Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (49 page)

The special irony of all of this is that Miller has written more about Big Sur—and praised it more—than any other writer in the world. In 1946 he wrote an essay called “This Is My Answer,” which eventually appeared in his book
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
, published in 1958, long after the first invasion.

“Peace and solitude!” he says. “I have had a taste of it even in America. Mornings on Partington Ridge I would often go to the cabin door on rising, look out over the rolling velvety hills, filled with such contentment, such gratitude, that instinctively my hand went up in a benediction.… That is how I like to begin the day.… And by God, that is why I came to Big Sur and settled down. I want every day to begin thus … here there is peace and serenity, here there is just a handful of good neighbors and the rest is wild animals, noble trees, buzzards, eagles, and the sea and the sky and the hills and the mountains unending.…”

Needless to say the day would come when Miller could look out his front door and see a lot more than trees, wild animals and a handful of good neighbors. On some mornings he would forego the benediction in order to shake his fist at the horde of geeks who had gathered in his yard. But his was a special case; he was a marked man. The rest of Big Sur has put up a
stern resistance, and, although the battle was lost from the very beginning, the steamroller of progress has made slow headway here. In some spots, in fact, it has bogged down altogether.

There are people here without the vaguest idea of what is happening in the rest of the world. They haven't read a newspaper in years, don't listen to the radio, and see a television set perhaps once a month when they go into town.

To read a
New York Times
in Big Sur can be a traumatic experience. After living here a few months you find it increasingly difficult to take that mass of threatening, complicated information very seriously. Sitting here on a cliff above a rocky beach, on the edge of a vast and empty ocean, with the hills stacked up behind you like a great wall against the chaos of war and politics, the world of
The New York Times
seems unreal and altogether foreign, so completely opposed to the silence and the beauty of this coast that you sometimes wonder how the people who live in that world can hold on to their sanity. Not all of them do, of course. People are losing their grip every day. Thousands have cracked up from reading too many newspapers, and countless others have gone under for no apparent reason at all.

Not so in Big Sur. Here they didn't even have electricity until 1947, or telephones until 1958. In New York, where you're forever hearing stories about the West Coast “population explosion,” it is hard to believe that a place like this still exists. Compared to the rest of California, Big Sur seems brutally primitive. No sub-divisions mar these rugged hills, no supermarkets, no billboards, no crowded commercial wharf jutting into the sea. In the entire eighty-mile stretch of coastline there are only five gas stations and only two grocery stores. A fifty-mile stretch is still without electricity. The people who live there—and some of them own whole mountains of virgin land—are still using gas lanterns and Coleman stoves.

Despite the inroads of progress it is still possible to roam these hills for days at a time without seeing
anything but deer, wolves, mountain lions and wild boar. Parts of Big Sur remain as wild and lonely as they were when Jack London used to come down on horseback from San Francisco. The house he stayed in is still here, high on a ridge a few miles south of the post office.

With a little luck a man can still come here and live entirely by himself, but most of the people who come don't have that in mind. These are the transients—the “orphans” and the “weekend ramblers.” The orphans are the spiritually homeless, the disinherited souls of a complex and nerve-wracked society. They can be lawyers, laborers, beatniks or wealthy dilettantes, but they are all looking for a place where they can settle and “feel at home.” Some of them stay here, finding in Big Sur the freedom and relaxation they couldn't find anywhere else. But most of them move on, finding it “too dull” or “too lonely” for their tastes.

The weekend rambler is a very different animal. He may be an account executive, a Hollywood fag, or an English major at Stanford—but whatever he is he has heard the Big Sur stories and he is here to get his kicks. His female number is the part-time model from L.A., or the bored little rich girl from San Francisco. They arrive singley and in packs, on Friday and Saturday, quivering with curiosity and ready for anything that comes their way. These are the ones who start orgies—the gin-filled Straight Arrows and the secret humpers who come out of the city to let off steam. They will start at Nepenthe, summer headquarters for the local drinking class, and finish in the big Roman tubs at Hot Springs Lodge, ten miles down the coast. Girls will come into Nepenthe on a Saturday afternoon, freeze the whole bar with a haughty stare—and by midnight they'll be romping in and out of the crowded tubs at Hot Springs, stark naked and shouting for more gin. The bath-house is an open concrete shed, looking out on the sea, and the tubs are full of hot sulphur water and big enough to hold as many as ten people. During the day most people observe the partition that separates the men's side from
the women's, but once the sun goes down the baths are as coeducational as a cathouse New Year's Eve party, and often twice as wild.

This is the glamorous side of Big Sur, the side that occasionally matches the myth—and none of it is hidden away in the hills, as a lot of people seem to think.

The highway alone is enough to give a man pause. It climbs and twists along these cliffs like a huge asphalt roller-coaster, and in some spots you can drop eight hundred feet straight down to the booming surf. The coast from Carmel to San Simeon, with the green slopes of the Santa Lucia mountains plunging down to the sea, is nothing short of awesome. Nepenthe, open from April to November, is one of the most beautiful restaurants anywhere in America; and Chaco, the lecherous old Tsarist writer who, in his words, “hustles liquor” on the Nepenthe terrace, is as colorful a character as a man could hope to meet.

There are plenty of artists here, and most of them exhibit at the Coast Gallery, about halfway between Nepenthe and Hot Springs. Like artists everywhere, many do odd jobs to keep eating and pay the rent. Others, like Bennett Bradbury, drive new Cadillac convertibles and live in “fashionable” spots like Coastlands or Partington Ridge.

