The rock-cheeks have red fire-stains.
But the place was maiden, no previous
Building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements,
Rock, wind, and sea; in moon-struck nights the mountain 
Coyotes howled in our dooryard; or doe and fawn
Stared in the lamplit window, We raised two boys here
All that we saw or heard was beautiful
And hardly human. 

 

Oh heavy change.
The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin. 
They have built streets around us, new houses
Line them and cars obsess them--and my dearest has died.

From Robinson Jeffers, “The Last Conservative”

 

 

No place is unchanging.  Carmel-by-the-Sea was founded as a refuge from the rush of modern life and soon held a wide reputation as a Bohemian place.  Of course, there is something paradoxical about a development company selling real estate in a town in the name of resisting business and economic development.  Jeffers was disappointed to see the area lose its wildness, and, although many of his closest friends were among of the West’s most famous Bohemian figures, the poem quoted above demonstrates his frustration with his adopted town’s modernization.  It is interesting to note that what is commonly called development and progress—new hoses and new streets lined with cars—is described here as a form of “rotting.”

 

Carmel is no longer wild but is it still a Bohemian place?  By the decade after Jeffers’ death, dwindling options for cultural resistance by Carmel residents and visitors mirrored those of the nation at large.  Political radicalism in Carmel in the 1930s, in the form of a local chapter of the John Reed Club, had been met with vigilantism.  Thirty-five years later, the city council passed a law specifically designed to keep the Hippies from congregating in Carmel, fearful that these modern-day Bohemians would keep away tourists planning to spend money.  On a national scale as well, by the 1970s, reform and political radicalism seemed impotent or dangerous, while the Hippie movement had failed to bring about the revolution many within it had hoped for.  Tellingly, no large scale countercultural or “Bohemian” movement has followed.

 

Increasingly, middle-class Americans found their power, their means of expression, and their release in lifestyles centered on consumerism.  Carmel, while remaining a refuge from middle-class urban and suburban life, reflected these broad changes.  In 1986, Clint Eastwood was elected mayor, symbolizing a new way of expressing discontent with the status quo.  Frustrated at the city council for stymieing his planned real estate development, Eastwood redirected the libertarianism of the Hippies and their Bohemian antecedents toward “liberating” businesspeople from Carmel’s traditional restrictions on modernization—now themselves symbols of a constraining society—while also moving to protect the natural environment.  The political debate in town became a contest between those who saw cutting regulation as bringing “freedom” of individuals (including businesspeople), and those who perceived these same changes as threatening Carmel’s sense of difference.

 

Today the median home price in Carmel is above $1 million and the median age of residents is over fifty five.  Since the 1980s, upscale chain stores have moved into Carmel and art galleries, few offering the work of local artists, have proliferated.  Alarmed at the loss of its artists and the coincident rise of the art market, the city government recently capped the number of art galleries allowed (currently there are well over 100) and required new galleries to feature the work of a single artist or have an artist working on site.  The “deterioration” Jeffers lamented has surely become a gentrified one, but we might pause and consider why. 

 

Historian Gary Cross has noted that consumerism was successful as an ideology in the twentieth century, “because it concretely expressed the cardinal political ideas of the century—liberty and democracy—and with relatively little self-destructive behavior or personal humiliation.”  As the United States modernized and urbanized, it was consumerism which allowed Americans to express themselves in the evolving mass society, a means for redefining and re-expressing identity and personal meaning.[1]  Thus, Carmel’s slow evolution from a quaint village of rustic bungalows and one-of-kind shops to a graying town of million dollar homes (a third of which stand empty most of the year) surrounding Saks Fifth Avenue and a Banana Republic makes more sense.  With no other options visible, Americans have opted to turn their refuges into lovely outdoor malls.  If Jeffers were here, he might take solace in the fact that “The ocean at least is not changed at all, / Cold, grim, and faithful.”

 

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[1] Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 2.