Big Sur: Coastal Muse

By Gemma Peckham

This story was first published in ROVA Adventure One, Spring 2017

Along the roads of Big Sur, there’s a feeling that words are scrawled under the tarmac; they bob in the tie-dyed water off the coast; and they hang from the staunch redwoods inland. In Big Sur, you can’t escape numerous artistic legacies—not least those of the many writers who visited this region to find particular things, including solitude, inspiration and sobriety.

Understanding why Big Sur has been a muse for so many does not require a lot of head-scratching. Only a two-hour drive from San Francisco and around four hours from Los Angeles, Big Sur is a roughly 100-mile region of spectacular purity that’s easily accessible to those living lives of excess in two of California’s largest cities. And in middle of last century, excess was famously the domain of the creative.

Crazy, alcoholic, pornographic, criminal... writers of the mid-1900s were called many things—most of them slightly derogatory, some outright offensive. For all of their failings, though, these wordsmiths could sure weave a phrase, especially when given some dense scenery to dig their poets’ teeth into.

For literary inspiration, Big Sur just as easily offers up drama as it does serenity; deep rifts of loneliness as much as throbs of joy. It is bare-faced nature at its best: desolate cliffs; a far-off horizon preceded by an arresting stretch of ocean; tide pools and gnarled rocks fringing the coast; and the Santa Lucia Range, dressed in mist or soaked in sunlight, looming over it all.

It’s little wonder that the artistic community found the region so magnetic. For an artist, one of the greatest challenges of nature is to represent it more beautifully than it presents itself; no mean feat in a region that threatens to burn out your eyeballs with its beauty.

In the early 1900s, writers and artists began to arrive with their rucksacks and dreams in Carmel-by-the-Sea, the northernmost town of the Big Sur region. They were first encouraged by the town’s founders, who appealed for“brain workers”—creative, artistic and intellectual members of society (how novel that creativity was once seen as“brain work!”)—to settle in Carmel, and then driven there by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. An arts colony inCarmel took root and grew steadily, and art has been in the salt-laced air of Big Sur ever since.

If you’re searching for a sign of the artistry that shaped Big Sur, you can’t really miss it in Carmel. There are countless galleries displaying the work of the region, and the town has maintained much of its original charm (think wood-carved street signs, no streetlights and no sidewalks outside of the main commercial area). A striking literary remnant is poet Robinson Jeffers’ stone cottage and tower, which he built by hand between 1918 and 1921 using granite stones from the cove below the property on Carmel Point, and where most of his words were spilled. Tor House and Hawk Tower are open to the public, so visitors can press their hands against the smooth granite that Jeffers used to “make stone love stone,” and soak up the vibe that fed one of America’s greatest poets.

Jeffers, who lived in Carmel for 20 years and was preoccupied with the disconnect between man and nature, was unhappy about the development of the town in the years after his settling there. He wrote in his poem “Carmel Point”, “This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—how beautiful when we first beheld it.”

Over time, the vagabonds, hippies, and writers who had originally populated Carmel began to decamp to the Big Sur region for reasons that mirrored Jeffers’ unhappiness with the growth of the town; an influx of money and development had diluted the bohemian appeal of the original artists’ community.

The ensuing pilgrimage further into Big Sur took the artists deep into the wilderness, where there was a lot more space, and enough isolation to either inspire an artist or drive them crazy.

At the heart of Big Sur is Highway 1, that theater of panorama that allows motorists to get an eyeful of ocean and sky while they barrel through the region. Not far out of Carmel, it’s all nature, all the time. State parks prevail along Highway 1; Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park provides a retreat from the ocean into an insanely beautiful forest packed with huge coastal redwoods. Most of the classical elements are on show here: trails wind over, through and past earth, air and water—fire you’ll find in your heart (or your lungs, if you’re on a particularly strenuous trail).

Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park is only a little further down the road, and it boasts what real estate brokers might call “absolute ocean frontage”—so absolute, in fact, that one of the park’s waterfalls—McWay Falls—plummets directly onto the beach (or into the sea, depending on the tide).

For counterculture writers, this untainted natural landscape was irresistible, and dotted among the redwoods, between the coves and along the highway are markers of their history here.

A leader of the movement into the Big Sur region was Henry Miller—that non-conformist to literary tropes and a major influence on the Beat Generation of writers. Miller lived in the area for decades, drawn to its majesty and the people who lived there. His desire was to escape from the America that he’d grown to dislike: sterile, overpopulated cities full of mean opportunists. Miller was at home with the other inhabitants of the coast, writing, “These young men, usually in their late twenties or early thirties ... are not concerned with undermining a vicious system, but with leading their own lives—on the fringe of society. It is only natural to find them gravitating towards such places as Big Sur.”

Miller’s first residence in Big Sur was the Log House, a cabin in the hills behind what is now Nepenthe restaurant. Rumor has it that if you were ambling along the highway near the Log House while Miller was caught up in the throes of writing, you’d be able to make out the tapping of his typewriter over the sound of the waves smashing into the cliffs.

Nepenthe was built in the late 1940s, and became a hangout for celebrities and the Beats, who ate, drank and danced on the terrace that is hyped to have the best view along the coast. Nepenthe is still open to visitors, who enjoy the jaw-dropping view and the great food on offer, but who are also hoping to breathe in some of that rare air that kept Miller and his counterparts coming back night after night.

