Kitschery Row
posted by Scott Herring @ 12:37 AM
My mother- and father-in-law recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. To commemorate this remarkable milestone, their children arranged a weekend in Monterey, on the central California coast a couple of hours from my home in Davis. I had little enough to do with arranging the weekend; I was just along for the ride, and available to help with whatever emergencies presented themselves (flat tire, lost wallet, stinky diaper needing disposal in the middle of the night, that sort of thing). Having spent many weeks stuck in the Central Valley, I was more than ready to flee. It didn't matter that I have always found Monterey disappointing.
When I was younger, I spent most of my time stuck in another inland valley, the San Fernando Valley. A month or two in the Central Valley will bore me, today; when I lived in the other valley, I sometimes did not get out for years on end. Monterey, which I had then seen only in photographs in places like Sunset and the auto club magazine, seemed like very heaven to me. I pictured it as a vast headland of black, jagged volcanic rock, jutting into the Pacific in defiance of the elements. In between storms that lashed the rock with brilliant white foam came waves of fog that--penetrated only by foghorn and lighthouse beam--blurred all the edges and lent an air of mystery. Tortured pines grew inland, bent permanently to the lee of the weather. The town itself looked like a seaport in a paint-by-numbers set. The people all wore yellow rain gear, and said things like "Avast!" and "Arrr." This, again, is how I pictured it: a place that looked, in short, kind of like the Maine coast, only not so far away.
And this was, of course, not what I got, when I finally made it to Monterey. I had been in the area before, so I knew what to expect when we motored into town for the reunion. My brother-in-law had been in charge of reserving hotel rooms. He flies all over the world on business, and accumulates so many frequent-flier miles that he actually has trouble using them all. So he set us up in a hotel I would not have gone to if I were paying (or if he were paying, either): the Monterey Plaza, on the bay in the middle of what was once Cannery Row. When we pulled in, we discovered that we would not be allowed to park the car ourselves. A platoon of valets and bellhops were all over us. They looked a little funny carrying, with greatest care, my filthy and odd-smelling tackle box, and Lewis' diaper bag. It developed that they were going to charge us $18 a day to park the car, down the street somewhere, even though we were staying here; there is no free parking along the shore, even at businesses that are already making plenty off the occupants of the cars. One of the bellhops took us to our room, which was of course spectacular.
We quickly learned that this was the sort of place where we would not be allowed to do anything by ourselves. When the feared stinky diaper problem presented itself at about one in the morning, I went looking for a trash can outside the room. There were none, in the whole hotel; we were apparently intended to summon the staff if we wanted to throw out a gum wrapper or toothpick. If we needed something from the car--like some antacid, or another stick of gum--a valet would be dispatched down the block and would return with the car in a hurry, delivering the stick of gum as if it were cargo. Everywhere, staff members hovered, yearning to help:
"Sir! Oh, please, sir, allow me to carry that! Oh, it hurts me where I live to see you exerting yourself, even in the slightest. Yes, please allow me to carry your wallet." And make a judicious assessment of its weight.
"Sir! O, sir! Slow down. You move too fast! You've got to make the morning last! Rest here, sir, and allow me to massage your toes. O, no--I would not think of you giving me a tip."
"Excuse me, sir, your buttocks seem a little uneven. Will you allow me to straighten them for you? Sir?"
The service, like the room, was spectacular. Having worked in places like this, however, I did not at all enjoy being the subject of this kind of attention. I am not sure why.
But much of the Monterey experience leaves me wondering. Monterey is not the windswept seaside village I had dreamed about, as a teenager, but rather a gigantic tourist trap. The center of the action is Cannery Row. The name of the street is a hangover from its former life as an industrial nightmare: until about forty years ago, sardines were converted into fertilizer and also canned here by the millions, until the whole operation destroyed the very fishery it depended on. The smell is supposed to have been breathtaking. Why would people travel from around the world to see the ruins of such a thing? They do so in part because John Steinbeck made the place famous, in books like Cannery Row and elsewhere. Steinbeck is treated as a kind of patron saint here, which I think could only work if people aren't reading the actual books much. This is, after all, the author most famous for The Grapes of Wrath, a story of desperate, grinding poverty. How could this person work to attract tourists? There is even a Steinbeck wax museum. Coming soon: a theme park with jalopy rides and robotic starving Okies who guffaw when you throw quarters down their throats. I'm kidding, for now.
We ate that night at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, a restaurant based entirely, and relentlessly, on the movie Forrest Gump. It left me wondering what other movies might become theme restaurants: Plan 9 from Outer Space, maybe, or The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. The food was good. We walked up and down Cannery Row, and I was confronted by another mystery, one I have been pondering for a long time. Salt water taffy, fudge, designer cookies, an entire Ghirardelli superstore--why is the food in a tourist zone always like this? Why, that is, do the food offerings always run on fat like a car runs on unleaded, and at a rate of about a thousand calories a bite? Fat and sugar are of course easy ways of hooking people, and I suppose tourists are more easily hooked than others, being far from home and always a little lost. This would explain the other businesses that proliferate in such places: t-shirt shops and wind chime shops and shops selling drink coasters with John Steinbeck's face on them (he came out looking like George Costanza's dad on Seinfeld, more than once).
Just offshore is another world. Sea birds live here in such quantities as to make themselves a nuisance, for the human merchant. Kelp forests grow just offshore, and support a population of sea otters. These creatures, once close to extinction, pop up in surprising places along this coast. I watched one from our hotel room, and two others from the lobby balcony. I watched yet another from the commercial fishing pier; the otter surfaced and floated on its back in the classic otter posture, using its belly as a platform to hammer a shellfish open. A gull flew over and set down in the water about six feet away; the two then engaged in a long staring match. Harbor seals swim around the marina and sun themselves on rocks. Submerged, they look like small whales. And not far offshore, real whales migrate up and down the coast.
