On the Back Roads (15 page)

The only Western-style hat I saw in Taft was at the post office. It was of black felt with a garl and of sterling silver as a hatband. It was worn by a tall, straight man whose boots had silver tips matching those on his shirt collar. His shirt, too, was black with cowboy artifacts embroidered in red. His face
and hands were those of a seventy-year-old, but he was probably younger. Several lost teeth and an Arkansas accent gave his speech a lilting lisp, maybe a guitar strum away from a country song.

“Gotta get to Pismo Beach by nightfall,” he said, walking to his camper parked outside. His daughter and her daughter crowded into the front seat, which was already occupied by a dog.

As they backed from the curb, I asked a cityboy's question: “You got a card or something?”

“They call me Cowboy Dean. It's on the back,” he said, pointing with a thumb to the rear of his camper.

Sure enough, reflective silver letters spelled out Love Me Tonight—Cowboy Dean—Country Classics Band. There were bumper stickers, too, but they were a blur before I could read them.

It was dark when I returned to my motor home. I opened it to let in the cool night air. The park was quiet except for a couple of lovers who drove in to giggle and chase each other around the swings. I fell asleep without knowing if anyone got caught.

Just before dawn, water began pelting my motor home. I jumped from my bed to close the roof vents to keep out the rain. False alarm. The automatic sprinklers in the park just had a long reach.

Leaving town, I stopped for coffee at McDonalds, the new early-morning hangout for Taft's old-timers since the Safeway closed. McDonalds gives free coffee to those over age sixty-five when they spend a dollar. So they buy three cookies, drink their free coffee for an hour or so, see their friends, and take the cookies home to their grandchildren. Great system. Everybody wins.

I sat with a group of five men who had qualified years ago for free coffee. Two were sipping through triangle-shaped holes in the plastic tops. They all talked.

“When haircuts went up to fifteen cents, I just didn't have one so often.”

“You probably came out ahead over time. So the barber ended up the loser.”

“But they say now they can't make it at five bucks. That's too much for seniors. We've got less hair for one thing.”

“You know that new guy on Kern has a deal for seniors? He gives you the first and last haircuts free.”

Silence. Some thoughtful swallows, too.

The same man continued, “I guess you just have to tell him it's your first time in there to get a free one.”

Just then, a senior lady-customer walked by with a coffeepot, but my attention was on the silent drama unfolding around me. One man mumbled something about decaf. Another struggled with a shaking hand to get the plastic top back on his cup.

It finally came.

“Yeah, but how do ya…or when do ya tell him? I mean, how do you know it's your last haircut?

“I guess ya don't. That's the way he makes his money.”

They all laughed, but it seemed forced. After that, conversation slowed.

Back in my motor home, I headed south on Highway 33 through oil fields where pumps stick up like cactus in the Arizona desert. I stopped in Maricopa to think for a while about which way to turn. I looked at the map. Either the heat of the valley or the cool of the coast. I headed west toward the Pacific.

I
t's all one big, homogenized beach with sand hard enough to drive on. Its south end rolls into sand dunes. People used to run horses through the dunes. Some still do. But off-road vehicles are more popular now. You can rent one at the end of Pier Street without even getting your toes out of the sand.

California's Pacific Coast High way runs parallel to the beach. Tourist haunts, groves of eucalyptus and Monterey pine, and pricey RV parks line both sides of the road. The towns of Grover Beach and Pismo Beach run together here. Apparently, identity is not a big issue, nor is competition. A Pismo Beach T-shirt can be bought in Grover Beach, and vice versa. Roadrunner beach towels cost the same in either place.

Pismo clams made this place famous for a while. Commercial fisherman once harvested as many as 45,000 a day. A few years of this, coupled with the appetites of sea otters, have about wiped out Pismo's namesake mollusk.

It's butterflies now. Although the interest in butterflies will never surpass that of the clams, their numbers may have already. From late November through March, millions of migrating monarch butterflies settle near here and at Pacific Grove, farther up the coast.