Miller’s legacy is on show at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, just south of Nepenthe. Part bookstore, part museum and part performance space, the building was constructed by Miller’s best friend Emil White in the mid-1960s, and named in his honor a year after Miller died, in 1981.

In one of Miller’s best-known works, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, he reveals his vision of the coast: “It is a region where extremes meet, a region where one is always conscious of weather, of space, of grandeur, and of eloquent silence.”

It might have been this eloquent silence that drove Beat writer Jack Kerouac into a psychological spin in the 1960s. Kerouac headed to Big Sur, hell-bent on drying out and harnessing his literary genius. He left San Francisco to get sober, to get inspired, and to rediscover his talent, and holed up at friend and fellow writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the wilds of Big Sur, at Bixby Creek Canyon. Kerouac’s plans were sunk soon after he arrived; the noiselessness and seclusion combined with withdrawal from booze started to warp his mind, making him paranoid and afraid, and he quickly headed back to the comfort of San Francisco and its liquor stores. Kerouac’s agony on the coast is documented in his novel Big Sur; although Kerouac said the novel was fictional, it’s largely understood that its main character, writer Jack Duluoz, is a thinly veiled version of Kerouac himself.

Bixby Creek Canyon, and the bridge spanning it, is today one of the most recognizable spots on the Big Sur coastline. The architectural grace of 280-foot-high Bixby Creek Bridge is a stunning complement to the shoreline below, the smooth arches of the bridge facing off with the ragged edge of the land. There’s no safe way to reach the beach from here, with treacherous cliffs and shotgun-toting landowners spelling danger for anyone who dares to try. Those who want to get close to Kerouac can pull off the road and contemplate the unforgiving landscape that famously broke him in this desolate area. “A troublesome spirit hanging here can’t make it in the void,” he wrote in his poem“Sea,” which tells of his exile from Big Sur. “The sea drove me away/ & yelled ‘Go to your desire!’ / – as I hurried up the valley / it added one last yell: ‘And laugh!’”

Another of the Beats whose writing is synonymous with Big Sur is Richard Brautigan, who visited the area with his first wife. The couple stayed with an unpredictable friend, Price Dunn, for a month in the Sur, living a rustic life that was punctuated by strange events as a result of Price’s knack for making things weird (as an example, he brought an alligator to the home in an attempt to silence the frogs on the property). Rather than the nightmare fuel that Kerouac encountered, Brautigan’s Big Sur was an enchanting adventure, populated by the raucous frogs, alligators and businessmen that would appear in his first published novel, the absurdist A Confederate General from Big Sur. Brautigan’s experience of Big Sur was what Kerouac had been looking for but unable to find—a little strangeness, a little magic, and a lot of inspiration. He wrote in the book, “Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.”

And then there’s a writer who would not only let his soul get outside its marrow, but would then likely turn around and suck the marrow up, smacking his lips and grinning past the pipe wedged between his teeth. Hunter S. Thompson, very early on in his career, was also a huge fan of Big Sur; his problem was that he wanted to be there, but other folks in the region wanted the opposite.

Thompson hit Big Sur in 1960, seeking to find himself a bit of what Henry Miller had. He wound up working as a caretaker on a parcel of land that was then emerging as the Esalen Institute—a New-Age holistic health facility that today attracts thousands of visitors. Hot springs were the attraction here, and the Institute brought in some of the more adventurous and outgoing types from the region and further afield.

Thompson, in the course of his duty, became enraged by some of the more raunchy goings-on at Esalen, and policed the hot springs with a wild-eyed ferocity, alarming patrons and causing trouble. During his time there, he also developed an obsession with guns; he would down a skinful of liquor and fire off rounds in the middle of the night, sometimes bringing bloody parts of animals back to the hot springs as a practical joke.

At the same time, Thompson’s first nationally published article, which was about Big Sur, appeared in Rogue Magazine. In the story, he painted a picture of the Big Sur region as being populated by unsavory characters, and of the Esalen property as a “lonely campground for the morally deformed, a Pandora’s box of human oddities, and a popular sinkhole of idle decadence.” Thompson was given a month to leave the property, and with the community having turned against him, he had no choice but to leave Big Sur an outlaw in retreat.

Esalen, once popular only with counterculture figures and New-Age types, is now a thriving business in Big Sur, attracting all types of people seeking a unique experience. The original ethos of the place remains; the website of Esalen notes that by choosing to visit, “you’ve joined a long and illustrious band of pilgrims and refugees, pioneers and roustabouts that feels oddly like family.”

One of the most famed and popular aspects of the Institute is the hot springs, which rise to the land’s surface right in front of an absurdly picturesque, cliff-flanked cove on the property. A bathhouse designed by Big Sur architect Mickey Muennig is settled into the side of the mountain, with seven baths laid out under the ever-bright stars. I say stars, because public bathing takes place between 1 am and 3 am—daytime bathing is reserved for guests who have paid to attend workshops or make use of the other services of the Institute.

Beyond Esalen, Nepenthe and the specters of writers past, there’s a lot more to see in Big Sur. This may seem like a passable overview of what’s on offer, but trust me—it’s not. You could read every poem, every book and every article ever written about Big Sur, and you still wouldn’t be prepared for what awaits you there. Because Big Sur is nothing to you—or Miller, Kerouac or Thompson—until you’re in it.