David Wills Big Sur
I could tell in the final days of my friendship with the Canadians that Matt and Jess would not be a couple for long. Neither of them said anything to me, or in front of me, to make me think so pessimistically, but it was there in their looks, in the tones of their voices, and in the circumstances thrust upon the young adventurers. With Jess’s growing sickness it became apparent they had to leave the farm they loved, and all along I’d felt Matt loved the farm more than Jess. By the sounds of things it had been him that had made the decision to come, who’d made the phone call to Eric, and it was certainly Matt with whom I’d become good friends. Eric and Jim, too seemed to get along better with Matt, who was more easy going and less easily offended than Jess. But for all that Matt was a modern, forward-thinking young guy, he also subscribed to the traditional values of a relationship and would stay with his girlfriend until the end. If she went, he’d go, no matter how much it hurt him.
Jess was obviously more than reluctant to leave. Although the work was tough and she didn’t really care too much for Jim, she did love the farm. We’d become friends, and for all her differences with anyone else, she was still a well loved part of the dysfunctional family we had gathered on that blessed and cursed piece of land. But she tried to put a brave face on it and say that it had to be done… She’d talk optimistically about what would happen when they left and not talk too much about how she’d miss the farm.
But in Matt I saw less optimism. His characteristic hyperactivity and jovial banter were gone, lost under a frown and a voice that had inverted its intonations. No longer did he shout things or build to a higher pitch through his constant excitement and enthusiasm, but instead he talked like a disaffected teenager. He wouldn’t really say that much about leaving, except to confirm my statements about how much the situation sucked. In fact, the guy barely spoke for the last few days on the farm.
After sticking it out for a few days, with Jess coming close to dying from the inability to breathe at nights, and cancelling a few departures – which I suspected probably came down to privately held arguments between the two of them – it was decided that they’d leave the farm for good, and that Eric would drive them some of the way up the coast to help with their journey.
I tried to lighten the mood a little with suggestions and questions about their future adventures. Matt usually shrugged his shoulders, but Jess seemed to have it mapped out. “We’re thinking of going to Big Sur for a few days, then cycling up the coast. We could probably stay around the Bay Area pretty cheaply, then head up to Seattle and Vancouver. I’ve got family in Vancouver, and a friend who could get me a job in Seattle.”
But it was Matt that came up with the suggestion that brought us all our finally adventure together, and kept at bay for a few days their departure from everything to do with Clark Valley Farm. He was talking with Eric about leaving, and suggested that the four of us spend the night camping in Big Sur. Eric, always the playful and reckless explorer, loved the idea.
Soon Matt was a bit happier, talking about Big Sur and the fun we’d have there. He seemed to briefly stop thinking about the pain of leaving a life he’d wanted to live indefinitely, and began focussing on a few days of fun. The plan he had was for him and Jess to spend a short time in Big Sur, and then leap on up the coast again. As we sat in the little kitchen one night, eating pumpkin and chilli as we always did, Matt suggested that I take the cursed Crystal Meth Bike, and then stay for a few days, travelling about with them. I was flattered, having secretly longed to do so, but been too shy to actually ask. After all, whether they were on good or bad terms, Matt and Jess were a couple and I wasn’t overly keen on being an uninvited third wheel.
We spent our last full day on the farm working and surfing the internet intermittently, brainstorming things to see and do, but mostly just looking at pictures of the incredible scenery to build our enthusiasm for the trip even higher. I found a photo of a waterfall dropping into the Pacific Ocean that we decided should be a definite point of interest, and so made plans to see Pfeiffer Big Sur, and check out that incredible and unique sight. Eric told us that we had to see the Henry Miller Library, and I agreed, although Matt and Jess weren’t too happy at the prospect.
Jess spent a lot of time with Felicite, with whom she’d become close friends in recent weeks. Felicite was full of her usual eccentric advice and whimsical sentiment. Mark, on the other hand was typically casual and spaced out: “Man, this blows. I mean, like, I can’t believe you guys are actually going.”
But night came, and then morning, and that was about it. I did a few hours in the field while Matt and Jess got their things together, and we waited for Eric to get back from work. He’d arranged to do a half day and so we’d be leaving at twelve. While I worked, the bike-savvy Canadians disassembled all three bikes and got them ready to pack away in Eric’s car.
When we took off, Matt returned to being depressed, from his momentarily enthusiastic state of being, and Jess became borderline hysterical. She looked through her bags and pockets, searching for a multi-tool she needed, but couldn’t find it. The car was speeding up the coast, but Jess was begging to go back and look. The three of us just tried to explain to her that there wasn’t much we could do; it was too late to turn back and the best idea would just be to wait and check the bags at the campsite, and then have Dana post the tool forward if she found it while we were away. But Jess sunk into a foul and sarcastic mood, while Matt sulked, and Eric and I tried to joke and talk.
Somewhere North of Cayucos we stopped for supplies at a supermarket. Eric, wanting to leave a good and generous impression upon his faithful former workers, gathered plenty of food and beer, and paid for it all. Then he proceeded to give us each fifty dollars for the trip.
“I feel like such a cheap-ass,” he said, shaking his head and rubbing the back of his neck. “Y’know, I really wanna treat you guys right, but with the lawsuit and all… And all the financial stuff. I’m sorry, I wish it were more.”
We all assured him we appreciated the money and everything he’d done for us over our time at the farm. I felt bad that he felt bad for not being able to afford to give us more. I really did appreciate the generosity the guy was capable despite his financial limitations. He gave what he could, but was forced to feel like a scrooge because of circumstance.
