Lifornia Dreamin’
there’s not enough water, and the fire danger is extremely high. Many folks who come don’t last long.”
Like many of my generation, I visited Big Sur and dreamed of one day living there. But the place I really want to show Clay, the place that is sacred ground to me, is Pfeiffer Beach. Not exactly a secret but not overrun either, this beach with its jagged, arched rocks that open onto the sea like doorways is one of the most beautiful on the West Coast.
There’s a fierce wind gusting when we arrive, but we find shelter beneath the cliffs. Compared with the crowds at the Nepenthe restaurant and other spots along Highway 1, the beach is relatively empty. A few tourists take photographs; some young men scamper up the rocks ahead of an incoming wave; a woman with a crown of seaweed in her hair slowly creeps across the sand on all fours, trying to communicate with a seagull. The year could be 1969 or 2014. The seagull flies away. People come and go. The primal rhythm of the ocean thrashing against the rocks is unwavering. There’s something about Pfeiffer Beach - its magnificence, the scale and dominance of nature - that comforts me even as it reminds me of how small I am, how fleeting my time on this earth.
I didn’t move to San Francisco until 1975, but I did make a pilgrimage to the city in early 1967, the winter before the Summer of Love. I arrived soon after the first Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park and crashed with a friend of a friend on Stanyan Street. The Haight was overflowing with people. There were long-haired girls in brightly colored peasant garb dancing barefoot in the park alongside dreamy long-haired boys in serapes playing guitar and beating drums. The Diggers, a radical commune of actors and activists, were everywhere, handing out food, and everybody was stoned out of their minds,
There’s no way to revisit that San Francisco, especially now when the tech gold rush has transformed this once scrappy town into a place nearly impossible for the average person to afford, So Clay and I do the next best thing: We hop a ride on the Magic Bus.
The bus is a performance piece on wheels that aims to transport travelers back to the city in the ‘6os. With its psychedelic paint job and streaming soap bubbles, there’s no mistaking the Magic Bus for one of the standard tour buses that clog Union Square. “This is not just a tour, it’s a trip,” says Artemis, leader of our “tribe.” She offers each passenger a flower, a la the famous song lyric, “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” This and classics by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and other bands provide the sound track as we pass many of the iconic spots of the era; City Lights Bookstore, the original Fillmore West (now a Honda dealership), Golden Gate Park, a large mural of Janis, Jerry and Jimi on Haight Street.
When the bus pulls up to the corner of Haight and Ashbury, the recorded narrative tells us, “To be standing here in the ‘60s was like standing at the center of the universe.” True. And the trip aboard the Magic Bus gives Clay a sense of what it was like to be a young person in his hometown back then, even the darker bits - troubled runaway teens, bad trips, racial tension. For me there’s something unsettling about taking an organized tour of my life. It’s a reminder that the raucous, idealistic time with which I still identify is now (marketable) history
From San Francisco we head north on Highway 5. We’re on a mission to find that Trinity County A-frame where we lived when Clay was a baby. For some reason I can’t explain, I need to revisit the place where, at 24, I had my aha! moment and realized that living off the land in a remote location - no matter how beautiful - was not for me. The problem is, we don’t know exactly where the cabin is or if it still exists. As soon as we head west on Highway 299, the main road connecting the Central Valley to the north coast, I can see that of all the places Clay and I have visited, Trinity has changed the least. There still isn’t a single stoplight or parking meter to be found in the county. With dense forests, snowy alpine peaks, abundant lakes, and the rushing river that runs through it, Trinity shows little signs of development.
We head into Weaverville, the county seat as well as the largest town. Weaverville could easily pass as the set for a remake of “High Noon” - only its for real. My room in the antiques-laden but appealingly fresh Weaverville Hotel and Emporium overlooks the redbrick courthouse, erected in 1857.
I hope to glean some intelligence about the location of the phantom A-frame from Dero leorslund, a fourth-generation Trinityite. “I’ve sold a lot of real estate based on the back-to-the-land idea,” says Forslund, an affable man with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Trinity. We’re meeting in the Jake Jackson Museum, surrounded by old photographs, tools and pioneer outfits. “People move here to live a simple life, but not everyone can hack it,” he admits. Before we part, Forslund, who is director of the museum as well as former county administrator, promises to sift through old tax records to try to find the site of the A-frame.
I worry that even with Forsluncl’s help we’ll never locate the property, which is starting to seem as elusive as Oz. “As great as it was to show you Topanga and the other places, I’m afraid this trip will feel incomplete unless we find that land,” I tell Clay over dinner at La Grange Café in Weaverville.
“Did you say Topanga?” a woman at the next table asks.
This is when our adventure takes the sort of turn that happens only in movies.
I shift in my chair and see that the speaker is about my age. “You know it?” I ask.
The woman, whose name is Megan Curran, chuckles. It turns out that she grew up in L.A. - her father was a well-known Hollywood producer - and she hung out in Topanga (once with Crosby, Stills and Nash) around the same time I was there. In 1973 Curran ventured north to Trinity with a friend. She never left. And her son, Michael - her dining companion, who looks strong enough to wrestle a bear and earns his living leading wilderness trips - plans never to leave either.
It’s not often that you come faceto-face with your doppelganger, but that’s how my chance encounter with Curran feels. This is one of those rare sliding-door moments when I see who I might have been - and who Clay might have been - had I stayed in Trinity. Like Curran, who confesses that when she first arrived she didn’t know you could actually grow your own vegetables, I probably would have raised as much of my own food as possible and done whatever else it took to survive here. And like Curran, who for 25 years worked as a cook at the local school, I would have had to find a way to pay the bills that, likely, would not have involved a career as a writer. Not surprisingly, Curran is friends with another ‘70s immigrant, Susan Holthaus, who happens to live down the road from the property where - yes! - the A-frame still stands.
In the morning everything comes together. Forslund phones me with the exact location of the land, and I call Holthaus, who leads me there.
Although it’s been 41 years, the area feels as strangely familiar and unfamiliar as a dreamscape: the rutted dirt road, the rushing creek, the narrow bridge we cross to get to the property, the tepee-shaped A-frame itself. At some point a small room and new roof were added, but the place has not aged gracefully.
It is startling to be here. I’m amazed that I lasted for even six months.
Holthaus describes the difficulties of living for years without electricity, having to scrounge for firewood, being snowed in for weeks at a time, “My family thought I was crazy,” she says, adding that she had fled a few times when life seemed too hard. “But the beauty of the natural world always drew me back.”
When I was new to motherhood - and unaccustomed to life without any modern conveniences - I wasn’t able to appreciate the splendor. Still, I have no regrets - either about living here or leaving. Like Topanga and the other stops along the way, Trinity was part of the journey of finding myself and my home in the world. National Geographic Traveller: © 2013 National Geographic Traveler. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate