The Road Home: Across the Desert and into the Trees

Heading east from Point Loma and Coronado in San Diego, Interstate 8 goes up into the Laguna Mountains past the Campo and Manzanita Indian Reservations and their casinos. The change is dramatic in altitude and topography from the coast so that it isn’t unusual for the temperature to be 20 degrees cooler in Julian or Cuyamaca than it is in the eastern San Diego suburbs. During part of the year, you can walk and sun yourself by the sea at Ocean Beach in San Diego in the morning and then ski or play in the snow in the mountains in the afternoon- a very unexpected combination of activities for an Easterner. Moving across the crest of the mountains, you begin the descent into the Sonoran Desert. In twenty miles, the road drops from 5000 ft to sea level, and the temperatures reflect the difference. The land here is desert and one of America’s most productive agricultural "deserts" is Imperial County. Irrigation has changed the West and altered the water table. When you leave the lush irrigated patchwork of fields and pass the vast Imperial Dunes for the push toward the Colorado River and Yuma, the land is flat and the arid environment sports ocotillo and cactus. The Colorado River, which flows dramatically through the Grand Canyon, is more like a creek by the time it reaches Yuma on the California/Arizona/Mexico Border.

Through Arizona, the desert is vast and beautiful. The vegetation is sparse but alters notably as you move through the micro climates and changes in ground water and altitude. Lush irrigated lands emerge as part of the landscape and then the landscape reverts to tumbleweed or saltbush. Exits on the interstate are coveted and businesses crowd the well spaced intersections usually sporting some unique experience or spot such as Arizona Dateland with its featured date palms and distinctive if cloyingly sweet date shakes. Anything to break the long sameness of the journey is in order.

Moving into the Gila Valley and Phoenix, the flat, empty landscape creates opportunities and an evolving storyboard of continuous sprawl with the “Fill in the blank” Ranch or Rancho subdivisions grouped precipitously and then punctuated by another gathering from the bag of ubiquitous chains such as Home Depot, Applebees, Wal-Mart, Old Navy, etc. The desert has been consumed with a whirlwind devolution of options touting the good life as far as the eye can see. The flat,nearly endless horizon only makes this urban encroachment all the more obvious and strangely incongruous. The destination here in the desert metropolis is Scottsdale and Taliesen West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Arizona home created in the 30's as the winter headquarters for the Wright Fellowship and its school of architecture. At the edge of Scottsdale, for another few years anyway, Taliesen West is the rich and bigger brother of Taliesen East in Wisconsin. It was started as the winter tent camp headquarters and then expanded to meet the needs and artistic whims of the Great Architect. When the powerlines were installed between him and his view of the desert in the forties, he merely changed the orientation of each added building to be sure that the view was of the mountains to the east. Taliesen West really wows the visitor. It is much more hands-on and displays more artifacts and facilities. Art of all sorts, a movie theatre, and gathering rooms to talk, work, and share music and ideas. Its style seems so in tune with the surrounding desert that it is not surprising that this creation flourished and grew faster than its Midwestern sibling. It is impressive and worth contemplating for its artistic blending with the desert landscape and the cultural history lesson that is so evident in the details of the place.

From Arizona, it was across New Mexico into Texas. Ah, Texas- 900 miles of mostly flat, sometimes arid sometimes swampy landscape. West Texas is hauntingly beautiful. The Davis Mountains were stunning and quite a surprise after the flat desert. With the McDonald Observatory and a vista in every direction, these low slung Rocky Mountain remnants surprise and delight the eye. Moving across Texas is time consuming and yet interesting. The horizon beckons in every direction, and nature is king (and queen). We saw fabulous sunsets(Picture is near Cline, Texas), constantly changing vistas, and few trees. San Antonio is mushrooming in size with lots of new roads and developments. The downtown River Walk is still delightful (unreal, but delightful) and full of tourists and convention goers. This is a boom town with the river increasingly lined with chain restaurants and stores- the phenomenon played out in many spots coast to coast when rising rents force out small businesses. Houston has some amazing neighborhoods which are distinctive and beautiful, but the major roads are parking lots- I had enough of that in LA and deal with it all too frequently in DC. Houston seems to be even more recalcitrant than LA and DC in moving forward with mass transit playing a significant role in quality transportation.