As we pushed on up the road to Big Sur and the afternoon wore on, the clouds and fog set in and the views became limited when they would otherwise have proven stunning. Nonetheless, Eric was familiar with the route and narrated the whole thing. I tried to work out whether this was because of his desire to feel like a fountain of wisdom or whether it was because of his hatred of silence. The guy really just liked to talk.
“Yup, I’ve thought about ending it all a few times,” he said, as we’d all drifted a little into the scenery, and begun to tune the old man’s voice out of our conscious hearing. “When my first marriage ended I used to drive up and down this road and just think about going over the edge. Yup. Whoosh! Bang! All over. That’s all she wrote, folks! No more Eric. I don’t believe in all that afterlife stuff, y’know? It’s all a load of bull. Yup. That’d have been it forever.
“But I didn’t, of course. I sat around for a year, just drinking a bottle of old Jack everyday and watching cable TV. But my buddies brought me through it. Next thing I knew I’d met Dana.”
We stopped by the side of the road at one point to look at a herd of elephant seals basking on the beach. The creatures were magnificent and hideous – giant obese monsters with endless aggression and a complete lack of awareness for their surroundings. It was like looking back at Dundee, only I had no contempt for these beasts. I watched as they sat around in the fog, wailing at one another and moaning at the sea. Every now and then one of them would get up and awkwardly limp towards the ocean, and usually another would come and attack the first, as though the ocean were its territory and needed defending.
But we couldn’t waste too much time. If we were to see the Henry Miller Library and still get to the campsite before dark, we’d have to hurry the hell up and go. So we jumped back in the car and pushed into what even through the fog we could tell was the real famous Big Sur scenery – the plunging cliffs and raging seas crashing into the edges of jagged, green mountains. It was only between the fog banks that we could see this. Mostly, we’d look up and see the green blend into grey fog, or look down and not even see the water before it was engulfed by the grey. But every now and again, as though someone were holding their giants hands before our eyes and wiggling their fingers, we could see glimpses of the spectacle – that meeting of land and water… That last glorious physical triumph of the American continent.
When we reached a sign that said “Pfeiffer Big Sur” I asked Eric to pull over and he reluctantly agreed. “We’ve gotta keep up the pace…” he started, but by that time three of us had run across Highway 1 and jumped a fence. Following Matt, I slipped and scampered down a hill to a path that would its way along a cliff, then jumped another fence. We all turned and watched Eric muttering as he attempted to follow us, predictably struggling a bit more. When he got down we walked around the path until we came to the point where the photos we’d seen were taken – the view of a tall and thin waterfall crashing down upon the sand and becoming part of the Pacific Ocean each time the waves came and lapped up the water. There was something eerie about it. The road above was quiet and just out of earshot enough anyway to immerse the scene in some heavy silence. Even the waves, so far below us, were mere background noise to the nothing. The view was like the postcard picture even in its silence.
We stood around, dumbstruck at the spectacle, taking the occasional photo and not saying much, except to announce our awe. The remarkable thing was that the fog which would have otherwise completely obscured the view had all but momentarily vanished. The bay below was completely visible, and even the cliff and surf and rumbling mountainsides for maybe two miles in either direction had become immediately visible upon clambering down that little slope… We’d entered another world, somewhere so beautiful all was moved to silence and above the trivial matters of visibility and weather.
Further up the road we came to the Henry Miller Library and stopped the car. It was late evening now and we all just wanted to eat and get the tents pitched before tiredness set in too heavily to make the effort tolerable. But we’d agreed to do this and so we all climbed out of the car and along the side of that most glorious of roads, to entrance of the strange little memorial. Through the gate we walked into yet another alternate realm, something lost and separate from the regular world. We walked into a forest of obscure and dangerous art. Great walls divided this playground of the eyes from the tarmac of the world, and inside lay the forests and some random method of memorialising the late, great Henry Miller. There were huge works of art, all in the colours of the forest, jotted and dotted about for all to freely view. One was a cross made of computer monitors, and the others also grand and bold.
We looked around and then walked into the little cabin that comprised the “Library” element of the Henry Miller Library. There was a notice proclaiming the fact that Henry Miller had wished for no memorial in death, and so the “Library” was something without definition. It was something constructed in his memory and against his will, and without any particular and specific function. It was a bookshop, it was an art gallery, it was a forested escape from the world. The cabin itself appeared to serve only as a bookshop, which stocked what looked like the entire canon of Big Sur literature. It also seemed to be a Jack Kerouac shrine, which pleased me and amused Eric. By the time we’d left, he had bought us each a copy of Kerouac’s Big Sur, and kept making jokes and references to my love of Kerouac. “Hey Jack! I’m finally gonna get to read some of your books!”
Out back of the cabin there was a little lounge of furniture set back in the forest. I walked out on my own into the oppressive silence of the dark abyss and stood around, drinking it all in. Even in the cabin there were the footsteps of Eric, Matt, Jess and the single member of staff, a young, trim woman. There was the occasional conversation or statement. There was the sound of the woman’s computer running. But out in the forest, even a hundred yards from the famous road and ten yards from the little cabin, it was silent and the air felt different. This was a border with a wilderness; something I’d never experienced before. In front of me stood nothingness in a sense I could barely comprehend, coming from a small country and having never been more than a short distance from a road. But looking East from the Western outreach I stared into an unfathomable spectacle, and one of which I’d fantasised for years. If I walked in a straight line, straight ahead, not stopping nor looking back, I’d certainly die before coming across another 7-Eleven or Starbucks, or even a road. It’d be quite a challenge to find my corpse, too.
