In 1994, when I was 23, I was shopping for graduate schools. I remembered a paper I’d read by U of O archaeologist Madonna Moss, “Shellfish and Gender.” So I applied to the U of O. A year later Dr. Moss was my graduate advisor.

In 1990, I was obsessed with Twin Peaks. It was set (and filmed) in Washington, but that was the first intimation of the coming Pacific Northwest Cultural Wave (Grunge, Starbucks, Microsoft) that kind of wormed its way into my perceptions of the world.

In 1986, when I was 14, my family took a vacation to the Pacific Northwest. On that trip I first saw the ocean, probably at Neskowin. We stayed in Manzanita. I’d had dreams about the ocean my entire life: swimming in heavy waves, being underwater, sailing, standing on beaches. The beach at Neskowin was exactly like I imagined an Oregon beach should be. Even the smell was familiar; the whole experience was familiar. Cold feet, salt air, windburn, gray sky, woodsmoke, rotting seaweed.

In 1985, I saw the movie Goonies. It was a good enough story but I fell in love with that landscape. Trees and cliffs and rocky beaches, set hard against the restless water.

In 1981, I was in fourth grade, the year that Nebraska children first learn state history. We lived in Scottsbluff, within sight of the famous bluff that featured prominently in diaries of the Oregon Trail. Near at hand were actual physical artifacts of the Trail: the Rebecca Winters Grave, Signature Rock, wagon ruts on Windlass Hill. Much of our state’s history was the story of people moving through. To Oregon. These were gruesome stories of hardship: hunger, starvation, dysentery, Indian attack, freezing in passes, drowing in river crossings. It didn’t take a genius to figure: Oregon must be pretty nice. Nice enough to walk for four to six months across a continent.

The year previous, Mt. St. Helens erupted. It struck me as profoundly weird that people would live in a place with volcanoes. And Bigfoot. And flying saucers. All of which were childhood obsessions.

Also around that time I read a book I think no one else has ever read: The Haunted Cove by Elizabeth Hazelton. I think I got it free from Scholastic Book Club for ordering umpteen other books. It’s a Young People’s Mystery (ala Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew) set on the Oregon Coast. Hazelton did a superb job drawing the Oregon land/seascape. Her prose is why my dreams of the ocean looked exactly like the ocean in Oregon. This obscure book is probably singlehandedly responsible for my ultimate move to Oregon.

We’ve a long gray wet spring that just can’t seem to quit. It’s easy to complain but — for me, anyway — easier to remember: this is why I moved here. I came here for the gray and wet and chilly. So mild, so green; so unlike the fierce wilting humid heat of my childhood summers. The coldgraywet makes me grateful for books, for bicycles, for mud and coffee and hiking boots, for empty beaches and quiet forest trails. It makes the beer taste better.

After the painful slog through Cup of Gold, I despaired a little for what might await me in Pastures of Heaven. Although I’m reading it in the Library of America collection Steinbeck: Novels and Stories: 1932–1937 which should have been a tip-off that Pastures… is on a higher shelf than Cup of Gold.

And it is. Pastures… is a collection of related stories on a scale similar to Tortilla Flat or the Long Valley. It sort of reads like a less-depressing version of Winesburg, Ohio: small-town vignettes, each focused on a single character who has a remarkable adventure. Each story follows a predictable arc (which I won’t spoil), but delivers a satisfying read altogether.

Steinbeck, like most early-to-mid–twentieth century writers, doesn’t make small town life seem particularly nice. And Steinbeck clearly had a great love of rural lifeways and landscapes ... and still makes the Pastures of Heaven valley seem like a social straightjacket. If this accurately reflects the contemporaneous feeling toward rural life, it goes a long way toward explaining the great urbanization of the early 20th century, and the allure of the suburbs in the last half of the century. Steinbeck underlines the particular haze through which American view country life; the final chapter is a sharp coda that eerily presages the exurban developments of the the early 21st century.

