The walk in Monterey would start here. Saturday morning (really Tuesday morning, because my weekend was Tuesday and Wednesday) I'd go off walking from my boarding house room above Cannery Row, wander down here and look in shops and head along the coast down to the downtown and the Monterey Pier. The walk between here and downtown wasn't built up yet and you were climbing up rocks or walking in surf part of the way. There was a desk clerk who spend all of his time off fishing off the pier. He had been to Vietnam and back and had a wife, but just fished and worked. He never mentioned if he caught anything. I'd stop to say hi. There was never anything in his bucket. He was as cool as ice. A janitor that had been fired from the hotel came back on Walt's shift with a pistol ready to kill the owner. Walt admired the gun and asked to see it. The guy gave it to him to look at. When the janitor realized he wasn't going to get it back, he just left.
Downtown were a bookstore or two and an old adobe where Fanny and her sister and her children were living when Robert Louis Stevenson showed up to propose and run away with her. She had to get a divorce first. And Steinbeck lived in Pacific Grove for years. I was told the old timers knew him as Overcoat John because he wore one all the time.
Usually, I'd find a different route back, walk up through the Presido and then down into Pacific Grove or just go back up Lighthouse to the boarding house.
Stevenson House
It was a quiet little town most of the time except for the weekends in the summer when the tourists all appeared.
No comments:
Post a Comment