but the garbage.
It's a safety mechanism, I guess. If you aren't like me, I don't have to worry about you. But it's not real. And if you don't believe me, visit your nearest homeless camp. You won't have to travel too far. There's no need to book a flight.