The people here do not ignore this other world. There are, however, a lot of distractions.
When I was younger, I spent most of my time stuck in another inland valley, the San Fernando Valley. A month or two in the Central Valley will bore me, today; when I lived in the other valley, I sometimes did not get out for years on end. Monterey, which I had then seen only in photographs in places like Sunset and the auto club magazine, seemed like very heaven to me. I pictured it as a vast headland of black, jagged volcanic rock, jutting into the Pacific in defiance of the elements. In between storms that lashed the rock with brilliant white foam came waves of fog that--penetrated only by foghorn and lighthouse beam--blurred all the edges and lent an air of mystery. Tortured pines grew inland, bent permanently to the lee of the weather. The town itself looked like a seaport in a paint-by-numbers set. The people all wore yellow rain gear, and said things like "Avast!" and "Arrr." This, again, is how I pictured it: a place that looked, in short, kind of like the Maine coast, only not so far away.
And this was, of course, not what I got, when I finally made it to Monterey. I had been in the area before, so I knew what to expect when we motored into town for the reunion. My brother-in-law had been in charge of reserving hotel rooms. He flies all over the world on business, and accumulates so many frequent-flier miles that he actually has trouble using them all. So he set us up in a hotel I would not have gone to if I were paying (or if he were paying, either): the Monterey Plaza, on the bay in the middle of what was once Cannery Row. When we pulled in, we discovered that we would not be allowed to park the car ourselves. A platoon of valets and bellhops were all over us. They looked a little funny carrying, with greatest care, my filthy and odd-smelling tackle box, and Lewis' diaper bag. It developed that they were going to charge us $18 a day to park the car, down the street somewhere, even though we were staying here; there is no free parking along the shore, even at businesses that are already making plenty off the occupants of the cars. One of the bellhops took us to our room, which was of course spectacular.
We quickly learned that this was the sort of place where we would not be allowed to do anything by ourselves. When the feared stinky diaper problem presented itself at about one in the morning, I went looking for a trash can outside the room. There were none, in the whole hotel; we were apparently intended to summon the staff if we wanted to throw out a gum wrapper or toothpick. If we needed something from the car--like some antacid, or another stick of gum--a valet would be dispatched down the block and would return with the car in a hurry, delivering the stick of gum as if it were cargo. Everywhere, staff members hovered, yearning to help:
"Sir! Oh, please, sir, allow me to carry that! Oh, it hurts me where I live to see you exerting yourself, even in the slightest. Yes, please allow me to carry your wallet." And make a judicious assessment of its weight.
"Sir! O, sir! Slow down. You move too fast! You've got to make the morning last! Rest here, sir, and allow me to massage your toes. O, no--I would not think of you giving me a tip."
"Excuse me, sir, your buttocks seem a little uneven. Will you allow me to straighten them for you? Sir?"
The service, like the room, was spectacular. Having worked in places like this, however, I did not at all enjoy being the subject of this kind of attention. I am not sure why.
But much of the Monterey experience leaves me wondering. Monterey is not the windswept seaside village I had dreamed about, as a teenager, but rather a gigantic tourist trap. The center of the action is Cannery Row. The name of the street is a hangover from its former life as an industrial nightmare: until about forty years ago, sardines were converted into fertilizer and also canned here by the millions, until the whole operation destroyed the very fishery it depended on. The smell is supposed to have been breathtaking. Why would people travel from around the world to see the ruins of such a thing? They do so in part because John Steinbeck made the place famous, in books like Cannery Row and elsewhere. Steinbeck is treated as a kind of patron saint here, which I think could only work if people aren't reading the actual books much. This is, after all, the author most famous for The Grapes of Wrath, a story of desperate, grinding poverty. How could this person work to attract tourists? There is even a Steinbeck wax museum. Coming soon: a theme park with jalopy rides and robotic starving Okies who guffaw when you throw quarters down their throats. I'm kidding, for now.
We ate that night at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, a restaurant based entirely, and relentlessly, on the movie Forrest Gump. It left me wondering what other movies might become theme restaurants: Plan 9 from Outer Space, maybe, or The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. The food was good. We walked up and down Cannery Row, and I was confronted by another mystery, one I have been pondering for a long time. Salt water taffy, fudge, designer cookies, an entire Ghirardelli superstore--why is the food in a tourist zone always like this? Why, that is, do the food offerings always run on fat like a car runs on unleaded, and at a rate of about a thousand calories a bite? Fat and sugar are of course easy ways of hooking people, and I suppose tourists are more easily hooked than others, being far from home and always a little lost. This would explain the other businesses that proliferate in such places: t-shirt shops and wind chime shops and shops selling drink coasters with John Steinbeck's face on them (he came out looking like George Costanza's dad on Seinfeld, more than once).
Just offshore is another world. Sea birds live here in such quantities as to make themselves a nuisance, for the human merchant. Kelp forests grow just offshore, and support a population of sea otters. These creatures, once close to extinction, pop up in surprising places along this coast. I watched one from our hotel room, and two others from the lobby balcony. I watched yet another from the commercial fishing pier; the otter surfaced and floated on its back in the classic otter posture, using its belly as a platform to hammer a shellfish open. A gull flew over and set down in the water about six feet away; the two then engaged in a long staring match. Harbor seals swim around the marina and sun themselves on rocks. Submerged, they look like small whales. And not far offshore, real whales migrate up and down the coast.
The people here do not ignore this other world. There are, however, a lot of distractions.
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