July 9, 2006 – San Simeon

July 9, 2006 – San Simeon

It’s Sunday, July 2, 2006 and my wife IM and I are in San Simeon, not the place where Hearst Castle is, but the town on Highway 1 about six miles south of the castle. The road sign coming into town says the city has a population of 462—I’m assuming this means full time residence not travelers—and is 69 feet above sea level. You can actually measure the height as well since the five-city block long settlement is literally right at the edge of the Pacific. At the northern end of town is an under-one-city-block long, gently-sloping, compacted sand path leading from Highway 1 to the ocean’s edge. At the southern end of town, the distance, which also cslopes, from main road to water is just about two city blocks long and at the end there is a cliff that falls 12 to 15 feet. Nine streets with signs form the settlement’s grid. On the western side of town is Hearst Drive which runs the length of the town in a north-south direction. On the southwest side of town is Balboa Avenue which runs parallel with Hearst Drive and dead-ends at its northern extreme and curves into Vista Del Mar, which is perpendicular to Hearst and crosses Highway 1—along this stretched called the Cabrillo Highway—and right-angle curves into Castillo Avenue on the east side of town, which also parallels Highway 1.

We’ve come to spend the 4th of July weekend at San Simeon—my company gave everyone Monday off—and we’ve booked a sea view room for two nights at the Seacoast Lodge, which is the third hotel from the southern edge of town; the southernmost is the Sea Breeze, which used to be the Jade Motel and the next is the Orchid Inn, which also owns the Seacoast. We’re here because all the rooming establishments along Moonstone Beach Drive are filled even with their room rates nearly double their off-peak prices—rooms are going for about the cost of a suite at a San Francisco 4-star hotel. When all the rooms along Moonstone Beach Drive are filled, the entire length of the road is crowded and noisy, another reason we’re at the Seacoast. We’ve come to the California Central Coast for a quiet couple of nights reading and listening to the Pacific relentlessly pound the coast of California. The room we’re scored is actually delivering on both these needs. Our room on the second floor in the middle of the motel has blue water views of the ocean and you can hear the distant rhythmic sound of surf. There is no foot, nor automotive traffic outside our window, just an open field the size of a city block square sliced through in a north south direction just outside our room by a creek overgrown with vegetation fed by the underground water trapped beneath the creek bed. In fact the shrubs, which resemble trees, have gotten high enough to block the view from the rooms on the first floor.

San Simeon is different from Cambria in that the former serves travelers, visitors on a trip along California Highway 1—656 miles of great scenic California coast line, from southern Orange County to US 101 near Leggett. The latter also serves these travelers but is also a destination spot for visitors who linger at this point on the California coast to tour the wineries dotting either side of Highway 46 from Highway 1 east to beyond its junction with US 101. Tourist also come to visit the artist colony that has sprung up around Cambria. The small village’s other appeal that few visitors notice, except those who come seeking it, is its complete lack of commercial development. There are no housing developments of ticky tacky houses as described in the Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes.” You get a sense of individuals rather than a group, though to be fair, a good many of the homeowners are occasional residents rather than year around occupants. The contrast to the housing development IM and I visited in Oxnard a couple of weeks back is startling. In retrospect, the Oxnard development was akin to a factory with homeowners as cogs in the wheel of the factory and their money the energy that turned the wheel, an endless stream of money flowing to the shops surrounding the development, to the government—a toll for living there—and housing association, for ensuring the development maintained a consistent look and feel to keep the property value inching upward rather than depreciating.

In Cambria, you will also not see any national or regional brand restaurants, bars, or merchandising outlets—no Starbucks, no McDonalds, no Chevy’s, no Denny’s—you get the idea. Cambria is your mom and pop restaurant, grocery store, and retail outlets. About the only national brand you’ll find in town is a Best Western Motel on Moonstone Beach Drive. Most all the rooms on Moonstone Beach Drive are owned by absentee landlords who hire local management to run their operations. They have gotten web savvy and a group of the establishments have engaged a web and phone reservation service. Some of the hotels in the East Village are owner operated, the Blue Bird Motel, for example, a nice couple who’ve made their living waiting on visitors, many of them returning regulars, my daughter RD and her family for example. IM and I have stayed there on occasion but prefer the Moonstone Beach location.

This small town without major commercial development is rare in California. Look at any small town on a major highway in the state and you’ll find a fast food chain there to feed the hungry masses that stream through without ever noticing the small town where they dumped their kids’ soiled pampers and the accumulated garbage from their last 100 miles of high-speed driving. I won’t romanticize the quaint, uncomplicated Mayberry-like quality of Cambria and San Simeon, but it does make my heart glad to know there is a place in the world where corporate America and its mass producing mentality hasn’t taken over. If you’re like us, you can come to this area, not turn on the TV and not log onto the Internet—this part is the hardest for me—and experience a time before mass media completely took control of your thoughts. I’m spared the temptation of logging onto the web because the Seacoast has no high speed WiFi connection and yes if they had I would be logging on.

IM and I settle for catching up on our reading, two back issues of The New Yorker, June 19th and June 26th for me. The earlier issue has a profile by Hilton Als on the life of Geoff Toland, the cinematographer, who helped turn the camera into an integral part of the narrative of film. His work with Olson Wells in Citizen Kane brought to the art the use of “deep focus” setting the camera’s F-stop to its lowest possible setting F/16—smallest aperture opening—and lighting the scene with an intense amount of light to allow the character in the foreground and background to both be in focus. The shot in the film capturing Kane in the background—bored, distant—and his opera-singing wife in the foreground more effectively conveyed the disintegration of their marriage than any spoken word. I liked this piece. The June 26th issue had an interesting review by Louis Menand of a biography by Robert Greenfield entitled “Timothy Leary.” From it I learned among other things that Aldous Huxley gave “The Doors” their name, which was taken from a 1954 book Huxley published entitled “The Doors to Perception.” I wasn’t much into the drug culture of my age, though I’m fascinated by those who seemed convinced that it was a way to achieve self-enlightenment. The issue also contained a piece entitled “The Dessert Lab,” by Bill Buford, which profiled the life and times of Will Goldfarb—proprietor of Room 4 Dessert on Cleveland Place in SoHo. Goldfarb is a gastronome geek, who has made a lifes work of developing counterculture desserts—don’t expect cakes, pies, or even Zabaglione (an Italian dessert made with egg yolks, sugar, and Marsala wine whipped up to a light custard consistency—my favorite). This chef is into desserts made with, for example, Chinese spices, curries and black olives, but this is only a small portion of the palette of flavors he draws upon in his creations. The profile is compelling because of the chef ascetic dedication to developing tastes that are unique from any experienced heretofore. I read so much on the Internet and get much of my day to day news from TV broadcasts that reading always provides a welcome change.

After a night sleeping with the window open and no sound by the distant surf rhythmic rushing the shore, we woke late on Monday morning—after nine—and sat watching the field outside our window come alive with activity as the sun burned away the lingering morning mist. The Seacoast is home to a few feral cats, one of the two sitting outside our window this morning on the hotel side of the creek is pure white and the other the coloring of a tiger. Both appear to be well fed—is the hotel staff sharing discarded uneaten breakfast items with the cats? The field on the other side of the creek is alive with birds pecking away at the ground feeding on insects and seeds, which appear abundant. Soaring overhead are two hawks, wings outstretched looking for the unsuspecting older or younger animal to swoop down upon. Life on the Central Coast is good.