And then Louisiana. We passed through Cajun Country and fields of sugar cane and the destructive footprints left by Rita. This area is recovering slowly but deliberately from the "second" hurricane of '05. New Orleans is another story all together. Since Ashley began working for the Road Home Program in August, we have been very aware of the struggles of New Orleanians to reclaim and rebuild their city- and it is a struggle. There are parts of the city that are nearly back to normal, there are parts that are hobbled but growing, and there are parts that are still utterly deserted and broken. So many factors come into play. The real danger is that the rest of the country will forget that for many people, home is still rubble, fungus-infused furniture, and few options that will work. Ashley and her team co-workers have hope that "The Road Home Program" and the auxillary programs for rowners of rental units will make a difference and provide the boost that so many people need to be able to start and then get to the finish line in the rebuilding process. Only if all of us keep an eye on what is happening and demand answers and evidence of progress will the programs work and create some momentum to get life rolling again. There are so many wrenchingly sad stories that are made worse by the fact that generations of families and lives lived in this one of kind place are now endangered. Everyone wants a higher, smarter rebuilding, but as usual, it is those who already lived on the edge who are put off, ignored, dehumanized and ultimately displaced and forgotten. I only hope that we not only ask the difficult questions about our response, but come up with some answers that will ensure that natural tragedies of this sort are not compounded by a response that was ineffective to the point of being bizarre and more of a second blow to people who were already down and out rather than a helping hand. There is always hope, but the obstacles are many. I keep thinking "We have met the enemy and it is us."

As we left the "Big Easy" and made our way across the Mississippi coast, we were again amazed at the destruction. There wasn't much left on the Mississippi coast to save- a horrendous loss and one of a different sort than they experienced in New Orleans with their failed levees and standing foul water. We passed through the lower South and spent one whole day in blinding rain as we navigated the mountains of east Tennessee. When we entered Virginia, the sun reappeared, and the autumn that was not so evident in the desert or along the Gulf Coast, burst forth. There are few places to surpass the splendor of the Shenandoah Valley in the fall. No wonder Sherwood Anderson found his final home in the town of Marion, Virginia where he edited the local paper (two papers actually) and wrote about the glories of small town life, an odd final chapter for the author of Winesburg, Ohio. Yet, even in that book with its themes of suffocation and defeat, there is an acknowledgement of possibilities and human potential even if in Winesburg, they went unrealized.
So the circle is complete. Wrapped in the blaze of leaves, oak and maple, we return to what has been for us, for nearly thirty years, home. There is an inherent irony in a journey that searches for a place called home. Home is an ideal. It is a state of mind. It is an internal emotional gauge, the creation of many experiences and eternal longings, which guides and informs us, and sometimes derails us. Home is our one-of-a-kind canvas, the base and inspiration for the indefatigable gleam of meaning which defines each of us. Home is physical but far more and always changing to reflect our ideal port and harbor, uniquely personal and yet profoundly and inevitably shared.

Coasting: California- Carmel to Cabrillo

If there is an overused adjective in modern American English, it is “awesome.” This word is close to meaningless because it has become a place filler for an unidentified precise word or, even worse, a mere expletive. In its more vigorous days, awesome meant “eye-popping, breathtaking, wondrous” or “possessing reverential fear or wonder.” All of my hopes through the years that the shameless co-opting of this word to describe pizza or shoes or a haircut would end have been repeatedly dashed and thus, I will strike a small blow against the underthinking and overuse that has coverted “awesome” from blazing cobalt to beige. The California Coast from Carmel south to Santa Barbara is nothing short of AWESOME. Robert Louis Stevenson called this coast “The greatest meeting of land and sea in the world.” As the road known as “California 1” snakes its way between the crushing crashes of Pacific waves to the right and the jagged rocks and grass covered hills to the left, there is never the slightest doubt that this is a place to rival the most wondrous. Stark and boldly beautiful yet supremely serene and natural, this place hijacks the visitor as even the highway becomes a part of the mysterious effect of the place and the journey. As the road carries you south, through Soberanes Point with its ocean beaches and dense redwood groves and across the mellow yet dramatic heights of Big Sur, the mark of those who have embraced and lived here from the original Chumash or Salina Indians to Henry Miller, Orson Welles, and William Randolph Hearst become figurative outcroppings testifying to the enduring and inspiring power of this great physical landscape. At Big Sur, Welles’ Nepenthe (his gift to Rita Hayworth in the 1940’s) which is now a restaurant hangs over the ocean with a gasp-producing view to accompany the pricey, forgettable food. The Henry Miller Memorial Library huddles in an evergreen copse ready to serve up its eclectic collection of volumes and artifacts, art and community center- internet access is available- a real anomaly (like eating McDonalds in Rome) in this remote spot where man seems small and the idea of being connected isn’t about Netscape or Verizon. Perhaps the unquenchable quality of our thirst for constant electronic connection has to do with our inability to find a truly “wireless” plug-in with who we are and the greater universe that surrounds us.

