Roland

There was the time, after everyone had stayed up all night, that Jackie Coon stopped by and Roland got out his bass. Or the drive to the Highlands when he told me, without pity, “I love your old man, but he's a got a hole in his heart.” The way he would laugh at hitchhikers and say, “I decided a long time ago that I would give them a ride out of Big Sur, but not into it.” And finally, the day I emerged from three weeks in the Sierra wilderness to hear the news that he and Melanie had died within hours of each other.

But the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Roland Hall was his gait. A kind of imposing, solid shuffle that anchored a playful set of arms and a ready, mischievous laugh. The first time I ever worked for Roland, I remember mulching some flower beds when I heard the grave padding of his footfalls behind me. “Maybe, I didn't make myself clear,” he said, “It needs to more of a matrix. Like this.” He proceeded to get on his knees and fix my botched work himself.

I learned a lot about work, labor from Roland. His own approach to things resonated with mine: twenty minutes of philosophizing before twenty minutes of muscle on shovel work. He taught me how one is never too old or wise to be humbled at the feel of rich loam in one's fingers. And I observed that our little band of old coasties and young hippy kids could skate pretty far on the pull of Roland's charisma when it came to finding landscaping and carpentry clients. Even abstract painting, high-octane philosophizing, advanced meditators need to get in the dirt and make a few bucks. But it helps to have rich patrons already in awe of you.

I would have worked for free, just to ride around with Roland and hear stories of the old Big Sur and the beatnick days of San Francisco. The days when one could wander around the south coast naked, eating abalone, eeking an ascetic existence out of cutting firewood and caretaking. Rub shoulders with Jaime DeAngulo. I once asked Roland what changed with the hippies and he said, “The thing was, before the hippies all the bohemians I knew had a discipline. We were painters, or musicians, or meditators. But the important thing was, we had a practice. Something we did every single day. The hippies weren't like that.”

It is memorable to me that I first knew Roland in what were perhaps not his finest of moments. He himself once told me that his life had reached a zenith on Partington Ridge and in the desert of Arica, Chile that had dissipated when he had, “moved to town to sell things to assholes.” But when I became a teenager and learned landscaping and plants from him, it looked as if he had hit an older man's stride. He and Melanie lived a simple life, managing apartments and dedicating themselves to meditation and painting. I knew plenty of people Roland's age, and of similarly rich backgrounds, for whom such a transition fell like a lead blanket on their shoulders. But not Roland, the longer I knew him the more fully he radiated an ecstatic, high-wattage wisdom.

The other day I was reading an oral history of the Big Creek Preserve. It was recounted in the book how, when Roland had been the caretaker back when it was owned by the Farrs, his father had died there on the day of his daughter's birth. They buried him in a redwood log until the coroner got wind and autopsied the body. I have heard the story before, but I wish that he and Melanie were still around to tell it to me again.

Niches

I remember driving past the Castroville artichoke restaurant during the housing madness of the early 2000s. I was living in Oregon and there was this churning migration as one group of people moved to the cheapest place they could find displacing another group of people who then moved to the cheapest place they could find. And so on.

But Monterey county is a place of highly defined and long settled communities. Wealth is certainly a factor, but I reflected that someone living in Seaside would be highly unlikely to move the thirteen miles to Castroville just to get a cheaper place to rent. Even though the economics and class of these two places is somewhat similar. Such a thing would be quite common in Oregon.

Or to take another example, I am staying at a friend's ranch in Big Sur. But I only say “Big Sur” to paint an accessible picture of where I am. Within Big Sur, there are the south coast communities—Gorda, Willow Creek, Chalk Peak, Pacific Valley, Lucia, Esalen, Big Creek, etcetera. There are the Big Sur Valley niches—Apple Pie Ridge, Pfeiffer Ridge, Deetjens, Coastlands, Coast Ridge Road, Nepenthe, Molera, etcetera. There are the cliff dwellers along the roadside north of Little Sur. There are the north coast communities of Garrapata and Palo Colorado, both of which have many different divisions such as Long and Green Ridges, the bottom of the canyon, the upper canyon. Though they might well have much in common, a wild hair from Ragged Point is socially a very different creature than someone living in the Big Sur valley and working at the Post Ranch.

