The valley between two ranges

An overture chapter. The narrator remembers the Salinas Valley in Northern California, a long swale between two ranges: the Gabilans to the east, "light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness", and the Santa Lucias to the west, "dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous", from which he takes "a dread of west and a love of east". The Salinas is only a part-time river, a destroyer in wet winters and gone underground by summer. He catalogues the valley's flowers — lupins edged with white, poppies the colour of liquid gold, mustard tall enough to hide a man on horseback — and the thirty-year cycle in which rich years are always forgotten during dry ones. Then the valley's history: the Indians, the Spaniards who had to name everything they saw, the Americans who took the land and remade the laws. It closes with his grandfather settling the foothills east of King City.

The valley is given its character before any person arrives: an east that invites and a west that broods, a river that destroys and then vanishes underground, and a rainfall cycle that makes people forget whichever years they are not living in. The naming history explains how the land came to be owned at all.