Art Deco Associated Pacific

Near the intersection of Highways 1 and 41 in the town of Morro Bay is the business of Associated Pacific, with Art Deco for a front and a Quonset Hut to hold the guts.

Harmony

Harmony has an art gallery. Harmony is an Art Gallery. Harmony has a chapel. Harmony is a Chapel. Nowhere is the union of art and religion more apparent.

Solid Rock Church

On the side of a hill in Cambria, California, just off of Highway 1, is the Solid Rock Church. It is situated between Nitt Witt Ridge and a Public Park[ing Lot]

Cambria Public Park

Nitt Witt Ridge sits high above the Public Park in Cambria, California. The Solid Rock Church sits not so high above the Park. On Sundays the Park is transmogrified into a parking lot for the Church. Restrooms in the Park are perfectly clean but full of cautionary signs.

Nitt Witt Ridge

Arthur Harold Beal was not a Nitt Witt, nor was he a Nit Wit. But he was a believer. He believed that all things recycle through toilets. Consequently, he placed a toilet at the entrance to his house, one on top of his house, and numerous ones inside his house, on the walls as well as on the floors. He was way ahead of his time. Nitt Witt Ridge is on a hill above the Solid Rock Church in Cambria, California.

Spirit Garden

Spirit Garden is a play on four stages. Spirit Garden is a liturgy at four altars. The four stages are the four altars. The drama enacted at Spirit Garden is the union of Art and Religion. The lead is played by a woman, who enters the Garden Gallery and speaks her most important part into a cell phone, "I got a recommendation to you from Michael, who says you're good. My mother thinks I need a soul retrieval, and she is willing to pay for it. I went to someone else, but I didn't like him." Spirit Garden is in Loma Vista on Highway 1 south of Big Sur.

Giant Artichoke

Giant Artichoke in Castroville is on the corner of Highways 1 and 156. Most of the time you stand in line a while to order them fried, the specialty of the house. The thing to do is take them out to the hood of your car, along with a coke, and eat them as the traffic goes by. In the grocery the presentation is as follows: bananas in a banana, lemons in a lemon, tomatoes in a tomato, and etc. down the aisles.

Haute Enchiladas

Haute Enchiladas is in the town of Moss Landing, south of Santa Cruz and north of Monterey. (You know Moss Landing by its smoke stacks.) Haute Enchiladas is a restaurant (where you can order apple tart with cheese filling topped with whipped cream) anchored to a park, with a coop art gallery in the rear that features the work of Debbie Delatour, whose card wishes you "Luminance Blessings."

Sunset State Beach

Sunset State Beach is just south of Santa Cruz off Highway 1. The campsites are roomy and the sites well-kept. But here is the reason to camp there. On a night of the full moon, waves of white water come in from the west and waves of strawberry-protecting white plastic crest over the low hills to the east. That makes Sunset a thin island with scenery simultaneously in your face and behind your back.

Half to Have It

Half to Have It is an antiques store on the corner of Kelly and Main in downtown Half Moon Bay. Outside, clear winds inspire assorted wind chimes. Inside, inspiration comes from Just Stuff piled in and then piled up. As you inspect the thousands of things, cut-outs of Elvis, Marilyn, and Humphrey inspect you. Ecstatic Maxfield Parrish women gaze longingly at the heavens (they are ready to go) while Buddhas big and small wear transparent smiles (they seem happy enough where they are). Mirrors are all over the place so you can ask them, Mirrors Mirrors among the Stuff, Tell Me True, Am I happy Enough?

Flying Fish Grill

The Flying Fish Grill is in Half Moon Bay, near the intersection of Highway 1 and Highway 92. The fish tacos and the mahi mahi tacos are good, as is the grilled shrimp. But the truly fascinating thing about the place is a trip to the two-gendered restroom. You go out the front door, around the northeast corner of the building, by a row of parked cars and exotic flowers, around the northwest corner, around the southwest corner by piled up debris, in the back door, past the cooks, who have to step out of the way, and around an interior corner to the door. Pray that it is unoccupied.