As you head further south past the immense Hearst Castle barely visible to the east in the coastal hills, past the beaches where elephant seals loll away the day flopping from side to side and flipping sand hither and yon to readjust their amazing heft, the majesty of the Ventana Wilderness behind you, you see the monolithic Morro Rock, known as the “Gibraltar of the Pacific” jutting dramatically out of the ocean. This has been an extraordinary trek through a part of California which defies the glitz, speed, and sprawl of the notorious urban encampments and serves up a snapshot of our greater selves or at least a mirror to reflect an image of ourselves in a simpler and slower context. As Robinson Jeffers characterized it “this coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places.”
So it is time for Solvang. This town was designed to be a real Danish enclave by its Danish founders in 1911 to preserve and continue Danish language and culture, however, it has become an attractive but over-the-top, Disneyfied version of Copenhagen and Denmark. In an odd way, Solvang is more Danish than Denmark. Its need to emphasize and reinvent the place makes it more important to reproduce the most obvious and popular aspects of the Danes. If you’re looking for smorgasbord or Danish pastry or kirsch, then you will be well-rewarded by a visit to Solvang. While it is kitschy, it is fun with its gingerbread-trimmed hotels and shops and fabulous windmills. As the largest town in the Santa Ynez Valley, it also offers great weather and wine, and, of course, this is the location of the Reagan Ranch where our 40th President escaped the stress of politics and government for his final years. While distant in political philosophy, our paths seems to continue to cross during this trip,
From Santa Barbara, it is a short trip to the burgeoning, ever expanding footprint of Los Angeles. From Ventura on, jutting southeastward now, down the California 101, there is unbroken city, except for the occasional protected or too-expensive-to-develop mountain. When I entered LA, I couldn’t help but notice the amazing contrast of sweeping suburban expansion versus the calm primordial redwood forests just up the coast. It did not take long to be engulfed in the parking lots known as freeways in LA. I soon decided to abandon the clogged arteries of the megalopolis and hit the city streets in my search for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House which sits atop Barnsdall Park in the center of old Hollywood. This small park, named for its benefactor, is an arts park. It features not just the first and some say the best example of Wright’s architecture in LA, but public galleries and one of the best views of Hollywood (and the sign) to be had. This house was built in 1921 to resemble a Mayan temple. Aline Barnsdall required that Wright use images of her favorite flower, the hollyhock, throughout the house. Images of hollyhocks in concrete adorn the outside of the building and add to the overall effect of the house as it sits, not at the top, but at the brow of the hill. How Wrightean!
Alas on to San Diego, the birthplace of California and the home of the avocado. No wonder I like it so much. With a natural harbor and perfect weather, this seems an appropriate spot to launch a trip back across the continent. Visiting Cabrillo National Monument with its sweeping view of San Diego, the harbor, and the Pacific is always restorative and soul satisfying. With the elegant simplicity of Point Loma Lighthouse crowning the peninsula, Cabrillo is dramatic and windswept, a place for walking and whale watching and reverie. There is time left for lunch at our favorite Latin American restaurant, Berta's in Old Town, and we are ready to head east. Now up and over to the desert and back to the land of green and trees and…

