Point Lobos

 “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

                                                                                                            (Henry David Thoreau)

This man was evil through and through.  Bald, heavyset and brutish, with the mottled cheeks of the heavy drinker, he was the product of old mining camps in the Sierra Nevadas or rough bars on the San Francisco docks. He had been mean and vicious in life. In death, he was totally in thrall to his demon. 

He smelled of week-old sweat and piss, and his fangs were very long. She couldn’t stop looking at them.

Then she saw what he was going to do to her.

Even she shrank away in horror.

When it was over, he threw her out into the open. By pure blind chance, it was still night.

She lay by a forest path for a while, whimpering softly, terribly hurt.

After a while, she sensed dawn coming and blearily thought about just letting the sun claim her, but some flickering sense of self-preservation dragged her slowly to her feet.

She smelled sea air.  The ocean was nearby.  She had always liked sticks of rock at the seaside.  There would be no sticks of rock for her today, not after what had happened to her, but she would go there anyway.

Bent over, lurching, gathering what rags of clothing and shreds of dignity she could, she made her way down to the beach.

Her body slashed with bite wounds, she had wandered along the coast near Monterey Bay at dawn, still wondering whether she should wait for sunrise and end it all.

(Drusilla's Roses)

The MST bus dropped me off by the Chevron filling station just south of Carmel. Point Lobos State Reserve, the location for one of the most pivotal and upsetting chapters in Drusilla’s Roses, and the original inspiration for my journey across America, was less than two miles away along California Highway 1, and I’d have to walk the rest of the way there.

 A Mack truck whisked by me, a little too close for comfort. I remembered the joke I’d made several times before I’d left Scotland:

“I’ll try not to get hit by a Mack truck...”

Not long after I said that, in a coincidence too bizarre for fiction, I saw a Mack truck (sans trailer) tooling down the long straight stretch of road which passes by Tinto Hill in the Upper Clyde Valley.

Coincidence, omen, or sign of predestination? I did not know, but a picture of Point Lobos produced by Google during my search for a location had awakened Thoreau’s song, left me with a feeling of quiet desperation that I would never see that place, and a sense of horror that all there was left for me to do was go to the grave with the song still in me.

But Drusilla’s Roses had been written, and the dream of reaching Point Lobos began to become a possibility. There was a kind of magic in the air. James Christie in Partick and Juliet Landau in Hollywood emailed each other back and forth, the National Autistic Society approved the plan to make the trip across the United States as long as I didn’t try to hitch-hike or dodge Mack trucks, and I began to prepare to go on operations once again, as I liked to describe it.

I was breaking the shackles of that quiet desperation felt by so many men trapped in middle age and mediocrity. As if I once was a sea captain who now had a ship of his own again.

But there was fear. It had been twenty years and more since I had taken ship for Australia (metaphorically speaking), and I had to consider the possibility I was no longer fit for purpose. There was also the knowledge that something could go wrong. All that would be needed to derail me would be one catastrophic failure in one of a hundred machines – a burst tyre, a frozen aileron, or a simple mistake at an intersection. And don’t forget, there are a lot of guns in America.

Like Buck in The Call of the Wild, though, if you lay down low to the race, then the road will open up to you. 

Now, though, the race was nearly run. Perhaps the near miss with the Mack truck on the highway had been a timely reminder of the danger of hubris, so I walked humbly down the last road to Point Lobos and Drusilla’s beach. The place I thought I’d never see.

The blue Pacific was to my right, blue as it had been in my dreams, blue as Juliet’s eyes.

I came to the carved stone sign which told me I was there. I walked up to the entrance station.

“Have a good day,” said the ranger after I bought a map from him.

“Good day to you, too,” I said, and walked into Eden.

James Christie

27^th March 2010