Cannery Row. It felt strange to be standing in a place he’d imagined so clearly in his mind, stranger to find that it resembled his idea of it almost not at all. Maybe in the daylight it would seem more like the Cannery Row depicted in John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name. But now, at night, it felt more like an arcade at a county fair, all bright lights and tourists.

You’re just tired, he told himself. And he was. He should have just had dinner and gone to bed, venturing out after sleeping off some of his jet lag. But he’d been unable to rest, knowing that Cannery Row was only blocks away. Finally, overcome by the irrational fear that either it or he might not survive the night, he’d gone out to see it for himself.

To his left, a large brick wall was painted with a mural of a whale. Next door, a dive flag flapped over the entrance to a shop offering 10% OFF OPEN WATER TRAINING: PADI CERTIFICATION. On his right, a hotel rose up from the street, the balconies of its rooms overlooking the Pacific. There used to be a cannery there, he thought vaguely.

There had once been many canneries on the street named for the abundance of processing facilities that had lined every inch of it. Now there were none. They had been replaced by shops selling T-shirts, dolphin figurines, doughnuts. There was a Starbucks, a Bubba Gump’s, an ATM. Hudson felt slightly ill.

What did you expect? he asked himself. He knew Cannery Row was a tourist attraction, visited by people who mostly had probably never even heard of John Steinbeck or his famous book. They came for souvenirs, postcards, earrings, and boxes of fudge that had nothing whatever to do with the Row and its history. Maybe they would pick up a replica of one of the old cannery signs, hang it in a kitchen or den, and never think about it again. “Oh, that,” they would say if someone happened to ask. “We got that in Monterey. There’s the nicest shop. I bought a picture frame made out of seashells.”

He was being more than a little bitter, he knew. But he couldn’t help it. The commodification of history angered him. “But isn’t that what Steinbeck himself was doing?” Marty had once argued when Hudson was on a tear about the indignity of having a gift shop at Ellis Island. “Didn’t he manufacture a Cannery Row to fit his story?”

It wasn’t the same, Hudson had argued. And it wasn’t. Steinbeck hadn’t invented a sanitized Cannery Row for public consumption. He’d written about it as it was, merely changing a few names. This was different. This was Cannery Row as strip mall, with all of the real history stripped away to make room for snow globes and key rings.

He tried not to think about it as he walked, looking for what might remain of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. He looked for it in the windows of the stores that lined the street, seeing nothing that Steinbeck would recognize in the T-shirts (did that one really say HARRY OTTER?) and baseball caps and mountains of knickknacks presented for consumption. Even the smell was wrong, the stink of fish and oil replaced by the aroma of mocha vanilla lattes and potpourri.