I know Big Sur in my bones, in my skin, in the scar on my throat from when I was a baby. The jagged, rocky coastline that I’ve adored and feared since conscious memory. I was accidentally baptized by fire there at six weeks old when my parents took me camping, swaddled and tiny and new. They and their friends made a bonfire, my mom holding me in her arms. The fire popped, and they thought that’s what made me cry, but as my howls became more guttural and feral, they realized an ember had jumped from the fire to my throat. My Mom and I were both inconsolable, I’ve been told for years. The scar is six weeks younger than me, but it’s been with me almost my whole life, right in the crease where my throat turns into my neck. It changes shape and depth as my body changes, and sometimes I try to swat it away when I see it in the mirror before realizing it’s just my scar, looking unrecognizable on my inconsistent body.
We camped there every summer when I was a child, packing up our yellow Volvo station wagon with tents and coolers in our driveway in Salinas. My sister and I dutifully held our breath every time we crossed the Bixby Bridge, each time racing each other to tell the story first of the man on the prison crew who built it. The man fell into one of the pillars while the cement was being poured. We claimed to be able to see the outline of his hand, grasping from the inside, and he would haunt the campsite at night if we didn’t hold our breath over his early grave. I never bothered to research this story later in life, never felt the need to verify it. It was as real as my purple and green plaid sleeping bag, as the poison oak I carefully avoided.
We ate cereal from flimsy paper bowls, washed our hands at the spigot on the edge of the campsite, and hiked up to the gorge with the dead pine needles crunching beneath our water shoes that released a cool, wooded scent I can access anywhere in the world when I think of it. The hike to the gorge seemed endless as a child, but the payoff of the cool water in the swimming hole at the top of the hike was worth the trek, worth the river crossing, worth our screeching when mating dragonflies buzzed around our heads.
In the afternoons, we peeled off our wet bathing suits in our tent and changed into clothes for soccer, kickball and tag, rode our bikes to the general store to buy candy, and made friends with the other camping kids our ages. At night, after a propane stove dinner, we went to the ranger’s campfire, where ghost stories were told under the centuries-old redwood trees.
Everything tasted and smelled better in Big Sur: the Ambrosiaburger at Nepenthe lived up to its name; the taste of instant hot chocolate temporarily alleviated the itch of our bug bites; root beers we were allowed to drink in the afternoons, swaying in a hammock, have never been so crisp or refreshing since then. Pfeiffer Beach smelled salty, from the white water crashing on the signature black sand, but also sweet, from the sun-heated rocks and kelp. The first time I smelled marijuana was in Big Sur, sitting in the river in a giant wood chair, reading a chapter book about a witch child who made her own elixirs to heal people. I thought I was smelling one of her healing ointments as I read about them, so mysterious and herbal.
There lived the Henry Miller Library, which seemed too dreamy to be real, with its monstrous redwood trees, fairy lights, persimmon tree, green grass, ping pong table, resident cats, and a cabin full of books for all the artistic interlopers to choose from and talk about. This was where I first brought Daniel when he came to California to meet my family; I had to bring him to Big Sur. I had to show him this place exists, this place is me, this is who I am, and what I smell, and what I see, and what I feel, this is what I carry with me. This place that soothes and scares me, this place that has the most welcoming people and the most treacherous land, this place that falls apart every few years to reject too many visitors, to preserve its history and its pristinity. I couldn’t believe it was real, or that I was real, until the person I loved saw it and knew it, too.
I drove Daniel to the black sand beach, where we giggled as the wind whipped our hair across our faces, and we ducked for cover behind a rock and kissed as the wind howled. I took him to Nepenthe, where we sat by the fire, looked at photo albums of the locals drinking martinis at the bar in the 1950s, and Daniel shared a pot of tea with my mom. I could see Big Sur worked the same way on him that it did on me.
