Trask ranch (Sanchez place)
The Trask ranch, known originally as the Sanchez place, was the core of a ten-thousand-acre Spanish grant that had dwindled over generations through gambling, taxes, and the purchase of luxuries. The nine hundred remaining acres straddled the Salinas River and tucked into the foothills on both sides, at a point where the valley narrows and then opens out again. The original Sanchez house, built of adobe with walls four feet thick and round pole rafters tied with rawhide, stood in a tiny opening in the foothills fed by a precious ever-running spring of sweet water. Huge live oaks shaded the miniature valley, and the earth had a richness and greenness foreign to this part of the country. The house seemed to have grown out of the earth, but when Adam first saw it, Bordoni, the Swiss owner, was using it as a cow barn, with his cows putting their heads out the deep recessed windows.
Purchase and Adam's Vision
Adam Trask refused to buy in a hurry, but Bordoni, childless and longing for his Alpine past after his wife died, knew Adam was going to buy the land long before Adam knew it. Adam drove and rode and walked over every foot of the land, put a post-hole auger down through the subsoil, examined the small wild plants, and knelt in damp places to examine game tracks. He threaded among willows and sycamores and wild blackberry vines in the riverbed, patting the trunks of live oak and scrub oak, madrone, laurel, and toyon. After struggling all night with his thoughts, he drove out and shook hands with Bordoni, and the Sanchez place was his. He planned a permanent seat, a place in which to plant his dynasty. The manure was scraped out, the old floors torn up, neck-rubbed window casings ripped away, and new sweet wood—pine sharp with resin and velvety redwood—went in, along with a new roof of long split shakes. A gardener trimmed the ancient roses, planted geraniums, laid out the vegetable flat, and brought the living spring in little channels to wander back and forth through the garden. Adam foretasted comfort for himself and his descendants. In a shed, covered with tarpaulins, lay the crated heavy furniture sent from San Francisco.
Abandonment and Decay
After Cathy shot Adam and left, the unfinished Sanchez house lay open to wind and rain, and the new floorboards buckled and warped with moisture. The laid-out vegetable gardens rioted with weeds. Adam drew into himself, clothed in a viscosity that slowed his movements and held his thoughts down. He was aware of the twins because he heard them cry and laugh, but he felt only a thin distaste for them; to Adam they were symbols of his loss. Neighbors drove up into his little valley, but they could do nothing with the cloud that hung over him, and before long they stopped coming. The ranch remained fallow for years, a monument to his shattered dreams. Samuel Hamilton, visiting, wondered that Adam did not feel a shame at leaving that land fallow, and Adam replied that he had no reason to plant it. The land, like the man, lay unused, a waste that Samuel, who could never afford such waste, found deeply troubling.
Later Years and Legacy
Years later, after Adam moved to Salinas, the ranch was rented to a tenant, Rantani, a Swiss Italian who put nearly five hundred acres under cultivation. Cal, who had always liked the place, considered running it after he finished school, and Aron, in his homesickness at Stanford, dreamed of returning to live there with Abra, remembering the great oaks and the clear living air, the clean sage-laced wind from the hills and the brown oak leaves scudding. The ranch remained a symbol of a lost Eden, a place of potential that was never fully realized, a physical reminder of the dreams that had been shattered and the hopes that had been abandoned.
