Throwback Thursday: ‘Cannery Row’

I adjust the focus on my Dad’s Nikon and shoot.

The building is simple bare wood, plain and honest, no cheerful veneer of paint.  The horizontal boards are aged from the sun.  They’ve been bleached past silver to dark again.  I wonder if a fire has passed and singed the edges into charcoal.  But I think it’s from the sun, because that’s what light does, given enough time.  It reveals the scientific truth of a thing and brings it back to elemental earth, to essential carbon, even as it stands.

“That’s where Steinbeck wrote Cannery Row, right in there.”  My mother stands beside me as I take the picture.  She’s lit a cigarette.  It’s the seventies, and women are entitled to their privileges. 

I step away from her.  I’m only fourteen, but I’m my father’s son, and I don’t smoke. 

 My Dad has a wide-angle lens, and I wish I had it with me.  I want to capture how small the two-storey building is next to the tall cannery buildings.  The canneries also look decrepit, empty, deserted.  Faded lettering on the sides. 

My mother gets halfway through her cigarette.  “Most people don’t know about this place.  But it should be a monument.”  She nods at the rickety wooden staircase leading to a single wooden door at the top, as if there should be a plaque mounted with Steinbeck’s name.  She narrows her eyes a bit and blows her smoke up in the air at an angle, the way she does at parties when she’s talking to someone important.  I suspect she’s excited that there’s no marker, so she’s in on a special secret, a member of some inner circle.

I crank the advance forward to the next number.  I turn the camera on my mother.  She’s got a train of smoke obscuring her face, but I use the f-stop like my Dad showed me and tighten the field onto her hair.  She catches me just as I snap it. 

I thumb the ratchet again.  I have ten shots left on this roll. 

Just on the other side of those buildings is the ocean, but we can’t see it from here.  You can’t even hear it.  I try to imagine what it would have been like when these canneries were in operation:  the noise, the stink.  How would a writer get anything done inside a little laboratory building, when next door and all down the street were a million fish being gutted and tinned and loaded up into trucks?  Where would Steinbeck go for fresh air?

My mother’s about done with her cigarette.  “They used to have big parties in there.  Those were the days.  Did you get a good shot?”  She doesn’t wait for my answer but drops the glowing butt to the street and twists her shoe on it like she’s swinging with a dance partner.  “They’ll probably tear this all down soon.  When you read the book someday, remember I showed you this.  Save that picture.”