Dead Things | Cannery Row

Monumental Things

Cannery Row is built around a narrative of rise and fall, and revitalization – once a bustling cannery district, then crumbling into disrepair after the collapse of the fish population and canning industry, a gutted monument to the nation’s wartime demands (in this case, the military for cheap, nonperishable protein) and their equally rapid dissipation. Before the WWII-era boom in demand for the sardines, the area had been a popular tourist region and home to a Chinese fishing village which emerged from and eventually suffered the collapse of squid and whaling industries–precursors to the decimation of the sardine populations. Ed Ricketts, an early proponent of marine ecology and instrumental pioneer of its application to fisheries science, eventually declared of the vanished fish, “They’re in cans.” Its resuscitation became the project of a few investors, and the area now stands as a popular tourist destination once more with the renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium perched at one edge.

The ecological future of the area hangs on an edge of its historical cycle of boom and bust, a center of innovative study and efforts to funnel tourism. The industry both serves as an economic driver and can be harnessed to prevent the kinds of population cascades seen in the last couple centuries, maintaining healthy populations by supporting institutions like MBARI as Ricketts’ Pacific Biological Laboratories did for two decades, now maintained and offering tours.

Ed Ricketts’ contributions to the area extended to the literary as well; he appears as “Doc” in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, a novel documenting the exploits of “the boys” and other colorful characters around the canning district, also justly noted as contributing to renewed interest in this small stretch of Ocean View Boulevard in New Monterey.

In the novel’s opening passage, Steinbeck characterizes the early 1940’s Cannery Row as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

The preservation of the dead, a resurrection by embalming, is one of the most fascinating elements of any history museum. In Cannery Row, it is wrought large and ultimately transformed. The buildings themselves once stood as the skeletons of a dead industry; now, the area is again preserved instead as a celebration of its own revitalization. Beyond memorializing its history alone, it is the very process of doing so, and the successful reanimation of the former cement cemetery, that are memorialized. Beyond the stories of Cannery Row, the use of its narrative history to continue and sustain itself is ultimately the self-contained and -perpetuated function of this little waterfront street. Rather than freezing the row’s skeletons and monumentalizing the death of the thing, it consciously monumentalizes its history of revival, and the cycling thereof.

I know, very meta.

Although Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is the central story credited with helping to motivate interest in the area and he the figure most prominently celebrated, there is an intriguing lack of nostalgia to both the Cannery Row Monument in Steinbeck Plaza and the area at large. While it is almost entirely touristy shops and restaurants and the vintage styling is promoted, it nonetheless lacks an air of oversentimentality or romanticization of the past it evokes, either through the transparency of it, the pervasion of precisely the meta understanding of history as a living, evolving thing, or a combination thereof. The plaza itself is ringed by seafood restaurants and shops, but the monument is surrounded by small plots of flowers and colorful shrubbery, a refreshing little corner of the boulevard walk. Steinbeck perches atop the pile of rocks, naturally, around him others who helped to enliven Cannery Row (including Ed Ricketts holding a brittle star, the kind-hearted Madame Flora Woods and one of her girls (seen below), and a fisherman from the mid-1800s Chinese village which stood next to what later became one of the earliest protected marine sanctuaries). Despite Steinbeck’s opening claims about Cannery Row‘s titular boulevard, the surprising absence of nostalgia is conspicuous. The row feels insistently real in its current incarnation.

The monument, dedicated in 2014, feels much more organic with its shoreline rocks and tidepool-like base than the commercial bustle around it, though this was what I found to be noteworthily distinct about this among many similarly out-of-place monuments: it didn’t feel terribly out of place. In fact, it almost seemed fitting. This is the curious favor that Cannery Row as a monument to the act of memorializing itself does for this little plaza: rather than be awkwardly cast by the activity around it, the statue of Steinbeck gazing out over the souvenir-seekers, restaurant-goers, and pier-watchers instead contextualizes the scene he overlooks rather than vice versa. This place’s booms long-stalked by busts, there feels a digging in, a settling, a commitment to choosing the sustainable in and of itself, and to celebrating the choice.

Caught Things

I’ll admit, there are many reasons I am simply sentimentally fond of Cannery Row, one of them being a fascination with fish, and an arguably morbid one with dead ones in particular. This manifests itself primarily in my poetic endeavors and, rather than repetitive obsession, I’ll deem it a motif.

Catch
pale flash
gutted copper
openmouthed, bright and dead
sour stink
scale-edge thud
hot and sweet without a head

July 2017, creekside in the Sierra Nevadas

I find the human relationship with fish to be among the most curious and complex of our relationships with individual organisms (or in this case, large coalitions thereof), full of paradoxes which on closer inspection make perfect sense, then seem to break right back down into oddities again.

They are a food sources common to almost every people near any significant body of water, an organism and form of sustenance familiar throughout most of human history to the vast majority of humanity. They seem to ubiquitously capture the eye and artistic imagination, appearing in a dazzling variety of folk tales, art, and music. They do not receive the kind of awed reverence which large prey animals do, and even have some elements of absurdity and downright nastiness associated with them. They are more distant evolutionarily and in habitat than other hunted creatures, and are often invoked in disgust. We are captivated by their movement and repulsed by the stench of their dead bodies–as well as nourished by them. We often have a more mocking relationship with fish than other animals we eat, one more comfortable or at ease with their death than cuter, fuzzier meals.

The ecological understanding of fish is curious too, fisheries science being relatively new and, as mentioned above, long not terribly ecologically-informed or -oriented so much as agriculturally or industrially motivated, such as the canneries stationed at the edge of Monterey’s cold offshore upwelling. Now, studies of fish populations have become increasingly pivotal to studies of larger ecological networks and food systems as well as a conservation rallying point.