We visited Big Sur regularly after that first trip, and I eventually took Daniel to the midnight baths at the commune, at the southernmost point of Big Sur. There was a meteor shower, and we sat supine in the tubs, watching for the meteors, listening to the waves crashing on the rocks fifty feet below us. We got home at 5am, ate peanut butter chocolate cookies I’d made earlier, slept until noon. When we woke up he picked a fight with me and returned to the cabin he was renting in Big Sur for six weeks to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. I’d found him the cabin through a friend’s family. That night, a French tourist drove off the Bixby Bridge on his motorcycle and the Coast Guard spent a week trying to find his body, to no avail. When Daniel resurfaced and asked me to come visit him in the cabin, I drove over the bridge just as a crane was pulling up the mangled motorcycle from the rocks.
While Daniel made us whole wheat pancakes on his propane stove perched on the edge of the deck, I flipped through the roll of photos he’d had developed from the last week. Photos of the fog, of his feet, a close-up of a fern, Lucky, the dog he was minding, and, forgotten in the roll, a photo of a naked woman having sex with Daniel, shot from his perspective.
Adrenaline carried me through our pancake dinner. Like the other times I’d found a new woman’s face in a roll of his photographs, or heard a new woman’s name leave his lips, my instinct was to be measured, methodical. I would prove myself wrong about what I’d seen or heard, and I wouldn’t have to choose between living with knowing a new truth, or confronting Daniel. After we’d washed the dishes in the makeshift sink on the deck, Daniel told me he was tired and going to sleep early. As soon as the light from his propane lantern faded, I found the negatives to the roll of photos and saw the story: a photo of this woman at the beach in a typical tourist shot, then naked on a bed, then euphoric while being fucked by Daniel, then posing wet and dripping in the shower. Because I was looking at the negatives, everything was opposite and she looked like a monster with no teeth and an angry face. But I’d seen the one forgotten developed photo in the roll and knew that wasn’t true. I could tell which beach they’d been on when he’d taken the tourist photo of her, and so I knew that it was near the commune. I already knew the parts of the story that weren’t shown in the photos: her perky breasts, bobbing in and out of the water of the hot springs, him acting harmless while he hunted her.
Daniel, the photographer who rarely took photos of me, had documented one of his affairs and was either too lazy or too cruel to hide it from me. I had spent years fine-tuning the neglect of my own instincts surrounding Daniel’s infidelities. It always happened at a time when I was too tired to have my whole life change around me, so instead, I went to sleep next to him.
Ten years later, Daniel and I snuck into a pot farm across the street from the Henry Miller Library to take our wedding photos, because that piece of land had the best view. The man living in his VW bus working as a lookout saw us and opened the gate, giving us his congratulations, and adding a marijuana leaf to my bouquet. During our wedding dinner, Daniel got up from our table and didn’t return. He’d sat down at another table to talk to some friends. That night, back in our hotel room we couldn’t afford, he told me he was going to go to sleep, so I finished eating a piece of cake sitting by myself in my wedding dress. Even then I didn’t know, didn’t realize. I was so accustomed to accepting him, his reasons, his excuses. The next morning he wasn’t next to me when I woke up and I found him by the river, jittery, ready to hit the road, anxious to keep moving. We drove the six hours back to Los Angeles in relative silence. I didn’t want to speak first.
Shortly after our wedding, Daniel decided it was time to leave the city and our jobs, and finally move to Big Sur. We would have a new life, wide open spaces, and start our family. There was only one place he wanted to work: the commune. I began my hunt, pursuing old family friends and peripheral acquaintances. He sent resume after resume, all of which I edited. He got the call after I tracked down a particular former acquaintance who had once worked there. Daniel and I rehearsed the job interview ad nauseam — I asked interview questions until he became frustrated, and then asked more. He got the second interview. He drove the six hours to Big Sur after working a shift at his job until midnight, did the interview, and drove the six hours back. He got a speeding ticket for driving over 100 miles an hour. But he’d done it, and now we waited for the final word, the ruling on his future happiness. He had been convinced for years Big Sur was the only place he’d be happy, and if he just put the time in, he’d eventually earn it, or deserve it, or be ready for it. And so we waited. I left my long line of jobs of being a minder and mother to the rich and famous, and began taking any kind of freelance writing job I could wrangle — ghostwriting cookbooks, editing resumes, writing copy for a cosmetics company — so we could easily move if he got the offer.
