When I broke down in Big Sur, I discovered a jewel in the forest.
Where beatniks still play guitar, and chant poetry, my iPhone didn’t work.
I had to slow down and tune into a higher signal.
When I was a little girl growing up far, far away, on the East Coast, I saw a brochure about Big Sur. I always wanted to go there. It seemed very far away then.
It still is.
Big Sur is where Los Angeles, Maui and San Francisco cross paths. It is the furthest point from all three places. And even today, that isolation remains.
Seven years ago, when my car died on the highway while heading South for Christmas, I was serendipitously invited to spend the night in this magical asymmetric geodesic dome near Big Sur.
This rugged dome is hewn from random redwood beams, deep in the forest. It’s off the grid…cellphones are useless.
It is like stepping into a time capsule. Heated by a wood stove, not one item from the 21st century visible, nothing made of plastic.
I felt like a time traveler transported right back to my childhood, the 1970s, when I was longingly reading the Big Sur brochure and wondering if I would ever get to go there.
As then, only landlines work here. You won’t get a cell signal but you can tune into nature.
We need places like this where we can drop out of the matrix and turn on to live music played on wooden instruments, art made with brushes and paint on canvas, sculptures carved of simple slabs of wood.
I think Spirit broke down my wheels and sent me here to remind me that there is another time and place where silence reigns, the stars are bright, and iPhones are useless.
Where we tune into the serenity of silence, where “reality reality” is the only reality, and we talk to each other and listen, uninterrupted by beeps and buzzes.
I remember this world and miss it.
It is disappearing. Replaced with the ever encroaching “upscaling” that is paving over California’s bohemian roots.
I first traveled here in the 1970s on a family vacation. As a college student my boyfriend and I stayed at Deetjens Big Sur Inn (yes it used to be that cheap) in the room filled with hundreds of old Gideon’s bibles and broken teapots. Then, dogs roamed freely in the restaurant and the cook was barefoot. It was freezing cold and the wood stove was smoky.
As a backpacker, I did many excursions on the 12 mile trail to Sykes Hot Spring, long before it was on Yelp or could be found by GPS. (We used topo maps and a compass.)
Or we would camp at Andrew Molera beach. The beach was filled with campfires and acoustic guitar music into the night. It was often covered with tumbled jade stones, and polished Abalone shells, gleaming like jewels.
The sea was still teeming with seaweed, urchins, mussels, sand dollars and starfish.
At midnight we would drive in the dark up Highway 1 to Esalen, and visit the hotspring from 2 am to 5 am. It cost $2, and the evening crowd was different than the wealthier, older workshop goers in the daytime — wild, young, happy, carefree.
Not talking about our psyche or our “issues.” When you’re 21 you don’t even have carry on baggage yet and you don’t need to pay $1000 for a human potential workshop to learn how to be happy or live in the present moment..We didn’t need a massage because nothing in our body hurt yet.
We spent a day at the Henry Miller Library on each visit, while Henry’s best friend Emile (at least 90) was still alive, and would read poetry out loud to Emile as he laid on his Victorian divan. Emile would always try to kiss me. Dave would say: “Come on…Make the old man happy, give him a little kiss.”
When we are younger we are blissfully unaware of the power of our beauty, we don’t know that our beauty will change, everything will change, and what we are experiencing now will change. The characters in our movie, even we, will disappear.
I never thought that far ahead, certainly not to where I am now.
I have absolutely no photos of that time of my life, the dozens of visits to Big Sur. Cameras were expensive and heavy, and most of our life was undocumented…no selfies, no videos, no souvenirs, no posts. Just this memory.
After these visits, I began reading Anais Nin, who fascinated me, and the works of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. I always felt I was born in the wrong decade and belonged here with them.
But instead I got stuck in the 1990s where our job was to build the personal computer and Internet.
When Emile passed, Jerry Kamstra, one of my favorite writers, took over as caretaker and started life drawing classes under the trees. I was thrilled that I got to spend long days talking to him. I modeled once, freezing in the fog outside in the garden, standing like a statue on a redwood stump.
After the day at the library, we would ride in an rattling orange 1970s convertible VW bug with the ripped top down, sneak in the back gate to Esalen Institute and soak in the hot springs from sunset to dawn. We slept on the beach with dripping wet hair when we got back at 4 a.m. Or sometimes even in the bug on the side of the highway.
The springs then were leaning precariously a hundred feet or so over the edge of the cliff with the ocean pounding below. If a really big wave crashed, the cold salt spray would splash you and you could taste the mist.
The baths were in a dank cave, carved into the cliff, with glowing embers of incense sticks in sand, dripping nubs of burning white candles the only light, shadows dancing on the walls. It felt primordial, it smelled like the center of the Earth, sulfur.
Esalen then was still the edge of the left coast, so far West it was almost East. Separated by the Pacific from Maui, but energetically connected. When I came back to work in the Financial District on Monday, I didn’t tell coworkers I had been there.
I miss this time in my life when everyone seemed to have the time to go on adventures, you just needed a friend with a car, a picnic, a sleeping bag and gas money.
This day, I got to reexperience that, only because my broken car forced me to slow down.
There was no Post Ranch for $1500 a night, it wasn’t chi-chi, Robert Redford and John Travolta didn’t live there yet, and we were uninterrupted by phone calls. (The phone was 100 miles away, and it was ok to call someone back days later. A phone call interrupting a vacation was for a true emergency.)
The writer Henry Miller lived in Big Sur, and his words describe this wild land:
“Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.”
― Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus B
