them in duct tape; when he ran into something, he banged out the dings with a mallet. His truck was a handyman’s flea market on wheels; everything he might need for beekeeping or plumbing jobs was tied to the contractor’s rack, crammed in the back bed or jammed somewhere in the cab. The dashboard was packed several inches high with a nest of pipe fittings, grease-pencil stubs and rubber bands, opened mail and seed packets, and balled-up bits of beeswax. He used the hooks of the empty gun rack to hang his tattered work shirts, splattered with pipe dope.
I was wedged into a small space he cleared for me on the bench seat, separated from Grandpa by a barrier made of beekeeping magazines, his dented workman’s lunch box and a green metal thermos. His dog, Rita, was in her usual spot, curled on an old pillowcase beneath his seat, safe from falling objects. The three of us literally clattered down the road, creating a jangling chorus every time we hit a bump and jostled Grandpa’s collection of things that might come in handy someday.
When we turned off Carmel Valley Road south onto Highway 1 and entered Big Sur, nature woke up and suddenly started doing the can-can. Everywhere I looked, the jagged mountains were tumbling into the sea, like rockslides frozen in free fall—still yet dramatic at the same time. We navigated a thin, winding ribbon of road hundreds of feet above the exploding surf. I rolled the window down, and heard sea lions barking and waves booming into sea caves below. The spicy aroma of sage mixed with sea salt wafted into the truck. We dipped down into forests where the air dropped ten degrees and the massive redwood trees clustered together in tribal circles, then we burst back into the sun again. I twisted my head in every direction, trying not to miss a thing.
“There’s one!” Grandpa said, pointing toward the ocean.
“One what?”
“Whales. Look for their spouts.”
I squinted harder at the blueness.
“There it goes again!”
Grandpa was now driving with his head turned all the way to the right. I grabbed the armrest as he went around a tight left turn, but he stayed perfectly centered in his lane while he stared at the ocean. He’d driven this stretch of Highway 1 so many times he didn’t need sight to navigate it.
“Where?” I scanned the horizon, but it looked just as blank as it had a second ago.
“It should come up again, right about there,” he said, pointing farther south. “Sometimes you see two spouts, a little one next to a big one, then you know it’s a mama whale with a calf.”
As if on command, a white spray shot into the air from beneath the surface, and a beat later, a smaller one, just off to the right of the first.
“I saw it!” I yelped.
A turkey vulture circled effortlessly overhead on six-foot wings, its black feathers spread out at the wing tips like individual fingers. It was so huge it cast a shadow over the road as it passed above. I rolled the window down more, and the wind ruffled my hair as I looked up at the red of its head. We watched it glide above a cove with water the color of jade and kelp fronds waving on the surface.
“There’s where you catch abalone,” Grandpa said, pointing to the inlet.
“How?”
“You dive down with an abalone iron. You gotta get it under the shell quick, otherwise the abalone feel you doing something and clamp down on the rock.”
“Does it taste good?”
“Yeah, if you hammer it first.”
Sounded a little gross to me. I returned to whale spotting, but the ocean was a blank slate once again.
“See those two rocks?” he said, pointing to two triangular peaks jutting two stories high, less than twenty yards offshore. “I almost crashed right into them.”
Grandpa unscrewed the cup on his thermos and held it out to me—my signal to fill it with scalding chicory coffee. Then he settled into one of his Cannery Row fishing stories. Grandpa used to fish alone in his own skiff for sardines and sell them to the canneries, but it was hard to compete with the large Italian family-run fishing crews, and he had to catch lots of fish to make any money. One day his friend Speedy Babcock told him there was more money for less effort in salmon.
“I had never fished salmon before, and Speedy said he’d teach me,” he said.
They left Monterey for Santa