Big Sur and the Henry Miller Library

An Adventure with Britney

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Two days ago—Tuesday, July 4^th, Independence Day—Britney and I took a one day trip (I know) up to Big Sur from our house in Lompoc. The reason was to see the private nine-bedroom house off Highway 1 which we were considering renting for two nights for our wedding reception in mid-November.

It was an epic day. Four-and-a-half hours up there. We got up bright and early at the shocking, rude hour of 4:30am, and were on the road by 6:35am. The road was wide open and empty. It was gray out but not too cold. A nice early summer weekday. Britney drove with her typical lead foot. We talked endlessly, as we always have. (From Date #1, August of last year. Speaking of that: We’re coming up on one year together next month!)

The residence is a place called “Wind and Sea,” right off Highway 1 just north of Slates Hot Springs. Nine bedrooms. Windows galore, facing the gorgeous, placid blue sea 50 yards off. A huge property. Cabin-like. Two stories. Etc. We’re getting married in October at the Santa Barbara Courthouse so this would solely be for the reception. (After Morocco.)

Big Sur has always held great meaning for me. For one, I’ve been hiking and, more importantly backpacking here for decades. Solo trips as well as trips with ex’s and friends. I wanted to take Britney sometime to Sykes Hot Springs, which I’d done multiple times over the years. As a young man obsessed with the Beat and eccentric avant-garde writers, Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur and Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch also both changed my life and made me see Big Sur in different terms. These writers romanticized the place.

And it made me think of my father, dead since June 2^nd. He and I never backpacked Big Sur together, but we backpacked together in Ojai on and off all my life until 2013, when I started going with my ex. Being in nature—being somewhere I’d held as sacred and which reminded me of Matilija Canyon backpacking with Dad—made it impossible for my mind not to slide back to my father. His kind softness. His subtle arrogance. Hiking behind him on the trail, his wrists clutching each other facing me behind his back, wearing that old hat of his, no sunscreen, his blue eyes ahead, walking slow and sure, humming softly to himself as he often did.

The appointment for the house was at 11am. We got there right on time. The traffic had been moderate-light. There were tourists around, but it was mellow compared to how it sometimes got on the winding, twisty, absolutely gorgeous Highway One, especially in summer. It made me think back to all the trips I’d taken here over the past 20-plus years. One memory rose up: Being maybe 24 years old, with a good friend, leaving the campground in “Godzilla,” my 1977 GMC van I once lived in for a few months, faded lime green color (I bought her for $1,500), windows down, summer, hot yellow sun beaming on our faces, the cool air assaulting us, Neil Young’s classic 1972 album Harvest playing, the song Out On the Weekend, me and my friend silent, big silly grins on our faces, young and happy and dumb and thrilled to be free and alive in the moment. Lord: How easy things were back then!

Britney and I stayed at the house for maybe 45 minutes, an hour. The guy who showed us around was our age, maybe a few years younger (perhaps early to mid-thirties) and seemed to possess a sort of hiker/hippie/outsider vibe, with a beard and thick gray hair. Tantalizingly, I couldn’t quite tell what race he was, either Black, White, Hispanic or other. Not that it mattered. But it did tap my curiosity a tad.

The place was both gorgeous and a little run down and less than we’d hoped for. We discussed the potential for rain in mid-November—Britney has Northern California/Redwoods in the rainy season in mind—and he showed us each room. There was a large front yard, an area for a wedding ceremony, a dance floor, a sauna, a separate detached little studio where Britney and I could theoretically sleep. Etc.

We thanked the guy—romantically, he and his girlfriend lived fulltime up the hill on the property right by Highway 1 in a “yurt”: I imagined writing there fulltime, Britney doing yoga in the next room while I penned the Great American Novel—and headed out, back north on the highway. We decided we had to stop, of course, at the famous Henry Miller Library, but first we needed grub. We passed the library and ate at Nepenthe. I’d eaten there before. Grossly overpriced tourist-trap. Yet tasty. We people-watched, smiling at the Asian tourists, ogling the calm sea as we ate a basket of $14 French fries (well, I did). Leaving, poor Britney complained about her painful thighs: The day before she’d worked out a little too intensely and now she felt the results. So, no hike we decided. Oh well.