It was early evening when we reached the campsite. Turning off the highway it became overwhelming to consider the trees. From the car they’d been mere cartoon trees on a comically giant picture of the outside world, but when they ceased to be a passing blur of an almost clichéd brilliance, they became painfully real. Looking up at them was a challenge for the neck and for the eyes, as I strained to see the tops. My head hurt, too, contemplating the sheer massiveness of these famous plants. And they were everywhere. They were not the freakish postcard obscurities that I’d seen before on TV, but rather real living things in their thousands or millions. They were everywhere, and all of them were magical and fantastic. I looked up and still they rose until I looked directly above me, where they met, and thus were so great that they altered my perceptions, for my visions of them were so warped by their size.
We checked in and took the map and set off to find our spot for camping. Being off season, the place was fairly empty, and we were offered a choice of sites. Naturally, we took the one furthest from the entrance, so we’d be furthest from civilisation. We were the closest spot to the wilderness that bordered the campsite and stretched for countless miles into California. And the campsite was big, too. It took a good fifteen minutes of driving to reach our chosen spot.
We got there and it became apparent that our light was limited. It was late and we were in the trees, in the depths of a valley between a range of hills and a range of mountains. It’d be dark here before we were used to on the farm, for sure. And the trees made our surroundings dark and eerie even in the fullest light of day. So we jumped out of the car and literally ran about the duties of tent construction. This was the first time I’d seen Matt and Jess put up a tent, and I was impressed, as they did it so quickly and efficiently. They were both still quiet, and they barely communicated as they carried out their respective roles elegantly. Their tent was up before Eric and I had laid ours out and looked over the bits and pieces, in doing so finding a black widow loitering cruelly in the folds. For some reason, in the dirt and dark of the forest, this discovery carried nowhere near the weight it would have done back in the barn, or anywhere else, and we crushed the spider and carried on hopelessly assembling the night’s accommodation. In the end it was the four of us that put Eric and my tent together, with Matt and Jess doing most of the work, while Eric pretended to be guiding us.
Once the tents stood up, we threw our bags into them and went about the fun part: making a fire. This was something I’d done a few times in my life and enjoyed immensely. Of course, in the approaching darkness it was tough as hell, but in fire-building ,that is the fun. We didn’t really show much restraint, and ended up lighting the fire before the structure was complete, and consequently all four of us ran about, getting down on our hands and knees to pick up sticks and branches to throw on the dying flames. We were all pouring sweat and breathing heavily, as we literally ran and crawled with our full energy. But after a while the fire caught on and we had the materials necessary to keep it going. Nonetheless, I kept going back and forth for sticks and whatnot, for the sheer joy of doing something productive. I loved the feeling of searching in the dark for sticks, completely blinded and scared by the mystery of my surroundings, only to run back into the light and throw the results of my gatherings onto the embers and watch them set alight. Little sticks really served no purpose after a log had caught on, but they went up quickly and gave a little light.
Once the darkness had set in as oppressive and consuming as it could possibly be, I felt the urge to seek more wood. Another log and we’d be set, I reasoned. So I went around the leaves and mud on my hands and knees until I found a big, relatively dry log. Somewhere maybe fifty yards from me a crashing took place in the bushes and I froze. The prospect of a spider or snake or something horrible running across my hand had actually disappeared from my mind with the alcohol I’d consumed and the joy at building a fire, whereas earlier in the process I’d been more cautious and restrained. I’d barely given consideration to the prospect of dangers in the forest. But here was the sound of something massive close by.
The sound was followed by the sound of a roar. It was something that caught me off-guard and I barely had time to recognise what was happening. The roar, had I been expecting it, might have made more sense to me, but as it was it slipped by and simply left me afraid and hurrying backwards to camp. It came and went in one brief blast and I hadn’t even the time to speculate to myself what it might have been. Was it a bear? Was it a cougar? Not that I know the sounds of the different local wildlife, but I might have had a better chance of guessing had I not been so startled by its volume and close proximity.
I didn’t turn full, but rather turned my head every few seconds and moved very quickly backwards towards the dim light of the fire. I was too afraid to turn my back on whatever was there. Even since I was a child I’ve been afraid of turning my back on the darkness. Nothing that’s real, I reasoned, could hurt me. And as a child in a safe and loving house, the only things that could therefore hurt me were unreal, and if they’re unreal, they can’t be seen. Turn my back and maybe they become real. For all I’d know, anything could be happening that I couldn’t see… And years later, as an adult in the darkness of the forest, in a land with possibility of a very real danger, those same irrational instincts held strong. Between glances backwards to make sure I wasn’t about to walk into a tree, I stared so hard into the darkness that my head hurt with the visions of nothing. I stared so hard that nothing that lay in front of me could go unseen, and eventually I walked back into the little group, where the combined forces of fire and human kinship completely and immediately alleviated my fears.
“What the fuck was that?” Matt said, his voice rapidly ascending in pitch.
“Sounded like a goddamn bear!” said Eric.
“You don’t get bears here, do you?” Jess asked.
“Shit yeah!” Matt cried.
“Nah…” said Eric. “Well, maybe, but don’t worry about it. C’mon guys. It’s probably nothing.”
When the fire began to burn itself out, with the flames receding back into the heart, and the embers covering themselves with ash and hiding below a dull orange haze, we retired to our tents. Matt and Jess as usual shared their little two-man traveller, and Eric and I took the bigger, clumsier family tent. Inside a sleeping bag, inside a fraction of a millimetre of canvas, I suddenly no fear at the prospect of being torn apart by a bear or a cougar. I felt invisible, and I felt unspeakably happy at the fact I could hear the trees alone in the outside world. There were no cars, nor voices. No sirens. No alarms. None of the unpleasant noises of the city, or even of the more pleasant noises of the country. This was borderline wilderness and only the trees spoke.
