The Long Shadow of the Spanish Flu
In the fabled California of yesterday, land of blue skies and optimism, of sun-kissed valleys filled with spreading oaks flanked by the majesty of snow-capped peaks, a youngster walked, contemplating the glory of nature around him. It was an idyllic place. “Under the live oaks, shaded and dusky, the maidenhair flourished and gave a good smell…,” this youngster would go on to write many years later. “Under the mossy banks of the water courses whole clumps of five-fingered ferns and goody-backs hung down. Then there were harebells, tiny lanterns, cream white and almost sinful looking, and these were so rare and magical that a child, finding one, felt singled out and special all day long.”
To this beauty of nature, man had added industry, utilizing the soil of the valley to grow first wheat then vegetables, and especially sugar beets. Looking to that valley the youngster — at 16 too old to be a boy, but not yet a man — saw those ever expanding fields of beets where the purple roots were harvested and loaded for shipping to the great Spreckels beet works in Salinas, there to be refined for their sugar. The great factory, the youngster knew, had been thrown up by an army of workers only a few years before his birth in 1897. It was an odd coincidence, he thought, that the house he and his family lived in had also been built in that year of optimism and confidence in Salinas.
As he looked on, he might have noticed a feeling of unease. A gasp of breath here, the slight pounding in his head, foreshadowing a blossoming headache. It had started while still in class at the high school. Now he was beginning to feel dizzy. John Steinbeck, at once enraptured, as usual, by the land around him, made for home.
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