Big Sur

We began this leg of our adventure in May. After a four-hour visit with some new friends on our favorite Indio on-ramp, we were soon reunited with our old friends in San Francisco.

Eighteen years old, as free as free can be, hanging with our friends in America’s coolest city … the partying was epic. So much so, and I know this is hard to believe, but after a week Theresa and I locked bloodshot eyes with each other and said, “We gotta get the hell away from here. How much Thunderbird wine can our metabolisms withstand?” (Side note and home improvement tip: The Thunderbird of this era cost two bucks a gallon. One night we spilled a full glass from the kitchen table. Within minutes the tiles on the floor started to buckle and come loose. I’m not sure if the classic wino Thunderbird is still available but if so, you might find that in addition to being an affordable aperitif, it is also an inexpensive and effective flooring adhesive remover.)

In the eight years between the summer of love and our arrival, San Francisco had experienced a significant exodus of peace and love. It was still a great place, especially the music scene, but the corner of Haight and Ashbury, while not exactly barbiturate-laden, was, shall we say, trending in that direction.

So off we went in the gradual and at times circuitous direction of Alaska. The plan was to begin by going places where walking down the street with your home on your back wouldn’t cause the locals to drag their children indoors and call the authorities.

Embracing the era’s tradition of nonconformity, we began our trip to America’s most northern region by heading due south to Big Sur.

In 1975 it would have been damn near impossible to find a larger concentration of people dedicating their lives to what would later be called new age pursuits than the cast of characters that had invaded this coastal California community.

The Esalen Institute was and still is located near some hot springs in Big Sur.  It is a non-profit American retreat center and intentional community, which focuses on humanistic alternative education. What does that mean? No one knows. But what it meant to me at the time was that from there some deep-thinking naked hippies in hot springs were sending out cosmic vibes to every like-minded seeker on earth. If you were interested in personal growth, meditation, massage, yoga, psychology, ecology, spirituality, organic food, Eastern religions, alternative medicine and/or the exploration of human consciousness, you best be gassing up the Volkswagen van and following Esalen’s beacon of positive energy (which is only visible to the truly enlightened) to this California epicenter of grooviness. (I believe that in the fine print of that cosmic beacon it says that in addition to your sleeping bag and your determination to enhance your personal evolution you should also bring your checkbook.)

The road had been patiently waiting for us to untether from the familiarity of what we had known so that it could begin to introduce us to people who were on a spiritual journey. In retrospect, it would have been nice if our first introduction to this new world had been a bit more incremental. Our hasty transition from a world where it was normal to drink adhesive remover intentionally mislabeled as wine to an Esalen world so polar opposite was at best … unceremonious.

It seemed like the plan was to show us the end at the beginning and then see how close we could come to it via all the experiences the road intended to subject us to now that we were embracing it by relinquishing our San Francisco safety net.

We didn’t know it, but we were taking our first steps on the well-worn route of personal discovery blazed by the countless flower children who came before us. That month we meandered up and down the coasts of California and Oregon which were saturated, infested, inundated, irretrievably overrun with what were in those days affectionately called freaks.

It seemed like every man who gave us a ride had long hair. Every woman wore Birkenstocks. Everyone used to live in Haight-Ashbury. Everyone had toured with The Grateful Dead. And everyone had a book to give us that “will change your life”.

And we read them all—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Be Here Now, On the Road, The Dharma Bums—all required reading for mid-seventies seekers. Each page of every book and all these encounters inching us away from what we had known and toward something we didn’t know but thought might prove interesting.

During those traveling years our impressionable brains were forming an understanding of a world where yes was the answer to the question, adventure was its own reward, trusting that things would work out was the only way to view a situation, and almost everyone was a potential good Samaritan.

I estimate that during that first year we traveled between fifteen and twenty thousand miles entirely on the wings of kindness.

Here are a couple of pages from one of the stories in the book.

