Monterey bay area green business program
Monterey bay area green business program
California, the State. San Francisco, the city. Monterey, the town. John Steinbeck, the author. Regarding this Steinbeck fan, San Francisco is quite close to paradise. From San Francisco it is a facile drive down the peninsula to Santa Cruz and into Steinbeck territory.
I fly into San Francisco airport late in the afternoon. The marks are immediate America. ‘No Ped Xing’, ‘Squeeze right’, ‘Occupation by more than 132 persons unlawful’. From Rent-a-Wreck I accumulate a Monterey Chevrolet in two tones — cat-sick green and vile yellow. A typical pimpmobile. And was it not in a Monterey bay area green business program car like this I drove into San Francisco for the 1967 Summer of Love, to abide by Timothy Leary’s rules to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’?
It was. And was it not in very much the same Monterey automobile I parked outside the City Lights Bookstore and went in and listened to Ginsberg recite ‘Howl’ and got Jack Kerouac to sign my copy of ‘The Dharma Bums’? It was. This antediluvian American monster is the car of my youth. Be doomed to the characterless compacts of today. (It is an unfortunate reflection on advancement that the Rent-a-Wreck franchise now rents modern compacts.)
Now I drive across Highway 92 and its capturing Monterey bay area green business program signs directing to San Jose along the Camino Real — the Royal Road. (Indeed, I am aware of the path to San Jose and a sterile, dreary city it is.)
Dangle to Highway 1, America’s very own Pacific Highway, which gets me to the peninsula and along the coast, the sturdy, rocky coast on the right, the remains of cypress forests on my program left – and goes through Santa Cruz to Monterey. Returning, I will use Highway 9 which is a business backroad, in spite of the grandiose title, and pursue the San Lorenzo river up, up into the Santa Cruz mountains and then through the splendor of California redwoods in the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.
If I have sufficient time, on the way back I will take a break at Felton on Highway 9 and ride on a steam train for an hour of nostalgia on the marvelously known as Roaring Camp and Big Trees narrow-gauge railway line. No railway line of my youth ever pounced through stands of redwoods; it is correct that only God could have made these trees, one of which is within spit of being a hundred meters tall.
No train in the Monterey bay area green business program darkness of the Rhondda Valley in Wales puffed like the ‘Little Red Engine’ — I believe I can, I believe I can — up one of the most extortionate railway gradients in the world to Bear Mountain.
But that is on the gmorrow. Today is for blessed Monterey. Robert Louis Stevenson in travel-book mode wrote of Monterey in a fish-hook simile as being ‘cozily settled beside the barb’. (At the time Stevenson was skulking around Monterey, waiting for the green split up of the light of his life, Fanny Osbourne.) Much earlier than Stevenson, Gaspar de Portola and the intrepid Monterey bay area green business program explorer for God, Father Junipero Serra, claimed Monterey for Spain and the Holy Catholic Church through creating a fort and a mission in 1777. Now I claim it, still once more, for myself.
The sea as I go down the coast route is white with ramp and fizz. A hurricane has been producing catastrophe at sea and in Mexico. This is the dying margin of the storm. Waves bang against the rocky coast and erupt in white flags to signify the route ahead. I haven’t recognized any sea lions or seals as I did last year. Maybe the sea is too rough. Perhaps they have a shelter where they conceal from the Monterey bay area green business program big waves. This could be true.
