Going Again to Big Sur
Excerpted from Vanishing America, in Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes
Just south of the Carmel River, a field of artichokes ran down to the beach where surfers risked cold waves heaving against black rocks. Beyond that point the land shed its California trappings, including Carmel’s pastel bungalows, and the continent seemed to tilt upward and to the right. The place was one perpetual edge, I thought, where ordinary concerns paled before the prospect of gravity and its effects. To live was to cling to the mountain and view things in a vertical perspective that surpassed what was commonly considered beautiful; it was to feel the heat of a persistent sun, to smell eucalyptus and red dust, and to hear – when the wind was right – the reverberation of waves in rocky crypts hundreds of feet below.
It was 1963 and there was no town of Big Sur, just an unincorporated collection of wooden structures that included a gas station, a store, a campground and a bar or two. Here the Los Padres National Forest, which included much of the Santa Lucia Range, touched the highway. Hairy, bundled figures not yet labeled “countercultural” hooked their thumbs in the clear air, hitchhiking to what I could not imagine, since the next 60 miles of coast looked empty on the map.
Some were bound for Nepenthe’s, a bar and restaurant that became somewhat famous when it appeared in “The Sandpiper,” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. But for the moment Big Sur was not widely celebrated. It languished in a happy sociological trough between the demise of the Beat Generation and the advent of San Francisco’s “summer of love,” which, in a few years, would bring thousands of day-trippers west for experiences that had nothing to do with literature or nature.
Nepenthe’s offered a fine view, as well as black bread and hot soup. The habitués existed on the proceeds of trust funds set up in eastern cities, according to my friend, another wayward post-grad at Stanford University. They billed themselves as artists, but the real article could be found a mile farther down the road, at the Big Sur Inn, a ramshackle but charming collection of houses up against the mountain, made of redwood scraps, with steeply pitched roofs, cunning little balconies and elaborate, rustic woodwork signifying a highly idiosyncratic intelligence. It belonged to an old-timer named Deetjen, a Norwegian emigrant who according to his story came south by donkey in the early years of the century and constructed his bucolic kingdom where the road had then petered out. Deetjen’s wife had died, and he had gathered round him enough legends and compliant young visionaries to keep the beds made, the pancakes flipped, and an occasional fire in the hearth.
The tiny bar supported the elbows of various people wrapped in serapes and animal skins, with staffs and bongs, big silver earrings and beards of fierce impenetrability. Deetjen drank jug wine and wandered around the place trailed by his cats, sufficiently drunk to be sociable, if that is the right word. He managed to be contemptuous and friendly at the same time, no small accomplishment.
We slept in a tent and hung out at the inn in the evenings, eager for tales of early derring-do in the literary wilds of Big Sur. It was all marvelously arcane and authentic, and, besides, the girls serving hot tea had about them the woolly concupiscence of apprenticed dharma bums, or so we imagined. We went for a walk with one of them, our breaths freezing in the winter night, our soulful conversation overwhelmed by the intensity of a sky like stretched black plastic riddled with an infinity of bright punctures. The moon broke free of the mountains, spreading a silver film over the broad Pacific, and we had the distinct impression that we could reach out and touch Japan.
Deetjem claimed to disapprove of Henry Miller. That had not prevented the two of them from having long, contentious conversations when Miller lived a few miles down the coast. Deetjen was proud of the association, despite the fact that he often called Miller a “guttersnipe.”
By day we hiked in Partington Canyon, to the south, where a fast stream descended through redwoods to the ocean, in a cove where dramatic rocky overhangs, twisted madrone trees and drifting spray created the visual patina of an Oriental scroll. We waded the creek and found an old tunnel dug through the mountain, full of puddles and broken supports, that opened up onto a secret harbor choked with kelp. Waves rolled in with fearsome power, smashing against the rocks and raising the water level 15 feet in an instant.
An iron cable, snarled and rusted, had once stretched across the harbor’s mouth between bleached wooden bulwarks – a testament to what we were sure had been an illegal port for coolies, opium, and timber. More likely, tanbark had made its way down off the mountains and through the narrow passage to waiting ships. Before the invention of chemicals for tanning hides, the bark of the tan oak tree had created a heady industry in the Northwest and wiped out a lot of forest in the process. Remote Big Sur still had its share of tanbark trees, protected by the inhospitable coast.