The other night at monday night dinner, someone told the sommelier that I was living in his neck of the woods, meaning the north coast. It lessened my already low opinion of him when he responded,”Oh yeah, I live in Palo. Where are you?”

"Up above Bottcher's Gap."

"Oh yeah. I used to go there for boy scout camp."

Well, I'm not at the Boy Scout Camp which is way down below Bottcher's. I am above Bottcher's, which would perk the interest of anyone with even a vague curiosity about this area. There is no one else above Bottcher's. And culturally I am not down in Palo at all. Call it north of the Little Sur and south of Garrapata.

This intense specificity of place is not unique to the Monterey area—or maybe I should say the Monterey/Pacific Grove/Marina/Charmel/Carmel Valley/Jamesburg/Cachagua/Charmel Highlands/North Coast/South Coast/Big Sur valley/Seaside/Mid Valley/New Monterey/Sand City/Pebble Beach regional association of approximate localities—but it is more highly defined than anywhere I have ever been. Pacific Grove proper is definitely not Pebble Beach and not Monterey. And living down by Lover's Point is a class away from living up off of David Avenue. And don't even think of telling someone in Jamesburg they live in Cachagua. Oak Grove is not Monterey and not Seaside, and I don't even know what Del Rey Oaks is about. Partington Ridge is a cousin to the Big Sur Valley, not an outlier.

I don't mention Salinas at all because the Salinas valley and environs are a different world, connected only by political geography. Hence the idea that moving from Seaside to Castroville or Prunteucky is a major migration.

The only thing like this I have experienced elsewhere is in the neighborhoods of Portland. The structure of that city, where each major eastside arterial street tends to have its own small, pre-automotive merchantile section, lends itself to organic, individual neighborhoods. But as Portland has become gentrified, as there become fewer and fewer areas to redevelop, that neighborhood camaraderie has descended into cliquishness. Having less meaningful distinction from each other, the neighborhoods now over-emphasize their separateness. For instance, an early-stage gentrification St. Johns resident is likely to look with disgust upon the foibles of late-stage Hawthorne gentry. A north Portland early, early stage gentrification neighborhood might look down its nose at the decadence of nearby Mississippi Street. I remember most of these areas when there was plenty of crack and prostitution to go around.

But Monterey county was long settled before WW II shipbuilding gave Portland its major growth spurt. And access to water, both of the potable and of the ship-receiving kind, had as much to do with the individuation of places here as trendy redevelopment and increasing wealth in Portland. I kind of like it this way, how the brush strokes of community character can be so nuanced and deep-rooted. It fits an area whose stunning diversity of ecosystems and microclimates give rise to it. It's a good thing.

Big Sur

Before I make a plan for the day, it has already defeated itself. Loading up the sixteen gauge to go hunt for quail, I develop the notion that for Thanksgiving this year I will eat only what I can hunt or gather from the ranch. But the first thing I consume is ground, tropical beans infused with creek water. Coffee.

Undeterred I walk an old jeep road below the cabin. It has been raining the last few days and the brush and grass are slick. As these things go, whenever I head out to look for them, the quail are invisible. When I walk this road for no reason, they scurry around me like, well, quail. Just to keep it real, I take a detour down a ridge toward the river. By real I mean Santa Lucia real—you're not really hiking here until you're off-trail, surfing through waist high ceanothus, and making out with random madrone saplings. And it helps if things are steep, recently burned, covered in rain, and in view of the ocean. Helps even more if there is poison oak, sharp limestone, the scent of coastal sage.

After an hour or so of this, I conclude that if I am going to consume anything from the ground, other than smoking the yerba santa or gleaning withered tomatoes or kale from the garden, it is time to look for some chanterelles.

So I drop over the other side of the ridge, into where the ground is given to second growth redwoods and tan oak. Many years ago, I helped install the original water line that ran through here. Imagine running pvc pipe for about a mile and a half up a steep gully, along a rocky ridge, and down to the house, all the while looking over your shoulder at the ocean. The whole thing was powered by a ram pump so overtaxed it looked as if it was going to expire with each stroke. Instead of looking carefully for fungus or quail, I walk down the draw remembering the water line project and looking for any unearthed pvc.

