Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Driving the California coast on Highway 1 comes with challenges.

For most of its length, CA-1 is a narrow, undivided, two-lane road that climbs and descends as the topography demands (sometimes rapidly), hugging the often precipitous coastline with switchbacks, hairpins, and a gazillion good old twists and turns. Negotiating these requires a fair bit of concentration, especially when you’ve already put hours of them behind you, and still have hours of them to go. As hard as it is on the driver, though, it’s even harder on the passengers, as they end up as little more than ballast, tossed from side to side like Kirk and Spock on the bridge of the Enterprise during a Klingon attack. While I spent about 80% of my brain power trying to achieve the optimum balance between minimizing the turn-induced, stomach-sloshing G-forces and maximizing our velocity so that we might get to the hotel by the end of check-in time, my wife, whose superpower is the ability to sleep in damned near any moving conveyance, spent several nausea-limned hours regretting our decision to take this route.

Fortunately, the California coast provides ample excuses to pull over, give one’s innards a rest,  and enjoy the scenery. We found the first excuse fairly quickly.

Something in the Air

Piedras Blancas is a section of coast just up the road from San Simeon (of Hearst Castle fame). We didn’t go to the castle, nor were we interested in the light station nearby. No, we had stopped for a chance to view some wildlife, for Piedras Blancas is a nursery for elephant seals. Exiting the vehicle, we became immediately aware of an . . . aroma. It was earthy, dusty, salty, with a hint of kelp, and a bass note of something undefinable, like warm, unpasteurized milk. As we walked to the overlook, what was merely an aroma now hit us full force like a crashing wave. Below us was a lumpy carpet of huge creatures, each about twelve feet long, though we learned that these were only the “smaller” females and juveniles. (All the males were probably out playing poker and drinking beer.) They lay side by side, even on top of one another, as they lay to bask in the sun that had just burned off the last of the fog and now dominated the cloud-studded sky.

We’d only been out there a few minutes when my wife began to cough and sniffle. Allergies we thought, a flare-up of what we’d experienced back home for the past month. What we didn’t realize was that this was molting season for the seals, and the breeze that came in off the water (and up into our faces) was filled with bits of the elephant seals’ fur and shedded skin. We walked along the short overlook, observing the beasts below us, hearing their guttural snorts and flubbery complaints, but by the time we’d gone a hundred yards, my wife was in full histamine meltdown. Turns out, she’s terribly allergic to elephant seals. Who knew? In our defense, that’s not something one usually tests for. We rushed back to the car, left the nursery, and within a few miles of open-window driving, the crisis had passed, my wife could once more open her eyes, and so (naturally) she closed them again, and took a nap while I drove us northward.

It was in this section of the trip that I was reminded of my hatred of RVs.

The stretch of highway that lay between us and our night’s rest had been subjected to some of the most massive landslides in recent memory, closing down sections of the highway for up to fourteen months while repairs were made. And the repairs were not yet complete; the already narrow road was reduced to a single lane in several spots, each requiring a ten- to thirty-minute wait before either a flag-worker flipped a placard from “STOP” to “SLOW,” or a pilot car led you at a crawl through a cliff-edge section of sagging tarmac.

This would have been difficult enough, if the traffic consisted of cars, pickups, and the occasional van, but this was a Friday, a sunny springtime Friday, which meant there were troops, no . . . convoys, no . . .  bloody armadas of rental RVs, all traveling nose to tail, all driven by over-confident, under-experienced desk jockeys, all going out for a weekend’s relaxation with umpteen of their best buds, crack me a beer, bro. They rumbled in lockstep down the highway, filling the lane from edge to edge, recklessly slowing and accelerating, and never, ever using the turnout to let the smaller, more nimble vehicles pass. I spent a couple of hours following the last in a train of El Monte RVs, all with nothing to see except for their 1-800 number (should I ever want to rent one myself . . . ha!), and their unbelievably annoying catch-phrase, “Goin’ Places with Smilin’ Faces!” I was torn between regurgitation and sending us off the nearest cliff. Technically, I suppose I could have done both.