The fictional Pastures of Heaven seems to be based largely on the real-world valley of Corral de Tierra. A quick trip to Google Maps makes that coda seem especially eerie.

Next: 1933’s The Red Pony, the Steinbeck book (other than Grapes of Wrath that it seems everyone has read. Except, apparently, me.

Today I finished Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). About forty pages in, I realized I had attempted to read this book before. Clearly: it had not made much of an impression.

Those first forty pages are hard. They’re mostly about a puddle-headed Welsh boy’s relationship with his slightly insane relatives and a man named “Merlin.” Please note that Cup of Gold is a story about a real-life pirate whose real-life name was Henry Morgan. When I pick up a book whose cover prominently features pirates, I want me some pirates, damnit, not Welsh mysticism. Which is probably why I never got more than forty pages into Cup of Gold on my earlier try, and might explain, a little bit anyway, why Cup of Gold is on absolutely no one’s Best of Steinbeck list.

The boundless knowledge of Wikipedia tells us “Steinbeck wrote Cup of Gold for the film business.” Which is one explanation, I guess. Two films (Captain Blood and Black Swan) depict Morgan in heavily fictionalized form, although neither of these appears to have been based on Cup of Gold. As a pirate story it’s a little too inward-looking, and a little light on the actual piracy.

Like all good historical novels, though, Cup’s... historicity is suspect. The relationship between Steinbeck’s Morgan and the genuine article is about as to that of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and Caeser Commodus. Apparently there really was a person (or perhaps two persons) named Henry Morgan and that this person certainly sacked some cities in Cuba and Panama and eventually became governor of Jamaica, as depicted by Steinbeck. The way Steinbeck tells it, Morgan lusted mightily for the sea from the early days of his very mystical Welsh childhood. (The source of this lust is only sketchily attributed — but I think Steinbeck generally wrote archetypes more than characters.) Drawing upon all the resources of being a character in a Steinbeck novel, Morgan parlays indentured servitude into a career in piracy. From the start of his career Morgan has his eyes set, absurdly, on the sack of Panama City (the eponymous “Cup of Gold”), and through pretty exclusively the power of narrative fiat he achieves it. Again: none his motive for this is explained, but the last twenty pages make pretty clear that Steinbeck was aiming for something a little more than a mere explanation of things that happened.

Steinbeck picks up a lot of themes, only to carry them halfheartedly or turn them entirely in the space of a page or two. To pick a single example: Morgan’s desire to sack Panama is conflated with his obsession over La Santa Roja, a reputedly beautiful woman who lives there. The first half of the book concerns this lusty young buck literally itching to literally rape Panama (in the symbolic person of The Red Saint); he is a man entirely of action and devoid of introspection. When ultimately confronted with The Red Saint, his personality jumps the shark and we go from Treasure Island to Winter of Our Discontent. In one page.

Even in a stinker like Cup of Gold — and let’s not kid ourselves, if Steinbeck hadn’t written it, it wouldn’t be in print today — Steinbeck displays a few of his uncanny talents that he went on to deploy to greater effect in later works. He excels at portraying the book’s landscapes — the brooding Welsh hills, the plantations of Jamaica, the pestilential swamps of Panama. This is perhaps my favorite of Steinbeck’s qualities, a trait I think a lot of Western American (particularly Californian) authors share. He has a neat motif about mythology and honesty that he plays about three times, in the form of Morgan’s recollections of his first love. Finally, he tops the book with a weirdly touching death scene. I like it when a book ends with the protagonist dying.

Next: Pastures of Heaven (1932) ... but first I have to read Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, because I always read every new Murakami paperback. After that is Dale Basye’s Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go, because the author is a friend and also it is a good book. But after that: Pastures of Heaven.

Last week, I finished reading the entire Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin series. (Yes, these are the books that Charlton Heston described as his favorites. I’m probably the world’s youngest Aubrey/Maturin fan.) I think this is the second time I’ve read the entire series beginning-to-end and probably the third time I’ve read most of the individual novels.