I stop for a minute to pull twigs and rocks from my boots, shake the water out of my hat, and there is a clean deer skeleton in a small depression of earth. It had been a four-point buck, at least until a falling branch had cracked a point off and mice had nibbled into the marrow. By now I have broken the strap on the shotgun and so I amble/slide down the rest of the draw with a deer skull in one hand and a gun in the other. That's when I remember that the gully I am headed down most likely exits onto a regional park preserve that did not exist when I first came here. Not a great place to be dawdling along with no hunting permit and a gun that doesn't belong to me. Oh well.

I hit the trail of the preserve and stop to read the interpretive sign. It talks, in very sketchy fashion, of how the Ohlone and the Esselen or maybe just one or the other, or who knows, some brown folk had lived here for thousands of years. And then they were gone, logging and homesteading began—you know the drill. Changing ways of life. Me and my gun and deer head walk back up the ridge to make some brown rice, red curry tuna, drink PBR. I See a few puffballs on the way, but my hands are full.

Postscript: After dinner I hear a Spotted Owl calling at dusk. I return call and it responds, but does not come inspect me for consideration as a mate. It is the winged bird of the day.

Frittering

I spent the last few days visiting with two of my parents, my father and stepmother, who long ago moved from the valley to Sebastopol. My folks are very ill and very poor. My father let it slip, as we were driving around doing errands and enjoying the autumnal scenes of west Sonoma, that he was in danger of losing his wedding rings as he had pawned them for groceries and did not have cash to pay the interest.

So I spent my visit engineering a way to retrieve the rings without offending their sense of dignity. I pasted on a perma-grin and waited for the right time to sound nonchalant in offering to pay the pawn shop off. The right moment to sound cavalier about spending $180 I don't really have, the proper affect to sound unphased about the symbolism of the event.

My folks have a luminous, thriving marriage. After thirty-three years, they still sound like kids in love. There have been moments when their struggles have the quality of listening in on the Gift of the Magi. They have often been in the position of sacrificing something for the other even as the sacrifice diminishes the other one's ability to give back. They have given everything they have to give to each other and they don't have much left. When the first one of them goes, the other will probably follow in short order.

Symbolism aside, the rings are beautiful. I am not a fan of gold usually but the cut out designs encircling the band are whimsical without being silly, ornamental without pretense, generous but not ostentatious. All three of us would like to see them passed to me and then to my son.

The material inheritance of their life that interests me otherwise runs to Henry Miller Library posters, handmade spoof business cards on yellowing paper, red and black cotton molas. I have declined to adopt their double yellow headed Amazonian parrot, but my father's copy of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is a dear object to me.

Their struggles, at least materially, are a hand they have largely dealt themselves. Their shame at living in a remodeled chicken coop and having to scrimp so they can put soup and bread on the table when I visit just makes it harder to help them. They did much wrong for themselves—cigarettes will kill my father quietly, in the shadow of other addictions so formidable they might well have killed other people several times over. But the people who love them agree that they have long ago paid their pound of flesh, reformed their excesses, made amends to us.

But I do admit, on a day when putting their visceral pain to words seems narcissistic, pompous, cheap, that I wish one of us just had some fucking money. My father was reminiscing about an amusing little side business he used to have. It was something I thought he did when the rent was coming due or he wanted us to take a vacation to Lake Tahoe.

It went like this. He would take a stuffed parrot toy, shove a fistful of 90,000 hits of LSD up its ass and fed ex it to the east coast. Several weeks later the parrot would return home, its contraband replaced with rolls of cash. As he was telling me the details, I did the math in my head. He and my stepmother had put most of the proceeds up their noses, in their arms, inhaled them from the mouth of a base pipe. It had been at least $600,000 in 15 years. And this was a minor part of their income.

It's folly to wish people in the grip of serious but lucrative drug addiction had made the stable, forward thinking choices others might have. And though I wish there had been money for me to go to college, perhaps a piece of land to live on and pass to my son, I have no resentment, no animosity. They have always been emotionally generous, supportive, and transparent parents. I could not have done better. Still, I wish I didn't have to worry that the next time they have to chose between their rings and a bowl of soup will be the last.

