San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Monterey’s salty charm grows with each visit
I first became acquainted with Monterey when I was a newly minted soldier, going through basic training at Fort Ord, a few miles away. Most of us had been drafted, unhappy warriors let loose on a Saturday night to see the bright lights of downtown Monterey. There is nothing lower than a buck private walking the streets of a soldier’s town, which is what Monterey was in the days before big-time tourism. The town had a hard edge. We were welcome in bars, but nowhere else. The Cold War was on, and we got the cold shoulder.
But I have forgiven Monterey for those days, and have come back again and again, drawn by the beauty of the place and a kind of salty charm that eluded me in the past. Fort Ord has been turned into a college campus, a beachfront park and even a national monument; Monterey and I have changed, and I like it more each time I go there.
The Sailor Girl, my companion in these later adventures, liked it, too, when we went there for a couple of late summer days. She liked the kelp smell of the placid bay, the clarity of the water, the constant chatter of the seagulls. But San Francisco has seagulls, too, doesn’t it? “Yes,” she said. “But Monterey seagulls have more class.”
It’s a great place for a getaway, only 115 miles from San Francisco. Monterey is a small city, with just over 28,000 residents, a cleaner, quieter version of the tough little town it used to be. We stayed on Cannery Row, a place John Steinbeck once described as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”
It’s not like that anymore. But what is? If you look past Bubba Gump’s, Mackerel Jack’s Trading Co., and Sharky’s Shirts, bits and pieces of the old days are still there. There’s the Pacific Biological Laboratories, a ramshackle wooden building hidden in plain sight at 800 Cannery Row. It is the site of Edward “Doc” Ricketts’ lab, where Steinbeck and his pals hung out, drank and argued about life. There are colorful ruins all around, and a factory whistle sounds every day at noon, as if the old canneries are still there.
One establishment that wasn’t there in Steinbeck’s time is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the best in the world. The aquarium is housed in the old Hovden Cannery, once one of the biggest in the world. The place was remodeled and repurposed, to produce a remarkable look into the underwater world.
There are all the usual suspects: small sharks, big bass, schools of fish hurrying along as if late for an appointment, fish that are blue, gold, gray, glow in the dark or nearly invisible. You can look an octopus in the eye or wonder at the complexity of jellyfish. You can peer into an undersea forest of kelp and watch the animals who live there. Best of all, the aquarium is perched on the edge of Monterey Bay, and you realize what you are seeing is just under the surface a few yards away.
The aquarium is by far Monterey’s biggest attraction — it draws 2 million people in a normal year. There were so many the other day and packed so tight, we began to feel like sardines.
So we went outside and walked the bay shore. There were seals
in the bay and hauled out for an evening nap on a little rockbound beach just west of the aquarium. There was a tide pool just beyond that, full of sea creatures, the aquarium in real life.
On another day, we drove past the Corral de Tierra (which Steinbeck called “the Pastures of Heaven”) and down the pretty River Road on the west side of the Salinas Valley. There’s a wine country there, just south and west of the lettuce fields, where the valley edges into the slopes of the Santa Lucia Range. It’s uncrowded and well worth a look.
We had another day, so we drove over the hill from Monterey into the pine forest on Highway 1. Carmel was full of people, so we headed south into the land the Spanish called el pais
Grande del Sur — the Big
Sur coast.
We drove south and south, 50 miles past Carmel, over the celebrated Bixby Creek Bridge, past the famous Point Sur Lighthouse, had lunch on the terrace at Nepenthe, watched the birds circling in the sky, noticed the wispy fog drifting in and out of trees on the edge of cliffs.
We drove as far south as the tiny town of Lucia, where there’s a restaurant overlooking the ocean. We’ll have to stop there some time, we thought. Three days after we were there, the restaurant burned to the ground. Maybe there’s a lesson in this: Go when you have the chance. It might not come again.
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Not long ago, I wrote a column about Carl Payne, who had a long career as a cable car gripman and champion bell ringer and then followed up by serving as a police officer for nearly 25 years, and then as a Golden Gate park ranger. Carl was one of those people who made San Francisco special. He died Aug. 7 after a long battle with cancer. He had just turned 81.