Journey on the Big Sur

Journey on the Big Sur

-- Sesameboat

This December has been wet. When the five day shower finally came to an end, a mini pond has formed around our house. Tomato plants lay blackened and drowned in the front garden; our cats spent their days crowded motionlessly in the half soaked bed, casting long gazes on the back yard walls, which seemed to be shedding colors in the rain. The whole Santa Barbara blurred up as a painting tarnishes in water. The sky grew leady, the ocean grew pale; the redness of the roof tiles, the greenness of the roadside shrubs, together with countless other hues slowly oozed into one another, making the town look even darker. It is only towards the end of the month when the weather finally started clearing up. Having been stuck at home all this time, a brief traveling seemed to us the best way to welcome the New Year.

And so we did. On the brink of the New Year, we hopped in our car and headed north along Highway 1. The trip took around five hours each way. Our destination was Carmel-by-the-Sea, a tiny town tucked between the rocky peaks and the wavy coastline of El Sur Grande – the Big Sur.

Elephant Seal Beach

One of the first attractions along this route was the Elephant Seal Beach near the town of San Simeon. Early spring to late summer is the breeding time for elephant seals. During this period, they are more likely to stay ashore nursing the babies than fishing in the sea, and we were just lucky enough to bump into the scene: hundreds of these huge sea mammals scatter on the soft sand. Male elephant seals looked rather like beach rocks with their dark wet skin and rotund bodies. The females, though, had quite a different appearance. Ivory-silver colored and much smaller in size, they looked like youngsters at a first glance. Watching them nap on the sand was quite funny – it reminded me of our cats, for they, too, slept with tummy facing upward and whiskers twitching in dreams.

The real elephant seal babies, wrinkled, black and helplessly cumbersome, snuggled up and cried to mom for milk from time to time. As I stood there watching the heart softening scene, I noticed a faint odor mixed in the salty sea breeze. It got stronger so it seemed, when we walked up along the shore.

Suddenly I caught a glimpse of a gull pecking the small body of an elephant seal. It was a dead baby, from starvation or illness we don’t know. There amidst the nursing moms and the gulping newborns, the dead baby seal itself was the feast of another species. The subtly repugnant smell probably came from the slow decay, as the weather was chilly here in San Simeon. I tried to locate the mom – just feet away all the seals were busy feeding or resting, nobody seemed any different.

In his masterpiece Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Paul Gauguin had made the everlasting quest on life and death by putting the newborn, the youth and the old woman, crying or brooding, excited or confused together on one scroll of heavy colored painting. I had a flashback of th

is piece, and couldn’t help feeling that even a genuinely talented artist like Gauguin came across pitiable when compared to Nature herself.

Nature paints the scroll of life and death every day with such beauty, cruelty and ease. Creatures such as seals don’t quest. Embodied with the rich vigor of life, they fit unawares in our world as Gauguin’s flat figures on his canvas.

Waterfall House

The road got curvier shortly after the Elephant Seal Beach. Hence we entered among the peaks of Santa Lucia Mountains. Mark and I started looking for a word that could rightly describe this territory -- “Stately” seemed too pretentious; “Magnificent” seemed too vague; “Lofty” failed to capture the masculinity, while saying they are merely “masculine” would have missed a very important point: these mountains were solemn and imposing: Cliff lines that plunge deep into the ocean were half veiled in a transparent mist, and valleys so shadowed by dark pine trees close in on the narrow highway at times, before abruptly retreating, revealing the vast open sea over the next turn. Santa Lucia Mountains did not come across as a hiking friendly place – not merely for safety concerns, but more because of a feeling – as if doing so is to intrude, to disturb, as if these mountains deserve more respect than that.

Even the reeds looked different. They were much tougher here than the ones growing on wet land or by ponds. Instead of bending and waving in the winds, these reeds thrust up towards the sky like disarrayed arrows and swords. They gave us a weird feeling of having stumbled upon a deserted battlefield – the blood once shed long darkened, the roar once resonated long faded, the cause once died for long forgotten, leaving behind only millions of arrows on the lonesome cliffs. Santa Lucia was, in that sense, a forlorn place. The occasional electric poles by the cliff side were the only thing that reminded us of modern inhabitation.

I’ve always wondered about those pioneers who, driven by the Homestead Acts, first ventured into this daunting wildness. What was it like to live on the cliff along the coastline, greeted by the Pacific Ocean every morning, threatened by rock slides every night? What was it like to set up ranches at a place without roads, without power, and over years hoping to prove to the state government that the land you lived on was “improved”? How many people succeeded, and how many failed?

Somewhere along the way stood a sign called Waterfall Vista, and it was here we decided to take our first stop for a walk. The trail ran parallel with a quiet creek, curving its way amidst the thick redwood forest. Then it led to a short tunnel that went underneath the highway we just drove on. At the end of the tunnel, all of a sudden, we found ourselves standing on the outside of a cliff, directly facing the ocean and the beach.

And what a beach.

