books: East of Eden, pages 2 and 602

John Steinbeck was a word magician.


"The floor of the Salinas valley, between the ranges and below the foothills, is level because this valley used to be at the bottom of a hundred-mile inlet from the sea. The river mouth at Moss Landing was centuries ago the entrance to this long inland water. Once, fifty miles down the valley, my father bored a well. The drill came up first with topsoil and then with gravel and then with white 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 must have been a forest. And those things had happened right under our feet. And it seemed to me sometimes at night that I could feel both the sea and the redwood forest before it."





My own father, sixty years ago, set out to discover the valleys and rivers, the seas and forests of California. He started rivers with the Santa Ynez and ended with the Eel, with stops along the San Dieguito and San Lorenzo.

He was flawed as we all are and grew stronger along his way, loving three women deeply and raising four of his own explorers (flawed as we all are and growing stronger). He discovered John Muir and John James Audubon and taught them to us, gave us our own rivers - the San Luis Rey and Sacramento - and a vision of the world as wide and designed, with people to read and love, spaces to take in, communities to help prosper. And books and words to marvel over.





the feeling that sometimes at night we can feel the sea and the forest under our feet






East of Eden, page 602: "His eyes closed and he slept."

1971 or 1972