I went back to Monterey a couple months ago, as we hurtled toward the vernal equinox, the peninsula of my birth, bahía de los pinos, bay of the pines, home of the California constitutional convention, desecrated burial site of St. Junipero Serra, etc. etc. She who, as the Berthold monument in Friendly Plaza poetically informs us, dreams by the ocean side. 
While the elements making Friendly Plaza are a definite chronological hodgepodge, we have one brave creator of internet content who’s gonna reckon around the 1840s, when Colton Hall next door was erected. Apart from this adjacent history, there is no way to date the Plaza to the 19th century, much less before the dawn of yankee imperial expansion from the east into California. I would figure folks hung out here but any supposition of activity nor construction would be a total lie on my part—so let’s get to what is known. 
Southwestern periphery of plaza, exiting via brick path that spills out toward entrance of Colton Hall: Huge piece of granite with a bronze rectangular plaque headed by the circular great seal of the state of California—I mean THE GREAT SEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, which was designed by Major Robert Selden Garnett, U.S. Army. This all makes sense—the constitutional convention happened a few dozen feet away in 1849, inside, where they would have had to have chosen a seal and apparently went ahead with this one. That all happened right here! I’m not gonna say I’m super thrilled about the seal. It’s cool that it’s got a bear on it and at the time there probably even still were some California grizzlies, but that is far from the point. The point is quite probably the point that Richard Brautigan might have been making after he passed through Monterey in the years after this monument was dropped onto Friendly Plaza in 1857 and when he wrote A Confederate General from Big Sur: the people who founded this state were members of the military who were sent to subdue, occupy, and colonize land—land that recently was already, mere decades before, taken by imperialists who had used Jesus to justify the theft—and when these men founded this land for the white true inheritors of the continent and after they got to know it they went back to fight in the Civil War, and he who designed the GREAT SEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA fought in the Confederate Army—against the United States, but for the salvation of the country’s whiteness. He was the first general officer to fall in the “war between the states.” So maybe you can handle all of that—but why was the monument “erected,” as we say in the parlance of monuments, clear into the 20th century, barely collecting dust by the time young Richard Brautigan romped through, still a raging military town at the time, Monterey, California. The California Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy not only existed in May 4, 1957, they funded, constructed, moved, I assume got a permit (right?), and held a ceremony letting everybody ever that came to this park in the future know Hey—you know the dude who designed the seal of the California, you know, THE GREAT SEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, that fellow wanted to prolong slavery, he left this beautiful land upon which you stand to fight for the continued subjugation of an entire population of the country 3,000 miles away, and he died to preserve the right of another man to own, use and break the body of another man. I am not telling you this to tell you he fought in vain—I am telling you this to tell you that this man died a hero, this man exists on the right side of history. When they left this rock with its bronze plaque on the lawn of the former capital building, I should note, the seal was less cool since the California grizzly was extinct, save one last bear named Monarch captured at the behest of William Randolph Hearst, held in captivity for years, and stuffed and mounted in 1911 upon its death. This is not so much the point that Richard Brautigan may have made in the writing of the novel, but instead a rather straightforward reading of this plaque which desperately needs its own plaque, a fucking explanation other than the tacit one it perpetuates: it is not even coded that this is a society intended only for those who believe themselves to be the true citizens, i.e. the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, you will find this etched in bronze and affixed to stone in the most important of spaces. To those who experience bliss and transcendence as the pacific expanse crashes dramatically against gnarled rock, spraying salty mist on the tilting pines hovering above, hearing the spirits of the bodies that have bled into the earth for the centuries, for those that come to this place and see this insistence on the divisions of white supremacy, it all seems a little cartoonish. You have come to the foggy crest on the splashing abyss and you call yourselves the daughters of the Confederacy as though you weren’t misty spirits yourselves floating among the pines. 
Beyond that 1849-1957 Richard Brautigan wormhole there is also a tree that went to the moon and back—no fucking joke. And if you don’t know now you know: 
It’s a Coast Redwood, sent to the moon as an embryo, germinated in Placerville, and planted here, Friendly Plaza, Monterey, California, in honor of the 200-year anniversary of the declaration of this country’s independence. To everyone’s surprise nearly all of the seeds germinated even though their containers burst open upon reentry during the decontamination process. There is likely a tree near you that has been to the moon! 
Another fun fact: Monterey was founded in 1776 by white Europeans, and then settled by their descendants—and yet the tree is to commemorate the signing of a document that occurred 3,000 miles away as part of a separate history that would not effect this one for nearly a century. It’s fun to think about the pieces of this puzzle—ever-movable pockets of colonizers, first fleeing for freedom, for purpose, maybe escape, or just adventure, they establish themselves, time passes, they cut the cord from the forces that helped them get started, and in turn their progeny use this new colonial base to launch a new campaign—from Washington D.C. to Monterey and to the moon and back the great game of chess continues—it is the destiny of whoever turns out to be the one to capture all the bases. Right now the United States military holds the hill above Monterey—even its own citizens cannot pierce its threshold, not even to say hello, see what’s going on in there, or avoid an hour long hike to get a goddamn sandwich.
