Published: July 12, 2008 10:13 pm            

STEPHANIE SALTER: Watching the fires from 2,000 miles away, and remembering

TERRE HAUTE — In 1973, when I made my first trip to Northern California, I sent my parents in Terre Haute a large photo postcard of the Big Sur coast. On the back, I wrote, “God lives here.”

That was an odd message from me because I was not long out of college, living the 1970s version of “Sex and the City” in New York, and I was agnostic.

Like so many people before and after me, though — writers, painters, poets, photographers, naturalists, spiritual seekers and tourists in rental cars — I instinctively understood that Big Sur was in a category by itself. The inherent drama of its precipitous topography, mountains halting and dropping to the sea, made it like no land I had ever seen.

In Big Sur, the richest, most powerful human being is no more substantial (or impressive) than the shore birds that dot the sandy coves and short stretches of beach. Cynicism about anything, let alone the divine, is puny and ridiculous. The outer trappings and inner turmoil of one person’s existence couldn’t seem smaller or of less consequence.

That realization of infinitesimal smallness and cosmic inconsequence makes some people anxious and depressed. It never fails to deliver me to peace and freedom.

So, it is with a kaleidoscope of emotions that I sit here in Indiana this summer and watch Big Sur burn. Acre after acre, square mile after square mile, the mountains and valleys are on fire. They have been since June 21, when an explosion of lightning storms set off blazes all over the parched lands of California.

As most Americans who have followed the fires know, they are everywhere. Thanks to a two-year drought, forests and meadows are on fire, as are rural and suburban acreage, hillsides and valleys, farmland and resort property.

At this season’s worst (so far), a staggering 1,171 fires were burning around California. Late this past week, the number was down to about 320 with 1,100 square miles charred, but the drop in quantity did not bring a proportional decrease in intensity.

As I follow the biggest conflagrations in news stories and on maps, I see the names of some of my most sacred California places. None is more sacred than Big Sur.

In the three decades I lived in San Francisco (after that 1973 trip, my soul was pulled west), I made numerous journeys down Highway 1 to Big Sur. Sometimes I drove alone, as I had that first time, sometimes with my visiting parents and other relatives, sometimes with lovers, sometimes friends.

Every trip was different. Every trip delivered me.

About 10 years ago, I added the New Camaldoli Hermitage to my personal collection of Big Sur coast treasures. Hung on the side of the Santa Lucia Mountain range about 55 miles south of Monterey, the 900-acre hermitage is home to a couple dozen Benedictine monks and oblates.

Established in 1958, it also offers silent retreats and modestly priced lodging for anyone who needs or wants to do what the Camaldoli founder, St. Remuald, suggested back in 11th-Century Italy: “Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it.”

During one of my retreats there, I sat in the morning sun, looking at the Pacific Ocean hundreds of feet below, and wrote down all the sounds I could hear. The list included an occasional dew drop and pine needles falling to the ground.

The Camaldoli’s land nestles into the 2 million-acre Los Padres National Forest. Like the Malibu hills, Los Padres is one of those perennial Golden State burn magnets, whether the source of fire is lightning, a negligent camper or an arsonist.

In 1999, the Camaldoli monks labored day and night with firefighters to protect their hermitage from a blaze that destroyed nearly 100,000 acres of Los Padres. This summer’s Big Sur fire has taken 90,000 acres and is only about 40 percent contained.

The monks have become like most people who inhabit the Big Sur coast. All the while they go about maintaining their home and planning for the future, they live solidly in the present, never forgetting that they are just borrowing the land from the mountains (and their Maker).

Because Benedictines regularly sing praise to God, the monks may be even more aware than most of the gift that is each day without a fire — and of the gift of renewal that will be the inevitable green re-growth from scorched land.

Rather than take this summer’s statewide catastrophe personally, the monks accept a reality that was best expressed on a bumper sticker I saw many years ago:

“Nature bats last.”

The outgoing message on the Camaldoli Hermitage’s answering system this past week began with a quotation from Psalms: “A fire prepares His path.” The monk who recorded the message said he and his brothers were “presently evacuated” but hoped to be back home by July 13. They promised to try to keep the message updated and thanked everyone for their prayers.

Picturing the destruction around the empty hermitage, and all the other places I’ve come to know and love on the Big Sur coast, I remembered something else from that first trip in 1973.

So moved had I been by the spectacular scenery, I’d stopped my car at almost every turn and snapped photos with my little Kodak Instamatic. At one of the few low-lying spots of Highway 1, where beach access is easy, I walked out across the sand and began taking shots of the surf.

With no warning, a huge wave materialized and knocked me over, tearing sunglasses off my face and the camera out of my hand. My first reaction was anger and a terrible sense of loss. All my pictures!

Then I began to howl with laughter. The absurdity of what I had been trying to do hit me.

Capture Big Sur? And with a pocket-sized, automatic camera? It was as if the entire coastline had decided to whack me back to reality, to remind me of my wonderful, comical, inconsequential place there, and to admonish me with a rueful smile:

“As if you would ever need a packet of photos to recall what you have seen.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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