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| Palm and Orchard Near McFarland, Steve Brown 2022 |
Somehow, the next morning, it felt like the trip was over even though we still had Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks on our itinerary, as well as a second swing through Death Valley National Park. It may have been our decision to skip Yosemite due to weather that gave the trip its premature feel of finality. Perhaps it was just because we were tired. But, for me, I think, it was that my soul knew the real reason for the journey was for me to visit The National Steinbeck Center even though I hadn't put that on the itinerary. It took a well-timed death of an alternator and the perfect geographical location for the garage to make that happen, but sometimes the soul needs what it needs, and the universe complies. In the moment, it feels like the universe is blocking all of our plans, but in hindsight, we realize we really would have missed out had things gone our way.
That morning, looking at the sky, I felt that way. We agreed that we both felt tired, satisfied, and ready to head home.
However, I was still excited to see more of the Central Valley. I wanted to see more of California's agricultural empire. I didn't yet know what I was going to get out of revisiting Steinbeck, but as I knew how central the farm field is to most of his work, I figured it was important to get that feeling down even if the cropland I was observing was outside the Salinas Valley. There is no story of California without its fields. You can say the same for America, as well as most of the world. Even deep within the concrete jungles of civilization, humanity is still deeply tied to soil, not only physically by still needing that nutrition, but also spiritually. We have all farmed for so long we are all farmers whether or not we've even grown a tomato. Drive by an orchard and just see if you can keep your heart strings from being tugged. The trees don't even have to be in bloom or be glazed with low light and casting long shadows between the long rows. Even midday there is a pull towards the apple, the orange, the pistachio orchard. And the same is true of a field of cows.
We may be revolted by an enormous industrial dairy with cows dotted among the mountain tops of dung and thousands more roaming around the squishy valley below, a thin green haze obscuring everything under the bending, twisting and tortured green light, but that's because our ancestors never knew of such agriculture. We are not tied to such monstrosities. I assume laboratories that grow meat will also have no such pull. But the orchard, the field, the average-sized barn and farmhouse--they will always whisper Remember me? They speak of our parents or at least our grandparents and every generation going back thousands of years. And our genes know that even if we don't. A farm says to a person: This is you, this is your story, and this is how you carried on. It can be no other way because for thousands and thousands of years there was no other way. We are all farmers deep in our souls. There is no way to truly find yourself without at some point finding your way back to the farm. Up until the 1970s pretty much every suburban yard also had a large garden in the back. Canning was still a common thing. There is a reason even people in high rises have the urge to grow things in pots on their balcony. We are just born to have our hands in the soil.
Steinbeck knew that. And I knew he knew it. So, this journey needed to be as much about the field as the sea.
And yet, it really wasn't. I was done. I'd lost my focus for the day, if not for the rest of the trip. And a void then is a void now. I really don't know how we got to the tall trees of Kings Canyon and Seqouia. I just know we did.
What little I captured of that irrigated empire I caught further south, on the other side of the high, high hills and passes and mammoth trees, and then back down in hotter, much dryer places, like McFarland, USA.
I had planned to go back, to feel that dirt, to know that space. Yet, every journey is left incomplete. Even one's life. Perhaps the best attitude is to absorb all that you can in the moment and don't judge yourself too harshly for all the amazing life you let slide right on by. We are, by design, creatures pulled oh so easily from purpose. If an unfocused life can't be appreciated, there can be no real appreciation of life. I am distracted because I am. That distraction, that milky white blur where there should be pulsating pigment and stone solid experience, are in the end, part of the journey. If you ain't ever been lost, you also ain't never been found. You ain't even is. You ain't anything. Incomplete is complete. The journey just ends when it ends, that time being known only by someone greater than us. And my belief is, then the journey just starts right back up. The trick is to be in the moment more often than not, and quick to self-forgive for the moments when you're not.