I think monarch butterflies are the greatest mystery of nature. They spend their winter here, then fly a couple thousand miles to Canada to spend the summer. There, they breed and die. But their offspring ret urn here in the fall, to the very same trees. When these youngsters make their migratory flight, they know exactly where they are going.

The ageless attraction of Pismo Beach is its summer weather. When most of central California swelters in ninety-degree heat, here it can be in the low seventies or sixties, even foggy.

“I remember as a kid hearing talk about going to the beach with a horse and buggy. Roads were rough and went through walnut groves and around lettuce fields. It took them as long to get there as it takes me to drive to San Francisco,” Gordon Bennett told me. His family goes back several generations in nearby Arroyo Grande, where his grandfather was the town's first mayor in 1911.

Midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Arroyo Grande is a century-old farming town of about 15,000 people. The trees and lettuce fields that Gordon spoke of are gone, replaced with people and their houses. The city limits of Arroyo Grande and the beach towns along the Pacific Coast Highway now bump against each other.

Arroyo Grande dates back to when Mexico issued land grants here. It was their territory until 1848. The Pacific Coast Railway set up a depot here in 1882.

E
ven before Areoyo Grande laid out its boundaries, the town of Halcyon sprouted in its midst. With 125 people now, Halcyon is a square town of 95 acres.

A group from Syracuse, New York, with common religious beliefs established Halcyon in 1903.

They built a single-story, triangular-shaped temple here 20 years later. A 7-foot-wide porch and 36 white pillars surround it. Each pillar is 7 feet tall and 13 inches in diameter. These numbers all have significance, especially when added together and divided by each other.

The temple owns most of the houses in town. To live here, you don't have to belong to the temple. Only half of the people in Halcyon do. They are a low-profile group, with no strict rules or roles.

Eleanor Shumway is the guardian in chief of the Temple of the People. “I'm the minister, the mayor, the whole thing,” she joked. We met in the post office and store, Halcyon's only commercial enterprise, and walked to her office across the street, above the town library. Among its racks of books, the
library features a 700-cassette collection of old-time radio shows.

While Eleanor and I visited, another lady entered the office. Her name was Barbara. I think she is Eleanor's secretary, probably part-time. With a worldwide members hip of fewer than 200 people, I don't suspect the guardian in chief of the temple needs much of a staff. Barbara volunteered to show me around.

“No street lights or sidewalks here, did you notice?” Barbara asked as we reached the temple. “Go around to the front door. I will let you in.”

I started around the convex, equilateral, 3-sided temple, past 3 equal doors and the 36 pillars. Back where I started, I stopped. I heard footsteps on the porch coming around one of the triangular points of the temple.

“Which door is the front door?” I asked. Barbara came through it, looking for me.

Inside, she pointed out 26 windows, each having 8 panes of glass. Barbara read from a brochure: “Each clerestory window forms 6 squares, plus 8 triangles, equaling 14, or 2 times 7.”

She offered me the brochure.

“I better have it,” I confessed. “I never get things right the first time.”

B
ack in my motor home, I headed north up Halcyon Road and hooked a right on Grand. It passes over U.S. 101, which splits Arroyo Grande in two. Grand there becomes Branch Street, the main street of Arroyo Grande Village, where this town started. Buildings along here were built the 1880s.

Down the street is the county's last remaining one-room schoolhouse. It served the town until 1957. Another one-roomer, a block off Branch, is the Hoosegow, built as the village lockup in 1906. It still serves the town, but mostly just as a place for visitors to look at.

The “Village” is a good example of what many small towns—and big ones, too—are doing to save their historic main streets.

They have been wilting in this country for decades. If they wither and die, we have only ourselves to blame. If they do, we all lose a tangible piece of our legacy. Already, there is precious little left.

The villain, of course, is progress. Perpetual and unstoppable. Every generation embraces those highly visible advancements
of the American lifestyle. Granted, our acceptance may not be to our ultimate betterment. Often, just because they are here, we accept them.

