big sur
it’s windy in Big Sur
We pulled off the 101 South onto 156 West and it had already been dark an hour. 156 injects you directly into Pacific Coast Highway 1, somewhere near Monterey. “The One” is a hip hugger of a highway, curly curvy clutching at the cliff edge above the ocean, my favorite ocean, the Pacific Ocean.
Focus on the ocean. I don’t like the beach. I need a battleground where there is land and there is sea and the one slams into the other like it wasn’t even paying attention, it was just rolling along for days and all of a sudden dry earth standing two hundred feet tall is there and the ocean explodes against it.
My gal likes a sandy beach. She likes the meeting of land and sea to be amicable. We came into Big Sur under cover of darkness and we stopped the car to see how close the ocean was. The elctric window slides down and we hear nothing, see nothing. I stop the motor. It seems like there is no noise out there. It takes time for the highway to stop humming and the drawn out curling of a wave laying back onto itself to register in your tread worn eardrums.
It’s as though the volume slowly turns up and there it is. Somewhere in the blackness the ocean is ending its journey with white blood squirting up pumped into the air, a crash victim, the earth’s injury a corroded shore. The inability to hear the ocean at first is like beekeeping. When I look out the back window where the hives are I don’t see anything but the bottle brush tree, old chairs, dead grass. I have to wait a moment before I see the flight path, the little winged blips shooting across the sky. After half a minute the sky looks full of them, even though they’ve been there the whole time.
Big Sur is a little town, no fast food joints, just some campgrounds, a deli, a guy converted his house to a living museum to Henry Miller (you can stop in and drink coffee and play ping pong and buy some books) and that’s about it. The hills have been burned bare, but the stretch along the ocean was saved. I came out of the coffee shop in the morning and an old guy in a flannel shirt was standing heavy on one leg and leaning when I overheard, “When I got run over and started having strokes I had to make some decisions about pharmaceutical stuff.”
I was out of earshot and on my way back to the campsite by the next sentence. But that’s what the locals are talking about, and I guess it’s no different from city folks. We get a spell of bad luck and look for something to take the pain away. In the meantime we’re still working, still drinking coffee in the morning and saying hi to familiar faces.