Fish

I have a very detailed memory. I would not claim it is particularly accurate, but I find that I remember all sorts of minutiae about people and places from the past without much sense of hierarchy in their importance. Having returned to more or less where I started in life, physically, I have lots of interactions with people in which I recall mutual acquaintances with such detail that I mislead the person I am talking to into sensing a greater connection between myself and the person or subject at hand than really exists.

For instance, I asked a new friend here if a kid I grew up with named Jason was still around. I did not know Jason well, but we played baseball together and had many friends in common in high school. But you would think, from what I remember of him, that Jason had either been my best friend or else someone for whom I had a sycophantic attraction to. I have no doubt that the person I was talking to will see Jason, mention my name, and be confused when Jason cannot really recall me with any clarity.

By the same process, when I meet someone who has been here for a long time and we play that game of parlaying old stories on top of one another, I know that I leave a strange impression of being at once very familiar with this place and yet completely unknown in the community. I talk as if I have always been a part of this place, and yet no one knows my name.

A ghost.

I was driving home today, and a neighbor was hitchhiking down Cachagua Road. When I picked him up, he said that he had seen a rainbow trout in the flowing creek. I had forgotten this happens, how the dry leaf choked stream bed floods and then once clear the trout make their way fast up from the river to the bigger pools. People tell me the steelhead still make it past San Clemente dam and all the way to Jamesburg in a good water year.

It somehow made me feel a little better, to see an obvious metaphorical connection to my own life here. You see the trout and remember that they are part of this place, have their own nose for what goes on in the temporary streams, but most of the time they are invisible.

Back

I returned home last night, from a month away, and the creek was running. The sheer sonic size of it—the entire canyon seems to be reverberating and echoing with the noise of it—adds a different dimension to the day. When I am in the Northwest, it strikes me that one of the things I hate most about Portland is the lack of kinetic force in the winter. The skies are leaden, the wind does not blow much, there is no ocean to punch a hole in the monotony. The weather, the time, just sits there day after day.

That, of course, is how I experience it, not an absolute observation. Nonetheless, though the Willamette Valley winter rots my soul from the inside out, I think that I could probably endure a winter on the Oregon Coast. The ocean, the storm wind, these events alleviate the grey tension of the winter day for me. Clear and cold is my favorite winter recipe; the interplay of sunshine and stinging air is completely invigorating. I love mushrooms and fungi, but I am not myself suited to winter where they thrive.

In any event, the creek is rushing along and a big windy storm is on the way. After breakfast I could not take it any longer and decided I had to finally go for a run up in the "closed" national forest.

By the time I was a mile or two in, the rain picked up and the dozer-loosened soil was soft under my feet. I came around a bend where the true forest trailheads begin and saw in the distance a vehicle parked at the end of the access road around the dam. I turned around.

Further up the Carmel River I could see the blackened hillsides, though the water spilling over the dam did not look muddy or really even very brown at all. I could not help but notice though, that it seems to take very little rainfall anymore to fill the silted-up dam and get the spillway flowing.

Back toward the parking lot, a Forest Service truck was heading out into the rain. I slowed down, ready to take whatever warning the driver might wish to saddle on me for jumping the Cal-Am fence. But he rolled down his window and just asked how far in I had been, whether I had seen anyone else. I mentioned the rig at the trail up toward Blue Rock and we waved each other on. Sometimes people are just plain reasonable.

Weather

When I was a teenager, I used to say that it took seven years to understand the climate here. About seven years is what it takes to experience a good flood, a big drought, a fire. Rainfall averages—about 20 inches a year here, about 40 over the mountains in Big Sur—have a wide set of data to encompass. Twenty might mean a good number of fifteens in a column with a twenty-five here and there and a thirty-five and a ten. Right now it is raining so hard that I left the trailer to use the bushes and now my hair is soaked and my vest is drenched. It has rained about seven inches since late summer and the creek bed below is only starting to form pools. I am waiting for the day there is a current under the Tassajara road bridge so I can write down how many inches it took to get there.

The climate is mild here, on average, usually, most of the time. And then it is not, for a day or a week, maybe a whole season. Other than frost nip on my left thumb—let me check here, yep still kind of dull feeling in that spot—and on my penis—skiing in five degree weather in old army surplus wool pants with missing buttons, I'm not going to go empirical on that—the only serious weather scares I have had were in the Santa Lucias. I have been both hypo and hyperthermic in the very same spot on the Coast Ridge Road.

