Big Sur - Never Meet Your Heroes!
There is the adage “one should never meet your heroes.” I have learned that truth as the times I have met someone I admired just completing an intelligible sentence was a challenge. I think any negative experience with meeting a hero has more to do with my tightly tied tongue than any ungraciousness on their part.
I’ve seen George Jones waiting at a Melrose pizza place with the lawn mower running. I ran into Conway Twitty on my chiropractor’s couch. I have fixed tape recorders for Minnie Pearl and Chet Atkins’ wife used to call my electronics store looking for “Chester”.
In Nashville, these giants live and walk among us. In the pre-BroCountry days, when Lower Broadway was delightfully seedy, we Nashville citizens tried to honor the privacy of our stars. I once failed to get a signature on a credit card for a $2,000 computer Charlie Daniels was purchasing for his son because I was playing “Joe Cool” and not wanting to appear as excited on the outside as I was inside. It was tough to track old Charlie down in Wilson County, but his manager eventually came in and signed the credit card bill.
But what happens when your “hero” is a place?
I fell in love with the idea of “Big Sur” back in the 1980s when I read “A Confederate General From Big Sur” by Richard Brautigan. This was the second Brautigan book I had read as “Trout Fishing in America” was recommended by my trout fishing extraordinaire friend, Chuck Richardson. The storyline of Brautigan’s Big Sur had faded over the years, but the idea of visiting what sounded like a magically gorgeous place with the coolest name imaginable had landed a trip down California 1 to my bucket list.
My bucket list is pretty short, and I won’t bore with the entirety. In addition to Big Sur, since I was a teenager, I had wanted to eat seafood at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. I had also added seeing the Redwoods before they possibly disappear by wildfire. Jan wanted to add Sonoma Wine Country and Alcatraz to the itinerary. I incorporated those along with a San Francisco ghost tour to fill out a packed eight days. All these could be accomplished in a single swing through northern California.
I did a lot of reading and research on our destinations, but for Big Sur I bought the audio book version of “Confederate General From Big Sur” to get reacquainted. I was also delighted to discover there was an audio book written by Jack Kerouac called “Big Sur”. I had read Kerouac’s “On the Road” twice and “Off the Road”, written by Neal Cassady’s wife Carolyn about what it was like to be caught in a love triangle between the author and her husband, “the Fastest Man Alive”. The Beatniks had always held some fascination despite being before my time.
The writing in both books was excellent, but Big Sur was just a cocoon backdrop for the most part. Sort of like those fake towns in the old westerns. Both books were about men in their 20s and 30s who were on their way to drinking themselves to death, tiptoeing clumsily through lives of poverty and sometimes depravity, all the while punctuated by adventure. I came to realize this lifestyle is not as romantic to me now, four to five decades from the acquaintance of first read.
With my apologies to The Bard, much ado about notta lotta!
Yet I had carried an image of Big Sur as a mythic destination and planned an overly ambitious day where we left San Francisco and drove three hours to the Monterey Peninsula. We found our way to the Pebble Beach Golf Links and probably compromised our timeline by spending too much time in the shops gathering family souvenirs. We were determined to disguise the fact we were from Lebanon, TN and MasterCard helped foster the illusion. It was mid- afternoon before we headed for CA Highway 1 and Big Sur.
We drove through picture book Carmel-By-The-Sea to get to Highway 1, planning to come back there for dinner at Clint Eastwood’s restaurant. Highway 1 didn’t disappoint in scenery. The mountains on the left and the angry Pacific on the right make for amazing views. I was driving and Highway 1 demands nearly undivided attention. The Bixby Creek Bridge is breathtaking, the largest single span arch bridge on the planet. I immediately thought of “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” as well as the rickety steel bridge in Junction, Tx that spanned the Llano River. I cowered in the back as a preschooler when my dad drove across the rattling Junction Bridge. I was sure the car would topple into the water below. I had some of same panic rise inside as I drove over Bixby Creek Bridge.
It was not all progress as traffic backed up in two places as the road went to a single lane both ways. The highway had collapsed and was under repair. California has spent about $230 million repairing these two acts of God, nature and climate change.
We enjoyed the views, but strangely didn’t stop to take pictures. Too many tourists at the overlooks I reasoned, the pot calling the kettle black. The reality was a seeming magnetic force drew us ever winding onward in the search for Big Sur.
We finally got to where the road dived inward away from the ocean to Pfeiffer-Big Sur State Park. There was plenty of camping, hiking and kayaking, but we hadn’t planned to do any of those this day. I had envisioned surf. My mind had simply added the missing “f” to the area name. I was looking for Big Surf. Since returning home, I found an article that talked about an unmarked road that took you down to the beach, but we missed it. It wasn’t…you know, marked.
We decided to continue to McWay Falls, but after a couple of miles the road came to an end. Closed for repairs so extensive even a one lane portage couldn’t be mustered to continue the trip. The best course of action seemed to be an about face and retrace our steps back to Carmel-By-The-Sea and our dinner plans with Dirty Harry.
I was nagged by something missing. The Big Sur area had not disappointed. The scenery was magnificent and while this was probably the least planned part of our trip, Highway 1 lived up to billing, landslides and all.
I think the nagging was a sadness that I missed Kerouac and Brautigan by more than a half century and there didn’t seem to be any trace of them. Henry Miller had a library dedicated to him in Big Sur, but I never read “Tropic of Cancer”, so he didn’t fill the void. Mr. Google said the book was banned like so many today, so maybe I’ll add it to my reading list. I’m old enough now.
Kerouac and Brautigan were writing heroes who had long ago sold me a longing to see Big Sur. In reading their two books about the area from a septuagenarian’s perspective, I had once again met my heroes and been disappointed this time. Neither of them had done Big Sur justice. But even Big Sur couldn’t meet expectations fitting only a reader’s imagination.
Henry Teague, my late brother-in-law, probably best summed up what I was feeling. Henry and my sister Nancy drove from Arkansas to Alaska and back twice. When I asked him about the trips, he said: “After a while, even the most stunning scenery gets old. Pretty is pretty".
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