In the morning Eric got up at six and drove off. He had to be back at work by ten, and I admired the guy for both living a little adventure and living up to his responsibilities as a family provider. I knew from what Dana had told me in the past, that for all Eric’s faults and childishness, he often got up at six and worked before work, then worked all day, came home and made dinner, and then worked until two in the morning. His job required so much care and drive, and yet he still found time to help out on the farm and occasionally take his WWOOFers off for adventures.
“Don’t worry about coming back,” he said. “I’ll tell Jim to come up on Friday morning. If you need to come back before or after then, just phone.”
Great. I didn’t even need to worry about getting a bus back or anything. Before leaving, I’d thought that maybe when Matt and Jess took off North on their bikes, I’d just head South on mine, maybe stopping for a night somewhere, or maybe just meandering slowly down the coastline I’d come to love. Of course, when driving up I’d come to realise that the road, though beautiful, looked somewhat dangerous. There was no cycle path for most of the way, and often cars would tear around sharp corners where cyclists had no chance for escape.
With Eric gone, we decided to get on our bikes and go find some breakfast. The shop and the lodge would be expensive, we thought, and so we’d hit the road and cycle to the nearest stop for something to eat. The morning was a biting cold, though, and speeding down the hill was fairly unpleasant. Only the smell of the redwoods and the nearby ocean distracted me from the pain of the wind in my face. I was wrapped up warm in a jersey and a raincoat, but still the cold tore through.
Luckily, about ten minutes of downhill cycling took us to a small collection of buildings, comprised of a gas station, a café, and a library. We wandered into the café, where wealthy looking tourists sat about well dressed, and we were all wearing the things we expected to get real dirty in the coming hours and days. But, not giving a fuck, we sat by the window and ordered as much food as we could realistically afford. And coffee. Lot’s of coffee. As we ate and drank, we talked about what to do during our time together. We all wanted the same things: to see the coast, to climb a mountain, to get out into the wilderness.
I got a stack of pancakes and maple syrup that I struggled to finish, and had my coffee replenished six times. And I needed that sugar and caffeine when it came to returning to the campsite. Whatever goes down, must come back up, and as such we found ourselves panting and puffing to get back up the hill. Or at least I did. As I’d found out in the cycles to San Luis Obispo and Los Osos, the dealer’s bike was in bad shape. Going along the flat valley roads around the farm had been tough, as the wheel ground against the frame, and the brakes proved temperamental. But coming down the steep hill to the café had been nothing more than a test of my nerves and finger strength, as I clutched the feeble brakes for the tiny amount that they slowed the bike, and hoped that when the frame inevitably collapsed I’d somehow be thrown off into the bushes or the grass, and not go face first onto the road. Cycling back up the hill, however, was less a test of my nerves and more a test of my muscles. With the back wheel grinding against the metal frame, and the brakes occasionally applying themselves now they were not needed, I found that each rotation of the peddles took my entire reserve of muscle and will-power. The energy I’d gained from eating was pretty much spent in the fifteen or twenty minutes it took to cycle back to the campsite.
But we made it. Matt, to his credit, cycled slowly in front of me, and must have spent a lot of energy not shifting gears and taking off up the road. He stayed close and talked shit with me as I struggled against the decrepit beast I was riding. Jess, however, exploded up the road, probably just happy to be free again and at one with the gods of travel. When we reach the entrance to the park, Jess was sitting by the side of the road, waiting.
We meandered back through the tiny roads, among the giant trees that we could barely see the top of, to our tents. The place was still quiet. The few people among the trees were mostly still asleep, or quietly eating their breakfasts indoors. Only we were moving about, taking in our surroundings.
When we got back to the tents we found a visitor. A tall, blonde German man was sitting on the periphery of our area. He looked about forty to fifty, was wearing a bandana, and was looking over a map of the area. We could see no bike, no car, no bag; nothing with him except his map. When we drew close and dismounted, he looked up and smiled at us. “Hello!” he called, in that same strange and overly-familiar voice one uses when talking to other travels, that suggests a happiness at the loss of the shackles of the normal working life. “It is a pleasure to meet you all.”
We went over to him and shook his hand and introduced ourselves. He asked all the questions, putting us firmly on the backfoot, despite standing on the ground which was temporarily ours.
“So where are you all from?” His accent was almost comically German – the sort of sound one would be called racist for mimicking, so grand and commanding was it.
“We’re from Montreal,” Matt said. “And he’s from Scotland…”
Before we could add another statement or idea, the German spoke again, taking full command of the conversation in its infancy. “I am from Germany. Yes, I am travelling through California. It is very beautiful and I like it very much.
“I see you have bikes? Are you travelling by bicycle?”
We told him that yes, we were travelling by bike.
“Where are you going?” he immediately asked, before we could clarify the previous statement.
“I’m going back to San Luis Obispo…” I said.
“Wow, what are you doing there?”
“Working on a farm.”
“What farm?”
“Clark Valley Farm.”
“I see,” he said, rubbing his chin in a comical fashion. “Where is that?”
“By Los Osos.”
“I see,” he said again. “I have never been there, but I will. When I leave I will go to San Luis Obispo. It is on the way South, which is where I am going. I have been here for two days now and find it to be the most beautiful place on Earth. I love it. But I will leave this afternoon, and go South. I am also travelling by bicycle. It is a most pleasant way to see the world, do you not agree?”
We said we did agree.
“While you are here, in Big Sur, what is it you are planning to do?”
“We don’t really know yet,” Jess said.
