Field trip, anyone? I assume you were not crazy enough to drive 1700 miles (2735 km) for Thanksgiving week, leave that to me. You might enjoy the sights vicariously, though, since that’s much of what you’ll get this week, with the occasional commentary if my happy but exhausted brain allows. Let me say first: I will never tire of the beauty of this country, in all its variety. It is simply breathtaking.

The photos were mostly shot with an iPhone through the car window, but they did capture, however out – of – focus, the glorious varieties of landscapes when driving from wet Portland, Oregon,

to sunny Paso Robles, California.

We took a route that went by Klamath Falls offering views of the Cascades and later Siskiyou mountains. Glorious pine forests, first snow on mountains,

large fields and a lot of farming or logging related industrial structures.

Evidence of the catastrophic forest fires from last year was visible everywhere. Every small town we drove through also had signs up thanking the firefighters.

A night in Redding, CA separated the two days each of the drive South and North,

after the majestic beauty of Mount Shasta – and the desperate drought of its adjacent lakes – greeted you on arrival in California.

Soon the landscape consisted of fruit orchards, and vineyards upon vineyards, once you hit 101 south.

The coloration was intense, as was the patterning.

Occasionally agriculture gave way to oil extraction, as here in the region of San Ardo.

But then field after field of vegetables. John Steinbeck country – with a Steinbeck museum we did not have time to visit in Salinas. The novelist’s themes of powerlessness and economic injustice, and the uncertainty of the future were paralleled in the work of one of the most important economists of all time, whose birthday is today: Happy Birthday, Friedrich Engels! His writings on wage labor, exploitation and the effects of unionization (stabilizing real wage levels) are as true today as they were in the 19th century.

“For most of the last forty years, pay in the United States has stagnated for all but the highest-paid workers, and inequality has risen dramatically. The share of workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement dropped from 27 percent to 11.6 percent between 1979 and 2019, meaning the union coverage rate is now less than half where it was forty years ago. Research shows that de-unionization accounts for a sizable share of the growth in inequality over that period — around 13–20 percent for women and 33–37 percent for men. Applying these shares to annual earnings data reveals that working people are now losing the order of $200 billion per year as a result of the erosion of union coverage over the last four decades — with that money being redistributed upward, to the rich.” (Ref.)

That does not even touch, of course, the issues with undocumented migrant labor in the fields of California.

Eventually we made our way – remind me never ever again to drive on the day before Thanksgiving – in the dark to our destination: a rented house called The Farm on some remote 120 acres on a hill. We woke up to this view the next morning – more on that in the next installment.

Music today honors the field workers around Salinas, CA.