A scramble round the rocky headland provided access, at some risk, to tidal pools full of scarlet starfish. I will never forget the sight of a seal floating on its back in the ocean, eating abalone, blissfully indifferent to the human presence. That isolated stretch further revealed a cave that had been used by the coastal Indians a thousand years before, still full of old oyster shells, blackened by smoke and, we discovered, occupied by a young man from New York. His girlfriend lived in a shack up the canyon, he told us. When we asked where he lived, he pointed to his head. “In here.”
The canyon above the highway rose steeply beneath an increasingly dense redwood canopy. Generations of needles packed the narrow path above the rushing water, and the decaying logging camp. I had never stood directly beneath a redwood, and, looking up, was mesmerized by the loss of depth perception. Big band-tailed pigeons streaked across the thin slivers of sunlight. Beyond the treetops, far up the mountain, precipitous grassy bluffs spread skyward, seemingly inaccessible and infused with mystery.
I came back to the Big Sur the next spring with a beautiful girl I had met in Palo Alto. Her name was Penny. We had a drink at the Big Sur Inn but didn’t tarry; I was in love and no longer much interested in the tall tales of a smoldering Norwegian. We camped in Partington Canyon and climbed out onto the rocks, held hands and watched the gray whales migrating south, rising and falling like great ships, so close that we could see the spots on their hides and clearly hear them gasping.
The next day we packed a lunch and scaled those heathery slopes. The magnitude of the hike is difficult to imagine; I am still amazed that we made it. At one point we turned around, confronted the unblinking blue eye of the Pacific and instinctively sat down to avoid falling off the mountain.
We discovered – everything was a discovery – an empty house with tin walls, a neglected asset of the rarely used Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. It didn’t compare with the subsequent discovery, higher up, off state land, of an old shakes-covered cottage with an overgrown grape arbor leaning into the mountain and a hoe rusting in the sun. All we could do was stand and stare at the 40 miles of coastline: To the south, huge headlands tumbled into the sea. Heavy timber clung to the creases and the ridge line, and the bluffs seemed to glow in the midday light.
We knocked on the door of the cottage, but it had been long deserted; faded café curtains covered the windows. The place needed some sympathetic soul to reclaim it, and we talked about doing just that – then, and after we were married, but there were other ambitions to follow.
I often though about that cottage 2,500 feet above the Pacific, and wondered what had become of it. Twenty years later I found myself in California again, on a magazine assignment. I decided to go back to Big Sur. I expected it to now resemble Carmel and was pleasantly surprised to find the village still unincorporated and the hillsides little populated. There were more people living up the canyons, but the precious feeling of isolation had endured. The bartender at Nepenthe’s told me that Big Sur had become middle class, social protest and free love having been replaced by bowling at the Naval Station at Point Sur. Drinking and drugs were still popular, she added, with chardonnay edging out the jugs and cocaine replacing pot as the substance of choice. A new restaurant had opened to meet increased culinary demands, owned by a man who once a week put his television set and some popcorn into his Volvo station wagon and drove north with his wife until they could pick up a favorite television show beamed through a break in the mountains.
Old Deetjen had died in the interim; his inn was managed by a friend who built fires under Henry Miller’s old bathtub and allowed guests to stew in it. The place was as dilapidated as ever. I slept in the cottage called “Chateau Fiasco,” with a display of Hindu bells and an amulet tacked to the wall outside, and a guest book on the table in which a guest had written: “The raccoon in the room at 3 a.m. was quite a surprise, but fortunate in that it woke me up in time to go to Esalen.”
A well-known local painter, Emil White, had opened the Henry Miller Memorial Library in his home down the road. White had grown old in the shadow of those redwoods but had retained a youthful accessibility. People of all ages in Big Sur considered him a kind of local treasure, with justification. White had established the library because he missed Miller and wanted people to have access to his works, and to old photographs reflecting the Big Sur of half a century before.
I drove to Partington Canyon and walked down to the ocean. The tunnel through the mountain had been shored up, a footbridge set across the stream, a fence built to prevent people from rock-scrambling. But otherwise the scene remained unchanged. I hiked up the canyon, and then climbed the steep trail I knew would lead to the abandoned cottage, envisioning a collapsed ruin, or the victim of one of the fires that regularly swept the coast range. I heard a chain saw. From the forest, I could see a bearded young man burning brush near the house, which had a new roof. I could see beet tops in the vegetable garden and beehives on the far slope.