I began (re)reading the series last year immediately upon returning from China. So it’s taken me a year to read 20 books. I’ve read a few other books, too — The World Without Us, a couple of Stanislaw Lem novels, and a collection of Haruki Murakami short stories, for example — but this has been pretty much my sole reading project. (In my own defense, pretty much the only time I get to read is for about 20 minutes before falling asleep, and a little bit on weekend mornings.)

Re-reading the series kind of underlines how weak the later entries are. O’Brian’s writing and characterizations remained crisp to the end, but his plotting slacked a lot. I think he fell into a trap where he loved his main characters too much to hurt them. I lost count of how many times either Steven or Jack would lose their fortunes, only to have it returned (usually with almost no effort) about 30 pages later.

Also, a surprising amount of heavy drama (like the deaths of major characters) happens off-screen, or in a kind of flip manner. Again: O’Brian just didn’t want his principals (and perhaps the readers?) getting sad about the tragic loss of friends they (and we) have had for 15 or 18 books.

O’Brian died while working on the 21st novel. Number 20 left plenty of loose ends, but something feels vaguely wrong about reading what amounts to O’Brian’s outline just to tie them up.

So now I’m left without a big reading project. For the past five or six years, I’ve kind of grazed at my pleasure reading, which in my case leads to a lot of mental junkfood habits. (For example, for want of anything better to do, since last week I read Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home — a fine piece of literature but one I’ve surely read 10 times.)

So now, for probably the first time in life, I’m going to undertake a serious reading project. I’m going to read John Steinbeck’s entire oeuvre, beginning (fittingly enough) with his first and only work of historical fiction, Cup of Gold

Jenny and I recently (re-)read Beverly Clearly’s Henry Huggins (because we’re having a son? because Cleary is from Portland? dunno why, really), which prompted a discussion about the prices Henry paid for things in (presumably) 1950. Life in 1950 was a lot cheaper but conversely money was a lot harder to come by. For example:

In the first chapter (“Henry and Ribs”), Henry pays a 10¢ bus fare. This was well before Tri-Met but we can actually make a direct comparison. He rode from the YMCA downtown to his house on NE Klickitat (or rather, that was his intention until he was ejected), a two-zone fare that today would cost $2.05. (You could make the argument that NE Klickitat in 1950 was on the edge of town, so it might comparable to a three-zone fare today, but I won’t make that argument.)

In the third chapter (“Henry and the Night Crawlers”), Henry wants a new football that costs $13.95. It sounds like a pretty nice football — perhaps like the Wilson F1100 Official NFL Game Football that Amazon.com sells for $79.99.

A ten-year-old with two football’s worth of money could buy one football, and then ride the bus across town 139 times (and still have a nickel left for soda) ... in 1950. A ten-year-old in 2008 could buy the football, and then ride the bus not-quite–across town 39 times (with one penny left over).

So on the one hand, the ability of a young boy to move freely about Portland, Oregon is 28% what it was 58 years ago. On the other hand, his ability to purchase a football is 5.7 times greater than it was 58 years ago.

Or, proceeding from the assumption that the prices of things reflect in some way their actual value — and not to put too fine a point on it — we, as a society, have traded about 70% of our kids’ literal freedom (in the sense of “freedom of movement”) for a five-fold increase in their ability to accumulate stuff.

Rereading Henry Huggins for the first time since the 1970s throws into weird relief how the world has changed since my own childhood. As a kid, I recognized in Henry’s adventures a lot of my own behavior, and that of my friends. In particular, I never felt like I was reading some historical document of childhood from ancient times (something I felt when reading, for example, Peter Pan). Henry was doing things that were recognizably real-world 10-year-old things to do, in either 1950 or 1979. There were differences but they were of degree, not kind: Henry lived in a city where I lived in the country; he rode the bus freely around town and I rode my bike freely around the countryside; he collected night crawlers to sell to fishermen and I collected golf balls from the irrigation ditch next to the country club to sell to, well, golfers who lost their balls in the irrigation ditch.

Could you imagine a kid in 2008 doing any of these things?