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| The old Coast Road north of Big Sur |
For Jeffers, the dramatic California landscape was a mirror to human passions and a symbol for eternity. He found meaning and metaphor in the brutality of the surf, in the merciless nature of the region’s wild predators, in the lasting beauty of stone, and in the earnestness of the diverse peoples who inhabited this coast before the influx of tourism and golf.
Despite the influx, almost in defiance of it, many of the canyons, creeks, rivers, mountains, backroads and beaches appear not much changed from when they inspired Jeffers’ intense, passionate lyric and narrative poetry. His national landmark home, Tor House, is an ideal place to start any exploration of what might be the most beautiful hundred-mile stretch in the west.
Any traveler, child or scholar, poet or plumber, will have his or her experience of the central coast enriched with a little Jeffers in a pocket. Much of his work remains available, including a handy, pocket-sized edition from Vintage Books called Selected Poems.
What follows are a few specific suggestions -- one historic house tour, one unique hike, one spectacular drive, one fine walk -- of places to go in and around Carmel and Big Sur and what to read when you get there. For more information, you should purchase “Jeffers Country Revisited,” an exhaustive guide (with a great map) to the specific locations of dozens of Jeffers’ poems, at his historic home on the coast, Tor House.
The House
Tor House and Hawk Tower
26304 Ocean View Avenue, Carmel, CA
Four blocks south of downtown Carmel
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| Hawk Tower at Tor House |
Tor House and Hawk Tower are the incomparable architectural gems a mile or so off the main drag in Carmel. Here Jeffers lived a bohemian existence with his wife Una and their twin sons, Donan and Garth. Both buildings were constructed with stones from the coast they overlook. The poet helped the stonemasons build the house in 1924, then built the tower himself.
For many years there was just the Pacific Ocean, Tor House, and to the east a stand of cypress trees planted by the poet himself. The first time I went looking for Tor House I drove right past it. I was expecting to find a still solitary homestead on a deserted coast. Instead what I found – what you’ll find – is a house surrounded by a busy neighborhood full of houses. Fortunately, nothing but a small roadway (Scenic Road) yet lies between Tor House and the ocean. Inside, the house is warm, and signs of a lively, literate family life remain.
Many of Jeffers’ books remain on the shelves about the rustic, low-ceilinged house. The last time I was there was just after I’d run across a blurb by Jeffers in an ad inside an old literary journal praising Horace Gregory’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. While the docent told our group stories of Robin’s reclusiveness (despite this, he was visited by most of the literary lights of his time), his work life and whimsical parenting style, I scanned the shelves until, in a downstairs bedroom wherein lies the bed in which he died, I found the Gregory volume. I excitedly told the docent of my serendipitous find. He was a little less enthusiastic than me.
Tor House inspired some of Jeffers’ most anthologized and representative works. The poem called “Tor House” serves as an excellent introduction to the way he viewed the Central Coast, and to the occasional beauty of his language:
Tor House
If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May yet stand, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind
Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from
Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.
Come in the morning you will see white gulls
Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
Their dance-companion, a ghost walking
By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.
My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings of the day moon.
With Jeffers one is constantly reminded of the contrast between the impermanence of human things and the lasting nature of stone, of the ocean, of the natural world. Stand at the height of Hawk Tower. Look only west. Someday we’ll all be gone, but the roiling ocean, the “wild sea-fragrance of wind,” will endure.
The Hike
Soberanes Canyon and Soberanes Point Trails
Garrapata State Park
Highway 1, seven miles south of Carmel
Look for cars parked in the shade of a cypress grove on the inland side of the highway
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| Footbridge near Big Sur |
This is a glorious two-to-four mile (it’s up to you) hike from the coast seven miles south of Carmel, heading east into the Santa Lucia hills. It’s one of those uniquely Californian hikes where in a relatively short distance you can go from rocky ocean beach to dusty coastal scrub and mission cactus, from warm morning sun to, finally, unexpectedly, dense forest chill beneath a towering canopy of redwoods.
If it is winter or spring, Soberanes Creek will be flowing westward beside the trail, making its hasty way to the Pacific. In summer and early fall, you’ll find lingering pools of cool water and, where the forest breaks, muddy patches covered in deep green grass and lined with goldenrod.
Toward Highway 1, near the bottom of the hill, at the beginning and the end of your hike, you’ll find a small corral in long disuse, haunted remnant of an older California. In a cypress grove near the corral gate, nailed to the trail’s bulletin board, protected in a plastic envelope, someone has posted this 1932 poem by Jeffers:
The Place for No Story
The coast hills at Sovranes Creek:
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;
The old ocean at land’s foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A heard of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.