Drive Thru Tree

The Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree resides in Leggett, California, at the junction of Highways 1 and 101. The two major attractions are the very large painting on the entrance road that makes the tree actually look sort of like a chandelier and the fallen tree off to the side with a big black hole in it. Maybe a third is the congregation of back-seat drivers who hop out and take pictures of driver and car passing through. None got down on their knees, even though an on-site poem directed them to do so.

Pot Garden

The Pot Garden in Mendocino is a garden of some potted and some not potted plants. The Garden is self-perpetuating, like the Eternal Tree House further up the road in redwood country. Hands come out of the pots, legs stick out of the ground upside down, and an alien stares out of a nearby window. The Pot Garden is like the Garden of Eden in one respect. Normal humans can't get into it, at least not without special permission from Alan the owner.

Point Arena

Point Arena is a whole town with a coordinated sense of humor. New Pine Creek is too. The photographs are evidence.

Pampas Grass

One website will give you ten reasons to love pampas grass. It is beautiful; it is tough; it is cheap. That's three of them. Another website is entitled, "Beware of Pampas Grass." It grows tall, and keeps growing, it will take over, and has very sharp-edged leaves. From its home in Argentina it is invading the coast of California. Wildlands maintenance crews are out on the beautiful cliffs of Highway 1, the ones with magnificent views of the ocean, spraying "Roundup" on all they can reach. "Are you all right?" "Yes, that was quite a hike." "How far down did you go?" "See where that pampas grass is blowing in the wind, deep in the canyon, on the edge of the abyss." The California Wildlands Grassroots Fund was established to support the heroic efforts of activists to preserve California's wildlands."

Bird Drop Half Dome

On California's Highway 1 south of Fort Ross is a human-made Half Dome. It was built to stabilize the roadbed. It has the curve. It has the cracks. And it has two features nature's Half Dome in Yosemite does not have: a blue fence (quite picturesque) and bird droppings (quite artistically placed).

Building of Hope

Right in the middle of Point Reyes Station stands the Building of Hope. There is no doubt about it: someone has stuck on its bricks, facing Highway 1, in block letters H-O-P-E.
It's empty. It looks as if someone else is trying to repair it, but no progress has been made in over a year.It is the community bulletin board, a valuable resource for anthropologists trying to figure out who humans are.

Bolinas

Bolinas is supposed to be a California alternative town, a latter day hippie town, an off-the-grid kind of town, especially off the grid of mainlining American culture. CALTRANS used to put up signs on Highway 1 with arrows to Bolinas. The town would take them down. No sign is there today.

You expect to see old hippies and young hippies, all calm and cool in the fog of a Sunday morning. You are not disappointed. A cluster of unshaven old men in unwashed clothes lean back against wooden house steps, talking, a young man in unkept khakis takes patient care of an untidy two-year-old, a tie-dyed young woman gently pushes her child in a second-hand stroller, an old woman with blackened teeth and patched bluejeans repeats "inevitable" to everyone who passes by, a man with a guitar slung over his shoulder, wearing a tailored black coat, with a paisley scarf over his face, slow dances down Wharf Road and sings a cappella to himself.

But also the sheriff's deputy shuffles along, smiling, talking to all of the above, and to none of the following: heroic bare-chested surfers manly striding out to meet the waves, moustached, leather-clad bikers, cyclists in motley tights, affluent French tourists digitally taking photos, a middle-aged, well-to-do American man, alone, sitting on the lone stump in the deserted bare-grass park and afterwards ordering a meal and beer at the Coast Cafe, not eating the former but drinking the latter, elbow on table, head on hand, staring.

The center of town is an altar of flowers and antelopes, angels and buddhas, lots of them. Next to it are multi-colored sheets of paper to write messages "for divine love nectar to bubble up throughout America's communities." Ernesto Sanchez left an artist's statement, "A spirit house, a shrine, an altar--each is a manmade object that offers a portal to the unknown." The guitar man says to the sheriff's deputy, "Dude, that's what got me to reality."

Behind Bo*Gas is a little outdoor, sort of a non-gallery. On the rear door is written, "Wharf Road will only give you life."

Schickenberg Nursery

Among a cluster of nurseries along Highway 1 north of Half Moon Bay are the topiaries of Schickenberg's. A carriage and team of horses ride by as birds fly off into the moisture-thick sky. Across Highway 1 to the west is Winged Stump, carved by the wind, unable to rise again.