A couple of weeks after the speeding ticket, the front door opened as I sat in our living room reading, but nobody entered the house. I jumped up from my chair in fear. A single cardboard box came through the front door and I knew what it meant: he’d gotten the job. We were moving. He’d planned on telling me this way, with the single moving box, for weeks. We screamed and kissed and made gin and tonics and packed that first box.
The commune held retreats, everything from photography lessons to meditation retreats to grief workshops. Its roots included first wave hippies and Eastern meditation, along with a legendary stint of Hunter S. Thompson as the security guard at the front gate. The staff mostly lived onsite in cabins, and most of them never left once they got there. It was perched on a cliff above the ocean, an hour and a half drive to the closest grocery store or doctor. Meals were served in a big, communal dining room, where any time you walked in you might see one person crying, another person close to climaxing, and definitely someone playing guitar or a more esoteric instrument. The food was heavenly; the nectar of the gods, all made from the onsite farm and garden.
This place was part of my body of celestial memories from Big Sur as a child, when my family went for open weekends held for locals. We hiked up the river, made flower crowns sitting on the lawn, ate plates of food heaped with rice and curry made from the freshly picked garden vegetables, homemade wheat sourdough bread with fresh fruit jams from the orchard, drank the richest coconut milk hot cocoa when the fog came in. This was the first place I saw a man naked in real life, by the pool, as my sister and I giggled and stole glances at his penis while he dove into the water and did a handstand. The commune was clothing optional, and it was famous most of all for those adults-only natural hot springs where I’d taken Daniel. In my teen years, I regularly partook in the midnight bathing offered to locals, from 1am to 3am every weeknight. This was the first place I saw lots of people naked in real life, and people in various states of seduction and power, and men pretending to be harmless.
As a child, I was completely unaware of the undercurrent at the commune. The hot springs, the food, the disconnection from the world made it a place free of law, morals or obligations. Many of the staff literally never left — people who “worked” and lived there for 30 years who hadn’t been off property in twenty-eight years, who lived in perpetuity in the Summer of Love. People who, Daniel would later marvel, “had totally different lives before they came here, but those lives don’t even matter.” The staff and its visitors all thrive on this perceived “freedom.” Everyone dates or just fucks each other, mostly in places they’ll be seen doing so.
Our last night in LA, our friend Nora hosted a goodbye party for us in her backyard, where toddlers and dogs and chickens ran around underneath the string lights, the orange trees with their blossoms releasing their scent into the hot night. I had never been sad to leave a town before, usually moving when I was past ready to move on. That night I felt panic rise repeatedly in my throat, so concrete it was hard to swallow the beer I was pounding. I couldn’t figure out why: we had a place to live, we both had jobs, we knew this place we were moving to, we had longed for it for years. But I felt terror. I watched all of our friends in that backyard and felt explosive sadness for everything I would miss, and miss out on. I watched Daniel peacock about the job he was leaving and the job he was about to start, inflating his story as always. I used to think this was a trait of his enthusiasm for something, but over the years, the exaggerations just turned into lies.
We packed our cars and drove separately, leaving over an hour apart from each other. This disjointed departure and arrival were indicative of what had begun to happen that I couldn’t see. The division, the separation, began far sooner for him than I ever realized. I was too busy always clearing the path ahead of him and cleaning up behind him to make sure he would find happiness along the way.
