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.

Where God Really Is

Even though I left New Mexico and returned to Pacific Grove, the experience there has continued to bubble up in my thinking as I go about my business here.  Most of all, I am acutely aware of the exquisite beauty and special qualities of nature in both places.  Of course, every place on earth originally was pristine and special in its own way.

In my mind's eye, I'm comparing what I saw there with what I see here, the similarities, the differences.  The Spanish missionaries made their presence known in both areas.  The Carmel Mission is just as old here as the old churches and sanctuaries are there for the most part.  People feel especially aware of nature in both places, as opposed to a place like San Jose or Phoenix where much of the area is cemented and shudders with the roar of air and automobile traffic 24/7.  The awareness of natural beauty and its pervasive influence on how we relate to it cannot be denied in either Santa Fe or Monterey.  Some people swear there are unseen forces at work that cause us to remember one place more vividly as compared to another.  I can't say they're wrong; that would be incredibly arrogant.

I can't really articulate the attraction to a place like Santa Fe and the region around it, but I know I am attracted.  It has had an intriguing allure for people for all of human history.  Some lucky accident of altitude, light and temperature creates a surrounding that is exceptionally interesting and pleasing.  It's no different than here.  The arresting sight of the big blue Pacific ocean frothing and splashing at the feet of 2,000 ft mountainous cliffs and undulating green slopes left nearly untouched for hundreds of miles are sights that impress people for their whole lives.

The best aspect of the central California coast and of New Mexico's high desert is that people have taken care to preserve what they have.  The Big Sur Land Trust and groups like The National Audubon Society, The Sierra Club, The US Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy have been alert for years to possibilities of preserving open space and understanding the nature of nature here.  I am hopeful that the people of Santa Fe and Taos as well as other cities and towns in New Mexico take care to safeguard the beautifully unique treasure they call home.

I have been reading with sickened dismay about the hell set loose in the Gulf of Mexico when the oil rig exploded there.  The implications for widespread disaster are certain, and I am a very optimistic person in general.  Why anyone thought drilling for oil was ever anything but a train wreck waiting to happen, I'll never know.  To stop and point fingers and politicize this situation is so petty and stupid, I cannot even say.  It has to sink in that oil and its products are toxic, that the region of the gulf pumps its waters on the gulf stream literally around the globe, that the food web in the ocean as it is lost will affect the Americas profoundly and travel to the shores of Europe and Africa and to the poles.

Economics is the least of our worries in this situation.  We need the planet - it is the air we breathe, the food we eat, the bed we sleep in.  Our children's children and their children will not know natural beauty and respite in nature unless we care for what we have.  We humans and our co-planet-passengers the animals and birds and fish need air and food, wether we then eat them or not.  This is what "dominion over" means:  Responsibility to safeguard and care for, with foresight and wisdom, our only home.