It's the most romantic stretch of coast in North America, possibly in the world. I've been going there for more years than I care to admit to, and finally came to understand the place with the help of those who live there. Part One:
(Photos by Catherine Karnow)
“Young people were living in cars
and under the bridges. Once I saw smoke coming from a field just north of here
and went up to find two dozen hippies, their naked kids running around, and fires
going. Fire’s always a danger in Big Sur.”
Don McQueen, 79, straddled an old
four-wheeler in his tattered sweater and torn trousers. A daunting figure -
six-foot-eight, big hands, size 15 boots – he was remembering the ‘sixties in
Big Sur, the spectacular stretch of coast south of Monterey where the Santa
Lucia Mountains plunge into the Pacific and Highway 1 snakes high above violent
surf. “Some of the newcomers were worthless, but some were okay. We were so
stuck in the mud around here that the supervisors couldn’t even approve another
school for the overload. The new people shook things up.”
I first saw Big Sur in 1963, and in
the intervening years returned several times but never had a clear
understanding of its unusual history, complicated geology, or its place in the
pantheon of great American landscapes. Beyond extreme physical beauty and the
inspirational jolt the first glimpse of Big Sur
always provides, it remained for me as much mystery as reality, intimately associated
with the Aquarian age McQueen describes.
Then a few summers ago droughty California had some 1,200 wildfires, including one in Big
Sur.
That became the Basin Complex fire, and it put the famous coast in jeopardy and
in the news again after a long hiatus. But many younger people, I noticed, no
longer had a clear idea of the place, and those my age had very different
notions of it: iconic collision of earth and sea, New Age navel, home of
superannuated flower children, prime ocean-front property, and up-scale venue
for travelers who could afford $700-a-night beds, infinity-edge hot-tubs, and
hundred-dollar prix fix menus.
McQueen’s father was the engineer
in charge of building the coast highway in the late ‘30s, and Don assembled his
commercial campground on the same road in the ‘50s, shaded by a 4,000-year-old redwood
and now worth millions. “A few hippies thought they could make a living just by
breaking into houses,” and a rougher element including motorcyclists hung out
in the Redwood Lodge just up the road. “It had a hard dope problem, with fights,
and gang-banging. I told the owner I’d clear it out if he wanted.”
He was also an authority, according to a
friend, “on what’s required to survive on a 17 percent slope,” just one of many
descriptions of Big Sur. McQueen admits to “throwing some people through
windows.” He put two malefactors in a car, “broke their distributor cap with a
hammer, so they couldn’t start the engine, and pushed them down a hill toward Carmel.”
That bar was re-born as Fernwood, a
sign of the times. Big Sur, too, is a relatively
tame venue for travelers who can afford $700-a-night beds, infinity-edge
hot-tubs, and hundred-dollar prix fix menus unimaginable in 1960. But half a
century after that restive time Big Sur remains as difficult to define as it has
always been: iconic American landscape or New Age navel, home of superannuated
flower children, or working community, California’s
most expensive real estate, or a unique bit of wilderness?
Spanish explorers
and colonists didn’t know quite what to make of it, either. Seafarers stayed
clear of the rock-toothed el pais grande del sur, and missionaries making the long over-land
journey from Mexico City used the valley of the Salinas River, miles to the east, not the impassable
coast darkened by huge trees and coursed by two un-navigable rivers. Presidio
and missionary headquarters were established in Monterey
in 1770, then a mission in Carmel.
Father Junipero Serra set about enslaving and converting to Catholicism those members
of the primitive coastal tribes who lived close by and any who could be enticed
out of the rugged and inhospitable “El Sur.”
Large tracts of coast were granted to
former soldiers and cohorts of provincial governors by the Mexican government
in the 1830s, including three near Carmel
on broad marine terraces high above the ocean, most of which have survived
intact. The 8,876-acre Rancho San Jose y Sur Chiquito, 20 miles south, eventually
came into the possession of Captain John Rogers Cooper, who turned it into a
cattle ranch in the 1840s, worked by Hispanics and Indians.
Some of the first “Americans” in El
Sur were the Posts. William Brainard Post, who had been stranded in lower Baja
on a voyage from Connecticut,
eventually made his way to the whaling station at Point Lobos, acquired 640
acres just south of the big river, and in 1867 began to build a house. Money
was made by others from redwoods and Douglas fir felled in the steep canyons, an
arduous, dangerous job, and the bark of tan oaks used in the tanning of hides.
