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PART ONE

Chapter 1

1

The Salinas Valley is in Northern California It is a long narroale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay

I rerasses and secret flowers I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even The memory of odors is very rich

I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to cli rass love The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley fro—unfriendly and dangerous I always found in ot such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that the ht drifted back froes of the Santa Lucias It may be that the birth and death of the day had soes of mountains

From both sides of the valley little streams slipped out of the hill canyons and fell into the bed of the Salinas River In the winter of wet years the streams ran full-freshet, and they swelled the river until soed and boiled, bank full, and then it was a destroyer The river tore the edges of the farm lands and washed whole acres down; it toppled barns and houses into itself, to go floating and bobbing away It trapped cows and pigs and sheep and drowned them in its muddy broater and carried the caes and the sand banks appeared And in the suround Soh bank The tules and grasses grew back, and s straightened up with the flood debris in their upper branches The Salinas was only a part-tiround It was not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it—how dangerous it was in a inter and how dry it was in a dry su if it’s all you have Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast

The floor of the Salinas Valley, between the ranges and below the foothills, is level because this valley used to be the bottom of a hundred- was centuries ago the entrance to this long inland water Once, fifty miles down the valley, my father bored a well The drill caravel and then hite sea sand full of shells and even pieces of whalebone There were twenty feet of sand and then black earth again, and even a piece of redwood, that imperishable wood that does not rot Before the inland sea the valley ht under our feet And it seeht that I could feel both the sea and the redwood forest before it

On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile It required only a rich winter of rain toflowers in a wet year were unbelievable The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies Once a woht if you added a fehite flowers to give the colors definition Every petal of blue lupin is edged hite, so that a field of lurins is ine And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a creaht be like the color of the poppies When their season was over the yellow randfather came into the valley the mustard was so tall that a man on horseback showed only his head above the yelloers On the uplands the grass would be streith buttercups, with hen-and-chickens, with black-centered yellow violets And a little later in the season there would be red and yellow stands of Indian paintbrush These were the flowers of the open places exposed to the sun

Under the live oaks, shaded and dusky, the ood smell, and under the ered ferns and goldy-backs hung down Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns, crea, and these were so rare and led out and special all day long

When June carasses headed out and turned brown, and the hills turned a brohich was not brown but a gold and saffron and red—an indescribable color And from then on until the next rains the earth dried and the strearound The Salinas River sank under its sand The wind blen the valley, picking up dust and straws, and grew stronger and harsher as it went south It stopped in the evening It was a rasping nervous wind, and the dust particles cut into ain the fields wore goggles and tied handkerchiefs around their noses to keep the dirt out

The valley land was deep and rich, but the foothills wore only a skin of topsoil no deeper than the grass roots; and the farther up the hills you went, the thinner grew the soil, with flints sticking through, until at the brush line it was a kind of dry flinty gravel that reflected the hot sun blindingly

I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley The water came in a thirty-year cycle There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there ht be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass Then would coood years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain And then the dry years would coht inches of rain The land dried up and the grasses headed out reat bare scabby places appeared in the valley The live oaks got a crusty look and the sagebrush was gray The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs Then the farust for the Salinas Valley The coould grow thin and sometimes starve to death People would have to haul water in barrels to their far So andthe dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years It was always that way