“Well you really must climb Mount Manuel,” the German said, pointing to where, between the trees, we could see a green a peak dominated the sky. “It takes eight hours to climb up and back down, and you will get the most spectacular of views. It is incredible, though it is difficult. And you must go to a beach that I love.” And he pointed, but this time in the direction of the ocean, which was beyond the trees and a row of hills. “It is, I say, the greatest beach in the world. I have travelled extensively and am certain of this fact. It is beautiful. Pure white sands. Clear water. You can see all of the coast from there and it is quiet, too. You must go there.”
“How do we get there?” Matt asked.
The German stopped and thought momentarily. Perhaps he was surprised to have been asked a question. “You must go to the entrance of this place and turn left. You must then cycle for two-point-seven kilometres, yes? Two-point-seven kilometres. Then turn right. Then you must cycle down a little road for three-point-two kilometres. Yes? Two-point-three kilometres. It is very beautiful.”
“Yeah. We should totally do that,” Jess said to us.
“You seem like nice people. I am sorry to be leaving this place just when I met you. But I am most certain we will meet again.”
And with that sentiment, the German guy went and sat at a picnic bench maybe a hundred feet away, and continued with his map reading. He bid us farewell and strode away as though he were to never see us again, yet he resumed his activities fully within sight, leaving the three of us perplexed.
“Dude, I just really wanna get out of society for a bit,” said Matt, staring into the forest. Jess was in the tent, packing her stuff, and the two of us were sitting at the table, eating seeds. “I mean, I’d love to get away properly, for months at a time, but even just for a day or a night. Last night was great, but imagine doing the same thing when there are no public toilets, no camp security, no cars anywhere nearby… You could build a fire but you wouldn’t be doing it in a sanctioned fire area. Fuck, that’d be awesome.”
“Let’s just fucking do it, then,” came Jess’s disembodied response from within the tent.
“Yeah, let’s go,” I agreed.
And so we finished packing our stuff away, disassembled the tents, and checked out. We said we’d not be staying another night, and cycled off towards the campsite entrance, then turned when out of view, and took another road around to take us back in the direction of our original site. We bolted back along the roads in some mad fear of being caught re-entering the place, until we came to our spot. There, we proceeded along the service road that was inaccessible to vehicles not owned by the park, and followed it until it came to a bridge across the Big Sur river. We pushed the bikes into the undergrowth of the South side of the road, chaining them for some semblance of security, and then took off on our next adventure by foot.
The river was a shallow but fast and wide affair, easily traversed with the use of a narrow bridge. The bridge was made with nailed together pieces of poor quality wood, on top of sketchy old tires, but served effectively the admirable purpose of keeping all of our feet dry. At the other side we found not a road, but a loose path that took us to various junctions and ill marked trails heading in different directions. We didn’t care too much. We just going one way and that way was East. East into the West. We were going to follow the trails and paths for a while, for the sake of convenience and speed, and then just disappear into the wilderness for a night or two, and come back simply by heading West. Geography was simple – a matter of East or West, and we’d never walk so far one way that we couldn’t get back the other without killing ourselves. The plan seemed flawless.
One of the trails pointed towards the great dominating presence of Mount Manuel, and that seemed logical to us. Why the fuck not just head to the highest peak around? From there we could scope out the landscape and use the contours and rivers to navigate. We’d be somewhere definite and easy to spot, and if we travelled onwards, off trail, from there, we could find our way back without any hassle. There was no missing Mount Manuel, we reasoned, so it was a good idea. The trail, too, looked promising, as it seemed abandoned and almost in disrepair. We were well off season and we knew it, and the trail showed the signs of having not been kept well. Even within the visible first hundred metres we could see a whole tree branch blocking the way. It had fallen, and not from the natural course of time. A storm must have brought it down, and that meant it’d been down for a long time. And a long time meant that the trail must be pretty sketchy in the coming miles if the entrance we barely ever cleared.
We started out as cheerfully as possible, growing excited with every few feet gained in elevation. We marked out the horizon and the heights of surrounding mountains, and celebrated every time they changed, for that marked our progress in climbing and escaping.
I held back in my excitement at camping out, for Matt and Jess had already told me about their lives camping across Canada. I didn’t want to seem over enthusiastic about sleeping outwith a designated camping zone, but I really was. But so were they, regardless of past exploits. This was America, not Canada. We were in going into the unknown, too, and not just camping out of sight of a big road. This was the real thing!
“It’s so beautiful!” Jess cried at one point, despite us all having articulated the same sentiment over and over.
“I’m constantly re-evaluating my definition of the word awesome,” I said. “Seriously, Scotland’s nice, but nice is nothing. Little green hills. That’s it. America’s awesome. But even here… Fuck! I was on the train from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo and thought the scenery was awesome. I mean, it blew my mind. And then in San Luis Obispo everything was awesome. I loved it all – the hills, the valleys… But now I can see why all the writers and artists and whatnot loved Big Sur. This blows everything out of the water.
“Look around and try and explain it. Try and take a photo, even, that’ll justify the sheer brilliance of this place. It’s so big, so beautiful. It actually puts a lump in my throat to see it.”
The sights were absolutely stunning, and I stopped every few minutes to take a photo. Usually, it’d be a photo of a peak, and then we’d round a corner and the peak would look bigger, better… Even the brilliance of the scenery kept improving until it hurt my head to consider the constant sensory overload.
After a while we largely stopped talking, except to make obvious statements about tiredness and awesomeness and speculation about the next turn in the trail. But the life sharing and general banter had disappeared when our lungs became entirely occupied by the monumental effort of keeping us each going. Again I surprised myself by not being the most tired. I’d always held Matt and Jess as these pillars of health, as they’d cycled so far and ate so well, whereas I’d spent much of my life staying up all night with a handful of pills and a bottle of rum, and then not going outside or eating for the next few days, but staying alive with pot and coffee. But evidently, as proven in our hikes and cycles, my brief experience with organics, relative sobriety, and the outdoors, had transformed my withered and pathetic self into something of which I could be proud.