Supplies arrived in small sailing vessels braving a coast with little safe
anchorage, and timber went out the same way.
The first continuously operating
post office south of Carmel called “Big Sur” was in the Posts’ house. It had one of the most
spectacular vistas ever shared by cattle, hogs, and the 60-residents who dropped
by to get mail, talk, peel apples in season, dance, and lament the absence of a
good road to “town.” That meant Monterey,
30 miles to the north, but the rough dirt tract over which they rode horses and
drove wagons meant they were no longer dependent for staples upon unreliable steamboats
plying an unforgiving Pacific.
The road was steadily improved into
the 20th century, when self-reliance took another hit with the arrival
of cars and trucks. They brought new faces, among them homesteaders, tourists
who stayed in roughhewn “resorts” run by the Pfeiffer and other families, and what
might be called a new creative class. During the ‘20s and ‘30s the poet, Robinson
Jeffers, praised what he called “the noblest thing I have ever seen,” meaning
Big Sur, and wrote about the difficulty of maintaining the tortuous road in Thurso’s Landing, where “seas thundered
on the rock, and rain fell heavily/ Like a curtain, with one red coal of
sundown glowing in its dark.”
Other new arrivals were more
interested in aesthetic adventure than convention. Jaime de Angulo, the son of
a Spanish nobleman and a disciple of Karl Jung’s, bought property on Partington
Ridge and built a house of concrete that was to be a dude ranch but never had a
customer. An avid student of native American languages known locally as “the
Old Coyote,” Angulo wore his hair long in Indian fashion, wrote poetry, and lived
in scholarly squalor, according to contemporary accounts, sometimes riding his
horse in nothing but a cape and a belt of silver conchos.
Another locally famous European, Helmuth
Deetjen, the well-born son of a deacon in Bremen,
Norway, arrived in Big Sur with
his wife, Helen, circa 1930, bought 120 acres in Castro Canyon,
and built a combination home, store, and inn. A devotee of music, philosophy,
art, and politics, he had attended the University
of Heidelberg with both Rudolf
Steiner, founder of the Waldorf
Schools, and Adolf Hitler.
Deetjen claimed that his last words to Hitler were, “You just don’t understand
the American cowboy,” and that he later fled Europe
because he knew what Hitler was capable of.
Deetjen brought a quirky combination
of sophistication and hominess to Big Sur,
reflected in his quaint construction, in Scandinavian style and in native redwood,
of what became both a home and a lodge. One of the locals helping him was the
11-year-old Don McQueen. Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn contained Helen’s antiques shop
and included cabins, some barely big enough to turn around in, with droll names
like Chateau Fiasco. Pottery, sculpture, paintings and craft, much of it
created by a long succession of Big Sur
artists, occupied most horizontal spaces, and still does. Deetjen carved into a
lintel in the dining room a quote from Mozart’s Magic Flute: “Within these sacred portals revenge and hate must
cease/ The souls of straying mortals in love will find release.”
In 1937 the coastal highway linking
northern and southern California
was completed, some say the biggest change to occur since the arrival of the
Spanish. Big Sur became accessible to cars from both directions, which meant more
sight-seers, more exposure of outsiders to a unique landscape that had largely remained
a national secret, and more artists, writers, and mavericks seeking an
alternative to what Henry Miller, one of them, would soon be calling America’s
“air-conditioned nightmare.”
Miller himself took up residence on
Partington Ridge in 1942 and became Big Sur’s
most celebrated literary figure. His neighbors included Angulo, Harry Dick
Ross, the sculptor and painter, and Emile White, another painter who lived down
on the highway and served as Miller’s erstwhile secretary. Miller wrote several
books while overlooking the Pacific, including The Rosy Crucifixion and Big
Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch. He and Deetjen occasionally drank
together at the inn, only six miles north of Partington, where an employee once
attempted - unsuccessfully - to hide a microphone behind a curtain to record
what the great men said.
In 1960, Miller left wife and
children to run off to Paris with a woman half
his age, dismaying the usually forgiving Big Sur
bohemians. Emile White’s house on Highway 1 later became the Henry Miller
Memorial Library, a trove of Milleriana that
today offers a broad retail selection of retail books, and a cultural program
popular with both locals and visitors.
