The Valley Between Two Ranges

The Salinas Valley runs roughly ninety miles from the Santa Lucia Mountains near the coast to the Gabilan Range to the east, a corridor of flat, dark, alluvial earth cradled between two very different kinds of mountains. The Santa Lucias rise to the west, steep and granite-dark, blocking the Pacific and holding the fog. The Gabilans rise to the east in gentler folds, sunlit and golden in summer. John Steinbeck, who was born in this valley and wrote about it for most of his working life, described the Gabilans as light and gay mountains full of sun and loveliness, and the Santa Lucias as wild and mysterious and forbidding.

He was not merely writing landscape. He was writing the valley's two moral poles. In East of Eden, which is set almost entirely here, the mountains become a kind of moral geography: the sunlit Gabilans associated with childhood and warmth, the dark Santa Lucias with fear and the unknown. He wrote that for the first time in his life he could know and love both mountains, and that knowledge made the valley his.

The river that drains this valley is the Salinas, and it runs underground for much of the year, vanishing into the sand during dry months and reappearing as if from nowhere when the rains return. The Spanish who arrived here in the late seventeen hundreds named it for the salt marshes near its mouth, the word salinas meaning salt works or salt ponds. The Esselen people had their own names for every feature of it. Sometime in the centuries before European contact, estimates range from around two hundred BC to five hundred AD, the Rumsen and other Ohlone-speaking groups moved in from the north, and the valley became Rumsen country until the mission system, beginning in the seventeen seventies, dismantled the cultures that had developed here over millennia.

What replaced them, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was a farming empire of staggering scale. Today this valley produces roughly seventy percent of the nation's lettuce, along with enormous quantities of broccoli, celery, artichokes, spinach, and strawberries. The entire American salad, in a very real sense, grows here. The soil is dark because the Salinas River has spent thousands of years depositing mountain sediment across the valley floor. That same fertility that fed the Esselen and the Rumsen now feeds roughly three hundred and thirty million Americans.

Standing here between the two ranges, you are standing at the geographic and agricultural center of a valley that has produced some of the most important American literature ever written about the working poor, and some of the most contentious labor history on the West Coast. Both facts have the same source: the richness of this ground, and the question of who benefits from it.