Pescadero Memories

And there was Kesey: Kesey the sea elephant.

Story by Russell Towle

June, there is yet another Ken Kesey/Año Nuevo Point connection. I will abbreviate Año Nuevo to AN.

I had the privilege of spending time on AN island in 1970 and 1971 with researchers from U.C. Santa Cruz studying the elephant seals. This project was headed up by one Bernie Le Boeuf. I would meet the scientists on the tip of AN POINT, and we’d climb into a Zodiac rubber raft with an outboard motor, and make the often perilous, wave-tossed crossing to the island.

At that time they were focusing on mating behavior and male rivalries. Certain “alpha” bulls controlled all of the females. The other bulls lurked around outside the harems, looking for any opportunity to sneak in and mate. We had blinds set up on all the breeding beaches, and would sit in those blinds for hours, recording which one bull backed down for which other bull, which bull successfully mated, etc. etc.

And how did we tell them apart? Each bull had a name spray-painted on its back. Some of the names were somewhat humorous. There was Nixon, for instance: Nixon the sea elephant.

And there was Kesey: Kesey the sea elephant.

The island was a wonderful place to explore, with its 19th-century lighthouse installation. The lighthouse itself had been vandalized by abalone divers, and all the fine curved diamond-shaped glass broken out. The iron frame of the tower had rusted to mere threads of iron in places, and most people wouldn’t dare climb it. I went up there quite a bit. Two windows, of the thirty or so, were partially intact. I obtained permission to salvage those windows, and incorporated the larger, pentagonal piece into a multi-paned window I made back in 1972. I still have that window, it is leaning up against the back wall of my hexagonal cabin. It was quite a trick fitting the curved glass into straight pieces of wood.

The two-story, rather simple, Victorian-era house of the lighthouse keeper was a place of great horror.

All the windows were broken out. The doors, gone. It was utterly infested with CA sea lions, upstairs, downstairs, everywhere. Hence the floors were literally a foot deep in sea lion excrement, with humps, here, there, everywhere: humps. These humps were dead sea lions.

So the house was not much of a pleasant place to visit.

But on the far side of the island were other buildings, all clear heart redwood, in great shape. And the water system of the island: a large underground cistern, made of concrete, with a concrete dish funneling rainwater into it, above ground. This dish was something like thirty feet across. It was carefully constructed to keep rats and such out, but the screens had rusted away, and down in the gloomy depths, floating in the water, were dead rats.

I made a wood stove from an old oil drum for the scientists. They would stay out there for days at a time, without any heat, without electricity, without running water. And those cold foggy winds never stop. Almost never. So I made a stove, and brought out some stove pipe, and set it all up for them. Between scraps of wood from the various buildings, and driftwood from the beaches, we were able to have a cheery fire out there, at night.

Those scientists had a rather casual attitude towards the sea elephants. When bored, they’d find a “weaner,” a baby sea elephant fully weaned, hence much like a golden, furry, bloated sausage, and at that age, there is little to do but sleep all day and sleep all night. The scientists would spy one out, sleeping on top of a sand dune, sneak up, and roll them down the dune with a single push.

The baby seal would wake up briefly, turning its large liquid eyes upon its tormentors, sneeze heartily, with mucus flying around, and then promptly return to sleep.

It was common, during fights between bulls, for baby seals, still with their mothers in the harems, to be crushed to death. We would then have to pick our way into the harem to retrieve the bodies, so they could be weighed and measured. This was highly dangerous.

The scientists taught me to “look tall” for the benefit of the bulls, to raise my arms above my head and not back down. It worked surprisingly well, but there were always times when one had to just turn tail and run for it.

It was wonderful to savor the aura of a true California island, offering as it did a unique view of the mainland.

The high bluffs of the Monterey Shale between AN and Waddell Creek are *not* from a roadcut, they are a scarp of the San Gregorio Fault, which has only in recent decades been traced all the way from Big Sur,
hence, it is much longer than originally thought, and capable of generating a powerful earthquake.

From AN looking to the mainland, these white bluffs are very conspicuous. They were landmarks for the earliest Spanish explorers of the CA coast, those bluffs, and by carefully reading the diary of a priest on one of those early expeditions along the coast, I was able to deduce the location of a certain Indian village just north of AN Point. I drove as close as I could, and then hiked inland to a certain hidden valley. It was rich with artifacts, both from the Indians, and from white settlers of the 19th century. In that hidden valley I found my first-ever Badger burrow, and my first-ever Redtail Hawk nest.

The bird life of AN Point is rich and varied to an extreme. Along Green Oaks Creek is a small reservoir. This is ringed with willows and tules and cattails. It is full of every kind of marsh bird. I used to canoe ever so slowly up that long narrow lake, binoculars in hand, paddling strong and quiet for an instant, and then drifting slowly into one of the many little bays. I saw so many marsh birds: Bitterns, Black-Crowned Night Herons, Long-billed Marsh Wrens, Soras, Virginia Rails, Great Blue Herons, etc. etc.

I knew where the Marsh Hawks nested, right on the ground, on AN Point. Ah, so many birds. A wonderful place for birds. To this day I am struck by the resemblance of the male Marsh Hawk to the White-tailed
Kite of either sex. The Marsh Hawks will sometimes mimic the classic kite behavior, fluttering over a single spot on the ground.

Well, that’s all for now.

Russell Towle

Story by Russell Towle

To live for two and a half years in that tiny cabin … shivering through every summer under that constant northwest wind, whipping wetly out of the fog bank, just offshore … quite memorable.