On any given day you might walk into the Village Store and find three Frenchmen and two bearded Greeks arguing about the fine points of Dada poetry—and on the day after that you'll find nobody there but a local rancher, muttering to himself about the ever-present danger of hoof-and-mouth disease.

The local poets outnumber the wild boar, but Eric Barker is the only “name,” and he looks too much like a farmer to cause any stir among the tourists. For that matter almost everyone in Big Sur looks like either a farmer or a woodsy poet. People are always taking Emil White, publisher of the
Big Sur Guide
, for a hermit or a sex fiend; and Helmut Deetjan, owner of the Big Sur Inn, looks more like a junkie than a lot of hopheads who've been on the stuff for years. If you saw Nicholas Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, walking along the highway, you might
expect him to flag you down, wipe your windshield with an old handkerchief, and ask for a quarter. Some of the local fags are easy to spot, but almost anyone could be a nudist or a lunatic—and some of them probably are.

To see Big Sur is one thing, and to live here is quite another. Anyone can perch on the glamorous surface for a few days, idling, drinking and looking for orgies—but beneath that surface is a way of life not many people can tolerate.

There is no glamour in the little man who comes down from the city to “get away from it all”—and runs amok on wine two weeks later because there is nobody to talk to and the silence is driving him crazy. There is nothing exciting about loneliness, and Big Sur is full of it. If you can't stand isolation this place can spook you right out of your mind. I've had people curse me bitterly for not staying “just a while longer” to keep them company, and I've had people in my house who wouldn't go home because they couldn't stand the idea of going back to their own place to be alone again.

Today the population of Big Sur is smaller than it was in 1900, and just about the same as it was in 1945. Hundreds of people have tried to settle here since the end of the war, and hundreds have failed. Those who come from the cities, hoping to join a merry band of hard-drinking exiles from an over-organized society, are soon disappointed. The exiles are hard to locate, and even harder to drink with. Soon the silence becomes ominous; the pounding sea is too hostile and the nights are full of strange sounds. On some days the only thing to do, besides eat and sleep, is walk up to your mailbox and meet the postman, who drives down from Monterey six days a week in a Volkswagen bus, bringing mail, newspapers, groceries and even beer.

Big Sur is no phony colony, no tourist attraction full of souvenirs and arty knick-knacks. You don't just float in, throw up your problems, and begin the goat-dance. It takes a tremendous capacity for remaining self-sufficient and a hell of a lot of hard
work. If you come here looking for something to join or to lean on for support, you are in for a bad time.

In his book on Big Sur, Miller describes the people he found here when he came. Some of them, depressed by the influx of tourists, have left for other, more isolated spots—Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, or the Greek Islands. But many are still here, living the same way they were ten years ago:

These are the expatriates, the ones who have come from all over the world to make a stab at The Good Life. But there are others, too. Some are ranchers whose families have lived here for generations. Others are out-and-out bastards, who live in isolation because they can't live anywhere else. A few are genuine deviates, who live here because nobody cares what they do as long as they keep to themselves. And there are people here of no integrity, no good will, no service and no apparent worth at all.

In some respects Big Sur is closer to New York and Paris than to Monterey and San Francisco. To the writers and photographers who live here just a few months of the year, New York is the axis of the earth—where the publishers are, where the assignments originate and where all the checks are signed. And once the checks are cashed, Paris is the next stop after that. It's keep moving until the money runs out, then back to Big Sur. In their minds, San Francisco is a bar, Monterey is a grocery store, and L.A. is a circus a few hundred miles down the road.

Others, primarily the painters and sculptors, look north to Carmel, with its many art galleries, craft-centers and wallet-heavy tourists.

Visitors to Big Sur—those who are actually invited—are more likely to be artists, foreign journalists or world-travelers than ordinary vacationers. There are no hotels here, the motels are small and devoid of entertainment, and the only nightlife revolves around Nepenthe, which is closed five months of the year. Most of the people who live here are jealous of their privacy, and nothing annoys them more than a curious intruder. A man sitting on the rocks with a can of beer, watching the sunset or the whales passing out to sea, is not as a rule very happy to explain his way of life to a traveling salesman who stops to “talk to one of the natives.”

Jerry Gorsline, who spent the first eighteen years of his life in New York and now lives on an abandoned mining claim twenty-five miles south of Hot Springs, is happy enough to have no visitors at all. Once or twice a week he will drive up the coast to borrow some books, put in a day's work for a man who is building a new wing on his house, or pass a few beery hours in the hot sulphur baths. He grows most of his own food, makes his own wine, cooks on a wood-stove, and keeps in touch with his friends in Europe, where he lived for two years before coming to Big Sur.

Lionel Olay, a writer, lives far back in the hills with a girl and two dogs. He spends a few days of every month in Hollywood, picking up assignments, but he does his writing in Big Sur. When he gets
money he moves off at a high rate of speed—Mexico, Cuba, Spain, and finally back to Big Sur.

King Hutchinson, on the other hand, has been here for three years and has no intention of leaving. He is one of many who live “the seven-five split”: seven months working at Nepenthe and five on unemployment insurance.

Don Bloom is a painter. He lives on what he earns and pays $25 a month for one of the finest houses on the coast. He gets along without electricity, has one of the best gardens in Big Sur, and spends a good part of the day on his porch, staring at the sea.