Early in his employment, I spent the day at the commune, and as Daniel’s shift finished, he suggested we jump in the pool before driving home. I deferred at first, uncomfortable being naked together in front of six of his coworkers. That I would be uncomfortable with this was mocked, and I eventually gave in. I mutely removed my clothes and stepped into the pool as his coworkers inspected and commented on every inch of my cold, naked body. I wanted the pool water to force itself into my lungs, to drown instead of having to get out in front of their predatory eyes. Daniel swam away from me.
Later, he chastised me for not being involved enough with his life at the commune. I pushed back that he was too involved, and that it was okay for me not to feel comfortable or normal being naked in front of his coworkers.
“Name one other job in the world where it’s normal for your wife and coworkers to be naked together,” I insisted.
“There isn’t one,” he replied.
“Exactly.”
“That’s what makes it so special,” he proclaimed. His superiority was palpable. He was unabashedly in love with this place, spent more and more hours there, infiltrating each department. He befriended the janitorial staff and was invited to their secret steak and whiskey night. He began a flirtation, and eventual sexual relationship, with a woman in the I.T. department who had taken on a Native American name, but whose real name was Rebecca. He finally won over the oldest, grumpiest member of the staff, the man who ran the art yurt. Daniel began to stay later and later at the commune each night, working on art pieces with him.
“They started calling me The Oracle,” Daniel told me after returning home from work one night. I stifled a laugh when I realized he was proud of this and not horrified and amused by it, like I was.
Daniel couldn’t have, wouldn’t have become The Oracle without me. My life was dedicated to his divination, and I was relentless in my desire to be the architect of his happiness. Before the commune, I got him a job running an enormous, ornate, insanely beautiful Spanish Gothic theatre built in 1926, founded by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin in downtown Los Angeles. He became obsessed with it, in a way that made me feel an absurd jealousy of an old building. The attention he paid to its details was envy-making: the restoration of a small piece of a statue in the lobby, his climbing through the duct work, ascending to the very heights of the auditorium, up above the heavy glass chandelier. He knew every centimeter of this humongous theatre better than the centimeters of my body.
He fixated on it in a way that gave him purpose, but when something went wrong there, he was shattered. An event went badly because the organizer hadn’t listened to Daniel’s recommendations, and he was so morose telling me about it on the phone when I called to tell him I was coming home from a party, I was convinced he was going to commit suicide. I barreled through every red light in Los Angeles and was consumed with fear as I raced into our house, leaving the front door open, preparing to find his dead body. I had been wrong, but not so wrong: he was in bed sobbing, where he remained for forty-eight hours.
He cried so relentlessly that I researched and found “The Best Psychiatrist in Los Angeles,” and broke down his door on Labor Day to get him to talk to Daniel and write him a prescription that might do something. The psychiatrist eventually told me he had never seen a lion in Los Angeles and it had frightened him, and at first I didn’t realize he meant me.
When Daniel began working at the commune, my first orchestration was telling him about the best bakery in town, and to go get a pink, butter-stained bakery box to bring with him his first day of work. It was a success. Within weeks he would retell the story of the tiny pastel French tarts and macarons as his own idea, eliminating me from it.
At the center of the commune’s functions and philosophies was a weekly group therapy session for each staff department called “Process.” Every Wednesday, when Daniel’s department had their Process, I came to expect an increasing stretch of silence from him. During the first few sessions, he came home at the end of his workday and reported some of it back to me — Sandra and Soren had been having tension in the office, and when the Process practitioner confronted them about it, he told Sandra she was holding her resentment in her chest, and Soren that he was holding his in his jaw. He pressed on their bodies in these spots, and each crumbled into tears, Daniel said.
