Jolene, all is forgiven!
We never doubted you
It is Sunday and HaM leave their tree house and Dragonfly Cottage for Yosemite with Jolene now fixed to their windscreen. Without her ever-correct navigational instructions we drive to Salinas, home town of John Steinbeck. The museum devoted to him is stuffed with tricks. Voices of his characters boom out, extracts from films made from his book are shown in cubicles, blown-up photos on walls illustrate his life and the Monterrey canneries, his Nobel prizewinning speech is heard at length, his chair, his pipe, his wives, his belt buckle are all there. Steinbeck is now an industry; the writer is probably unread except as a set text. Extracts from his work on the walls seem portentous and self-regarding. The private man is not there. Sorry John! Perhaps if you returned you would pull it all down, forget about the money, the success, the prizes, Hollywood, the praise, the critics and just get on with writing a book as good as Cannery Row.
Our Steinbeck day doesn’t end there. Jane wants to visit the Gabilan mountains, which figure in Of Mice and Men, and she wants to photograph a farm and a river where Lennie and George might have lived. She has a project in mind: blown-up photos she takes will be pinned up on her school library walls, Steinbeck posters and other material she has collected will illustrate the writer’s life. She must find the right old timber barn and a pool in the river near where his characters would have camped. We pass many barns and farmhouses but none is what Jane has in mind. We must go a little bit farther, she says, past that hill over there, perhaps stop by that bridge.
Oh well, at least we are moving and Elefanta’s music system is happily belting out Broadway hits from the Fifties. And it’s still only four o’clock. In Jolene’s absence, Jane lays out a map in front of her. The map covers the whole of California and it always seem to fold where we want to go, so it becomes creased and torn and difficult to follow. The roads on the map are not so easy to find, we begin to realise. We drive on and dustily on, past huge fields of corn and enough cabbages to create a dark cloud over Europe. We are aiming for a road that will take us up to the Salinas Mountains in a big loop and into the Carmel Valley. None of the turnings off our road are signposted but we go up one or two hoping they will take us to the valley. But they don’t and we then find the road barred and having to turn round and brave farm dogs to ask the farmer where we are. We just don’t know where we are.
Jane disturbs two owls in a barn and the first stars appear. We still haven’t found the road that will takes us to Carmel Valley. If only Jolene were with us! And we begin to regret our cheap jibes about her. She is wasted on HaM, we say defiantly. Wasted! And they will certainly not appreciate her finer points.
But Jane is still thinking of her school “project” and blithely searching for barns and mountains and stuff. She has now developed a new interest: trees. She is going to make an album of interesting ones, she says. She wants to photograph every single one we pass. And we pass a lot of them dripping with lichen in the Carmel Valley. We make a lot of stops and the camera is hauled out of the bag for a picture of a tree.
It is now dark and we have been driving for hours and I’m getting hungry. I have passed into a state of Zombie-like dead-tiredness. But still Jane points her camera at trees, even in the dark. At last she relents when we reach Carmel Valley town, a settlement of smart shops and restaurants and well-dressed people. We collapse into a fish restaurant and lap up a fish stew. Jane says it’s Liza Minelli at the bar. But is so isn’t, I say.
Hours later and still cursing the loss of Jolene we somehow navigate through the fog and sign-less highways with their huge dark trucks that silently fill the rear mirror and, after many wrong turnings, push Elefanta through the redwoods to Dragonfly Cottage.
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