Those words aptly describe the scene I encountered in January, some 70 years after the novel’s publication. Drought seemed a distant memory; the green hillsides contrasted with the Salinas’ swift, muddy current. Along River Road, I met a couple taking their morning walk on a muddy path along the swollen Salinas. In the nearly 30 years they’ve lived in town, the man told me, he has never seen the Salinas so large—though, he added, in decades past, the river did carry a larger and more consistent flow. “There used to be a slaughterhouse right here,” he said, gesturing to a row of riverside homes. “They would discharge blood straight
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