This doesn’t surprise her, though. Relief is not dry land, but a moment on the tide charts, an interlude between drownings. There was a time when she didn’t know how to save herself, didn’t know how to swim back to shore. A long stretch of time—the 1950s through the 1970s—when, in the wake of the inevitable sardine decline, she would pace the remnants of Cannery Row and find herself at fault. Exhibits A through Z: the warehouse fires springing up twice a year as if on schedule, milk-eyed windows, graffiti-veined walls, weeds and pigeons, the abandonment made infinitely more unsettling by the small businesses that attempted to capitalize on the few visitors the Row continued to receive. A History of Monterey wax museum in which the models “breathed” via pneumatic lungs, an antique shop with nearly two hundred doll heads in the window, an art gallery selling coarsely executed oil paintings of naked people riding dolphins, a restaurant that consisted solely of a dented Weber and a trio of lawn chairs.
Worst of all was her father’s old cannery. It had come back into her possession, but she wasn’t sure what to do with it. The time wasn’t right. The world was far too satisfied in its conventionality and then far too satisfied in its iconoclasm, neither of which was ideal for what she had in mind. She found ways to pass the years: a marriage and a divorce, and then another round of both. She invested her father’s fortune and watched the original sum acquire a tail of self-replicating zeroes, the money sprouting like polyps. She made strategic donations to local causes, kissed the occasional rear end. She made the mistake of taking a course in business ethics at the local community college. She was elected and reelected to the city council. She invited Arthur and Tino to her house every so often and pretended to listen to them talk. For a while, she even thought about leaving town again, about finding somewhere entirely new: a language she didn’t know, a quality of light that confused her. But then—it was 1977; she recalls this distinctly because an aquarium called Ocean Park opened that year in Hong Kong—the tides began to change. Monterey began to lose its mind. It didn’t surprise her; she had always suspected that too many years beneath the region’s trademark variant of fog bore the potential not just of physical discomfort but of psychological damage, and now there were stories in the paper along these lines. The death of an otherwise unthreatening preteen, an empty swimming pool and a peaked roof and the great distance between the two, the body of a young boy found in a house in Carmel Valley high up in the rattlesnake-infested hills, the Pebble Beach woman who, bruised and cut from nightly beatings, shot her husband in the cheek and then turned the gun on herself. Stories of a failed local restaurateur attempting to stave off financial ruin by hiring an Israeli contract killer to murder his wealthy parents in their sleep. Stories of a veterinarian in Seaside slaying two waitresses and having them secretly cremated alongside a Doberman named Fancy.
The entire peninsula, in other words, was breaking apart. And she was just the one to fix it.
So she finally began to set things in motion. Arthur and Tino were on board, as were the scientists at Hopkins, many of whom were persuaded to leave the institute to work alongside her. There was some generalized resistance at first, just as there had been in her father’s day. The fishing fleets feared the fickle interference of tourism; the historical preservationists wanted everything to stay the way they presumed Steinbeck would have wanted it; the residents of Monterey and Pacific Grove moaned about traffic and parking. Permits were another issue. The old cannery from which the aquarium was to be fashioned straddled the border of the two towns in question, which meant that permission had to be granted from each municipality, a bureaucratic quagmire that nearly derailed the project before it even began.
Work, then. Work unlike any that had come before, that made her apprenticeships to Anders and Ricketts seem frivolous in comparison. Dark mornings, sweaty afternoons, weepy nights. A cast of humans to manage, but also a cast of fish and plants, none of them quite as amenable as one would like. Lingcods devouring the black-eyed gobies, sea otters using any object within reach to make deep, irreparable gouges in the three-story acrylic windows, seven gill sharks bashing their snouts against the tank walls and refusing to eat unless a sushi-grade salmon steak was clipped to a pole, dangled directly beneath their mouths, and made to thrash around in imitation of a live fish. A sea turtle was acquired from an aquarium in Japan, its suspiciously low price explained when, after its painstaking installation into a million-gallon exhibit, it attempted to mate with one of the volunteer divers. And the turtle wasn’t the only one. The aquarists, too, couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Almost every time she went into the service corridors behind the tanks, she would find a new couple going at it in the darkness: up against the filters and fiberglass, shirts off, pants down, the fish bearing witness.