IN THE MANTLE OF OLD TRADITIONS,
IN THE RIME OF A VANISHED DAY,
THE SHROUDED AND SILENT CITY
SITS BY HER CRESCENT IN THE BAY
Don’t trust anybody who tells you they know what Monterey means. The tourist economy, the conference economy, the Esselen/Asilomar/whatever neo-Imperialism pseudointellectual justification of perpetual theft. Read the California State Parks interpretation of the sleepy Mexican capital, becoming the sleepy capital of briefly independent Alta California, invaded and turned into the sleepy capital of the American West, abandoned for the gold rush, left for a century—great care has been made by the state parks to preserve the gardens. Walk the gardens, the Path of History. See the military presence and connect it with imperial past, first the simultaneous creation of missionary and presidio, then the capital of Mexican’s claim on Alta California so far away, then the site of the constitutional convention that allowed a few people in a tiny place the opportunity to thrust the rule of a government 3,000 miles away upon this land and is people, then the language learning capital of the military allowing after September 11th, 2001 the justification to restrict entrance to the cusp of Monterey, disallowing access and free flow for anyone formerly lucky to live so high up, now only able to go down the hill to get anywhere.
Don’t trust anyone who tells you that they are on the other side of a history based on theft, that this version of Monterey is anything but arbitrary, that there exists no alternate history in which all of the streets that ascend the hill are not named from presidents of the United States but instead the Californios who held their ground, named for Tiburcio Vasquez—imagine that he was allowed to stay in the town of his birth instead of fleeing and rampaging from San Jose to Los Angeles, murdering and stealing from the murderers and thieves who had just arrived and declared all that they saw to be theirs.
The spaces that we leave are the spaces that tell the real complicated story, and that is why Friendly Plaza is a ground zero of meaning. As I write from 1,000 miles away I cannot sit on its grasses or recline on its benches. Instead my mind like a mist occupies the different spaces simultaneously. I see me and my friends in 2006 drinking beer and waiting to go to a party. I see myself in 2003 reading on that same bench, considering going back to class, but maybe not. We would see the woman in charge of enforcing attendance in her fabled van—literally her last names was “Gates”—as 10th graders in backpacks (a rookie choice, giving anyone away as a refugee from public school) sprinted down Pacific and threw themselves over the fence into the garden of the Larkin House, an historic adobe, moments before the van turned the corner, suddenly having lost them, that primordial story of the briefly free and those who want to imprison them.
I see myself peeing on the moon tree late at night, not sure if it’s disrespect or union with cosmic forces, returning the water to the land that came from the sky to the roots of the tree that had been to moon—I’m going to say the latter because a fellow’s got to live with himself.
I did not read the space of Friendly Plaza like a text as I do now, years later, nearly two states away—I enjoyed the space for its utility, the abstractness of its deep meaning, its ancient restroom on the other side of City Hall, the well-kept shrubbery—I used the space instead to consume text, for books are free in Monterey, whether from the library visible from Friendly Plaza, from Ed Leeper’s Liquid Books, diligently laid out on his handmade bookshelves at the corner of Franklin and Alvarado every Tuesday Farmer’s Market, or from the half dozen charity shops in Pacific Grove, the enclave pushed further into the ocean, so shrouded in mist that it makes Monterey on certain days look like Southern California in comparison. These books are not free, but they do not cost more than a dollar. In the town that gave Steinbeck his break, that gave him Ed Ricketts, the inspirations for his first great works, books should be free.
On my last day in Monterey I found an old paperback copy of Cup of Gold, Steinbeck’s unflinching ode to Captain Henry Morgan, as well as a hard-copy of the Steinbeck House cookbook (lots of artichoke recipes), and a couple outfits for less than 10 bucks. The lady at the St. Vincent De Paul store said she unfortunately hadn’t been to the Steinbeck House in Oldtown Salinas since the ’90s because apparently it hasn’t been safe to visit Salinas for 20 years. The daughters of the confederacy failed what was once the center of white Monterey’s civilization—birthplace of Steinbeck, jailing site of Cesar Chavez, where Marlon Brando acted out Steinbeck’s epic East of Eden. Did I mention that Pacific Grove has a curfew of 10 o’clock for those not yet 18 years old?
I had to drive back toward Salinas but traffic was picking up and the weather was nice and there was one more goodbye I maybe wanted to make—I found myself on Pacific approaching Jefferson. I pulled over after the intersection and got out with my copy of Cup of Gold. I walked across the grass to use the historic restroom, and returned to that grass to begin the book.
Though I never read the texts of Friendly Plaza, they all reverberate at once now as I visit the place in my imagination, gathering the photos of the monuments, the texts I have consumed there, and my memories of being in that place where the land was not taken to justify those who took the land—it was left to tell an askew story, the one Richard Brautigan found on the monument to Major Robert Seldon Garnett: those who do not value the transcendent beauty of this place will always be the ones to possess it. But it will never really be theirs. As long as history remains physically right next to a present that negates the history, the whites who have colonized this haunted land will lead half lives, lives without guilt because nobody was ever wronged here, lives without mystery because they prefer golf courses to pine groves, lives without meaning because the truth is horrifying, and they have gentrified the spaces where that freedom to the tell the truth endured.
But the poem is there, written by a man who, though white, understood there once was a people here before, their spirit and stories still endured, and some californios physically remained alongside the property taken from them, their voices echo even if you cannot hear them:
OF THE OIL AND THE WINE AND THE PLENTY,
AND THE DANCE IN TWILIGHT GRAY,
“AH, THESE,” AND THE HEAD SHAKES SADLY,
“WERE GOOD TIMES IN MONTEREY.”
An Unauthorized Guide to the parks of the world 
Andrew! Jaymee shared your essay on FB. It is illuminating and brilliant- thank you! I think so we’ll if you-and wish happiness❤️