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Robert J. Brophy |
Arthur B. Coffin |
|
Robert J. Brophy |
Arthur B. Coffin |
The following is a sketch of adventures and responses during a class fieldtrip from the Greater Los Angeles Area by eighteen members of a college poetry seminar on Robinson Jeffers.
We start before sun-up Friday morning: some have begun the night before, one car already having broken down at San Luis Obispo. Our load: for each a tent (solo or shared), sleeping-bag, pillow, overnight bag, survival food, lantern, flashlight, bottle of water, change of clothes. Two have been assigned fire-wood and two, meal-planning. My ride swings by at 5:00 and we are off into spotty traffic --through L A, San Fernando Valley, a climb into Los Padres Forest, Castaic, Tehachapi Mountains, Gorman, Tejon Pass, the Grapevine, and the great valley floor that stretches from Bakersfield past Sacramento. From our map, we track highway 101 to Coast Road 1 at San Luis Obispo, thence through Morro Bay, Coyucos, Cambria, and San Simeon, pursuing the remaining miles up the California tide-line against a bleak but beautiful Pacific morning sun, past Piedras Blancas, which Una writes about in her letters, thence accessing the precipitous Coast Range, the highway now a narrow, twisting, ever-rising ribbon of asphalt between rocky overhangs and shoulderless drop-offs, the vista almost overwhelming in its panorama of perpendicular mountains- meeting-water and Pacific cloud formations. Thence through Gorda and Pacific Valley, tiny towns, the road is tortuous and slowed by unpassable campers. Riding high on the cliff-hugging two-lanes, we stop repeatedly to gaze back and ahead to headland after headland, surf boiling around rocks beneath. Soon Lucia, Slates Hot Springs, Gamboa Point, and Anderson Landing slip by as we read to each other "The Coast-Road," "Orca," "Distant Rainfall," "The Beaks of Eagles," "Oh, Lovely Rock," and "Flight of Swans."
Tassajara Hot Springs are inland to the east, then the Ventana Cones, cliff-overhang Nepenthe restaurant with curios and books, Henry Miller Library, Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park and Big Sur. Andrew Molera Unimproved Campground, our proximate destination, is just short of Point Sur with its Jeffers-famous lighthouse; we hurriedly walk the half-mile sand path, bowed under personal equipment which seems more excessive and irrelevant with each step. The camp is a wide, long, flat meadow just a hundred yards from the Big Sur River mouth. The river swishes and broils beside us. No electricity, no bathrooms, no car access. Several outhouses and fire-rings, spaced spigots, scattered picnic tables. Tents go up, lest we be caught later by the dark.
ll:00 AM. The remaining twenty miles to Carmel come filled with roller-coaster loops of road past beaches and creeks, around ragged points, each opening upon a staggeringly dark, bleak, craggy, breathtaking vista. Names from Jeffers's poems leap out at us from road- and bridge-markers: Point Sur Coast Guard Station and Lighthouse, Little Sur River, Sur Hill, Hurricane Point, Bixby's Landing, Mill Creek, Notley's Landing, Palo Colorado Canyon, Rocky Point, Kasler Point, Garrapata Creek, Soberanes Point, Mal Paso Creek, Yankee Point, Wildcat and San Jose Creek, Mission San Carlos, Carmel River.
And we have arrived at Tor House, just in time to join the first tour of the afternoon. Carmel is bright and clear. Stone, stone, stone. Its hard grain is everywhere to the eye and touch. How unique, strange, and compelling a house: low ceilings, fireplace-upon-fireplace, Una's piano and pump organs, family photos and paintings, unicorns everywhere, a writing desk. And books, shelf-crowding-shelf; we have no time to look (here are Hardy, Yeats, Scott, Moore, Lawrence). Redwood paneling, dark but warmly colored rooms, the famous bed by the window, scattered woodpanel- inscriptions. Stooped doorways and low ceilings are proof against roof-wrenching storms and hoard the fireplace heat. A steep and narrow staircase to cramped living-quarters under slanting roof- slopes and Jeffers's wonted walking/writing chamber.
And then Hawk Tower rising forty-feet: the twins' first-floor"dungeon" encompassed by four-foot stone walls, a Jeffers writing desk and chair, his eye-glasses and Price Albert tobacco can. Una's writing and resting second-floor get-away, beautifully paneled in redwood, accessed both by an outside staircase and a secret, panel-hidden, parallel stair, a joy to our childhood-remembering imagination. Thence the third-floor: austere, half- open ten-by-ten-foot Jeffers hideaway with its steep climb to a fourth-stage observation platform, looking out on Carmel Beaches, Point Lobos, the Carmel River mouth, and the broad, deep sky whence, as imagined in the opening of the narrative "Margrave" he could stand, hands gripping the parapet, and find context in the stars.
And, over-all and throughout the hour-long viewing of Jeffers household world, the congenial, knowledgeable, dedicated, informed docents. We are a challenge, having read and argued so many poems.
Then time to reflect, sitting on sea-surrendered rock-outcroppings opposite the house across Scenic Drive at low tide. We read more poems. A shock: how crucial the rough-grained granite boulders, the oceanward landscape, sea-air, and wave-sound now seem as background for the poems' rhythm. What do people do without it! What did we? We read, passing a book hand to hand, an experience almost painful in its intensity.