The Steele family, I see, enters some of your blog posts. I knew some of them, and even lived for a time at the Steele Ranch at Green Oaks Creek, years after my time down in the dunes. They had burned down one of their old barns, and it had not all burned, but in the wreckage were a number of hand-hewn redwood 12X12’s, dating, I’d guess, from the 1880s or thereabouts. I rescued a few of these, and one of them is scarcely six feet from where I write this. So, Año Nuevo stays with me.

The Steeles had a collection of amazing obsidian spearheads, probably ceremonial and ritual in provenance, which they had gleaned from the dunes of Año Nuevo, back in the 19th century. Several of these spearheads were six inches long. Perfectly made.

Yes, in my little hexagonal cabin in the Sierra, three of the six interior walls are paneled with tiny little redwood laths, liberated from a property line which marched across the dunes, now all part of the State Park. The laths are intricately colored by lichen and iron stains (they were laced together with wire, originally). I carried these laths in giant backpack loads across the dunes, back in 1975. They had long since served their original purpose, to shelter a line of Monterey Pines and Monterey Cypresses from the eternally howling winds.

Yes, Año Nuevo. My first time there, in 1966, maybe 1967, several friends of mine and I dropped acid in Los Altos and drove across the mountains on Page Mill and Alpine and La Honda roads, turned south on Highway 1, and parked at the south side of Año Nuevo Point.

It so happened, it was the very day that the Beatles’ single, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” was released, and the radio station was playing it over and over and over as we made the long drive over the Santa Cruz mountains.

We wandered into the dunes, and for the first time in my life I saw Indian mounds, which are everywhere out there, littered with thousands of flakes of chert derived from the Miocene-age Monterey Shale Formation. Chert, and shells, and bones. And this wilderness of sand dunes and Indian mounds was slathered, all over, with wild strawberries. Which we ate. While listening to the new Beatles’ song. In our minds.

We wandered far to the north. Ah those beaches which face the island. Stinking with masses of rotten seaweed, stinking with sea lion feces, swarming with flies. I had never seen the like. Eventually we reached the North Beach, where years later I would live.

The sun set into a mass of fog and the howling northwest wind ushered us away. In the dim light after sunset, all of us lost, except me, being gifted with a fine sense of direction, all of us stoned out of our minds, just as I pointed the way back into the dunes which would lead us back south to where we’d parked, a mile away still, my friend Milton Taulbee spotted a monster on the beach.

“Look,” he screamed, “a sea lion … hurt, injured in a storm perhaps… look at its mouth! Look at its head! Oh, the poor thing! We must help it back into the ocean, where it can die in peace!”

That was Milton. He was like some knight from the Middle Ages. He had the kind of courage which insists upon what is right, no matter what the consequences. Milton was a warrior. Tall, thin, and platinum blonde.

But it was not an “injured sea lion.” It was, in fact, a sea elephant bull, taking a quiet nap on the beach. It did not need any kind of rescue. We gathered around it in the deepening gloom and it took the combined efforts of four young men to convince Milton it did not need to be, somehow, rolled back into the waves.

Failing to convince him, I led our party into one of those infinite valleys, leading south into the dunes, with Milton standing staunchly there on the beach, a patriot of patriots, a hero of heroes, until finally he too followed.

Such was my introduction to Año Nuevo.

Russell Towle

Dear June,

Wonderful blog.

I found it by Googling for Kesey + “Año Nuevo”, inasmuch as I had just mentioned to a friend that, once upon a time, I had been in a movie made by Kesey and the Pranksters, at Año Nuevo. She said, “Go to Zane Kesey’s web site and see if you can buy the movie.”

I went. It is not there.

I knew Kesey a little, but, let me see, he did compliment my guitar playing, and I am in that movie, as is my little driftwood cabin.

Years earlier I had lived with Neal Cassady and some of the Pranksters. Another story.

I saw, on your blog, that one piece you wrote had to do with coastal erosion. I am an amateur geologist. I am now, and I was, in 1970, when Hank Bradley, retired mining engineer and part owner of Coastways Ranch, south side of Año Nuevo Point, drove his little old military jeep around the point to my beach, and introduced himself.

Soon we were trundling down the beach in his jeep, towing dead sea lions away from my tiny cabin with a length of chain. And we were talking history, talking geology, and Hank told me, “I have some old Geological Survey maps of this area, and near as I can tell, this part of Año Nuevo Point (the north side), has retreated 660 feet since 1880.”

I objected in the most strenuous terms. It didn’t matter how soft the almost unconsolidated marine sediments were, there was no “660 feet” in 90 years.

I was wrong. Those little marine terraces, capped with sand dunes, cannot withstand wave attack. Since 1970, that same beach, that same shoreline, has retreated another 100 feet at least. It is difficult to even recognize the complex pattern of little valleys amid the dunes, nowadays, as so many are gone. Where my little cabin stood is out where the waves break, now.

Hank Bradley was an interesting man. I lived at Año Nuevo for two and a half years, and ended up spending a lot of time with Hank and Betty Bradley. In fact, the door to my little cabin, here in the Sierra Nevada, is a redwood door from the *old* Coastways Ranch, torn down to build the glorified Eichler of the modern ranch, back in the early 1960s, I think.

But I explored all that part of the coast exhaustively. Twice I walked from Año Nuevo to Los Altos, cross-country. The Chalks. Where native blueberries grow. Wind-dwarfed redwoods, four feet tall.

Good job on the blog.

Russell Towle

[Russell Towle is the author of The Dutch Flat Chronicles; Artifacts from the Dutch Flat Forum 1875 and 1878 and The Seven Ages of Dutch Flat, 1849-1924

To read Russell Towle’s blog, click here