But I soldiered on.

Our first northbound night was to be in Monterey, but after our separate ordeals, we were grumpy and decided to stop for lunch in Carmel-by-the-Sea. We had decided early on that we wanted to do this trip, if not top drawer, at least something near the top, so the idea of having lunch in a bistro in what is possibly the most elite town on the West Coast was a no-brainer. Surprisingly, Carmel was a noisy little burg. April must be the month when the well-heeled all have their houses renovated, because every street had generators and grinders and crews of men in high-viz vestments walking to and fro. With the assistance of Yelp!, we picked a bistro a block away from the Tiffany and Cartier and Prada stores, walked around the jackhammers and caution tape, and entered.

It’s obvious that the people who work in Carmel do not live in Carmel. As we waited for our meal, we used Zillow to price out the neighborhood. Homes, small ones at that, started at about four million dollars. It is a bastion of privilege and wealth, and yet, driving around, I didn’t find it a a whole lot more beautiful than the town where I grew up. While I was enjoying my soup du jour and abalone doré (two appetizers that cost more than a meal for two back in Morro Bay), we learned that our server lived an hour away, in Salinas (remember Salinas, from the southbound leg?), where he worked another job, as well. This is the way of things in America: a whole generation who cannot afford to live where they work, stacking job upon job, just to keep the lights on and some ramen in the cupboard.

Finding John

We set off again, rested, and a good bit less grumpy. Monterey was just on the other side of the peninsula, and it wasn’t long before we checked into our hotel on Cannery Row. I’d been to Monterey only once before, back when I was still in knee-pants, so my actual memories of it were sparse. In my mind, though, it was a place of rustic charm, old buildings lovingly preserved, and streets filled with the sounds and smells of industry, where rough-hewn men and thoroughly capable women made honest livings from the bounty of the sea.

I crack myself up.

That place—if it ever existed—is long gone, replaced by repurposed warehouses and subdivided packing plants that look as if they’ve been curated by Disney. Aside from the deservedly famous Monterey Bay Aquarium at the far end, the rest of the Row is dominated by fudge vendors, t-shirt shops, eateries that can only aspire to mediocrity, and unabashedly incongruous game arcades. There’s not a tinned fish to be found, much less the aroma of the sea.

I did find one place that looked at least reminiscent of the bygone days I imagined. Down on the southern end I spied a small door in a squat building tucked in between a pun-infested t-shirt shop (think bespectacled sea mammal with a wand named Hairy Otter) and a Sunglass Hut. The little building was unpainted, with siding made of silvered, desiccated wood that had seen decades of sun and salted spray, and it looked for all the world like it had been abandoned, like a stray dog hiding in an alleyway.

What I had found was the Pacific Biological Laboratories, a true piece of Steinbeck history and, to my eye, the only piece of the Row that looked the part. Ignored by all others passing by its door, here was the inspiration for the Western Biological Laboratories of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I stood and looked at it, appreciating its dilapidated beauty, as if it were a piece of the True Cross (which, for me, it rather was).

As we finished our walk along the Row, I was struck by the color of the sand. I’m used to sand that is greyish or, well, frankly, sand-colored. Sometimes it has a hint of rose from nearby iron outcrops, or is pale and white and finely grained, glinting with silica. Not in Monterey. Here, the sand has a yellow cast to it, and it’s a color I could not accurately capture with camera or phone. If I had to pick a close match, I’d go with Pantone 121 or 1215, a color like ground sandstone with some chamois thrown in for good measure.

Our hotel room was right over the waters of the bay which lapped up against the breakwater in shades of blue and green, capped with white. Cormorants nested outside our window, and their garrulous chatter was punctuated by the barks of seals and the calls of gulls, one of which came to visit on our balcony rail, hoping for a handout. Below, sea otters rolled and fished in the kelp beds, and sailboats silently plowed the waters. Sunset brought in the fog, muting the brilliance of buoy lights.

In the morning, we would head out again, but this time to a place I know very well.

More later.

k