Olaf Wolff
West Coast Content Editor
Editor's Note: This is the first installment in a three-part series of Wolff's travels
Riding motorcycles makes me contemplative. It’s an addiction I don’t seek to kick. I need it. It’s how I regain my footing when the world around me tilts or my mojo starts to fade.
Arguably, one of the most spectacular stretches of road on the planet is Pacific Coast Highway 1, between Morro Bay and Monterrey California. It’s pure pharmaceutical grade synchronicity. That’s where I go for my soul-medicine. I first rode this magical mystical highway in 1972 on my way to UC Berkeley. Neil Young’s Harvest album topped the charts. Peace and love wafted through the air. The promise of change and opportunity crackled across the nation like an electrical charge. And Big Sur was a Mecca. Things have changed – though not as much in Big Sur – there the heart still beats strong and true.
Big Sur is a meagerly populated region of the central California coast, positioned idyllically in the middle of the above mentioned-dazzling thoroughfare, where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly and violently from the Pacific Ocean. Big Sur's Cone Peak is the highest coastal mountain in the lower 48 states, ascending nearly a mile above sea level, only three miles from the ocean.
An overwhelming, humbling, gut feeling, that some unfathomable power shaped this special place using brute force is unavoidable. Magnificent California condors fly free and unfretted here. Hiking purists from around the world travel to this spot to traverse switchback trails from blissful beaches to mountains filled with mind-healing scents and images. To trek along the streams in the cool, tree lined valleys. Climb up on the high ridges for a spectacular view of the western slope and gaze mystified into three million acres of wilderness in the Los Padres National Forest on the eastern slope. Henry Miller wrote, “It is here in Big Sur that I first learned how to say Amen.”
Nearly four years ago my daughter left home to attend the University of Santa Cruz. The morning she left home, her and I rode this exact route on a GoldWing. Mom drove her stuff up in the car and took a more direct route. I don’t for a second take for granted that my wife and Kristy were indulging me that morning. Many of the most important things in my life have a motorcycle in the picture somewhere. They both understand that. Kristy leaving home clearly rates at the of my top-ten most important things.
Kristy had compiled a song list specifically for this trip. I plugged her iPod into the Wing’s sound system expecting to hear music I didn’t recognize, performed by artists I couldn’t understand. She waited till we hit the coast at Morro Bay to turn on the music, until we had a couple hours of riding under our helmets. The first song that played that morning was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s, Teach Your Children. My bad for underestimating the importance of that morning for her as well – she wasn’t that little girl anymore.
Kristy’s entire song list was a carefully choreographed soundtrack for the shortest 320-mile ride of my life. A blend of old and new – songs we sang together as she was growing up – songs I sang to her and she hadn’t a clue as to what they meant until perhaps that morning. The iPod was off for a while as we navigated our way to the campus. Once we hit the road headed to her dorm, she switched on the last song on the list, Cat Steven’s, Wild World.
I tried to hold it back, but I’m pretty sure she felt me twitch and sniffle. I couldn’t make enough scenic stops that day to bring under control the passing of time. That ride ended way too soon.