The Town that John Built: Salinas Then and Now

SALINAS, CA.-The name Steinbeck is synonymous with Salinas. It could easily be called Steinbeckville for it leans heavily on this native son to keep the tourist dollars flowing. Businesses are named for novels, streets in subdivisions sport the monikers of characters, and the local coffee bar features a "Steinbeck Blend." John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902. He is the quintessential local boy who makes good and the payback has been considerable. While he was president of his senior class, he was neither a particularly outstanding student or athlete. He was shy and didn't date in high school. He went to Stanford, had a great time, learned a lot, but he never graduated. Steinbeck, from his early teens on, knew that he wanted to be a writer. He worked earnestly and unsuccessfully until he published Tortilla Flat in 1935- his first real best seller. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath, a book that he had researched carefully in the work camps and fields filled with Dust Bowl refugees who were refered to as "Harvest Gypsies" in the San Joaquin Valley of California as well as in his beloved Salinas Valley. The locals were not amused, and this book brought him derision and notoriety in the Salinas Valley. It was ceremoniously burned by the local Salinas library. Of course, as with most book censorship or burning, it increased the demand for the novel. The influence of this book and the movie that was made from it was monumental. Steinbeck lived in this area for much of his life up through the early 1940's. It was in Salilnas, Monterey, and Pacific Grove and other spots on the Monterey Peninsula that Steinbeck set most of his fiction. This is what he knew and what he loved, so, warts and all, he provided colorful, funny, poignant, always real glimpses of life in this "garden by the sea." He and Gwen, his first wife, lived in a cottage in Pacific Grove (a town often referred to as the Butterfly Capital, since the Monarch Butterflies migrate through here every fall). She helped him type and edit his manuscripts and was first mate on the ocean trip along the Baja California coast which resulted in the non-fiction work, Sea of Cortez. Indeed, Steinbeck often went exploring with his buddy, Ed Ricketts (Doc in Cannery Row)in the tidal pools along the shore in Pacific Grove, and he spent lots of time drinking and carousing with Ed and the guys on the docks in Monterey.


When I arrived in Salinas, I was amazed first that this was a very prosperous town with a vibrant downtown and activity in every direction. Could this be the town that nearly closed all of its public libraries just last year because there wasn’t enough money to run them? It was, and when I posed this question to a member of the Steinbeck Preservation Society, she said “Oh, that was just our city manager playing politics.” I think Steinbeck would have liked that answer and what it says about the tendency of those in power to engage in rather cavalier gambling with the public good The center of Salinas is dominated by the National Steinbeck Center. It is a large and imposing building built in the same brick style as much of the rest of the downtown area. The center has a large gallery devoted to Steinbeck, which outlines his life and works, but does it with numerous activities and lots of film clips to keep the multitude of students who visit interested in the various parts of the author’s life. I spent almost three hours reading the documents, watching the various clips from The Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony, East of Eden, etc, It was great to see so many artifacts, especially “Rocinante” the truck that Steinbeck drove across country in his American journey- Travels with Charley. The Steinbeck Center also has an exhibit room about agriculture in the Salinas Valley, a special exhibits gallery, and, of course, an extensive gift shop. Just up the street is the Steinbeck House, which is run as a restaurant by a local non-profit group, The Stenbeck Preservation Society. It is nicely restored and serves as one of the anchors for the Steinbeck tour that highlights all of the places in central Salinas that the author visited and that subsequently made their way into his novels. In Monterey, Pacfic Grove and through the valley, there was a heightened awareness of Steinbeck and the places that he had immortalized in his fiction. It is a vast literary playground which gives life to the settings of such works as East of Eden, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, I felt a real kinship with this place like I was revisiting a familiar spot although the changes have been massive as time has passed. Cannery Row is a particularly tragic development filled with cute shops and restaurants to meet the demand for Steinbeck memorabilia and shore dinners.

In fact, Steinbeck alluded to the changes that had already swept through this place when he visited on his “Travels with Charley” trip in 1960. By that time, Steinbeck had lived in New York for over a decade. He remarked “The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me.” He says sadly but thoughtfully “Old crimes and old triumphs were brought out and dusted. And suddenly my attention wandered, and looking at my ancient friend, I saw that his wandered also. And it was true …I was the ghost. Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.” He knew that he must accept this altered version of the town and valley so dear, and yet now so different. This experience was profoundly bittersweet, filled with the sadness embedded in the knowledge that these spots so central to his own personal history no longer existed or were so altered as to be unrecognizable. These places and most of the people who had made them dance with life no longer existed. In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck sits atop Mt. Toro surveying the whole Monterey Peninsula, a place that he had visited often in his early years, and he sees not just the place but the lost scenes of his own life spread out like a panoramic dream in front of him. He observes (to Charley, his beloved poodle) "I printed it (this scene) once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love." Thus, he was ready to move on to what had truth and purpose for the life he must continue to live with engagement and wonder. For his body of work, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. His knowledge of the human animal and his celebration of the human spirit permeate the characters and quandaries of his fiction. Steinbeck was a regular guy who shunned the spotlight as he embraced the pen and its possibilities. I think of him as a man who used words to enlighten, himself and others. Thus, its fitting to end with a favorite JS quip: "No one wants advice, only corroboration." - a wise man indeed.

