Sunday October 31, 2004 - Past Life

Sunday October 31, 2004 - Past Life

The highway—California 101, Interstate 5, 10, any stretch of macadam or concrete—can pretty much serve as the metaphor for my life. You get on one of these thoroughfares and they take you some place. And I have been going to those places pretty much my whole life. I’m most fond of California 101 but I’m pretty attached to those long stretches of Interstate 10 through the desert of California, Arizona and New Mexico.

I’ve picked a highway to make my point because it depicts normal life at 70 miles an hour or more—for most of us it’s more. Starting out at 10:00 on a Saturday morning, My wife “I” and I get onto 101 at the Interstate 87 interchange just south of San Jose en route to Paso Robles some 150 miles or so south. At the interchange, 101 is a four lane freeway and it moves at or over the limit all the way through Morgan Hill and Gilroy where it becomes the two-lane each direction highway it was 30 or more years ago when we first arrived in California.

But what the road takes away in speed and lanes, it more than compensates in the stunning landscape through which it slices: rolling hills, in the fall and winter green and lush, in the late spring and summer dry and brown, all year round truly beautiful. South of Gilroy, development on either side of the highway is relatively sparse, mostly farms for as far as the eye can see. That all changes as you near the junction with Highway 129 and Highway 156 both heavily traveled by tourist and commercial traffic going west to and from the Monterey Peninsula off 101.

The next big town 101 encounters is the farming community of Salinas, grown considerably in the 30 years we’ve lived in the state. Beyond Salinas are the farming towns of Chualar, Gonzales, Soledad, Greenfield, King City, San Lucas, San Ardo, Bradley, and San Miguel, looking from the freeway much like they did in the 1940s and 1950s if not earlier, though they have been colonized by the occasional fast food restaurants and Quik Stop Service Stations offering gas and food.

All along the highway between Salinas and the towns further south there are miles of acreage under cultivation. And the stretch of 101 south of King City through King City and into Paso Robles for miles on either side of the highway there are vineyards with their neat rows of vines forced to stand in nearly perfect straight lines trellises of wooden stakes and lengths of wire that give the impression of soldiers at parade rest on an enormous field. Just before you reach Bradley a small town 20 or so miles north of Paso Robles, you pass through an operating oil field populated by a large herd of preying mantis-looking pumps rhythmically extracting the black gold from the ground beneath and on either side of the Salinas River that races 101 all the way to Paso Robles.

It’s about a three-hour drive to Paso Robles from San Jose, but our destination is further west on the California Coast, a small town south of Hearst Castle called Cambria. To get there you exit 101 at Highway 46 west and you drive over the Santa Lucia Mountain Range over a spectacular stretch of winding two-lane road as it climbs for nearly 40 miles until you reach the summit. There you have an absolutely incredible view of the Pacific—it’s no wonder a man like William Randolph Hearst built his home on the side of this mountain range. From this height, you can see the sun racing west toward Asia when the coast hugging fog fails to make its usual appearance. From the heights you can see south along the coast all the way to Morro Bay and the distinctive Morro Rock jutting up out of the water. You can see north all the way to Hearst Castle.

Once over the summit, another 20 minutes of driving and we arrive at Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway. A right turn and another 10 minutes and we’re in Cambria. A left off Highway 1 on Moonstone Beach Drive and we’re at one of the bed and breakfast motels that sit all along this mile long stretch of road that parallels Highway 1. Each offers pricey rooms with ocean views but we willingly pay the rate to sit for a day or two and gaze at the Pacific, listening to the rhythmic pounding of the waves, and enjoying the on-shore breeze coming into the open windows. It’s a place where we go to enjoy a way of life that you can only truly have two or three days at any given time.

I began with the lofty suggestion that the highway was the metaphor for my life and this trip south is an example. We typically leave on a Saturday and arrive in the afternoon, spend the day on Sunday and return on Monday. All the way down, every mile you travel you’ve left some of your life on the highway behind you. And the drive back only makes that realization abundantly clear as you leave the peace and serenity of that time in your life that you stayed in Cambria to return to the life you left a few days before in San Jose. We’ve been making the journey to Cambria for the better part of 30 years and each trip we’ve left more of our lives than the last time.

We’re going again in the middle of November. There is no better place to leave a part of you than in Cambria.