And now the thousand words

WE got out of town late, after noon, since Chris and Lauren had to meet with the agent at their new townhouse complex to sign the papers. I didn't mind. I am usually (and very much) a get-out-and-goer, like to get on the road as early as is feasible, but in this case I let it go. The new place was a very good thing. I had been over to see it with them the day before, and it was a definite improvement over their apartment, not least because it has a very gardenable back yard. The drive out of the valley, as always, was low and flat; the drive through the hills, as always, was jaw-droppingly beautiful. The weather was pretty brutal, especially for early June, and the experts were just starting to make serious noises about how rotten the summer was going to be all over the country.

As we pulled off the highway and onto the streets of Salinas, I rolled down my window, and the air that flooded in was slightly cooler than the air-conditioned contents of the car.

I never take pictures in Salinas, although I should, so I might have some photographic evidence to support my contention that eating at Rosita's is the only good reason to stop in Salinas. The first time we stopped in there on the way to Big Sur was because I was curious what kind of place the birthplace of Steinbeck had become. Answer: a very, very silly, dirty little town doing it's damndest to hi-jack Steinbeck's fame and turn it into fodder for a civic booster program.

So we went to Rosita's. Chris and Lauren had tacos; I had a toastada. It's a fairly silly thing to eat, but it was what I wanted.

We got out of Salinas fairly easily, which is a trick in and of itself. The streets of Salinas fold in on each other, Escher-like, so that roads look like they head east and actually go south, left turns look like right turns, ins look like outs. But before long we were sliding out around the side of the Monterey Bay and down the coast towards Big Sur.

It was on the second or third stop that I remembered to dig out the digital camera. I had gotten my leather jacket out of the trunk when we stopped in Salinas, because I knew I was going to need it. The wind that whips off the ocean and buffets against the hillsides is wonderfully unpredictable; it comes at you from different directions at different times, although the main current comes landward and to the North.

No place else I know of smells like Big Sur. Sea-salt, cedar & manzanita, the chill of the sea-wind, the baked warmth of the hillsides . . . There's just nothing like it. This is part of the reason I have always said that pictures don't do the place justice.

But the pictures do, at least for me, bring the place back to mind. I can't say whether or not they do the place justice for others. I see the pictures and I'm there. I mean, it's not like Yosemite. Yosemite is impossible to capture in pictures because of the sheer scope of the place. About the best single-shot description of Yosemite I have ever run across was when we went up to the Higher Els last year, when standing at the edge of the over-look I managed to locate the lodge, some 3000 feet below. I tugged on Chris's arm and pointed at the floor of the valley. "That's the lodge," I said, and he looked and then smiled at me and nodded gleefully.

Big Sur you can caputue. You just have to catch it in profile.

The cloudscape is always different. Once in a while I fancy I see the hand of God in it, changing the way the light and shadows cast on the landscape, but that is a vain and arrogant thing to think, so I whip the thought into exile as soon as I feel it fingering around the edges of my brain. This time there were banks of seasonal fog and cloud that came and went over the ocean and the land, working South to North, so we alternately had soft gray land- and sea-scapes and brilliant blue skies and sun-flooded hills.

Several times along the way we saw what I always thing of as The Cows of Big Sur. There is at least one working ranch left at Big Sur, probably more, and every once in a while you'll pass a herd of cattle put out to graze between the barriers of barbed wire fence to the landward and cliffs and surf seaward. "Now those," I said, "are happy cows."

(The following day, passing a heard grazing admidst some outrageoulsy gorgeous hills in the San Robles, Chris wondered "Maybe we could eat those cows?" It was a reference to Chris and Lauren's newfound practice of buying grass-fed beef over the internet. We agreed, after brief discussion, that those cows would be pretty much guranteed to cost a million dollars a pound, as if they inherited the cost of the landscape they were ingesting.)

Houses at Big Sur always knock me out, especially the cool ones, the ones with cantilevered decks hanging out over the cliffs and window walls overlooking the . . . Well, the whole bit, really. I just imagine waking up in the morning and making coffee and then having to make the decision Which part of Big Sur should I gawk at this morning? People live at Big Sur. Lucky, lucky, extremely rich people.

We stopped at an outpost along the way to use a loo and stock up on water and road food, and then we were off again, down the coast. The rest of the coast below, compared to Big Sur, was rather tame, although gorgeous nonetheless. I wouldn't ever say we rushed Big Sur, because we didn't, but we had a hotel room booked in San Simeon that night, and so we had to move on. The following morning we got up and checked out and got breakfast at the restaurant in front of the hotel. I had the best Eggs Benedict I have ever had in my life; the eggs were light and firm and the size of raquet balls, the Hollandaise was creamy and rich and just precisely right in that unexpressable way a good Hollandaise is. It just made perfect sense.