Salmon in particular have become a widely recognized conservation concern and cause, as the broad-sweeping ecological (and economic) impacts of their decline continue to resonate. In advocating for their habitat preservation in the Pacific Northwest, conservation groups’ media generally emphasize not only on their import as a keystone species and emblems of the natural abundance of the region, but also the marvelous nature of the salmon themselves. Their incredible odyssey to the sea and back to spawn, their ability to identify by ‘smell’ the unique chemical composition of their stream of origin with remarkable precision, and even their striking size and appearance invoke an underlying curiosity regarding fish, organisms seemingly so foreign to us for something so vitally important to the ecological systems we resoundingly depend upon. While I acknowledge I may be unusually biased, fish do seem to grip human attention at curious times, and hold some pivotal sway over us.

In a more figurative sense, fish are just captivating, dangit! I’d theorize that some of this intrigue is derived from even the visual representation alone of the dynamics of individual and collective, as so mesmerizingly captured by schools of sardines.
Entranced by the movements of the whole body, occasionally fixating on a single fish, calculating the space around it as it calculates the margins between suffocation and being devoured. Our predator’s eye is hard-wired for seeking motion; What can we do but identify with the fish, then glance whiplashed at the next? What can we do watching the rippling hazards of a school of the many sardines but fancy ourselves among their numbers?

We call it the life cycle, though we dwell on the death segment much more. The dead fish which are cooked and feed us, or decompose and provide the nutrients evidenced in tree rings. I’ve often been dubious of cycles as a frame for movement through life and into death, as it seems almost too convenient, too reassuring. It is a stunningly simple axiom: From death, emerges life. What I find troubling in this assurance underpinning conservation efforts is how readily I see it warped: From death, must emerge life. This is not a guarantee. Cycles are not a guarantee that each arc will land and send forth another, that each seed will fall and sprout, that each dead body will feed another life. This uncertainty is, I’d contend, precisely the fearful majesty of each tiny success.
With each individual that survives or is picked off by a predator, each that starves or drowns or loses its offspring, each population hauled from the chilly bay into nets and nearly into oblivion and back, each species that we pull from the brink of extinction, watch die out in a zoo’s medical facility, or do not notice at all; none of this has to happen. This is the precisely the urgency carried on the back of conservation and sustainability efforts; there is no promised good to come of the many deaths. This is what hangs in balance through Cannery Row and its historical consciousness; what befalls it next is the product of chance and the care of its keepers, and of only one of the two are we agents. This is a sliver of what flashes in the flat eyes of the shimmering wall of fish, or the silent silvery piles of them at the banks of polluted waterways, or the beheaded ones that arrive on a plate. I may yet pinch my nose, but I’ll study them all carefully.

I am drawn to this vision of death, at once absolute and miniscule; urgent and indifferent; stunning and fitting; hideous and plain; violent and mundane. Tense coexistences perhaps, but none of these pairings are paradoxical. Fish muscle easily along, ignorant of a spectator’s anxiety over these boundaries, swimming right over every line as I am left to marvel mutely at their indifference to them.

Ugly Things

Theirs is, I think, an ugly kind of beauty, or perhaps more precisely, theirs is the forceful ugliness which is the only inevitable form of beauty. They strike us, at moments the sublime incarnate. They are comfortably inhuman enough to catch, to kill, to mock and perhaps to honor and celebrate all the while, but they remain captivatingly, uneasily foreign–and unknown, the quality that most infuriates and enraptures, that earns them our precious attention. The more one watches them die, the more immunized one can become to the wealth of the undiscovered they–indifferently–harbor. This is on occasion ruptured, and the softly awed curiosity again stoked.

There is a sentence from Michelle Boisseau’s “Ugglig” I keep circling back to.

Ugly is the mother of the sublime—dreadful/ and magnetic, it sucks you over edges/ with the torque of awe, so much like love/ it must be love.

Boisseau, Michelle. “Ugglig.” The Best American Poetry 2016. Scribner Poetry, 2016. 10-11. (Print.)

In watching the shimmering schools of sardines in perpetual miniature panics and wanderings, in watching the watchers of the fish, in walking through this animate, animal monument of a seaside street, I marvel at our invention of such words as ‘history’ and ‘civilization,’ and further still at our conviction in their use.

Cannery Row not so much a stink, a grating noise, a nostalgia any longer.
A quality of light, a tone, a habit, all absolutely so.
As for a dream, I don’t know. I say it depends where you draw the line.

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And so, scribbled at the base of my tiny travel notebook:

Dead Things
I Smell a Dead Thing.
It is the Flower cattycorner,
The European poet’s portrait of Life.
[The New School does not speak of Dead Things,
Does not Sing.
Their Noses point only Onward.
The flower is indifferent to their ignorance (or,
Murmur the Scholars,
Ignorant to their Indifference).
I believe them now, too, that they were truly afraid.
Eyed rolling in their
martyred
heads stuffed cold and cloying with the stuff.
Burdened.
Do not dare shy away; Sniff at the
rigid
cleaved carcasses, at Anguish, wringing
rank
their Psalms at the metal
sting
in their fearful
soft Palms.

– asls 7.21.19

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References, Readings, and Appearances by Cannery Row:
Between Pacific Tides (1939) – Ed Ricketts, Jack Calvin – A marine biology classic; one of the seminal texts on intertidal ecology along the North American Pacific coast
Cannery Row (1945) – John Steinbeck – Duh.
Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts. (2003).
NPR Morning Edition’s Ed Ricketts and the ‘Dream’ of Cannery Row – can be found at https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1252560
“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” – Bob Dylan, from Blonde on Blonde (1966)