No imaginable
Human presence here could do anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.
In this short poem, Jeffers, who’d written so many passionate stories in verse about the Central Coast and the hardscrabble ranchers and gamblers, Mexicans and Indians who’d settled there, admits to right here where you stand having encountered a place too naturally dramatic to populate with human characters.
To stand on the hills and gaze all around you with “The Place for No Story” still chiming in your mind is a kind of revelation: east the rock “shaped like flame”; west the notorious “white violence” of the breakers; hovering, the menacing presence of a red tail hawk hunting.
There’s no better way to recall the earnest human history of this place than to stand at that abandoned corral and imagine cowboys at their dusty work astride their horses. Even if this time Jeffers could find no story for them.
The Drive
The Old Coast Road
Thirteen miles south of Carmel
Left off Highway 1 immediately north of Bixby Bridge
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| Bixby Bridge |
Just a few miles south of the Soberanes Canyon Trail, immediately north of the elegant Bixby Bridge, there’s a dirt road leading up into the hills. The old Coast Road is 10.5 sometimes bumpy miles that must be taken slowly and with frequent stops along the way. The winding road leadeth you through green pastures, untrammeled meadows, dark redwood forests, along creeks, over the Little Sur River, and into the unspoiled country where Jeffers set many of his long, passionate narratives.
It was in these lush, mysterious canyons that the doomed Clare Walker wandered in search of nourishment for her flock in “The Loving Shepherdess,” one of Jeffers’ most accessible and compelling long poems. Along her way Clare encounters cowboys, subsistence farmers, ranchers and visionaries.
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| An old homestead along the Coast Road |
These are mixed-race American people, Asian, Latino, Native American, white, the western American people of a century ago, for whom the great hills and rocky coast were a living, a hideout, a refuge. Among them Clare finds kindness and rejection, gives joy and causes pain. Each encounter brings suspense, ambiguity, enlightenment. “The Loving Shepherdess” demonstrates the union of Jeffers’ fascination with the lives of the people and the natural grandeur of the place. It also demonstrates his poetic obsession with retelling the story of Christ. Clare is the good shepherd whose sacrifice is inevitable. Here’s a small excerpt from the poem:
...The Creek makes music below. Come, Clare.
It is deep with peace. When I have to go about and work on men’s farms for wages
I long for that place
Like someone thinking of water in deserts. Sometimes we hear the sea’s thunder
far down the deep gorge.
The darkness under the trees in spring is starry with flowers, with redwood sorrel,
colt’s foot, wakerobbin,
The slender-stemmed pale yellow violets,
And Solomon’s seal that makes intense islands of fragrance....
The old Coast Road affords some of the best, most expansive views of the coast and the much-photographed Bixby Bridge. I recently drove it twice in two days, in a 12-year old 2WD car with low clearance. Along my way I encountered hardly any people.
What I did encounter, along with the views, was an exceedingly rare California Condor perched in the upper reaches of a dying Alder tree.
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| California Condor and Sea |
The Walk
Molera Point Trail to the mouth of the Big Sur River
Andrew Molera State Park
Highway 1, 22 miles south of Carmel
The old Coast Road will drop you back on Highway 1 near the entrance to Andrew Molera State Park. There you can take a one-mile stroll along the Big Sur River to its terminus at the Pacific Ocean.
When with the river you meet the sea, stop and look over your left shoulder to see the marble precipice of Pico Blanco towering in the eastern sky. Here you can take the advice Jeffers gives in “Return.” We have gotten too far from the land, he says, “too abstract,” “too wise.” Modern life has muted our passions, has blinded us to the beauty and nobility of nature. Here in this little cove lies an antidote:
Return
A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.
Things are the hawk’s food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.
On a recent visit to Molera Point I had the cove all to myself. I read “Return,” there alongside the clear rushing water, the ocean waves, a driftwood strewn island in the stream. Inland the green carpeted Coast Range was bathed in late afternoon sunlight, every contour and every crevice in every hill in evidence. Beyond the green hills soared “noble Pico Blanco.” Maybe it was right here, at the end of the Big Sur River, that Jeffers dipped his arms “up to the shoulders,” here, where he found his “accounting where the alder leaf quivers/ In the ocean wind over the river boulders.”
Photographs by Caitlin O'Brien
