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Gratuitous snap of Bessie on a weekend adventure to give this post visual interest
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I finished
Travels with Charley this weekend and thought about posting a brief excerpt; Steinbeck's paragraphs about Seattle, based on his 1960 visit, could have been a recent
Danny Westneat column what with his talk of the way charming old neighborhoods have been displaced by modern hive-buildings and the rampant crime making downtown feel unsafe for even police. But that would require a lot of tedious keying-in and I'm tired these days.
Travels with Charley was followed by Juneau Black's Shady Hollow which is the very paradigm of the quick read; it's a cozy mystery oddly reminiscent of the early Gamache books (small village where everyone hangs out at the coffee shop and bookstore), but it's all animals: the plucky fox newspaper journalist, the gruff bear cop, the tycoon beaver . . .
This post is brought to you by the conclusion of the Chasing the Four Winds review I chose for my books read column because it sums it up so nicely:
Final Conclusion: If
you’re looking for a quick read that isn’t going to shake up your world
views or offer any glaring insights into the human condition, then this
is the book for you. Fun and refreshing, I can see myself continuing
this series well into the future.
I don't necessarily see myself reading more books in the series, but I don't entirely rule it out.
Oh, but look. Someone else has gone to the effort of infringing on copyright and scanning the text of Steinbeck's book to post online. Here's the Seattle bit, somewhat tidied up. (I don't swear all the paragraph breaks are correct):
It was only as I approached Seattle
that the unbelievable change became apparent.
Of course,
I had been reading about the population explosion on the West Coast, but for
the West Coast most people substitute California. People swarming in, cities
doubling and trebling in numbers of inhabitants, while the fiscal guardians
groan over the increasing weight of improvements and the need to care for a
large new spate of indigents. It was here in Washington that I saw it first. I remembered
Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage-a little city
of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is
no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the
rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through
the uneasy land.
This Seattle
had no relation to the one I remembered. The traffic rushed with murderous
intensity. On the outskirts of this place I once knew well I could not find my
way. Along what had been country lanes rich with berries, high wire fences and
mile-long factories stretched, and the yellow smoke of progress hung over all,
fighting the sea winds' efforts to drive them off.
This
sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old,
or cultivate in opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and
stupid. It is not so. This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew.
It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have
told where I was. Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers
rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The
torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls.
I wonder
why progress looks so much like destruction. Next day I walked in the old port
of Seattle, where the fish and crabs and shrimps lay beautifully on white beds of
shaved ice and where the washed and shining vegetables were arranged in
pictures. I drank clam juice and ate the sharp crab cocktails at stands along
the waterfront. It was not much changed—a little more run-down and dingy than it
was twenty years ago. And here a generality concerning the growth of American
cities, seemingly true of all of them I know. When a city begins to grow and
spread outward, from the edges, the center which was once its glory is in a
sense abandoned to time. Then the buildings grow dark and a kind of decay sets
in; poorer people move in as the rents fall, and small fringe businesses take
the place of once flowering establishments. The district is still too good to
tear down and too outmoded to be desirable. Besides, all the energy has flowed
out to the new developments, to the semi-rural supermarkets, the outdoor
movies, new houses with wide lawns and stucco schools where children are confirmed
in their illiteracy.
The old
port with narrow streets and cobbled surfaces, smoke-grimed, goes into a period
of desolation inhabited at night by the vague ruins of men, the lotus eaters
who struggle daily toward unconsciousness by way of raw alcohol. Nearly every
city I know has such a dying mother of violence and despair where at night the
brightness of the street lamps is sucked away and policemen walk in pairs. And
then one day perhaps the city returns and rips out the sore and builds a
monument to its past.