Our breathing and our groans grew heavier with every few feet gained. When we were exposed on the side of the mountain, the sun beat us down even further, and when we went into the trees to traverse a violent arroyo, we were attacked by the flies. At one point we stumbled upon a dug-up beehive, and though we could not spend more than thirty seconds examining the devastation, we walked on curious as to what had happened to dig the behemoth from the solid ground. Hundreds of bees lay dead on the ground and thousands hovered angrily in the air, eager for revenge for the loss of their home and the companions. Large scratch marks showed that the hive had been dug up, and had not just eroded away. My rudimentary memories of Discovery and Disney channels told me that bears enjoyed pilfering honey, but I was sceptical. The site of the crime was fairly exposed, and surely if a bear was to dig up and eat from a giant hive, it’d do so in seclusion.
“Do you really get bears in Big Sur?” Jess asked, trying to subdue the rising fears, though neither Matt nor I knew the answer for definite. Obviously, we’d heard some akin to a bear the previous night, and this bore the cartoon-like hallmarks of a bear attack, but to make any guesses without real knowledge was foolish. If we decided in our minds that a bear was to blame, we’d continue up the desolate mountain terrified of the dark and the woods, and it looked as though we’d be cutting it close in terms of daylight for getting back down. Whether we were to go back to camp or on into the beautiful Nothing, we’d be lucky to get anything done down the mountain before the oppressive dark took hold. And beneath Big Sur’s mighty redwoods, darkness took on an intensity that one rarely finds in the outdoors. No moonlight broke through the peaks and canopies.
We trudged on as the trail wound around the mountain. The nature of it made it impossible for us, without a map, to tell how near we were to the peak. We had cut back and forth so often, yet always heading up and East, that it felt as though we’d been walking from one mountain to another, around some whole range of mountains, to the top of one that we could not see. Even when we were free of tree cover and given reasonable visibility we could decide whether the next visible peak was the one we were aiming for. The path just kept turning and going in and out of wooded areas, that we couldn’t ever see more than fifty feet ahead of ourselves. This was fine further down the trail, but after several hours of accent, muscles flitted between aches and pains. We all complained bitterly, which just made us think more about our struggle, and kept us focussed firmly on the negative, when all around we were surrounded by beauty.
Whenever we entered wooded areas, it became apparent that the trail was not well tended. We found ourselves constantly climbing over fallen trees and branches, and having to help each other over parts where the trail simply disappeared into a several hundred foot drop. It became slippery in places where we needed grip, and roots tangled across the path where we really needed not to have to lift our legs any higher than necessary. The trail seemed to be turning against us.
Nobody said it, but the unthinkable entered the uncontrollable periphery of my mind. I became aware that the possibility technically existed of turning back before reaching the top. I never considered it an option, and tried to ignore it, but it was like someone ringing your doorbell. You can ignore them all you want, but eventually you have to answer, and even if you do so just to tell the bastards to fuck off, you’ve done what they wanted and answered. I didn’t want to think about it because I knew that would play hard on my body and mind. What I had to do was to focus firmly on the top, and how getting there would provide me with the chance to rest my weary muscles and be dumbstruck by the view to the point where my mind would erase all the pain of the journey and immortalise it as a perfect adventure. The descent, too, would be flawless.
But as we entered a densely wooded area and all our reference points became moot, and as we lost sight even of the incline of the land as it levelled briefly in the darkness, someone suggested sitting down and resting, and we all agreed as though we’d all made the original statement. And there we fell for maybe half an hour. In total silence we dropped to our asses on the dirt, and turned to where there would have been a view had the trees not been so thickly growing.
At the bottom of the trail, and throughout the campsite, I’d noticed warning signs. They’d warned of the dangers of cougars, snakes, poison oak and ticks. No bears were mentioned, which had helped my doubts grow in the face of the suggestions that perhaps they did roam around this area. However, cougars and snakes intrigued me. They excited me. They were a big part of the magnificent Wild with which I’d become obsessed. Ticks, though, were not. They were something I’d been afraid of since my first days on the farm, when I’d walked with Jim and Eric, and they’d told me that ticks lingered on everything in the brush, and that they’d transfer imperceptibly to your skin and begin drinking your blood and giving you diseases. Jim had even shown me a tick that he’d pulled off Billy, full with blood and wiggling all its legs repulsively. When he stamped on it, it left a great blood stain on the dirt road that stuck out in my mind – Note to self: Don’t let that EVER be my blood.
Of course, paranoia was always one of my worst traits. I’d spent most of my life scared of stupid things that never came to pass. But this was not one of those times. I looked over my arms: Nothing. I looked over my thighs: Nothing. But when I looked at the bottom of my legs, in that sweaty, hairy crevasse between sock and skin, and the joint between leg and foot, I found a tick burrowing into me. The vile little beast was actually invading my body. It hadn’t gotten in deep, but it was still partly inside me.
“Fuck!”
“What?”
“A fucking tick! I fucking knew it! I’ve been checking myself constantly! Fuck! I can’t believe the little fucker’s fucking eating me!”
“That sucks,” Matt informed me as I stood, gesturing stupidly at my own leg. “Is it inside?”
“Yeah.”
“Dude…”
“I know.”
“How do remove a tick, anyway?” Jess asked.
“I guess you just dig it out,” Matt suggested. “With a knife or something. Or burn it.”