Hopefully this will give you an example of my writing and send you into a wild book-buying frenzy.

The Dinner Meeting

The Crime

One warm summer evening in 1995, I was working at the computer in a bedroom on the second floor of my house, when my wife called my name. At that time we were both thirty-eight years old and had been together for twenty years.

Two people who have lived together for more than half their lives have certain modes of communication that are incomprehensible to the rest of the world. For example, it is common knowledge that many qualified members of this segment of society (the severely married) are capable of having entire twenty-minute arguments with their partners telepathically. Mrs. Severely Married will just look at this person with whom she has spent her entire adult life and in a few seconds be able to communicate, with subtle body language and almost imperceptible facial expressions, her side of the argument. And Mr. Married will respond accordingly. It is an extremely effective energy conservation program. And a survival skill.

My wife is particularly masterful at this style of communication. When she crosses her arms and leans her body slightly to one side, I know that is shorthand for her ten-minute diatribe about what an asshole I am for not doing more to help her around the house. When she tilts her head to the right and raises her left eyebrow, that, I know, is shorthand for her brilliant ten-minute indignant response to my feeble attempt to justify my lack of productivity on the weekend with some lame argument about how hard I work during the week. And when she places her hands on her hips and I see heat begin to rise from her head and shoulders, that is her way of telling me in no uncertain terms that I cannot possibly win this argument, and that it is in my best interest to shut the ball game off and help her.
These are twenty-minute, high-volume arguments, done silently in thirty seconds.

In addition to this complex visual language, there is also an entire audio vocabulary between long-time companions through which they can communicate, not so much with words, but by inflection.

My first exposure to this audio phenomenon occurred when my son was an infant. When he wasn’t sleeping or staring into the fifth dimension, he was crying. That’s what he did, he cried. To me it all sounded the same. One annoying baby sound—waaaaaaaah. However, his mother heard an elaborate, articulate vocabulary within the subtle (and to me imperceptible) differences in every sound that came out of his little mouth. She was equipped with a specialized hearing system that instantly decoded the secret world of infant cry/speak.

Often he would cry in the middle of the night. Sometimes she would ignore him and he would go back to sleep. That waaaaah, she knew, said, “Where the hell am I? Oh, there’s my mobile. I know this place. Everything is cool, back to dreamland.” Other times she would get up casually and nurse him. She had translated that cry: “I’m starving here. Where’s the nice lady with the big tits?”

But occasionally my wife and I would be asleep and our son would begin to cry. Not even a full waaaaaah but just the first waa. . . and she would catapult out of bed and be at that baby’s side in two one-hundredths of a second. She knew by the inflection of this sound that he was hurt. He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t teething. He wasn’t scared. He was in pain and all he had to do was make the “I’m in pain” sound for one millisecond and his mother would instantly appear to untangle his leg from the bars of his crib.

At my computer, my wife’s voice penetrated my air-space. One word—two syllables—my name—Donnie. I have heard my wife speak my name nearly every day of my adult life. At last count, she could say it with over four hundred inflections, each clearly communicating a unique reason, motivation, and sense of urgency. From the lips of my wife, my name is an entire language, one that we both speak fluently.

When the first consonant of the first syllable of my name reached my ears it did not make the lengthy trip to my brain for analysis and interpretation. It was snagged and identified by a visceral, adrenaline-driven, high-speed processor located in the pit of my stomach.

This astounding piece of equipment was developed, and used on a daily basis, by prehistoric man in an era when taking the time to think, “Hmm, that sounds like a lion,” was more than enough to significantly increase the likelihood of a Cro-Magnon’s abrupt and unceremonious return into the food chain.
Move and live. Or think and die.

I move. I do not get up from the chair and run downstairs. I just appear there. My son and his friend are standing in the living room with my wife. They are drenched in trauma. Before a word is spoken I already know that our lives have been permanently altered.

© 2006 Don White, all rights reserved.

Okay, you got me. I’ll buy it!