I am reading Steven King’s new book, Joyland, so when I caught a glimpse of this from the side of the road, I had to take a look-see.
California’s abandoned gated communities, shuttered amusement parks, forlorn desert strip malls — crèches for a new society struggling to survive the ruination of the old. As the economy crumbles, and refugees from the failing American economic system struggle to remake their lives in what had been vacant real estate, ranks of the dispossessed amid seeming abundance, what happens when people start doing the math?
Morro Bay, California.
El Rancho Motor Hotel by the good people of Best Western, Morro Bay.
Hitting the open road was, at some point, emblematic of the American vacation. In fact, it was so popular that by 1962 nearly 75 percent of all public lodging establishments in the United States were roadside motels.
The blanding, Tusconanifying, and granitization of America is not quite complete. Enjoy the all American shabbiness while you still can.
California is war torn, and the hard dry landscape does not bear its injuries decorously. Each burned-out swatch of wildfire victimized land, each bulldozer gouge, each swath of stolen hillside, each mark of human commerce, all stand naked against their surroundings, unmitigated by time. Even the great heavenly chunks of untrammeled nothingness lay exposed, up against the dense clusters of exurban sprawl. But, the hum and buzz of breathtaking oceanfront miles of winding open road await — visions of rustic farm towns unfolding into sun-bleached fishing villages, the sun, the salt, the crispy California coastal air that will become transform the narrative, via a storied and scenic backdrop.
Morro Rock is the fat, rugged 576-foot mound of splintered volcanic dacite that guards the entrance to Morro Bay, at the mouth of a three-and-a-half-mile north-south estuary formed by a spit of bulky sand dunes. Explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo named the rock El Moro in 1542, because it reminded him of a turbaned Moor. Over the centuries the name evolved into the less poetic Spanish homonym, Morro, or knoll.
At the center of the Central Coast in San Luis Obispo County is Morro Bay, a gently beautiful coastal town with an unusually high population of landlocked, airborne and aquatic wildlife; egrets, herons, sea otters, and a enormous colony of sea lions who pose and cavort for the camera, yuking it up in the water, flopping out of the ocean, tossing cooling sand on their fat bellies, then settling in.
We have a date with a miniature horse farm, so we exit on highway 246 which rolls through the hilly ranch country 36 miles north of Santa Barbara. The bucolic Santa Ynez Valley is a verdant landscape of rolling hills frosted by coastal winds. There are 9,000 acres of ranch land adjoining the isolated and beautifully austere Santa Inés Mission, surrounded by beautiful green rolling hills, rambling vineyards and grand equestrian estates, and an incongruously situated faux Danish village called “Solvang”. Coated with faux half-timbered homes, towers, gabled roofs and windmills, Solvang is a frightening hellscape. Crawling with tourists, many two-fisting delicious treats (ice cream cone + doughnut or ebelskiver + danish pastry, etc.), Solvang is also famous today as the setting for the movie “Sideways,” and you can spot the occasional disappointed hipster, realizing how grim Solvang really is.
Bakersfield, a sprawling, fossilized industrial town, a ghostly Nowheresville. Laborers toil in the San Joaquin Valley farmbelt with non ironic trucker caps, suffocatingly hot.
Snaking North on Route 1, the Pacific punching at the base of the bluffs, flinging curtains of spray.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles of breathtaking, scarred landscapes.Through beach towns, past enclaves of the filthy rich and the hovels of dirt poor laborers, stretches of deep wilderness, farms and hot springs, military bases and railroad track, migrant farm workers lining up for water in the grape fields, Honky tonk Marine corps towns, sprawling messes of trailer parks, starter-home suburbs, Mexican drug shipments rolling ashore on lifeboats, toxic harbors and sewage lagoons, empty “communities” of suburban buildings, abandoned gated housing developments, the forlorn desert strip malls, and every one of them closing their days with a million-dollar ocean sunset.