Riding: Just to make sure

I had no idea there was such a place as San Ardo until about fifteen
minutes ago, when the cold began to penetrate even my leather gloves to an extent
which threatened to render my hands useless-a thing much to be avoided when
riding a motorcycle, and particularly when one is in the midst of a search for
the essential California library. I didn’t find what I was looking for further
north, and had to come this way home in hope of scaring up something
interesting. What I have scared up is a pretty good case of rider’s hypothermia from
having gone two hours at high speed in the cold fog of dawn. The first
symptom of the ailment is the inability to form concrete thoughts; I decided to pull
over when I could no longer make sense of the speedometer.

Notwithstanding this, I could make out the sign for the town; read the
name, note the population (some 576 souls) and see, a little ways beyond the
first bend, a gas station and general store, and across from that, the
Mexican-food joint where I now sit, warming my hands over a plate of
huevos-con-chorizo
very much like my own mother used to make. I am the only customer, but that
says nothing about a café in the sticks: breakfast is early here, lunch the
usual time, and I have come between the two events.

After the meal I saunter outside to sit on the porch in the glare of the
warming sun; the street is a dusty lane whose background is an artist’s study
of grassy hills and oaks in one direction and the commencement of endless
tilled fields in the other, with the inevitable railroad tracks lining off to the
horizon. This is Steinbeck country; we are hard by the banks of the Salinas,
a river he knew well. He has his George and Lennie spend their first night
along the banks of the Salinas before looking for work on a ranch that could
have been within a stone’s throw of where I sit, waiting for the sunshine and the
breakfast to bring me around again. I am waiting for a clear head because
there is something in this town I want to see, though I didn’t know that an hour
ago.

On my way off the 101, stiff as new lumber and hungry, I spotted a small
building on the left side of the road that lead to the café. A closer look
told me it was an animal of the species I hunt with varying degrees of success.
It was a library, but I was too cold and dazed to give it more than a look
before heading to a warmer spot.

The waitress doesn’t speak English. When I ask her when the library
opens she says, “Yes,” then hands me another cup of coffee. Outside, the clock on
my motorcycle tells me it is almost ten. A lot of libraries open at ten in
the morning. I stroll across the street to the grocery store, buy a lottery
ticket and a pack of mints. A battered truck drives up for gas; a man who
could have been Lennie cranks open the door, exposing a friend who could pass for
George and a dog whose appearance is somewhere between the two of them. The
dog approaches my beckoning hand, gives it a lick like the dog I have left at
home.

Back on the other side of the road my motorcycle starts without complaint
and falls immediately into rhythm; hot motorcycles run well. This one will
get a lot hotter before I sleep at home, three hundred miles down the road-but
that’s tonight and it isn’t even lunch yet and I’ve got a library to look for.

A bit nearer to the river the little rectangle awaits me; the tiny lot
before it is empty of cars. I turn the bike down the road to waste some time.
Surrounding the library is a jumble of dwellings most of which would be
flattered to be called shacks; here and there an immobile trailer-house squats
disconsolately among weeds, junk and cottonwoods; this is a poor place, a place
nobody would live who could live elsewhere. I turn back down the street, which
is not really a street but a rough paving over raw dirt at whose end the fields
commence, fields whose existence is the reason for the houses, whose
existence is the reason for the poorness of the houses, whose existence is the
governing factor for the state of the town: agriculture has not enriched the people
of San Ardo.

The library waits for me at the corner of the optimistically-named
College Street in a place where few inhabitants can have escaped to any university.
I step up to the window, look through the glass; it is a library after all;
and that thing alone erases the cold suffering of the morning and the gloom of
this sad little town. Through the glass I see the shelves with their regular
arrangement of books; something that might be a circulation desk, or perhaps
the reference area-I imagine the librarian seated there, waiting, helping,
being herself at her work, bringing light to the town, and especially to the
children who must live here. I wonder if she recommends any of Steinbeck’s
childhood favorites; perhaps she keeps a copy of Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’ at hand
for some bright boy to enjoy.

While I am imagining the librarian at work, perhaps wishing myself to be
at that desk, the sound of tires on gravel brings me back to the world; there
is a car in the lot, but only to make a turn. It disappears and leaves me to
the view in the window, but this time I notice the sign which says the library
is open three days a week, and today is not one of them. I run a finger over
the message as if to make sure that it is real, then stand for a long time on
the porch of the library looking through the glass at the books and the desk
and the other important, precious things which I will not be able to taste
today.

Finally I pull myself away, pace off the distance of the little
rectangle, which seems to be about thirty feet across its front; I need to know this
somehow; knowing things, keeping facts is something a librarian does, and I need
to have something of this place in mind as I go on with the day, something to
salve the disappointment. Knowing the size of the place is a small thing,
but it is mine to keep. On my way back to the motorcycle I gaze a final time at
the window and realize that I have smudged the glass with my face; my
handkerchief erases the mark and then I am back on the road with many hours to go
before the day is over and I can think of these things without worrying about the
truck in the rear-view mirror.

Still, I think of the place through the long miles: It occurs to me that
this may be the library I have been looking for all along, the one which
holds the soul of California as part of its collection. This library sits, a tidy
box among shacks, on the dust-blown main road of a hamlet whose residents
must look to it for any hope and cheer they cannot find in meager wages or the
product of the liquor store. Right here where Steinbeck walked, where he put
his stories, is a little nest of hope, a vaccine against despair and emptiness,
courtesy of the County of Monterey, which manages to cast a net of these
libraries across the span of its jurisdiction, because they know that is what
libraries are for. A tiny place in a tiny town, open just enough hours to keep the
devil at a distance, at least for those who would shun his works. Imagine
it: a library in a place like San Ardo. The very name of the place is a cheap
truncation, as though they couldn’t afford more letters for the sign. Places
like San Ardo do not have libraries; they cannot afford them, and larger
governments don’t often waste time on hamlets with a handful of voters. But they
did here; here they plunked down a real library in a place that doesn’t have a
motel or sidewalks, a place where you park where you want because there isn’t
any clear line to mark where the street ends and the front yard begins. In
this kind of place, here in California, the government of the county has put a
librarian to work, doing what librarians do, working her desk for any patron as
if he was the mayor of Salinas, population 123,000 more than this little
burg.

And maybe that’s what the soul of the library is: the idea behind it,
the executed concept, the operative theme with its gears showing through the
front glass, even when it’s a Monday morning and the place doesn’t open for
another two days. Maybe that’s what the whole thing means, and I didn’t have to go
all the way to the weedy banks of the Salinas on a chill morning to find it
out. But I went anyway, and I’m likely to go again. Just to make sure next
time. Just to make sure.