Sparsely, Sage and Timely
By David V. MitchellTwo ‘minor’ deaths
Winter began with a magnitude 6.5 earthquake centered in the San Simeon-Cambria-Paso Robles area where I happened to have taken my new family for a vacation three months ago. It is a lovely region. Along the way, we rode Amtrak from Oakland to Salinas, rented a car, and then visited the Monterey aquarium, Point Lobos, and Hearst’s Castle.
Although it was still early fall, my new wife Ana Carolina and stepdaughters Anika, Kristeli, and Shaili, and I had much of the coast virtually to ourselves. There was more noise from wind and waves than cars and people. A more serene landscape would be hard to imagine.
Now the region is getting its 15 minutes of national fame as the epicenter of "yet another California earthquake." In Paso Robles, buildings collapsed, and two women died – crushed by a falling clock tower.
A government spokesman on television said that because the temblor occurred in an isolated area, it caused minor damage while giving scientists an ideal chance to study a little-known fault. His comments sounded eerily like black humor – as if he were saying, "As for the people killed by the falling clock tower, what can you say? ‘Their time had come.’"
I doubt he intended to sound callous or indulge in black humor although when something so grievous happens, many people can remain sane only by resorting to black humor. It diverts us from a threatening reality we can’t comprehend.
Meanwhile, for readers planning their own trip south this winter through Monterey, Big Sur, and San Simeon let me offer some advice. The aquarium in Monterey is the most spectacular I’ve seen, including the giant aquarium in Honolulu. I won’t enumerate its exhibits, but the most colorful is devoted to – of all things – jellyfish. Given the right lighting and water movement, the larger jellyfish become ballerinas of the sea.
One of the odd aspects of driving south from Monterey is that we found ourselves back on Highway 1, the same street that goes by my house 200 miles to the north in West Marin. Whenever someone would ask me where I came from, I was tempted to answer, "Just up the road."
Between Point Lobos and Big Sur, a series of long, arched bridges carries Highway 1 high over the mouths of several coastal creeks. The bridges were completed in 1934 as WPA projects that people back to work during the Great Depression. Innumerable car commercials have shown roadsters speeding across these towering, curved bridges. And while they are, of course, far smaller that the Golden Gate Bridge, many were designed with the same understated elegance. Indeed, the grandeur of these old highway bridges puts to shame the uninspired overpasses being built today.
Further down the road we stopped at one of the many homes of the late William Randolph Hearst, whose New York Journal, along with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, caused the term "yellow journalism" to become synonymous with sensationalism. (The name comes from the fact that Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s sensationalistic newspapers around 1900 both carried different versions of the first cartoon character printed in color, "The Yellow Kid.")
Meanwhile, Hearst’s "castle" at San Simeon, makes clear his sense of elegance was hardly understated. Hearst collected innumerable historic treasures, but he threw them together in a hodgepodge: Moorish with French, Near Eastern with British. Overlooking the dramatic "Neptune Pool" is an ancient Greek frieze of marble while below it sit flappers from the Roaring Twenties flapper. Unlike the zaftig, genuinely ancient Greek goddesses statuary around them, the carved-marble flappers are notable for their bobbed hair and breasts appropriate for a pinup calendar.
Apparently the castle suffered no structural damage in the earthquake, and an inventory of its more-than-500 found little amiss.
Readers considering an Amtrak trip such as ours be warned, however; call the depot every couple of hours before heading there. Passenger trains have to give way to every freight train, so Amtrak often departs three or four hours behind schedule and arrives whenever. Monday’s quake delayed the train by an extra eight hours or so.
But at least no one ever hijacks US passenger trains (more black humor); nothing could be finer than dinner in the diner; riders get tours they would otherwise miss of warehouse districts in small cities; and even on short trips, the continual changes in terrain are inevitably intriguing. On our trip, a twilight ride along Elkhorn Slough was a highlight of the scenery.
And now, three months later, two women, 19 and 55, have been killed in the same area where we vacationed. As it happened, they were leaving a clothing store when the clock tower fell on them. An older woman had been talking to the 19 year old just before the earthquake struck, but she managed to escape. "She was so young," the older woman said. "Two minutes before she was there. Now she’s gone.
Even readers who don’t live along the San Andreas Fault might think twice before habitually grumbling they’ll be glad when the hustle and bustle of the holidays are over. As the end of the year might remind us, "The bird is on the wing," to quote Persia’s Omar Khayyám in the 12th century or West Marin’s Youngbloods in the 20th.