Two mountain ranges frame the Salinas Valley. The Gabilan Mountains to the east are full of sun, as welcoming as a mother’s embrace, while the Santa Lucia Mountains to the west are brooding and dark. A river that runs through the valley, also called the Salinas, often floods and destroys homes. The valley itself is leveled by its past as the bottom of an inlet from the sea. Fertile and large, the valley hosts spectacular springs of beautiful flowers blooming so vividly and tall that a person can’t even see someone else walking through. In the extremely dry summers that characterize the valley, the ground cracks up and becomes dust. Life in the valley is a gamble. Sometimes the rain is plentiful, while other times droughts ruin people’s lives for many years.

Several societies had lived in the Salinas Valley. After the Indians came the Spaniards and then the Americans. The narrator dismisses the time of the Indians as unsophisticated in comparison to the Spaniards, who conquered vast swaths of land and named the valley. When the Americans took over, they changed the names to reflect people and events. During the arduous first American settlement, the narrator’s grandfather settled with his wife near King City.