California, the State. San Francisco, the city. Monterey, the town. John Steinbeck, the author. For this Steinbeck fan, San Francisco is quite close to heaven. From San Francisco it is an easy drive down the peninsula to Santa Cruz and into Steinbeck territory.

I fly into San Francisco airport late in the afternoon. The signs are immediate America. ‘No Ped Xing’, ‘Squeeze right’, ‘Occupation by more than 132 persons unlawful’. From Rent-a-Wreck I collect a Chevrolet in two tones — cat-sick green and vile yellow. A veritable pimpmobile. And was it not in a car like this I drove into San Francisco for the 1967 Summer of Love, to follow Timothy Leary’s instructions to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’?

It was. And was it not in very much the same automobile I parked outside the City Lights Bookstore and went in and listened to Ginsberg recite ‘Howl’ and got Jack Kerouac to sign my copy of ‘The Dharma Bums’? It was. This antediluvian American monster is the car of my youth. Be damned to the characterless compacts of today. (It is a sad reflection on progress that the Rent-a-Wreck franchise now rents modern compacts.)

Now I drive across Highway 92 and its beguiling signs leading to San Jose along the Camino Real — the Royal Road. (Yes, I know the way to San Jose and a sterile, dreary city it is.)

Swing on to Highway 1, America’s very own Pacific Highway, which takes me down the peninsula and along the coast, the rugged, rocky coast on the right, the remains of cypress forests on my left - and goes through Santa Cruz to Monterey. Coming back, I will use Highway 9 which is a backroad, in spite of the grandiose title, and follow the San Lorenzo river up, up into the Santa Cruz mountains and then through the magnificence of California redwoods in the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.

If I have enough time, on the way back I will stop at Felton on Highway 9 and ride on a steam train for an hour of nostalgia on the wondrously named Roaring Camp and Big Trees narrow-gauge railway line. No railway line of my youth ever swooped through stands of redwoods; it is true that only God could have made these trees, one of which is within spit of being a hundred meters tall.

No train in the darkness of the Rhondda Valley in Wales puffed like the ‘Little Red Engine’ — I think I can, I think I can — up one of the steepest railway gradients in the world to Bear Mountain.

But that is on the morrow. Today is for blessed Monterey. Robert Louis Stevenson in travel-book mode wrote of Monterey in a fish-hook simile as being ‘cosily ensconced beside the barb’. (At the time Stevenson was skulking around Monterey, waiting for the divorce of the light of his life, Fanny Osbourne.) Much earlier than Stevenson, Gaspar de Portola and the intrepid explorer for God, Father Junipero Serra, claimed Monterey for Spain and the Holy Catholic Church by establishing a fort and a mission in 1777. Now I claim it, yet again, for myself.

Comments