From Tao House to Tor House: Long Days Journey Into Light

CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, CA- He built his house by the sea with his own hands. He found the spot on the sparsely settled, ruggedly beautiful California coast just south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, and he knew it was the place. He came with his love, his wife, his muse, Una Call Kuster to this place above the rocks and the erratic undulation of waves, and together they built Tor House, their haven and home for the rest of their lives. He said “we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place.” (Powell, 24) He studied with a stonemason learning the art of making “stone love stone,” and set about his work. He had been using words in the building of poems since he was a child, and Robinson Jeffers was 26 when he came north to create his home and construct his artistic vision on this "perfect" spot with its straight eye view of craggy Point Lobos and the unending ocean beyond. His complementary identities as a worker in stone and a craftsman of words formed the basis for his life and his art. This duality receives a simple but splendid treatment in his poem "To the Stone-Cutter"

To the Stone-Cutters

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart;
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.


The Jeffers had come to Carmel in the wake of their grief over their first baby, Maeve, whom they had lost at birth. Jeffers purchased his remote property, two miles south of the village on a treeless headland. This bold adventure, on the heels of sadness, indeed was the new beginning, and their twins, Donnan and Garth, were born during their first years on the north coast. They were a close and devoted family, much as Jeffers had experienced with his parents growing up in Pennsylvania and California. Tor House, rose up with the careful and tenacious work of “Robin,” as Jeffers was known to his family, and eventually the boys helped out as they grew. Una saw his work in stone as a real kinship which awakened “strengths in himself unknown before” much like a conversion experience. In 1920, Jeffers began to build Hawk Tower, which was for Una. It perched solidly on the other side of the garden looking out into the bay. It had four floors and included a dungeon and a secret staircase. They would often share their last glass of wine together at the end of the day, with the boys climbing up and around the stones, as they gazed from the top out to the ocean and the natural world that surrounded them on every side.

Visiting this place was a real inspiration for me. The town of Carmel, which has become a toney playground for the monetarily gifted, has completely swallowed all of the land around Tor House. Only the original lot with the house, garden and tower remain, and, yes, alas- the view . It is small and personal in scale and yet gigantic in impact and implication. There is power in this place as it contains the mystical energy of the poet unleashed. In the details of family, and celtic folklore, and in the treasures from the Orient and the “Isles,” the sense of something beautifully loved and felt and then expressed comes through with a redolence worthy of the finest reverie.
The front room in Tor House is the guest bedroom which has the best view of the sea. Jeffers wrote a poem to this room or more specifically to the bed which gives it its name.
The Bed By the Window

I chose the bed down-stairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed
When we built the house; it is ready waiting,
Unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth, who hardly suspects
Its latter purpose. I often regard it,
With neither dislike nor desire: rather with both, so equaled
That they kill each other and a crystalline interest
Remains alone. We are safe to finish what we have to finish;
And then it will sound rather like music
When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock and sky
Thumps with his staff, and calls thrice: “Come, Jeffers.”

Una Jeffers died in Robin’s arms in this bed in 1950. Twelve years later, with his family nearby, Robin heard the “thump of the daemon’s staff” and was gone from his home of stone. His ashes, their ashes were sprinkled in the garden amongst the rocks and flowers between Hawk Tower and Tor House. A fitting epitaph for these two and an embodiment of the place which they created is provided by the final lines of Jeffers’ poem “Credo”

“The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.”

