The sky was clear, the moon just shy of full and the stars glinting against the blackness. The sea murmured steadily. In the darkness, if you didn’t know you were next to the ocean, it would be possible to mistake the water for a vast field of grass with the wind soughing through it.

As he watched, a figure emerged from the waves and came toward shore. The heavy-footed walk reminded him of the Creature from the Black Lagoon movies he’d loved as a kid. This creature, however, carried a set of fins in one hand and a flashlight in the other. As it neared Hudson’s rock, he saw moonlight reflected off a face mask and heard the dull clinking of metal against the tank strapped to the diver’s back.

“Evening,” the man said as he passed.

Hudson wanted to ask him what he’d seen in the water, but conversation would have broken the mood. He was content to nod silently and let the diver be on his way. Alone again, he looked out into the night and thought about why he had come there.

No, Cannery Row was not what he had hoped. And part of him had known that it wouldn’t be. Places changed. Nothing as fragile as Steinbeck’s Cannery Row—a world that depended for its survival on an industry that died out almost as quickly as it had sprung up—could have survived the changing American landscape of the past sixty years. Mack, Doc, and the others could not live in what Monterey had become since the days when a man could set up house inside a discarded boiler or live on the money earned from catching frogs.

He imagined what Steinbeck would think of the new Monterey. Probably he would hate it, he thought. But perhaps not. The writer was, after all, fascinated by the progress of the human spirit. But not progress that resulted in emptiness, Hudson argued with himself, in a lack of spirit and absence of fire. Shopping, he was almost certain, would not be high on Steinbeck’s list of human accomplishments.

And what of Ed Ricketts, the marine biologist who had so inspired Steinbeck, both in his writing and in his own deep interest in the ocean. Could he exist in modern-day Monterey? Hudson imagined him walking down Cannery Row, a collecting bucket in each hand. He saw him coming to the edge of the ocean, scouring the rocks for the tiny creatures he spent his life observing.

Ricketts would have loved a night like this. Perhaps he would have rolled his pants to the knee and walked into the water in search of octopuses. Or maybe he would have just sat—as Hudson was—admiring the largeness of the sea and thinking that there was time enough later for work.

Steinbeck and Ricketts. The two men had haunted him like ghosts for the past year, filling his thoughts and walking through his dreams. Now, seated in their backyard, he wished they would appear before him and answer his questions. That would make what he had to do so much easier.