In the beginning, he seemed as skeptical of it as to wonder if this was a performance, some kind of initiation they were doing — a prank on Daniel, the new hire. After a few sessions, he reported to me that Christine was having trouble in her marriage, a marriage to another woman who lived and worked at the commune, and they were going to move into different yurts and intentionally fuck other people and take a vow of silence from each other for six weeks. Process was, apparently, all about the here and now. Forget your past, don’t think about the future — the only way to best serve yourself and your life was to be completely present. Surrender entirely to what you want and who you are at any given moment. Talking or thinking about one’s past and how it affected their present was futile, pedestrian, a waste of time, and surrendering to what you want in the present moment every moment was the only way to be aware, the only way to exist.
Once Daniel was sold on Process, he absorbed it wholly. His coworkers were not just seeing his naked body and sharing that act of exterior intimacy every day, but they were now getting his interior intimacy, too. He stopped telling me anything about Process, except to gloat about how incredible the sessions were, what a special group of humans he spent his days with. He had post-Process meetings — dates, really — with some of his coworkers. He’d allude to a special conversation he’d had with Christine sitting on a grassy hill, drinking tea and weaving feathers into each other’s hair. He began to crow about “The Human Potential Movement,” another belief system held in the highest esteem at the commune.
Frantic and embarrassed that I didn’t know any of these new words or ideas in his daily life, I dutifully wrote down and researched all the phrases he brought into our home and listened for hours to him ruminating about how evolved these people were, how being present and only giving a fuck about yourself in any moment was the way to reach maximum potential. Inevitably I would ask the wrong question, and he’d look at me like I was a human who would never reach any kind of potential.
I stopped doing the research and asking any questions, though I became increasingly aware of the fact that he was spending all of his “present” time with other people, at the commune that time forgot, and living by the principles of people who had left behind cities, jobs, responsibilities, several who had left their own children, to live in an exclusive Utopia. A place where you could grow your own food and drugs — opium being the preferred homegrown drug — where you could never see another newspaper for the rest of your life, a place where phones didn’t work, where everyone was naked and free of any morals, judgments, or burdens.
In researching the methods and tenets of the Process, I found hope in the last one — that its practitioners had to take responsibility for their actions and feelings. I waited for Daniel to get to that step, to recalibrate and see that being present and having a conscience could coexist. He didn’t reach it before he left me. Being present and surrendering to what he wants in any given moment seem to be the principles that he continues to adhere to, the rules by which he lives his life. He told me he sat in a chair in the house of Fritz Perls, the man who originated this school of thought or therapy. Daniel sat there for three days, feeling Fritz’s presence, feeling the emotional weight of it. This meant nothing to me, and still doesn’t. He wanted this to mean something to me, and I wanted it to mean less to him. He wanted me to be astounded by this intensity, and I wanted him to ask me about my day. I wanted to rip that feather out of his hair and eat it, so it could travel my body and belong to me, so I could shit it out.
By winter, Big Sur began its traditional cycle of expelling roads and mountains from itself, with entire portions of Highway 1 being wiped out by landslides. Just a few months before, the Soberanes Fire had burned 100,000 acres of land, and now there were streams of black ash pouring down the hills that used to boast centuries-old trees. The rains, which we all begged for during that endless fire, were near-Biblical, destroying the limited infrastructure of the tiny, wild community. On the weekend before Valentine’s Day, a man living under the Pfeiffer Bridge saw that it was buckling in half, the pylons caving in towards each other. His alert to authorities caused the bridge to be shut to anyone but locals, as they brought out crews of engineers to forge the wilds and inspect it.
The bridge would need to come down. There would be no way to drive in or out of Big Sur for close to a year. No tourists could come in, children couldn’t get to their schools in Carmel or Monterey. Each Big Sur resident would have to make a choice about which side they would stay on: north or south. If you chose south, you had to be willing to live without medications, food and propane deliveries. February 15th the bridge would be closed to everyone, demolished, and rebuilt. Residents could drive their cars, one car on the bridge at a time, north or south, once they decided on a side.