Miller himself was quickly superseded
by a tide of so-called beatnik and hippie writers, among them Jack Kerouac
whose On the Road replaced the
once-banned Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn as a must-read for a
new, rebellious generation. Kerouac’s friend, Lawrence Ferlenghetti, owner of
City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, publisher of the poets Alan Ginsberg
and Gregory Corso, had a cabin up the coast, on Bixby Creek, that was featured
in Kerouac’s depressing, eponymous Big Sur novel; another novelist, Richard
Brautigan, a suicide, wrote the goofy, charming fictional account of life here the
sixties, A Confederate General in Big Sur.
By then the place had acquired a reputation as the gravitational center of LSD
and “free love,” an image it has never really shed.
Deetjen died in 1972, and his inn
was transformed into a non-profit, another sign of the times. Patrons in the
‘80s included John Denver, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Peter Sellers and
Mia Farrow. Nowadays in season it’s thronged with baby-boomers and young lovers
drawn by the fire on the hearth, gnarly authenticity, and the ghosts of a
watershed decade still ringing in the speech of occasional regulars ordering
blueberry pancakes at the bar.
Meanwhile, Don McQueen was repairing
gaps in the coast highway his father had built, where pavement occasionally slips
unavoidably into the ocean, destabilized by torrential winter rains. He worked
on other, now famous Big Sur projects, including Nepenthe, the bar and restaurant
built on a point just north of Castro
Canyon and named for a
magical potion in Homer’s Odyssey, on
land previously owned by Orson Wells and Rita Hayworth.
Nepenthe was patronized by locals
and the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton during filming of The Sandpiper, and Kim Novak who once
danced on a table there in her almost all-together. “Nepenthe’s was incredibly
welcoming in the hippie era,” says one long-term resident. “Every month there
was an astrological birthday party for locals, with dancing on the deck,” but
all that gradually ended as the contingent of tourists grew exponentially and
Nepenthe’s expanded, and raised prices, to accommodate it.
The actor, Steve McQueen, visited
Nepenthe’s in the late ‘70s, looking for Don McQueen as a possible long-lost
cousin, annoyed by the failure – or refusal - of locals to recognize him as the
star of The Great Escape and other
movies. He and Don McQueen became friends despite the dissimilarities in their
lives, and physical statures. “Steve walked around like a bantam rooster,” Don
said affectionately. They rode motorcycles together on Highway 1, and “my wife
and I once took Steve’s dinner reservation at Ventana. When he showed up with
Ali McGraw and saw us, he just laughed. They came over and joined us.”
The Ventana Inn and Spa was, when
it opened in 1975, Big Sur’s first modern, full-scale
resort, and another watershed. Ambitiously designed, lovely to behold, and controversial
due to its size and prices, Ventana made Big Sur a “destination,” to the dismay
of many in Big Sur who nevertheless played dominoes at the bar. By providing
beauty, luxury, and whatever else was required for a restorative “California” experience,
Ventana brought a new sort of sophisticated, well-heeled visitor.
After a few years the formality in
the dining room and bar, like the steep prices, discouraged locals from coming,
and in the early ‘90s, after a succession of owners and infrastructure problems,
Ventana’s coveted spot as the primo watering hole passed to the Post Ranch Inn.
Just across Highway 1, on land once occupied by old William Brainard Post.
There builders took pains to make that
resort environmentally friendly, with cottages raised on pilings among live
oaks. The restaurant, Sierra Mar, seemed to hang over the ocean, a la Nepenthe, and today guests can dine
on ahi and braised Kobi beef while watching gray whales bound for Baja. But
beyond the tasteful confines of the Post Ranch Inn and Ventana, life remains a
struggle, with relatively few jobs and an acute housing shortage that’s getting
worse. The chef at Sierra Mar, Craig von Forster, recalls living in a van at
the side of Highway 1 in his early days at the inn. Today, he adds, “if you drive
south toward Lucia after 10 p.m.
at night, you’ll see dozens of cars in the pull-offs. In most of them the
people who do Big Sur’s work are asleep.”