The Henry Miller Library was, of course, incredible. That goes without saying. I’d been probably four or five times over the years. They did weddings there, too. We inquired more about that, chatting with the affable, loud, chatty guy in his late thirties behind the counter, black hair and a trucker hat, sleepy, literary eyes. We spent some time in the “library” (really a bookstore) and—bookstores being for me like bars for alcoholics—I walked out with a thick volume of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Score.

After this we headed in the direction of home, north again on Highway 1 since, I forgot to mention earlier, the southern portion of the highway was still closed; aka we’d had to drive up north to Monterrey and then dip down into Big Sur, and now we had to do the reverse. Not long after we’d left, though, still in Big Sur, both exhausted from crappy sleep the night before and getting up at the wee hours that morning, we pulled off the shoulder for a brief power-nap.

We shifted our seats down and closed our eyes. The noise and rumble of cars and trucks rushing by us only feet away on Highway One rocked us to sleep. We were exhausted. I feel like 85% of the time I’m exhausted now. Ever since Covid came in spring 2020 it’s been more or less like that for me. First it was Covid. Then Dad’s cancer. Then my depression. Then Dad’s death. Etc. Spiritual exhaustion.

Something interesting happened. I’ve noticed—and my mom said this, too—that Dad “comes to me” (my memory) most often when I’m in a semi-wakeful-semi-sleep state. I fell asleep—sort of; mostly—for perhaps twenty minutes and when I “awoke” or “came to” (Britney still asleep in the driver’s seat) my father suddenly and vividly came to me. It was a deep, guttural, powerful image and feeling; it came from my inner core.

I saw Dad; pictured him; remembered him. I saw us backpacking when I was a kid, and then again in my early twenties, one of the times we went the whole 12 miles from trailhead to Highway 33 in Matilija Canyon. I saw my dad’s translucent blue eyes. Heard his laugh. Imagined his smile. His smell. Then I remembered the 23 months of his dire sickness, and especially those final six weeks after the last hospital stay, and especially especially the last two weeks and those terminal two days. And his death: before and after. His plastic, lifeless body; his dead black marble eyes; his rubbery skin; the weird LSD-like out-of-body experience of seeing him gone. It all came back to me in a heart-pounding rush of emotion and adrenaline over the course of ten minutes, Britney asleep beside me. Dad was gone. I was alive. Life went on. Strange. All of it.

Britney awoke and we switched seats and I drove.

*

A few hours later we decided to stop in SLO—San Louis Obispo. About an hour north of Lompoc. Britney desperately needed a massage, particularly of her painful, raw thighs. And she was hungry. She looked up local massage parlors and all of them seemed closed minus one. We found it and parked and she went in. Sixty minutes. We’d taken Franky—our old Border Collie—and he was in the back, tired and lazy and calm, a wise Buddha. I took him on a nice walk around downtown, which was just a block over. It was half-empty. A college town. Some bars were open, a smattering of open restaurants, but most things were closed. Fourth of July. America Day.

We took a nice, relaxed, meandering walk, passing a park and the creek and the main drag. It was a nice area, though SLO has a bit of an edgy, strange reputation. It reminded me, vaguely, of Ojai somehow. When we got back to the car I opened the back and put Franky inside and gave him some water and then sat there and people-watched and read Emerson. Brilliant. How had I not read him before? In high school I must have.

Britney came out around 6:30pm. We were starving. We locked the car and left Franky and wandered around. We located, downtown, a Greek restaurant. We ordered, sat, ate. Then we strolled back to the car and took off, heading back along Highway 101 South.

We got home around 8:30pm, just as the curtain of dusk was slowly descending. We’d seen bursts of red and blue and gold fireworks going off in downtown Lompoc as we headed closer. We heard them now, those bombs bursting in air. Since early June they’d been going. Around the time my father passed.

We got into bed with the cats and listened to the firecrackers. My mind wandered back to Big Sur, backpacking, Dad, my youth, all the years growing up we’d sat in lawn chairs in the back yard in Ojai watching the Fourth fireworks at Nordhoff High from the house. I glanced to my right, to the woman I loved more than anything, who I was going to marry, and I grinned and thought, Things are pretty good.

Even when they sometimes feel hard.