The latter was during a very hot day in August after two waterless days of hiking. It was not that I was careless but that I depended, after the first day, on a spring that runs 95% of the time. I pushed on through a mid-nineties afternoon, canteens dry, to arrive at the spring and find it a brackish, fly-covered, 5% mud hole. The next morning I collected some of the least disgusting brack and carried it with me, setting out early for the long climb out of Lost Valley. By mid-morning, my throat was dry, my skin was not sweating very much, and I had not peed.

I stopped along the trail and boiled up the brownish, tea-like water on my stove. I choked it down and felt thirstier than before, drier from standing over the stove. By the time I had climbed up to the ridge, I was faint and dizzy. I lay under a tree in what shade I could find, twelve more miles to go to the car, and tried to remember what the signs of heat stroke were. Far down below me, the ocean crashed around the rocks.

The dizziness did not subside, but the walking was along a road now. A dull, magnetic plodding took over. I had not been this far up on the road but knew that somewhere along it there might be a Forest Service truck or cabin. About a mile or so down the road, I rounded a bend and there indeed was a cabin looking out over the ridge, out over the ocean. On the porch, an old guy was drinking beer. He saw me and waved, offered me one when I hailed him. I sucked it down before getting up the nerve to admit I needed some water. I needed a lot of water.

A couple of years later I went back to Lost Valley in the winter and was caught by a storm. The camp there was shaded by big knobcone pines, the knobby cones being of football size and the knobs being more like spikes. As the wind whipped the trees around, a few cones fell from the branches and I had to choose between sleeping under falling cones of death or out in the open with no tent. I chose the open and the next day awoke in a soggy sleeping bag. There was more water than I could use and up on the ridge above me I could see what looked like snow.

I really don't remember why I had no tent or rain gear. Probably because, you know, the climate here is mild and I was about 19. I had been living in the snow in Oregon and thought I knew what I was doing though, come to think of it, my rain gear had been stolen there. Note to self: when your rain gear is stolen, that's no excuse not to get some more.

Trudging out of camp, soaked to the bone, rain falling fast, I could feel my hands getting stiffer and stiffer. My head was getting dull and foggy, as if each thought needed to be shepherded far across the pastures of my mind before it could be understood. One such thought was that I had to pee, but the realization competed with my hands' insistence that they were not going to untie the water clinched knot of webbing holding my pants up. I stopped and pleaded with them, my bladder entering the discussion and before the three of us could come to some compromise, a hot stream of piss gushed down my leg. I stood there, peeing in my pants, trying to decide whether the stink and humiliation was worth the warm leg.

Probably this took place within 100 yards of where I had boiled up brack a few years previously. But when I got to the ridge I found the wind blowing the trees sideways, and the ocean hidden in deep cloud, and patches of snow all over the Coast Ridge Road. I tried to believe that Pete was going to be there again, drinking tea from a thermos on his cabin porch, a warm oak fire going inside. He was not.

I walked the twelve miles (I think) afraid to stop for too long. The air was not horrendously cold, but I felt that if I stopped too long and tired I would not be able to get going again. My mind floated the idea that I could shelter for awhile and make some of my own tea, but my legs resisted, by now knowing enough of the turns in the road to convince the rest of me that I was almost there. No wait, now I'm almost there. Okay now.

Toward the end of the road, when I knew that soon I would be drinking coffee by the Big Sur post office and chuckling at the whole thing, well except for my piss soaked pants, the clouds parted just a bit. Down below I could see Point Sur, the line of surf on its northern beach a maw of white and blowing spray.

The rain here is cozy tonight, but not exactly comforting. The fire burned hills in the backcountry are probably not ready for this kind of drenching. Over on the coast, folks are probably starting to think about landslides.

The last big ones that I experienced as a kid, in 1986, tore out a section of Highway One between Big Sur and town, leaving people on the coast effectively islanded. My dad and stepmother lived in Big Sur then and I remember one day the three of us, cabin-bound, reading an illustrated version of Robin Hood to one another. By the fire, all day long, reading a wonderful book together.

I remember that delicious feeling of knowing that the earth had taken over the day. That kind of surrendering for awhile, staying inside in pajamas and looking outside wondering just how our house was tethered to the ground. Would it float away?