“I’d prefer to burn it,” I said. “I don’t think I could dig something out of my skin. I can’t even remove a splinter.” The challenge of actually removing the little bastard had taken my mind off the initial anger of having been attacked. I no longer felt the need to swear and gesture uselessly.
“Don’t you have to dig it out?” Jess asked. “So the it doesn’t give you Lyme disease or something. Like, if you leave the head inside.”
“Fuck disease. I just want it to die.”
“Dude, yeah, cut it out. Or burn it first, then cut it out.”
Jess took a box of matches from the front pocket of her backpack and handed them to me. Seeing this, Matt took his knife from his pocket and gave that to me, then both of them fixed their gazes on my leg.
I could barely stand to look at the creature feasting on my blood. It looked utterly sickening as it went about its wicked ways, lost in the wiry hair of my leg. My contempt for it and its species grew by the second.
“If I burn it, then I have to dig it out after, probably… Unless it just gets burned and fucks off… So what if I just cut it out straight way?”
“Go for it.”
I extracted the blunt blade of Matt’s knife and brought it close to the tick. It didn’t move. I’d hoped that maybe the presence of a blade would terrify it into retreat, but no, it didn’t. So I drew the blade closer until it touched my skin. I brought the point to the body of the tick and quickly and repeatedly gouged away until there remained only a bloody wound, and the tick sprawled and wriggled on the ground nearby. Relief clouded the pain, and vengeance became my minds occupation. I thrust the knife over and over into the ground around the tick, spilling my own blood into the dirt and churning it all into and horrible brown mess.
The peak became visible to us within maybe ten minutes of leaving the scene of my battle with the tick. In that ten minutes, however, the question was raised of whether or not we should turn back. No answer was ever given, and the question died as we trudged on uncertain and weary. The fatigue and pain we all suffered did not recede with our rest. Rather, the situation became clearer as we thought of the time we’d spent and the possibility of climbing for another few hours. The question briefly annihilated our spirits.
But as we broke the tree line of that little dark forest, we could see it. The trail led through a clearing to one last, steep climb to the peak. We could see the top against the skyline and knew that there was nothing higher around. The end was in sight after so much struggling.
I ran. Even though I’d previously found it difficult to even lift one foot after another in a walking motion, I was suddenly filled with boundless energy and enthusiasm, and ran across the clearing to the bottom of the last little climb – a steep switchback through five to eight foot scrub. Matt and Jess couldn’t bring themselves to move as fast as me, and I found myself tearing up the path alone. In two places, too, I cut through the scrub and missed out the switchbacks. It was as though getting to the top were some grand race with some grand prize. Running was completely irrational, but I was so gripped by the sense of impending achievement that I hauled myself to the top.
The peak – the very highest point of all the land around, and the sole aim of this agonising endeavour – was a rocky plateau above the visible world, wrapped in cotton cloud and swept with the cool breeze that dried the sweat that drenched my clothes and hair. I stumbled from the scrub-line into the open air, barely keeping my balance as I stepped from stone to stone, spinning around with my arms theatrically spread in embrace of the everything. My heart pounded and my head throbbed from the effort of taking in everything I saw and felt, and moments later I was lying awkwardly on the rocks, looking up at the sky, which was closer than it had ever been.
A lone tree stood among the grey and white rocks, bent sideways and seemingly reaching out to its brethren below. It bore no leaves, nor fruit, but looked as though it had long ago begun dying and never quite succeeded. When I turned my head, still lying on my back, I could see the tree against the sky and the horizon. It, too, had succeeded in reaching the top of the highest mountain around, but suffered like I.
The clouds sped by, but not above me. They were all below or in line with the peak of Mt Manuel. They moved fast, and were small and numerous. Whereas the previous day had seen fog and cloud that had made all beauty invisible, the clouds were now moving so fast that Big Sur was visible one minute, and not the next. One minute I could see the coast for miles to the North, and then nothing that way, but the South had cleared up and was staggered to view. Looking down, sometimes it was impossible to see any of the trail that we’d ascended, and sometimes it became clear and the scale of our journey became evident.
Matt and Jess finally arrived, looking haggard in body, but with eyes wide in astonishment and triumph. They, too, staggered out into the openness of altitude and the great exposure to the skies that none of us had previously experienced. They also circled, taking in the immensity of the sights, and even the simple feeling that was more than vision and a lack of sound. Then, they, too, succumbed to the drive for sitting or lying. When they sat on the rounded rocks near my head, I sat up and joined them in as upright a position as I felt I could possibly assume. Ever the intrepid explorers, we naturally faced West together and stared out over what we’d actually been closer to before climbing, but which was now visible, and visible indeed to the extent that its visibility became blurred by boundaries. The Pacific Ocean, that immense body of water that I’d dreamt about as a child and yearned to see since first setting foot on American soil, now claimed a significant portion of my field of vision as I faced West. It rose from the green hills below to a point, presumably somewhere ahead of us, where the horizon met the sky and became indistinguishable from one another. This horizon, the meshing of blues that made determining the limits of the ocean impossible, stretched, too, North and South, until outrageous distances claimed it from my sights.
“I wonder how far we can see…” Jess said without moving her head, or even adjusting her eyes from the search for the horizon. “I mean, we can see so far.”
“I wonder how far Japan is beyond the horizon,” Matt added.