The most common definition of Big Sur by people who live here is “the coast between the
lighthouse at Point Sur on the north and Esalen on the south.” The center of
the so-called human potential movement, and a story in its own right, Esalen
was founded by Michael Murphy, now 78, whose family acquired the precipitous
land in 1910. It was named for the indigenous Esselen people, the shyest of the
coastal Indians who left exquisite cave paintings and first used the hot springs that would
become notorious. Locals had gone there in number after the completion of
Highway 1. Miller reportedly did his laundry in the naturally heated water, and
itinerant users included the likes of Aldous Huxley and John Steinbeck. Murphy’s
passion was eastern religions, and soon after he met Richard Price, a
psychology student at Stanford in a meditation class in, the two of them created
Esalena.
To be community where no one
religion or philosophy was be favored over another, it evolved into a medley of
Eastern and Western traditions aimed at transcendent “human potentialities”
written about by Huxley. Esalen had an enormous influence on what became the “California lifestyle” and
it would flow eastward across the American continent, and beyond. The hot springs were essential
to that notion. In the early days, Esalen was open to anyone for a pittance, “and
it was free to good-looking women,” says Mary Lu Torens, who has lived in Big Sur for 30 years. She remembers when the purpose of the
springs was high-minded, based upon the belief of the Esalen Indians that “you
went there to heal.”
The old concrete bathhouse was divided
between men’s and women’s sides, and everyone was nude. “We all bathed
together, but if women wanted to bath without men they could go to the other
side. There were two big communal tubs, and two old single, bear-claw ones.”
Scented tapers were placed on top of pillars at night to counter the odor of
sulfur. “I can still smell those lovely candles.”
In those days, “no one talked in
the baths. You looked out at the ocean, or up at the hills. There weren’t many
cars in road yet. No negative thoughts were allowed in the baths, and they
weren’t for partying.” That came soon enough, however, along with an
ever-increasing presence of drugs, and sex. Eventually Murphy and Price,
accompanied by the folk singer, Joan Baez, and some others, walked down to the
baths with Dobermans on leashes and dispersed an orgiastic group from San Francisco.
This signaled a change at Esalen.
Control was imposed on users, and prices began to climb. Imported
psychiatrists, psychotherapists, proponents of Rolfing and various meditative
and massage techniques, psychologists – traditional and pop - physicists, and
lecturers of all sorts moved Esalen further into the academic and therapeutic
fields.
Co-founder Price was killed in 1985
by a falling boulder, after hiking up the springs’ origin, what some in Big Sur saw as a karmic event. Money became an issue as
never before in 1998, when the rains of El Nino started a mudslide that took
away most of the old bathhouse. Replacement cost $25-million and included
hillside stabilization and an earth-quake proof foundation. Etched glass doors
now admitted spa-goers, and a separate room was devoted to serious massaging by
fully clothed professionals. Less than half the bathers were nude, the choice
of swim suits and suntan lotion was strictly up-scale. Locals still had access
to the baths for $20 – but only between the hours of 1 and 3 a.m.
“The pettiness of the day-to-day
operation is annoying,” said one Big Sur
resident, but Mary Lu Torens pointed out that “many people over the years have
had that box inside them unlocked at Esalen. It has done a lot of good.”
The sprawling “campus” had an
established feel, with lawn running to the cliff’s edge, an enormous, carefully
maintained vegetable garden, and structures well integrated into the land.
Daily guests paid $50 just to stroll around. A mixture of the mostly
middle-aged attend one of an impressive array of workshops - Harmonic Presence: Primordial Wisdom and the
Music of the Spheres; Moving Meditation Practice: Inspiration, Vision, Ecstasy;
Sex, Love and Intimacy: For individuals and Couples, and many more – after
paying $150 for a minimum of two days, plus $605 for basic accommodations and
meals.
A total of 17,000 people visit
annually, most of them “students.” The dining hall was crowded at noon; dress
was casual. The director, Gordon Wheeler, appeared on the deck in jeans and a
flannel shirt. He was a clinical psychologist brought from Harvard in 1999 to
run Esalen, with swept-back hair and a scrim of goatee. Michael Murphy had turned
78 and, Wheeler said, “We’re all in founder transition.” Part of that was
Esalen’s subtle shift in message. “We’ve always been about personal and social
transformation. What’s new is our focus: the personal and the social can’t be
separated.” That meant workshops such as Sustainable
Eating for the Planet, and Building
Sustainable Leadership for Justice, and a heightened awareness that “the
world’s in tough shape. We have to step up, locally as well as globally.”
Asked about Big
Sur, Wheeler said, “it’s the land of the individualist, and
legendary because of that,” adding, “It’s outlaw country.”
Tomorrow: Part Two - Fire
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