San Simeon—Through the Slit in the Cat's Eye

San Simeon—Through the Slit in the Cat's Eye David D. Cooper An event is such a little piece of time-and-space you can mail it through the slotted eye of a cat. —Diane Ackerman, "Mystic Communion of Clocks" Whenever I ache for passage home from my exile in the Heardand I go down into the basement where I hung up the photograph. Chipped, creased, and spindled by thirty years of resdess navigation back and forth across the continent, the photograph, taken with a borrowed Leica on a tripod , freezes a wave that hasjust crashed onto a rock offthe tip ofSan Simeon Point UkeJeU-O splattered on a transparent waU. The photograph takes me to another heartland along CaUfornia's Central Coast where I Uved thirty years ago and worked at Sebastian's General Store. I walked the point nearly every day after work with my best friendTerry Martin. Sometimes I hitched a ride with Doc, the Hearst Corporation caretaker, on his late afternoon patrols to run hikers offthe point, beer botdes rolling around in the bed ofhis pickup. I visited the point to read the moods of the sea—steel gray, emerald, azure. Ever since, driven by an insistent and mysterious spawn, I return to San Simeon Point year after year, part of an annual parade of Chinook salmon, gray whales, sooty shearwaters, and tourists bused in from Fresno and Oxnard. To know why I return is to know something about the geography of the heart, the theology of thin places, and the texture of a dog's ashes. For the precision navigator, San Simeon Point nestles in the cross hairs of latitude 35° 38' 27" north and longitude 121° 11' 54" west along the grid of paraUels and meridians that holds the world together in a hatch ofgeographic rebar and keeps Chicago from becoming Shangri-La. For the geologist, the point, arching into the Pacific Uke a backward sixty-acre apostrophe, rides A briefversion ofthis essay appeared in DouhleTake, Winter 1999, Volume 5, Number 1. 50 David D. Cooper51 atop a massive slab of terra firma called the Pacific Plate that gnashes shoulders with the North American Plate seventy miles east ofSan Simeon. There the earth's crust writhes and twists in a ten-miUion-year paroxysm—a titanic bit of tectonic friction that produces the mountains of California's rugged Coastal Range. Far from being fixed in the mesh oflatitude and longitude, the point inches toward the Gulf ofAlaska at the rate your fingernaüs grow. Like the region's geology, the early human history of San Simeon is a study in tension, edges, and displacement. Anthropologists disagree whether the Chumash or the Salinan Indians were first to settle the point's fertile woodlands and benefit from the only sheltered cove along a considerable stretch of open and inhospitable coastline. We do know that the aboriginal Hokan stock—consisting of Chumash, Esselen, Costanoans, and Salinan Indians—inhabited the entire region stretching from the Channel Islands northward to the San Francisco peninsula through what is known today as the SalinasVaUey. Long-standing opinion locates the southern-most border separating the Salinan and Chumash territories roughly at Point Buchón, at least fifty miles south of San Simeon Point. Recent research tends to shift the Salinan-Chumash boundary much further north, making San Simeon Chumash, not Salinan, territory. It seems likely that considerable trading between neighboring tribes, friendly hunting forays, and generally fluid territorial boundaries probably lead to constant in-and-out migration between otherwise distinct homelands. I have walked coundess stretches ofbeach along the entire Central Coast. I have biked from Nipomo, in south San Luis Obispo County, to Salmon Creek, at the southern terminus ofBig Sur. I have scaled several ofthe Nine Sisters, volcanic plugs that rise as high as 1,600 feet along the spine of the coastal plain from San Luis Obispo to Morro Bay, neatly spaced Uke the plates on a dinosaur's back. Whüe I am no cartographer or anthropologist, the gentle lay of the Central Coast land shelf, I can say with some assurance, offers no formidable natural barriers to easy land passage aU the way from Point Conception...