After staring into the incomprehensible West for an indeterminable and utterly unrecorded period of time, we all began turning and standing again, between bouts of sitting. We were restless with the wonders around us, yet beaten nonetheless by our bodies. Eventually we began to eat. We positioned ourselves on some slightly more appropriate rocks, and rummaged through the backpacks for seeds, chocolate and yoghurts. The meal, such as it was, was welcome. The quick sugar fix, coupled with the sweet yoghurt and surprising sustenance of seeds, had us standing again looking for the highest point – that is to say, the single rock that stood above the others atop the mountain that rose above all else in Big Sur. Indeed, there was a pile of rocks near a sharp drop into the scrub below, that stood an extra few feet above the peak of Mount Manuel. We decided it had to be climbed to really claim to have climbed the full height of the mountain itself, and we closed in on the small and otherwise inconspicuous heap. Jess approached first, and it was her sharp scream and athletic leap backwards into the arms of Matt that had us all running the other way, practically to where we’d originally emerged. It wasn’t so much that there was something at which Jess had screamed as that she had screamed at all. Even in the limited time I’d known her, Jess had proven herself a non-girly female. She was proud of her strengths, and times it was normal to just consider her “one of the guys”. Indeed, I was never a particularly strong person, and Jess was usually braver and more adventurous than me, and in the split second before my reason and logic had time to kick in and ask why she’d screamed and I’d run, I had instinctively taken her fear as a justifiable motivation for my own escape. To see someone who’d just climbed a mountain and was looking forward to a wilderness adventure leap into the arms of her boyfriend, too, was a frightening spectacle to behold.
The culprit became clear before Jess was able to articulate herself. She kept saying “Oh my god! Oh my god!” and “It’s horrible! It’s horrible!” until Matt and I, neither of us particularly brave people, but bettered by our curiosity over the reasons of Jess’s behaviour, stepped forward at exactly the same time and proceeded in perfectly coordinated steps, to strain and step until we could see the highest rock atop the mountain. The rock was much the same as all the others, only higher, and perhaps a jot rounder, although one round rock looks much the same as another to me. However, a rock will always stick out in a person’s mind when it serves as the resting spot of a giant tarantula.
My fear of spiders had always been irrational – running from tiny creatures that wished me no harm, and even if they harboured the malicious intent I seemed always to suspect they did, they were utterly incapable to doing anything to harm me. This, however, was a dose of reality. Before my eyes, a few feet away, was a spider – a creature the idea of which was enough to send shivers through my body – with the means to actually harm me. It was huge, too. I’d always been scared of small spiders, and never even considered the possibility that big ones existed. They were the stuff of movies and Discovery Channel documentaries, and not the sort of thing one actually had to meet face-to-face. My heart naturally beat faster even than when I’d heard Jess scream. But still, there was not the same level of fear I’d have felt seeing a harmless little spider run across my pillow. Instead, I was filled with cautious excitement.
We stood, every muscle and tendon in our bodies, indeed, every fibre of our very being at the ready to turn and run full steam down the side of the mountain, but nonetheless craning forward to see the tarantula. Neither Matt or I had ever seen one before, and though I guess they are common in certain parts of the world, to us they were fascinating and terrifying. This very creature was dangerous and glorious. Watching it was surreal.
The tarantula moved. It moved maybe four inches in our direction and in unison, Matt and I jumped backwards, never taking our eyes off the spider, and always maintaining that natural poise for a quick escape. We were, however, reluctant to move at all. The thing had captivated us entirely. In its movements, too, the spider had further spooked us and had us braced for retreat. When it covered those four inches it did so in a fraction of a second. The speed of the spider over that small distance was phenomenal, and told us that were it to decide to travel over a larger distance – say, the few feet between it and us, and maybe the five feet from ground to jugular – it could do so as quickly. And the spider knew this, I suspected, as it didn’t run away from us as it could have done, nor did it run arbitrarily to any other point. Instead, it ran directly towards us over such a distance as to serve no purpose but intimidation. This was the King of Big Sur. This tarantula was the highest and most powerful being in the whole damn place, and we knew that for as long as it chose to be so, we were not going to usurp its position.
And together, in silence, we stepped back and left the mountain.
The journey back down the mountain was easier and quieter than the journey up. Of course, we had the knowledge in our heads that the light was about to fade and that our aspirations of wilderness camping, or indeed any camping, depended largely upon us reaching somewhere suitable with at least some light remaining. But no matter what it was we wanted, we were in no position to ask for luck. The mountain had taken forever to climb, but the path was in total disrepair for large tracts, and consequently difficult to traverse in the rapidly diminishing light. I lost count of the times we each almost fell to our deaths, or else had to warn the others of something that was obvious to us, as we switched the treacherous position of group leader. Still we never saw or heard another soul on the mountain. There were no lights, no sounds, and only the wilderness bounding out to the East. The road to our West was hidden by trees, and it was as though nothing existed anywhere. Was this wilderness?
It was sadly as close to wilderness as we were to get that night, for when we got maybe three quarters of the way back down the trail, it was utterly pitch black and the rain started to fall. Lightning struck ground twice, which was enough to send us all at perilous speed back towards where we thought camp might be, and nobody mention what we all knew – that we wouldn’t be going any further from civilisation.
That night we returned, soaked through and unthinkably tired, to our old spot, and set up the tents in the drizzle. I managed to get a fire going, somehow, and then wandered to the shop for some beans and a bottle of red wine. By the time I returned, Matt and Jess were asleep, and I sat and ate and drank the whole lot. When I went into the tent I realised that it was not even remotely waterproof, and that everything I’d put in there to protect was soaked, and that I had nowhere to sleep. So I sat in the tent, in the darkness, in the water, until five am, when a sliver of light appeared, and I ran off to a nearby lodge for wealthy people to come and ‘experience’ Big Sur. The owners took pity on me and allowed me to sit in front of their fire for seven hours, ‘til I was dry, and during which time I sat and reread Kerouac’s Big Sur, and contemplated the whole mess.