Daniel walked out of Big Sur, walked over the bridge and left his car on the south side. I picked him up — it was pitch black out, nighttime in the forest. He was holding a flashlight, and I knew it was him by the way the light was swinging to the rhythm of his walk. He came home, gave me a used, blue wool sweater he found for me at a garage sale, packed some bags, and slept in bed next to me with his back to me.
In the morning, on February 14th, Daniel wept as he said goodbye to our rescue pup, Ladybird. He grabbed his bag, and I drove him to the bridge crossing. He ran into someone he knew and they started to walk over the bridge together after he gave me a distracted hug goodbye. The Oracle decided to be the savior of the commune, of the land. He sequestered himself on his side of the bridge, while I remained on mine. When he did speak to me, it was to tell me tales of organizing helicopter rescue missions for sixty-five people who were stranded there, or saving a stroke victim, or deciding who at the commune would be removed and who would be allowed to stay. Delusions of grandeur, lies, or truth, I will never know. There are so many blurred lines with an Oracle.
He only needed me to be his audience now, and when I deigned to push back against him, he chose a vow of silence, to me exclusively. We were not going to speak to each other for six weeks, like Christine and her wife, while he continued to be worshiped and continued to worship the woman who replaced me and continued to worship himself and continued to lie to anyone who crossed his path who didn’t believe he was worthy of idolatry.
And so for six weeks we didn’t speak. I wept, and my body disappeared. Some days it felt like it was disintegrating from the inside out, when I stopped getting my period and when the nurses and doctors looked alarmed and retested my blood pressure. Other days it felt like it was disintegrating from the outside in, as when my hair began to grow in completely grey overnight, like Leland Palmer, and then just started falling out.
I began stumbling on the dead almost daily. First, a mangled snake on the beach, tangled into itself over and over again. And then the raccoons, birds, deer, mice, frogs, a fanged fish, lizards, a butterfly, squirrels. I felt like I had to acknowledge these beings that were now carcasses, acknowledge them in death to honor their life. At night, I heard the neighborhood cats screaming, like they were being torn to shreds. Every morning I walked the hills to find them, and every morning, each of them was still alive, though every night they’d scream “This is the end!” and it echoed through the canyon.
First I tried to sleep through the weeks, taking every pill the doctor would give me to finally fall asleep each night. Then I tried to live through it, running as fast as I could through the sand on the beach with Ladybird until I couldn’t breathe, until my body made me stop, my torn ankle tendons floating around like flotsam and jetsam. I couldn’t eat, my throat closing itself to anything but the bottles of liquor I poured down it every night, first once the sun set, then while it was setting, then at any time of day to try to make it bearable to be alive. Every night, hot and humming from the alcohol, I would hope not to wake up in the morning: the path of least resistance.
When I had to drive anywhere, I did so too fast, carelessly, too close to the edge, just hoping. I’d go as far as I could south to Big Sur, before the missing bridge, to see if it was time yet for my baptism by fire to be completed, for my body’s rejection from this place to be brought to its inevitable end. I begged for the Bixby Bridge to crack under my tires and swallow me, for a landslide to expel me from the mountains into the sea. I stared up at the redwoods that were heavy with rain, and imagined one of them turning into a guillotine, in a swift fall. I waited for a wildfire to finish the job it had started on my neck and turn me to charcoal. Daniel is The Oracle and he had removed his love from me, and so I needed to turn into ash.
Some days I wanted to live and I wanted him to turn to ash instead of me. All days, I woke up and gasped when I remembered what my life had suddenly become. Most days I wondered if it ever really existed the way I remember it. There’s nobody else who will testify to it, because Daniel is now The Oracle, and The Oracle wasn’t there.
A series of hand-carved wood signs posted every 20 feet on the fence at the commune separate the hills from the ocean cliffs. The signs read “Extreme danger.” I remember laughing at them — the signmaker had put effort into making the cursive script beautiful and non-threatening, though the words were harsh. I took a picture of one of them, the sea behind it and stalks of pampas grass in front of it, gently waving in the wind.