BARDS, SEERS, CHINESE MARINERS & KATE BOSWORTH
Thirteen miles south of Carmel, California stands one of
the highest single-span concrete arch bridges in the world,
the Bixby Bridge. Its elongated beauty is matched only by
the perfectly marbled blue-and-white ocean waves crashing
on the rocky coastline below, the two-story-high white spit
continually splattering on the razor-sharp rocks. Reaching over
260 feet high and spanning over 700 feet long, Bixby Bridge is
a structural masterpiece, and probably the most photographed
object along Highway 1. It is here, miraculously, at the river
mouth that flows under the bridge, that the California sea
otter was rediscovered one day in 1938 playfully frolicking in
the kelp beds, after a mysterious and unexplained 100-year
about the drug the inhabitants used to live forever,” landed on
the rocky shores and explored the jungles. In recent years, a
large, heavy stone anchor, from what appears to be an ancient
Chinese ship, was discovered off the coast, perhaps lending
veracity to the folkloric theory. Others say voyagers from
India, Cambodia, Malaysia and Java made it to Big Sur. There
is evidence, too, that the Russians were drawn to the area by
the sea otter pelt trade in the 1770s, bringing with them highly
skilled Inuit hunters to harpoon the sea animals from their
kayaks; their tenure in Big Sur helped to establish the area’s
reputation as “a dark and bloody land.” A tome in my hotel
puts it bluntly: “Feuds, murders and suicides in Big Sur were
reminiscent of the Ozarks.”
No matter how many times you enter Big Sur, it is a psychological
and transformative event. The place seems like it just sprang to
life from the pages of a Maurice Sendak book. You half expect to
be greeted by hookah-smoking dragons and operatic fireflies.
FOG SPIRITS, RED-LEGGED FROGS, SEA BEASTS,
MEDICINAL WATERS, HUMAN NESTS, SUBLIME HOTELS,
AND THE LIT CULT OF SEX & ANARCHY. WELCOME TO
THE RESTORATIVE MAGIC OF EL PAÍS GRANDE DEL SUR.
by Rob Hill photographs by Todd Hido
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extinction. And, October 2011 marked 79 years since the Bixby
Bridge allowed travelers to cross into the mist-shrouded—some
would say magical—forests of Big Sur.
While Big Sur is more an area and an experience rather
than an official town and destination, its unofficial perimeters
include the 90 miles of coastline stretching from the Carmel
River south to the San Carpoforo Creek, extending 20 miles
inland to the eastern foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains.
Like Bhutan, the last pristine Buddhist wilderness hidden in
the Himalayas that has only recently become an international
destination, the Eden of Big Sur has for centuries been
semi-blessed by its splendid isolation, namely its jagged and
impenetrable coastline.
From the 1800s to the 1950s, Big Sur was the watery
graveyard to over 20 major and spectacular shipwrecks. Finally,
in 1886, a lighthouse was built at Point Sur and a slow trickle
of explorers began to arrive. The first Europeans to see Big
Sur were Spanish mariners in 1542, who sailed up the coast
but never actually landed. Almost two centuries passed before
the Spanish attempted to explore Big Sur again, and in 1769
the first Europeans set foot there but were so terrified by the
rugged coastal wilderness that they settled far inland. Before
they did, however, legend has it that the Spanish gave Big Sur
its name, dubbing the region “el país grande del sur” (the big
country of the south).
Not surprisingly, over the years the place has developed,
like its ghostly morning murk, a mystical he-said/she-said
shape-shifting history. Diehard Sur-ites swear that Chinese
mariners, who were sent by the emperor in the first millennium
BC to “search for the mountainous paradise and find out
In 1943, according to one of Big Sur’s first settlers, rancher
Walter Trotter, a WW II Japanese submarine surfaced off of
Partington Cove, one of only two known Japanese subs to be
spotted off the West Coast during the war. Author Robert Cross,
who wrote Big Sur Tales and Henry Miller: The Paris Years,
likes to talk about how, during Prohibition, Big Sur had a system
to profit from the illegal booty. In Big Sur Tales, Cross shares
of rancher and hog-farmer Rojillo Castro’s entrepreneurial
endeavor: “In the dark nights many a basket of money was
lowered down the front cliff of the rancho’s grassy knoll to
the moonlit shoreline below…in exchange for quality bootleg
alcohol pulled back up. Neither buyer nor seller ever saw each
other.” According to Cross, the Feds got wind of this and sent
an agent, Kurtz-like, down the coast to sort it out…but he never
came back. When another agent was later sent, he found the
first agent’s horse with his colleague’s boots still in the spurs.
“They never heard from the Feds again,” Cross says. The more
time you spend in Big Sur you quickly realize there is something
allegorical—not quite real—about the place that has inspired so
many myths, poems, dreams and dewy apocrypha.
However, the more documented changes in Big Sur came
in the early-to mid-twentieth century, when its natural beauty,
uncanny spirituality and monkshood began to attract writers,
artists, astrologists and exiled healers: Robinson Jeffers,
Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Emile Norman, and Jack
Kerouac journeyed to and/or lived here. Kim Novak, Clint
Eastwood, Jack London, Man Ray, Jimi Hendrix and Dylan
Thomas were also swayed by its spell. But it was Jeffers, who
coined the phrase “in-humanism”—the belief that mankind
is too self-centered and too indifferent to the “astonishing
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