January 7, 2007
WHEN he moved there from France in 1940, Henry Miller, who had grown up in Brooklyn, called Big Sur his “first real home in America.” Running from Carmel, 150 miles south of San Francisco, to San Simeon, Big Sur’s mass of tight mountains pushes brazenly against the Pacific swell. Kelp forests sway at the feet of rugged sea cliffs. Deep valleys shelter some of the southernmost redwoods. The only way through this fastness is along winding, breathtaking California Route 1.
Nearly two decades after settling in, Miller wrote “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch,” a collection of fond, philosophical sketches that expressed a nostalgia for the place born of his fear that Big Sur’s magic could only wane as more people came to visit. Certainly, summers can be a crush here, a paradise lost of RV traffic jams and overcrowded facilities.
Yet in winter, nature reasserts itself. Whales, elephant seals and monarch butterflies arrive after travels that have taken them thousands of miles. California sea otters, once thought extinct and rediscovered only in a single Big Sur cove, float among kelp beds as effortlessly as the recently reintroduced California condors soar above redwood crags.
See what it looked like in the paper on Photographer Jeff Pflueger’s site…