The October afternoon already wanes, so we drive south again forty minutes to our open-field campsite, blinking at each new vista, much overwhelmed with wilderness and unmindful stone and water. Parking in the appointed Forestry Service circle, we walk the fraction-mile trail alongside a noisy Sur River, looking for the ghosts of April Barclay and Clare Walker; neither appear.
The first evening's fare is spaghetti and salad, French bread and burgundy (the group has been self-declared vegetarian). All are sufficiently hungry, and awed, perhaps overburdened with scenery the likes of which many of us have never seen. We read more poems, then hike with flashlights to the little promontory at the Sur River-mouth, overlooking the sea. The sky is full of stars. Orion rises in the east. The Milky Way arches overhead; we don't see it in Southern California cities. It recalls childhood wonder.
Raccoons of course are out, but not in the rumored numbers. They act as though the camp were theirs, we the invaders. Not much purpose in arguing. After some gaiety, guitars and voices are muted; we retire, exhausted from early rising and overwhelming sights, the student cooks (unwisely)leave a pile of spaghetti out as a truce- offering and bribe. One visitor, a recent Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, who has joined us late, sleeps in the open and wakes to find a raccoon, humanlike, unzipping his back-pack; it takes the masked bandit less than a minute. Who says animals are not intelligent! Later we will watch sea otters in a cove below Lobos, floating on their backs carrying stones to crack shells.
Before 9:00 a.m., instant coffee, hot chocolate, pastries, and fruit have fueled us for a fast start up the coast; it's Saturday and the sun shines benignly. Cannery Row and the 17-mile-drive are not sufficiently Jeffersian. We plot out separate car visits to Carmel beaches, State Beach, and Carmel River Lagoon, all with designated poems to read: "The Purse-Seine," "Point Joe," "Hurt Hawks," "Boats in a Fog," while a few late-arrivers tour Tor House. We agree to spend two hours noon till 2:00 at Point Lobos wandering among twisted cypress groves and exploring coves, beaches, and rocks covered with seals and sea lions.
Promptly at 2:00, we gather for a five-car caravan down the coast, reading more poetry to each other, appropriate to about seven headlands and creeks en route back toward Point Sur: "Continent's End," "The Place for No Story," "Fire on the Hills," "Wind-Struck Music," "Vulture," "Apology for Bad Dreams," "The Caged Eagle's Death Dream," "All the Little Hoofprints," "Give Your Heart to the Hawks."
We lose a few sojourners but the remnant manage repeated stops, reading more poetry (we are assured) than any like troop has done before. There has been a pit-stop at Safeway off Rio Road so picnics are snatched along with scenery. The afternoon wanes. We read "The Eye" from Hurricane Point, from which the Pacific is seen as convex, the horizon curved like an eye-ball, as Jeffers says, with hemispheric continents, Asia and the Americas, as lids.
The afternoon bleaches as we round Little Sur River and pass the ghostly "Point" out on its sand-spit, where the U S Navy dirigible Macon went down in 1935 with its five trapeze-launched fighter planes. No time to regroup at camp, we snake darkly through Big Sur redwoods, against the failing light, again alongside the rushing Sur River, and follow Sycamore Canyon to Pfeiffer Beach, our ultimate stop, where Alan Jardine of the Beach Boys (who set to music "The Beaks of Eagles") has a ranch-house. This is proximate to Wreck Beach where Jeffers pictured Fayne, Michael, and Lance Fraser on their community beach picnic, where the party drank Prohibition liquor from Drunken Charlie's jugs and acted out the Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel stories in "Give Your Heart to the Hawks." The island-like rock-formation, which splits this beach at tideline, invites six of our crew with its sharply perpendicular chopped footholds to a height of 50 feet. And then a most amazing sunset, red melding into purple. Sacrificial; more Jeffers than Jeffers.
Back at camp all are exhausted; lost sheep stray in; the Saturday night cooks have gotten lost going for supplies, much to everyone's dismay. Muffling a mutiny, we are rewarded with burritos, beer, and soft drinks. Since most are poetryed out, we tell ghost stories and other tall tales, remembering Jeffers's capacity for ingesting the macabre legends of this Sur landscape: parricide and strychnine poisonings, incest, fratricide, castration, drunken cremations, visions, Doppelgangers, and other hallucinations. A camp-ranger comes to quiet us down, and eventually we trail off to tents. One party stays up to trudge the dark to the Sur River mouth and read poetry by flashlight till 2 AM!
The rest is anti-climax: decamping Sunday morning amidst drizzle. Where else to go, what highway to take home, how to write that term-paper due Tuesday? We load our cars and again drive Highway 1 through Big Sur toward San Simeon. The lip of the road all but tips us over the continent's end visually; the vistas are more spectacular going south.
It has been a weekend of enthusiasm, practical jokes, landscape-injected poems, level upon level of appreciation. The best three days....! Of course the problem on return is decompression. It will take a week to focus again, to reel-in that far-away stare, to not be thinking of huddled stone buildings, rock, hard sand, salty wet winds, violet sunsets, craggy headlands, hovering hawks, oak and redwood, fern-hid deer, canyons and creeks, Lobos blow-holes, lichen on twisted cypresses, and a country that breathes poetry.
© 2005 Jeffers Studies
Contact: Jeffers Studies