Travels With Buddha 10.12 — — Steinbeck Country, near King City, Salinas Valley, Central California
“We are a Nation of immigrants”
Buddha tells me, as we are driving south through California, that the only reason there are any humans on this beautiful fragile planet of ours, really the only reason there is any life at all: is that it came from somewhere else. A few organic molecules hitchhiking on an asteroid that nestled itself into the ocean waters south of Pangaea about 4.1 billion years ago.
So, given that science fact, everyone and everything originally came from somewhere else. There are no people anywhere on earth whose ancestors did not come from somewhere else. If you were born somewhere then you are by definition “indigenous” to where you were born. Earth.
Buddha shakes his head and says: If only we all could see what a tiny speck of a world we have here. It’s a precious little speck with the thinnest veneer of an atmosphere and all life circulates everywhere. All humans belong here and they all have the right to go where they please. Why scramble to hold on to any one place of it? Put your resources instead toward preserving the whole thing….
That is the discussion while we are coming into the great expanse of the vastly fertile Salinas Valley.
Steinbeck Country. Where the tradition of immigration is long and hard and almost entirely successful. Refuges have always come to Central California. First the Native Americans coming from the north, then the Spanish grandees from the south, failed gold miners from the Sierra foothills, grey hardbitten refugees from the Dust Bowl mid-west, and now hardworking hispanic harvesters from Mexico and beyond.
The reason this area is so wealthy and productive is because of the hardworking humans who came from somewhere else. When the American John Steinbeck, (who was born in the city of Salinas) wrote about this; wrote about the treatment of refugees and workers (The Grapes of Wrath); the conflict between the haves and the have nots (East of Eden); his former friends wanted to ride him out of town on a rail. Eventually he had to leave Monterrey where he lived a poor writer’s life, supported by his father a wealthy factory manager. In his hometown he was vilified. He wrote things that were far to close to the truth.
But things come around if the story is good enough. Today in the Salinas Valley John Steinbeck is a legend: the Nobel Prize-winning author who wrote vividly of the rolling hillsides, and hardscrabble ranchers, and disenfranchised migrant workers living in camps. He wrote so well that he reached toward immortality.
And right now he is immortal in Salinas. And the drought is over in Central California. The winter rains have returned, the hills are green, the cattle are fat, the ground is almost ready for the first spring plantings.
A reminder of the fragility of everything, but also a reminder of the people and the land’s ability to recover.
The ongoing migrations of humans seeking a good life on a healthy planet. Welcome everyone. Please take good care of the place….All of it.
