Right Back Where I Started From

California is an extraordinary place. I know that one of the most stinging critiques of native Californians, such as me, is that we are naïve in thinking there is no place on the planet that can hold a candle to what California has to offer, but how many of those people know it like someone who grew up there? (Answer: nobody, so your critiques are baseless and futile!) California is so extraordinary that whenever I have tried to write about my youth in the past, I have had to fight my instinctual attempts to enlighten the reader on my childhood, for there is no possible way anyone reading a college essay or blog entry ever could imagine the uniqueness of my upbringing in a remote corner of the greatest state in the Union. Fighting this urge, I am electing to focus on a single vignette, an experience I had this January at the end of my holiday visit home and a moment that made me think of my fellow Cookie Monsters.

The American West is a place of legend, with tales of cowboys, pioneers, mining strikes, and movie stars. And legends are not limited to Geronimo and Sacajawea, Daniel Boone and Wyatt Earp, or Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis. Western legends also are extremely personal. To see the Grand Tetons or the Grand Canyon is to be inspired by the landscape’s significance in comparison to one’s own, or even in comparison to that of the greatest cities. It is difficult not to internalize the grandeur of the West, and for many, just being in it is experiencing a seminal moment of one’s personal Odyssey.

If traveling in the West can be akin to a religious experience, then Route 66 and California’s Highway 1 are its temples. These roads are legendary for two reasons: 1) the landscapes they traverse; and 2) Americans’ love of their automobiles. It just so happens that my boyfriend (we’ll call him “S”) and I own a home at the junction of Highway 1 and Route 66 in Santa Monica, and S got a beautiful new car last year. So it should come as little surprise that this holiday season, we decided to take a road trip. We drove from Los Angeles to my parents’ foothill farm and back, a Californian cruise that covered more than 1,500 miles.

Since S never really had seen the majority of California, I wanted to clue him in on its unquestionable superiority among states and designed a route that would provide a great sampling of vistas, tastes, and experiences. The drive up was a lovely tour of the rolling Coastal Range and fertile Central Valley. We toasted to the New Year overlooking Lake Tahoe, and for the pièce de résistance, we took two days to drive Highway 1, slinking along the coast from San Francisco to Southern California.

Highway 1 is an old road by Western standards, part of an effort begun in 1919 to link Mexico with Oregon, and its current route was completed by the mid 1930s. If a road can have a soul, then Highway 1’s was sealed into the pavement in the 1950s and ‘60s. Driving it recalls sunglasses and Hermès scarves, Pall Malls and leather jackets. Not the suburban Sunday drives of vintage Buick ads; think Grace Kelly with the top down in her 1958 Mercedes roadster and James Dean in his Porsche 550 Spyder.

The road takes its time southward from San Francisco, and slowing at sunset as we neared Half Moon Bay, motorists pulled to the side of the road. They knew that this sunset somehow was special: encapsulating the confluences of light and dark, California and the Pacific, and the mystique of American tradition and the minuteness of human experience, all in the gorgeous, fleeting moment when the Sun was extinguished by the curvature of the Earth.

Highway 1 pauses in Monterey for foot traffic along the rocky seashore. S and I stopped to have some fresh seafood and grabbed 40 winks in a motel of the same vintage as Grace’s Benz, a place where my family also had rested before I was a teenager.

Entering the exclusive enclave of Carmel, the roadside is punctuated with architecture too inventive not to have inspired a James Bond set, and then it slows to a crawl, heightening suspenseful interludes between impossibly dramatic twists cut into the cliffs. Each bend reveals another sweeping vista of crashing waves, tormented rocks, and an occasional lonely barn or lighthouse. For 40 miles, the pace is depressed enough that passengers are startled by gray whale spouts, osprey nests, pelican dives, and the enormity of beached elephant seals.

It passes through San Simeon, where (also in 1919) W. R. Hearst decided he would build a 90,000-square-foot country hideaway far from the problems that his publishing empire loved to sensationalize. San Simeon, like most of the settlements on California’s “Lost Coast,” probably has not grown much in the 50 years since Hearst’s death, still a hamlet that exists primarily to serve the comings and goings of the estate perched far above.

Shortly before meeting US-101 in San Luis Obispo, Highway 1 banks through the village of Cayucos, where my family summered for years in my youth, one of those places engrained in my memory as it was in the early 1990s. S and I had lunch in a building that I remembered as a classic American hotel and steakhouse, but since my visits ended, it had become a shabby-chic bistro and wine bar for the foodies en route to the Napa Valley from Los Angeles. I was disturbed that this place, along a road that had not really changed for decades, should fall victim to the pressures of time and economy. But looking out the dining room windows, I saw the beachfront motel where Aunt Monica had served up endless pots of spaghetti and Danish cookies for so many summers in my childhood, and I was reassured that my own story was tied somehow to that of Highway 1, so spectacular, so intimate, so legendary, so personal, so Californian.