Maybe the whole thing began when folks were riding buggies from here to Pismo Beach. Henry Ford created a car that made it easier to get there, and we taxpayers made roads that allowed us to get there quicker. Then Sears & Roebuck mailed us catalogs so that we didn't have to leave the house to shop. Trucks began using our new roads to deliver things to our door. So, who needs Main Street?

Here in Arroyo Grande Village, main-street merchants have not given up on the local shoppers. Their focus, however, is on the outsider, the traveling public, we tourists. The village is not the center of commerce it once was, but at least it is still here. The shops are independently owned, one-of-a kind businesses. Of all the buildings, it appears a Saloon and the Hoosegow are the only two that retain their original function.

“The biggest building along there had the boiler for the Lewis Dehydration Plant,” Gordon Bennett remembers. “They dehydrated pumpkins in there and made flour for pumpkin pies. It was packed in tin canisters, twelve pies to a canister. They shipped them out in boxcars. The railroad track went right through their building.”

Started in 1921, the dehydration operation did not last long. A wagonload of overripe pumpkins hastened the demise of the company. “The already mushy pumpkins were stored near the boiler, Gordon recollected. “They rotted in a hurry and smelled up the whole town. My cousin and I got in there one time, after they had closed up, and took a drying cart. It was like a small flatcar, a speeder that ran on narrow-gauge track. We would ride it to school. Four kids could ride if two pushed. Together we pushed the postmaster up the track one time. He gave us some stamps for the ride. I still have them.”

“What about trains?” I asked.

“Trains quit running around 1937 or 1938. When the railroad found out about our speeder, that ended our railroading days.”

Gordon led me to the yard behind his house. He pulled back a blue tarp. Under it rest the narrow-gauge speeder, complete with a 6 ½-horsepower gasoline engine.

“I didn't say that ended our railroading days forever.”

T
he Pacific Coast Highway runs up the California coast, at times right at the ocean's edge. It passes by Los Angeles and San Francisco almost unnoticed. Then in towns like Newport Beach, Malibu, and Big Sur, it is the main street.

Officially called Highway 1, it was built when America's first cars needed roads to run on, a need that still determines how big the pavement gets. Where traffic mandated expansion, its personality as a two-lane scenic byway disappears, and its highway number becomes an also-ran. For example, once out of the Los Angeles maze, the northbound Pacific Coast Highway becomes U.S. 101, the first superhighway to San Francisco.

Beyond Santa Barbara at Gaviota, U.S. 101 turns north, and Highway 1 takes off again on its own. It swings inland for about fifty-five miles. Interestingly, this leaves coastal travel exclusively to Amtrak passengers on the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Highway 1 joins the ocean again farther up the coast at Grover City and Pismo Beach.

During itsinland passage, Highway 1 goes through a couple of towns and cuts across a piece of Vandenberg Air Force
Base. This space-flight and missile facility covers about 100,000 acres, including thirty miles of pristine coastline. Vandenberg is the biggest piece of ocean-front property on the West Coast—probably the whole country—which is pretty much as it has always been. Part of the Pacific Missile Range, this piece of land that is bigger than some countries is more a physical barrier than anything. The Air Force does not traipse around on it like the Marine Corps or Army would, conducting training exercises and war games. Consequently, plants and wild life live there relatively undisturbed.

I drove that inland pass age, tracing El Jarco Creek on Highway 1 through long shadows and the rounded hills of the Santa Ynez Mounfains. It was a lazy drive unfil just short of Lompoc. There the road took on shape, mostly curves, and the oncoming traffic seemed in a rush. The workday was ending. People were hurrying home.

H
ighway 1 took me into the center of Lompoc on Ocean Avenue. It is “subject to flooding,” according to signs posted here. I envisioned that the person who named this street was on it one day when it flooded. Nothing so fanciful ever happened, of course. Ocean Avenue simply leads to the ocean, so I let it take me there.