I approached the house, watched by a pair of slate-blue eyes under the bill of a baseball cap held together with baling wire. He wore a ragged T-shirt and work boots, and his expression was neither encouraging nor hostile. I explained why I was trespassing after two decades of curiosity. Instead of ordering me to go back where I had come from, he said, “Let’s take a break.”
We sat in the yard and talked. His name was Jeff and he had stumbled upon the place in 1971, eight years after Penny and I had done the same, and decided he was going to live there. His determination had proven to be a lot stronger than mine. Over the years he had worked as a journalist and for the U.S. Forest Service, until the house and 100 acres came on the market. The property had been homesteaded by a Danish couple back in the ‘20s, he said, and later passed to an aspiring developer who fortunately failed to come up with a method of levitating tourists. Jeff was able to put together a syndicate of friends and family to buy it, and he lived on there alone, supporting himself by running occasional pack trips in the remoter parts of the Los Padres National Forest, over the eastern ridge.
“Everything I accumulated in life has finally come to rest here,” he said. That included a good naturalist’s library, some Indian artifacts, and a CB radio powered by flashlight batteries. Also a burro and a horse happily stamping their feet in the barn farther up the hill, prospering grapevines and fruit trees, canned food in the root cellar, and the joy of waking up every morning in that setting. We shared his bread and spring water, my oranges and chocolate, and the view I remembered so well. “It’s the nicest spot in California,” and I wanted to say the nicest anywhere.
A few more years passed. One summer I drove to California from Washington in a few feverish days. My son, Brennan, grown now, was a student there, and we found ourselves together on the road leading south from Carmel. His long, tousled hair and disdain for sartorial niceties reminded me of people I had seen in Big Sur 25 years before. It gave me pleasure and a renewed sense of awareness to see Brennan’s reactions to the same things that had originally struck me with such force – the breathtaking drop from the highway’s edge, the stands of redwood and the tidal pools of Partington Canyon. At one point he said, “I think I might bring a friend here. A female type.”
We hiked up the mountain the following day, packing fruit and a bottle of Napa cabernet for Jeff Norman. He came warily out of the cottage in cutoff sweat pants. He had, after all, chosen to live there because he valued privacy, and I felt uneasy introducing him to Brennan with a bit of high country formality that seemed to amuse them both.
Jeff showed us the new vines that he had planted and a fire lane that had been cut through the property since I was last there, miraculously saving the house from the most intense flames in 50 years. We drank the wine on his little patio, our eyes straying continually to the view. One of Jeff’s neighbors from the other side of the canyon dropped by – a mere four-hour detour. I heard Jeff mutter, “Grand Central Station.” When the neighbor had gone, Jeff served Brennan and me borscht made from his own beets, and waved goodbye before heading up to muck out the stable.
We slept in a high meadow that night, on the edge of the world. The next morning a peregrine falcon floated by us in a dream of feathered symmetry and high evolutionary art, its lustrous black eye passing over us in a brief assessment before it dropped from sight. We hiked on down and found a late breakfast under way at the Big Sur Inn. It had come under yet another management. The loquacious Georgian was gone; the ghost of Deetjen had been thoroughly exorcised, and weekenders from Los Angeles and San Francisco in pressed jeans and bright sweaters filled the dining rooms. “This place has been yuppie-fied,” I complained, and Brennan smiled.
He could have said then that the trend was upward. Now Big Sur has a “country inn resort” high above the road with a paneled lobby heavy with rustic furniture, lighted footpaths, hammocks strung under shade trees, and in the rooms latticed shutters opening onto a view of high meadows and ocean. There are fires laid, beds big enough for three, matching drapes and throw pillows, and chardonnay in ice buckets. The receptionist was previously a “work-scholar” at Eselen ten miles down the road and into deep-tissue massage, “cranial work,” acupuncture, acupressure, rolfing, and “zero-balancing, which is communicating with energy. No hippies now, it’s corporate.”
The dirt road behind the inn winds upward through strands of madrone and fir. After half an hour’s climb you can see Point Sur to the north and blond meadows all around, and not a human being in sight, although there are houses now with chameleon roofs blending into scrub and stone. The old elevation of mood still resides in this view and in this air, but the panoramic zero-balancing entails more elegy than discovery.
Lunch is served on inn’s broad deck. On the back of the menu is a promotional paean conflating a love of nature with commercial opportunity: “I am the Hawk. I have sailed the winds over the peaks and canyons, forests and meadows, sea-worn shores and soaring cliffs… This is a land majestic to the eye and the heart, but sternly unforgiving to those who would seek to diminish its primal authority.”
