Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.1]

Chapter Twenty

Nicasio and the professor pulled out of the hotel parking lot in Dr. Simons' beige Volvo station wagon. It was crowded with boxes of tools, video equipment, and a gasoline-powered portable generator. Within five minutes the two researchers were cruising back down the Big Sur coast toward the Bixby bridge site. As they raced past by the entrance to the Point Lobos State Reserve, Nicasio thought about how he and Daniela had visited that spot some five years before, when they had just begun dating seriously. He remembered how beautiful she looked in her forest green windbreaker and hair tied back into a pony tail. He smiled thinking of her as the young, pseudo-adventurer with her trendy, chocolate-colored reading glasses and new, athletic trainers, purchased just for the outing.

He also remembered his studies about the area-the rare and naturally protected coves inside the park complex that once served as a 19th century whaling port, and later a Chinese abalone farm experiment. The state reserve had a significant history, contemporary with John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, in Monterey-a place located only fifteen miles to the north. He remembered reading that California novel, written with stark reality about the people who had carved out a meager living by commercial fishing during the great Depression. It was an area where a small seaside community clung to the only work it knew-canning and exporting sardines. Until it went bust, bringing in all the social ills of decay and the Depression.

But twenty miles south of Monterey that morning the sun was just cresting over the magnificent gold and green mountains as they climbed higher, towards a treacherous spot on the two lane highway called Hurricane Point. It was there, that Nicasio looked back to the north and could see the rock precipices covered with pines known as "the dragon's tail" of Point Lobos. It was also where a breathtaking land and sea had converged so antagonistically as to cast its dramatic spell over artists and photographers consistently for the past two-hundred years. He remembered other writers he had studied both in high school and college associated with the area, beyond the obligatory Steinbeck.

Like Henry Miller, who, for a generation had settled into a rustic cabin there on the Big Sur coast, arriving in the late 1940's. Miller had become a sort of West coast expatriated guru to the literary establishment of the East. His recollections of living there over the years were chronicled so beautifully in his collection of memoirs titled Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. And how well he remembered the work of one of the earliest visiting authors to the MontereyPeninsula-Robert Louis Stevenson. It was he who was so taken with the mystical beauty of Point Lobos in the late 19th century that he formulated the setting of his novel Treasure Island from the wild attributes of the area's jagged headlands and enchanting coves. Having himself been on those cliffs, walking the perimeter of the cypress-covered point with Daniela, Nicasio had no difficulty imagining how Stevenson could have synthesized the terrain with his writer's mind into such an enchanted island-a memorable visualization provided for millions all over the world and in scores of languages.

It must have been exactly what the Spanish explorers had done at a much earlier time, Nicasio thought, when they discovered and navigated around the massive Baja California peninsula. It was far to the south of Point Lobos, incredibly larger and much more arid, but it was the first and greatest land mass the Spaniards had encountered northwest of New Spain (Mexico). Those men had also turned it into an "island" in their minds. And it fit so perfectly their recollection of Califia's mythical realm. They had no doubt remembered a phrase they had all heard while still just boys in Spain, sitting around the fire. It helped visualize the exploits of the brave knight Amadis and his son Esplandian in a far away land across the seas:

". . . at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise . . ." This island, which was in fact a peninsula the Spaniards had discovered and named in 1533. It fit remarkably well a place which could only be defined at the edge of the world as "California"-'Califia's Land.'

Almost five-hundred years later, as the two men from the University of California, Berkeley drove further southward, along the magnificent coastline so named, Nicasio weakly gave in to his thoughts of Daniela once again. He ruminated on how, through the power of myth and beauty-a radiant woman could lodge so permanently in the hearts and minds of the first men to sail over the Pacific. Califia was to rule her island nobly, populated only with women warriors and their manifesto of being the self-declared enemies of all men. Nicasio seriously pondered again his efforts of inquiry which dominated his and the professor's mind over the past week: Was there truly any profound connection to the Spanish romance by the Spanish writer Montalvo and the Amazonian tomb they were now investigating?

While further southward they drove into the midst of a region still isolated and foreboding to tame. It was originally called by the early mission settlers of San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo, Sur Grande-the "Big South." Now it is simply and affectionately referred to as 'Big Sur.' But to these early Spanish colonists, the region was a coastal wilderness of incalculable distance. It existed down the steep, winding shoreline, and continued indefinitely from the only established outpost of Monterey. The wind-blown headlands of the area offered little if no relief to the Spanish, English and later Russian mariners who sailed sporadically below these treacherous cliffs for centuries, exploring only briefly for any profitable resources.

The Spanish galleons had only distantly passed by these headlands, carrying for some two hundred years luxury goods back to Mexico and then Europe from Asia. The made their twice-yearly runs to the Philippines with great risk and peril to the men who attended these ventures. Eventually those goods were brought to the western ports of New Spain, still far to the south of Big Sur.

Its Anglicized name "Big Sur" came from the 'Yankee' settlers of the last century. And it was these 'homesteaders' who ventured down the serpentine coast, after arriving by ship around the horn of South America to San Francisco. Some came overland from the East Coast of North America and settled in the fertile valleys to the south. The twisted ribbon of roadway the professor's car now followed, would eventually wind its way down to Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and ultimately San Diego. The route was called by the Spanish, El Camino Real, "The King's Highway," as it eventually linked the nineteen missions which defined Spanish colonial culture during Spain's experiment of New World expansion in the 18th century. This bold, imperialistic enterprise stretched from just above San Francisco all the way to San Diego. Today these missions have morphed into California's major cities, and the original pathway is less romantically today known as California Highway One.

Soon the professor and Nicasio approached the dramatic edge of Bixby Creek canyon as it dropped hundreds of feet from the road down to the sea level. There a majestic arched bridge was built in the 1930s to span over the expanse below. This precipitous opening in the wall of mountainous cliffs at seaside loomed above the curving estuary flowing into the Pacific. A wide, sandy cove with high surf had defined the confluence of sea and fresh water there for millions of years. Nicasio looked southward and reflected for a moment about the rugged nature of the area. It had never been dominated or defeated by man, he thought. He imagined both the strife and good fortune of those who had come before him over the last century in an effort to battle the isolation along those extreme bluffs. A few families had homesteaded tenaciously and tried to survive this unyielding region with little success. Yet, hundreds of years before them the Esselen native people, as primitive hunters and gatherers, held this sacred domain in great reverence, having living in harmony with it for thousands of years.

As the professor's car left the highway sharply and turned onto the dirt road leading to the site, Nicasio smiled in remembrance of Carmel's poet Robinson Jeffers. He had written powerfully about the entire area in the 1930's. He claimed in his sublime verse that before any humanity invaded this realm it was the spiritual home only to the "rocks and hawks." The poet went on apocalyptically to predict it would remain forever with them as eternal victors over mankind.

For now, however, in the more immediate gyre of time, it seemed the greater mystery of the area was just what had gone on along those bluffs during a silent age. It had happened when the ghostlike Spanish ships had passed unnoticed and briefly along these headlands. Nicasio had spent the last six years of his life studying that first wave of enigmatic men to come to these shores as explorers. Big Sur, as a coastline, would certainly try to keep its secrets through any age, he thought. Looking out one last time that morning at what still guarded it all from the west was the largest, most treacherous body of water in the world-the great, and cobalt blue Pacific Ocean.

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