My family moved to the Carmel Highlands in 1954, and we lived in the two small cabins on the property they bought for the better part of a year, before we moved into Carmel proper. Those two cabins are still there today, and if, by "Eden", Steinbeck was referring to Corral de Tierra, aka "The Pastures of Heaven", a small picturesque valley nestled between the Los Laureles Grade and the Monterey Salinas Highway, then our place is indeed to the west and a bit south. Just south of Point Lobos State Reserve, for those of you who have been there. Cherie and I are presently trying to replace one of the cabins with a proper house, but that is a subject for another post, or perhaps for an entire blog of its own. Suffice it to say here that the process has been ongoing for four years and we just had our first hearing. The good news is that we were unanimously approved. The bad news is that there are more hearings ahead -- at least one and possibly as many as three more.
We pulled the Enterprise into our driveway in the late afternoon after a long but leisurely drive up the coast from San Simeon. Now, some people think that US 101 is the coast highway, but these are the non-cognoscenti from Los Angeles and environs. The people of the central California coast know that the coast highway is State Route 1, which begins in earnest a few miles north of San Simeon and continues to cling to the sheer cliffs of the Santa Lucia for the almost 90 miles to Carmel. I had forgotten just how serpentine the road is, especially the section south of Lucia, which I have only driven a half-dozen times or so. And in an RV, even one as easy to drive as the Enterprise, the perception is enhanced to say the least. To make it even more exciting, there is continual construction on that road, mainly because of constant slides. Mother Nature clearly doesn't want a road there, and it's not nice to fool around with Mother Nature, to paraphrase an old margarine commercial.
Indeed, the coast highway is a poster-child for 20th century technological hubris. Begun in 1919, it was eventually finished as a WPA project in 1937 with the help of a number of San Quentin inmates who, according to Wikipedia, were paid 35 cents per day and had their sentences reduced in some unspecified manner. I don't know what the numbers are, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that the State of California has spent ten, possibly a hundred times as much money over the years, inflation adjusted, to maintain that road than it did to build it in the first place. After it was finished, it became practical for people to live along the road and so they did just that. Now they depend on the road being open, so it has become a perpetual struggle against the elements, and of course an endless public works project. Even the Highlands, a mere 4 miles south of Carmel, has had a serious run-in with Mother Nature. In the winter of 1998 there was a series of huge Pacific storms due to El Nino. As a result, the Carmel River had one of its largest floods ever. It washed out the Highway 1 bridge, effectively cutting off the Highlands and everything to the south. Until a temporary bridge was put in, everyone had to be ferried across the river by helicopter.
But back to our drive. We passed Esalen, Nepenthe, and Post Ranch, and turned in at Ventana for a great lunch on the patio. I had voted for Nepenthe for old times sake, because in the old, pre-new-age days it was the only game of its kind down there. It was the 70's that brought us Esalen (formerly Slate's Hot Springs), Post Ranch, and Ventana. But Cherie wanted to check out the Ventana gallery to see if there were any fabulous Missy Loftons to lust after. Missy's father Dick Lofton was a Carmel artist of some local renown when we arrived in '54, and it's safe to say that Missy is a chip off the old block. Fortunately, the Ventana burger proved to be of uniformly high quality, and I didn't even have to mark it down because of the bun or the fries. A lightly toasted sesame seed bun and crisp, skinny fries. Definitely got an A.
I knew the Loftons quite well as a kid, mainly because Dick and Nancy were best friends with Cynthia and Russell Williams, our next-door neighbors in the Highlands. Dick had been an artillery officer in WW II. Every New Year's Eve he got dressed up in an old uniform complete with sword, and as the seconds ticked down to midnight he would bark out authentic sounding orders for the loading of the Williams' toy cannon with a 10-gauge blank. On the stroke of midnight the sword flashed smartly downward, a very loud retort echoed through the Highlands, and the party shifted into high gear. The children were never sent to bed, but generally fell asleep on the couch or the hearth reading comic books.
Cynthia loved children, having had five of her own, and attracted a large coterie of neighborhood kids, including me, by various devices such as stocking a large bin behind her living room couch with comic books and keeping it filled with the latest issues. For some reason, the Archie comics were particularly popular. The antics of Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie, and Jughead seemed to be of constant interest. I think Cynthia rather enjoyed them herself. She maintained, and I believe rightly so, that comic books were a great way to induce children to teach themselves how to read. She was also a strict grammarian, and would constantly correct improper usage such as "like" for "as", "good" for "fine", and of course "me" for "I" or vice versa. A copy of Webster's Unabridged was prominently displayed on a countertop, and whenever anyone (usually a child but not always) asked about the meaning of a word, they were directed to look it up in Webster's. I doubt that this would work today, because of the rate at which technology is creating new words. I suppose we would go online instead. But not Cynthia. She refused to use any technology that had not already been invented by 1925, when she was 10. This included TV, answering machines, microwave ovens, cellphones, and of course computers. However, in her later years she relented a bit on TV because she liked to watch Giants baseball. They won the World Series for the first time ever since they moved to San Francisco on her 95th birthday. It was a great birthday present for what sadly proved to be her last birthday.
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