When I was Eight . . . Thoughts on Big Sur

In 1962, my mother was able to fulfill one of her dreams when she bought a cabin on 5.23 acres in Big Sur, California. It was a tiny little thing, lovingly made of redwood, with a kitchen on one end and a fireplace on the other. My brother and I slept on bunk beds on one side, and she had a pull-out double across from us. The dining table sat in the middle of the room.

My mother had the shower removed so she could have a washing machine put in. That will tell you a little bit about her priorities.

She bought an old-fashioned aluminum bathtub just the right size for a kid, but spent the next year creating an involved collage on the outside of it. She never finished; the tub was never used, although I do remember taking a bath or two in the kitchen sink. I was a happy, dirty thing that year.

My mother had gone to Big Sur to be an artist, rejecting the role of the picture-perfect housewife who greeted her hardworking husband with a martini at the end of the day. What she got instead was poison oak (badly), raccoons digging in our trash (who scared our dog), the mumps (courtesy of me and my brother), and a year that had the largest rainfall of any for the prior twenty years. My father came to see us on the weekends.

This past week Big Sur has been on fire, so I've been thinking about it more than usual. An article in the L.A. Times brought back even more memories, when it told of the bravery of our up-the-hill neighbors, brothers Micah and Ross Curtis, in saving their place. They set a controlled burn that kept the fire from consuming what the press is calling a "compound" and in doing so, Ross was arrested.

I was a lucky eight-year old because there were two other eight-year old girls within short walking distance and one of them became my best friend. We would pack lunches and hike deer trails together just for the adventure of it. I got to know her family. Her mother was very impressive. She had a long braid, was always making something with flour (my mother barely knew how to cook), and could cut up a whole chicken in a quick moment.

Janie's father was a writer, the first writer I ever met. Interesting, as I look back, that was the year I decided I wanted to be a writer. I don't think that decision was because of him, although knowing him probably helped make it seem more real. Yes, Gina, there are people who write, and Jack Curtis is one of them.

He wrote Westerns, mostly, and lots of scripts for TV shows, and that's likely how he was able to purchase the Lyons place (as it was called then) and move his family up the hill to a 56 acre parcel. It was a strange spooky property in those days. No one had lived there for a while. (When one is eight a while isn't as long as it gets to be later, so I'm not sure how long that really was.) In those days, no one would have called the place a "compound."

We moved from Big Sur not long after that. We were rained out, really. My mother's dream had dissolved into an undriveable road over a steep slide, a water tank full of silt and mud, and an almost week-long period when we had no electricity. She discovered that to live in the country, at times you had to be totally self-reliant. You had to have food available for when you could not make the hour ride up to the Safeway in Carmel Valley where they had pre-cut chickens. In our case (because we had our own water tank without a filtering system), you had to have stores of water, too, for those days when you turned on the kitchen faucet and dirty water came out. She found out that living in Big Sur wasn't just surviving without television and having a four-digit phone number; you had to know what to do in a crisis--any sort of crisis. Living remotely like that, there were times when there was no one to turn to. You had to survive on your guts and your instincts and what you knew.

Our little cabin burned down in the early 90's because one of the many tenants my mother found over the years did something very thoughtless like leaving the stove on or a candle burning before they left for the afternoon. It was a total loss. She didn't have fire insurance--you couldn't get it there then (and I imagine you still can't). She sold that property a couple of years before she died. I've always wondered if giving up the dream wasn't part of what killed her.

Fire is one of those things that happens in wooded areas. If it isn't campers who fail to completely douse their fires, or hikers who smoke, it's nature herself who provides the lightning to burn back the overgrowth, as she did this time.

Thank God and all those brave fire-fighters that it is down to mostly just hotspots now. And thank the Curtis brothers for knowing what to do, and having the courage to do it, thereby saving their homes and stopping the fire from advancing to the homes of their neighbors.

Our cabin, lovingly painted by my mother in 1984.