The Big Sur Coast: Wild Untamed Beauty

Imagine being in a jostling crowd, shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other people.  You must shift your weight, turn, twist about and excuse yourself as you bump accidentally but repeatedly into all the people around you.  Then, you pop out of the snarl and away from them, leave them behind, and you begin to breathe deeply as you enter another room where there is peace.  It's calmer, quieter and a hundred times more pleasant.

That's what it feels like to drive down the Big Sur coast away from civilization.

At first, you see open hilly ranch land and a few regional and state parks on this and then that side of the road.  You drive past a stretch of golden beach where you swear you're at eye level with the ocean off to your right.  It's a treacherous but absolutely beautiful crescent of coast that serves as a visual frame for Point Lobos State Park.  Never been there?  Any photographer worth their salt has made fascinating and haunting images of the rocks, surf and trees there.  Put it on your bucket list.

You are driving into increasingly more twisting and dramatic coastal land now, and you must slow for the community of Carmel Highlands, which actually has its own post office, gas station and galleries.  Architecturally, it offers everything from low-slung ranch-style homes to rugged stone castles.  Be very careful driving on the coast from now on because people new to the area are often stunned into immobility in their cars and pull onto the shoulder - of you're lucky - or just stop right smack in the road to gape at all the soaring beauty.  It makes you want to compose arias, tell all your friends, kiss someone passionately, scream, run around or cry.  It's pretty nice as coasts go.

Past the Highlands, the sinuous quality of the road continues for another 75 or 80 miles.  You are presented with views, vistas, grand scale and proportion that requires every superlative you can remember.  Then, since the colors and atmosphere are constantly changing, you feel compelled to redescribe it all, all over again at every turn.  Finally, you just fall down in a heap of exhausted happiness, jaw slack and eyes glazed.  The best place to do that is at the inns and parks in Big Sur itself.

Now, if you're going to eat and contemplate life, God, the universe, love and every other thing you might want to wrap your mind around slowly and to great depth, Big Sur is exactly the place to do it.  No matter who you are, you can be assured that the steep mountains whose sides are awash with the Pacific surf or the Big Sur River will reveal the one exactly perfect aerie for you to breathe in and out.  Sit and think.  Hike.  Paint, write, eat, ride, walk, read, sing.  Be more human.

The coast that leaps into view as you are sprung from the pretty towns to its north is a wild living beast that is both beautiful and unruly.  It will always have the final say, no matter what the conversation is in your heart.  That is what is so freeing about it.  You are just so small and so helpless in the face of all that gorgeous, untamed wild earth.