It was breathtakingly beautiful, even to the eyes which had been accustomed to the grand scenes of Big Sur. Here the ocean adopted a crystal green hue, as emerald held in the sun. Huge surrounding rocks with leaning cypress and pines defined a small patch of silver sand, which gently dipped into the green water like a child’s palm. Right at one corner, an eighty feet waterfall flew down the cliff and smashed onto the beach, creating a mist that was joined, from time to time, by the foaming high tides.

The Waterfall Beach looked unworldly and delicate, as Eden looked in Paradise Lost. Right underneath the fall, I see Eve rinsing her long flowing hair, and naked Adam sunbathing by the rock at ease. If there were a place that made you forget all the mundane worries, it would be right here, on the Waterfall Beach. We stood there long at lost, on the trail that hangs on the cliff, looking down at the silver sand. The beach was inaccessible, as such an unworldly place should be.

The trail led to a platform with a couple wooden benches, and, oddly enough, the base of some piled-rock walls. The view here was splendid, with Waterfall Beach to its left, Santa Lucia valleys as its backyard, and the vast green Pacific at the doorstep. On a small peninsula now overtaken by wild cypress, I could see layers of pebbles that outlined what seemed once to be a huge garden.

Here indeed, once stood a mansion, owned by a former congressman and his wealthy wife, donated to the State of California upon his death -- for she had hoped to turn it into a museum of Indian relic -- and eventually torn down after her death.

Who is not to feel a bit empty, roaming on such a ruin? -- “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Carmel-by-the-Sea – a Nouveau Riche’s Bohemia

I have always been a fan of the Bohemian artists. Among them my favorite one is Modigliani, a young Italian painter who suffered from lung illnesses since childhood, thus forced away from his beloved sculpturing into oil painting. Throughout his life, Modigliani rarely ventured into landscape. His most famous pieces are mostly portraits.

It might have been a warm afternoon, more than ten years ago, in the huge and dusty library in Peking University. I sat there slowly flipping pages through Modigliani’s biography and portraits, greeted from time to time by necks long and thin, faces stretched and pale, eyes narrowed and yearning. The unique distortion bares resemblance to sculpturing, revealing, I thought, the painter’s own distorted yearning for the art of sculpturing.

That thought gave me a sharp sense of pain, for it reminded me of the lonely and odd life I was living. As a physics student, I never quite understood my own field, and never quite fit in scientists. What excites them always bores me deeply. For years I’ve yearned to be a writer, gulping down novels and poems at the expense of studying.

I didn’t belong to the aggressive group of overachievers of course, neither did I belong to the cool group of slackers – while they were busy partying, I was buried in the Humanity section of the library, working harder than a literature major – for nothing. Left in between the cracks of Arts and Science, I may have appeared weirder to my classmates than the distorted faces in Modigliani’s portraits.

Thus the word “Bohemian” found its way into a soft spot in my heart. I felt intimate to the concept – being a Bohemian is not about walking down a crowded street with wild hair and weird costume just so you’d appear avant-garde. Rather it’s about being different, ignored, and lonely.

Without that piercing loneliness, there wouldn’t be such a thing as Bohemian. Art is a most personal belief; it drives one into the abyss of individuality. Things that may appear crucial to others – acknowledgments, companionship and even the sense of social dignity all seem dispensable when, fortunately or unfortunately, the nymph of Art casts her gentle spell on you.

Bohemian as a trend is a ridicule to the word itself. It grew into the worst nightmare when the so-called Bohemian legacy was left among the wealthy – in a country untouched by aristocracy, where the short roots of wealth trace back to no other groups than businessmen and celebrities.

Carmel-by-the-Sea might once have been a paradise for artists with true talents; nevertheless it is a very different town now. It is one of the most expensive as well as ostentatious towns in U.S. – a Bohemia according to the nouveau riche.

Everything about Carmel was so quaint and classy: layers of gray wooden roofs dance in the arms of the redwood forest dense; numerous art galleries turned Ocean Avenue into an exquisite necklace. Along the seventeen-mile-drive lie the world’s most luxurious golf courses, while neighborhoods with dreamy backyards lead to the dog friendly beach.

Such appearance did remind me of a small European town, take Genoa for example – reclusive, subdued yet rich with history, it’s the kind of place where outcasts lead their own slow lifestyle. But then I thought of the vast golf course by the sea, and couldn’t help noticing that land here is ridiculously expensive, even to the California standard, driving hotel prices sky high and making a local store that doesn’t sell Jewels or Art impossible to afford its rent.

And that is not European at all, nor is it truly subdued and quiet. One of my favorite things in Genoa is to roam along the narrow alleys at night, watching doves resting on the long clothesline, and shirts and skirts waving in the soft lamplight. Deep down the alleys there often was a mixed smell of sweet climbing rose, salty fish net with a faint trace of cat pee. Those bumpy Genoa alleys connect cheap restaurants offering fresh pesto and porcini, tiny markets with local olive oil and salami before joining into Piazza de Ferrari, a grand square with more than a thousand years of history. Deep culture and vital tradition, rather than expensiveness backed up the charm of Genoa.

So, back to Carmel. How is a local artist supposed to afford living here, unless he or she has been tremendously successful already? The retired investment bankers love decorating their social life with well known artists, same way as Carmel ladies like to wear huge diamonds – in a Bohemian style that is.