Carmel-by-the-Sea: One Piece of the Peninsula's Pie

Carmel is the most densely built city on the Monterey Peninsula.  Multi-million dollar homes stand nearly touching, and yet each one is uniquely quaint or charming or grand or spectacular in some definitive way.  Because there is so much attention paid to the esthetic appeal of homes by their owners, there are more tradesmen and workingmen's trucks parked along streets than in any other city on the Peninsula.  Everyone is busy, up to their ears in the effort to maintain the now elite but formerly bohemian community that was started by artists escaping conformity and restriction.  Whereas artists once felt unable to abide building codes imposed by cities where they'd come from, now Carmel has become ultra elite in its effort to maintain its status as perfect and precious.

If you live in the city proper's 93921 zip code area, you don't have a street address like 142 Lincoln Street;  you have a description of where your home is generally found.  For instance:  Lincoln, between 3rd and 4th, third house on the right.  Your home has a name like Eiderdown or Peek-A-Boo or Sea Breeze.  Your home was designed by an architect, possibly a nationally prominent one, and it somehow distinguishes itself by virtue of expensive features and elements that sometimes defy description or categorization.  Certainly, real estate asking prices are not for the financially faint of heart.  

If you are a Carmelite, as you call yourself, you probably have vehement discussions about the trees overhanging your yard, the fence lines of your property, the color of your house and the amount of space your cars may or may not be taking up on the street.  There are no sidewalks and there is no post office delivery so you pick up your mail at the post office in town, but you make it a social event and spend time chatting about your dog or your massage therapist or your psychiatrist while you sip a latte or chai tea drink.  You most likely have at least one pedigreed dog for which you have probably paid over $1,000, and if you don't, you are planning to. You drive a BMW or Mercedes or maybe a Prius. You know where your neighbors and friends went to college and where their children attended college and you mention the names of the colleges as if they are equivalent to a pedigree.  You are a little bit fussy, a little bit eccentric and you expect things to get done when you want them to be done and expect attention to be paid to you when you are not feeling well or happy.  

Outside of Carmel-by-the-Sea is the rest of the Peninsula.  Then there's Pebble Beach, which is a gated community that is not a city at all.  It is as unique as Carmel, shall we say, but mostly because there are a zillion golf courses and golf balls zinging in every direction.  Homes and residences range from enormous McMansions built to impress passers-by, or truly grand well-designed and nicely situated compounds, all the way to surprisingly modest and ordinary ranch-style homes and post adobes.  Clint Eastwood, Peter Ueberroth and Arnold Palmer joined financial forces a few years ago, along with a number of other partners and shelled out $840 million dollars to buy Del Monte Properties, and they are now keeping it running somehow or another, the poor slobs.

On the north side of Pebble Beach is Pacific Grove where we have our own proud homes - many too expensive for the vast majority of Americans to own, but PG has a small, old-fashioned looking downtown, so it seems more within reach.  It's slow and quiet and peaceful most of the time.  There is one golf course - the city's municipal course - that costs a tenth that of green fees at Pebble Beach.  There are dogs here, too.  Most of them are rescue dogs grateful to have anything at all, much less a pedigree.  We have wind that makes us a little crazy every day, and deer that chomp our flowers as soon as we plant them.  And we have termites chewing happily on all the old historic wooden Victorian houses. We are working or retired and we shrug when a few things go wrong, but if anyone messes with our butterfly trees (where the monarch butterflies winter over), we become incensed and raise cain about it.

We think folks in Carmel are silly and they think we're boring and having nothing to do here, and we are both right.  We're all pieces in the same pie, but we find differences between ourselves for some reason.  Most of the time though, everyone is outside admiring the ocean and renewing their sense of awe at the grandeur of nature and their lucky stars for living here, however that might have happened.  Very few Groovers take it for granted.  In that one way, we are exactly like nearly everyone in every other part of the Peninsula - grateful every day to be alive, right where we are.