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.