Room at the Top: Eugene O'Neill's Tao House

DANVILLE, CA - Tao House was Eugene O’Neill’s only real home, and he lived in it for only six years. He remarked that it was the only place that he ever felt at home other than at sea. During this time, he wrote his final six plays, some of his best. Tao House is the only National Historic Site devoted to an American playwright.
Always a wanderer, Eugene O’Neill was a brilliant author of plays who revolutionized American drama. He won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature, all but one of the Pulitzers came before his time at Tao House. Yet, his personal life was unconventional and often filled with dysfunction and alienation. Born in a Broadway hotel room to a popular actor and his adoring wife, O’Neill had a father who was a hunk and a stage idol in his own right. Eugene’s mother, Ella, became a morphine addict while recovering from the difficult birth of Eugene. The family moved from hotel to hotel, so there was no real home, and his older brother Jamie provided the most influence in his early life and much of it wasn’t positive. O’Neill always felt a severe lack of communication from his parents. After several schools, day and boarding, O’Neill was asked to leave Princeton before the end of his first year. His education was of a different sort when he was said to pursue the three things that were of most interest to him: books, booze, and babes. He married three times, the first time secretly, and had three children. He did not meet his first son, Eugene Jr. until he was 12 years old. His son Shane, like his mother, was troubled and became a heroin addict. Both of his sons committed suicide. He disowned his daughter Oona after she married Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and he was 54. Oona had already had a romantic attachment with J.D. Salinger before she met Chaplin after a visit to Tao House. Her father never spoke to her again. Never having a real home, but instead living in other people’s houses and hotels because he was always starting the production of another play, he decided with his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, that they should buy a ranch and build a secluded sanctuary where he could avoid the heightened limelight that surrounded him after winning the Nobel Prize in 1936.
Choosing California for its climate and the East Bay for its proximity to the ocean, this pair found an old ranch on the east slopes of a mountain overlooking majestic Mt. Diablo near the town of Danville. They designed and built the house which they named Tao House because of O’Neill’s love of Asian art and ideas. Here O’Neill lived a peaceful life where he could think and write uninterrupted if he chose. He wrote, swam, gardened and, of course, spent time with his beloved dog, Blemie, whose grave is grandly marked on the ranch. Declining health, especially the degenerative palsy which ultimately made it impossible for him to hold a pen, and the depression he felt about the Second World War made O’Neill increasingly cynical and discouraged, and by 1943, he had written his last play. They left the house when they could no longer find staff because neither of the O’Neills could drive and their isolation made it impossible for them to deal with Eugene’s physical degeneration by themselves.

In order to visit Tao House, which is a National Historic Site, you must make a reservation and take a special bus up the side of the mountain to the ranch. The road is winding and the destination is still quiet and above the fray even with the increased development in this San Francisco/Oakland suburb. The house is simple and presents elements of Taoism and feng shui. All but one of the ceilings are deep blue, the mirrors which fill several alcoves are colored shades of blue or green rather than being silver in order to subdue the bright reflective effect in each room. While the view from the front of the house is spectacular, heavy curtains and blinds were installed because of Carlotta’s sensitivity to light. O’Neill’s love of the sea is manifested everywhere. During his brief interlude in this haven from his family failures and the hellish developments leading to WW II, O’Neill wrote six plays including three of his greatest: The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misgotten, and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Fearing the effects on his family since it was starkly autobiographical, O’Neill stipulated that Long Days Journey Into Night not be published or produced for 25 years after his death. Carlotta instead waited just three years. The play is O’Neill’s crowning achievement, and he presented the play to Carlotta on their twelfth wedding anniversary in 1941, with a dedication that read:
For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest: "I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play--write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.
These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light--into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!
Gene
Tao House
July 22, 1941.

It is fitting that this play and this place serve as enduring reminders of the triumph of the artist and of love in the face of despair, personal disaster, heartbreak, and tragedy. The solitude and simple elegance of the place holds this promise for all of us.

From Sea to Shining Sea: Sailing in Place

The sun sets across the dunes. The beach is nearly deserted, but the curve of Monterey Bay reveals city lights beginning to twinkle in the distance. This is Marina Dunes,California and my view out into the white caps accompanied by the strange music of screeching gulls begs me to look back at the western half of the continent that I have just slipped across like a sea passage.

When I left Chadron in far western Nebraska, the air was cold and the snow was falling. By the time I got fifty miles into Wyoming, the horizon had grown demonstrably, and the temperature began to rise. Following the railroad line, I could see that towns grew because of the train and were now dying because the train wasn’t stopping in so many places anymore. Larger settlements had shrunk, smaller settlements had disappeared. In every direction, there were vast high plains with cattle and the infrequent but distinctly marked entrances to ranches. The town of Lusk seemed prosperous and healthy with its own Carnegie Library and lots of bustle. As I headed southwest, the temperature rose and as I slowly veered west, the mountains emerged in the distance. River valleys were green and there were wild turkeys, antelope and deer visible in the landscape. The sky was getting sunny, and the mountain pass was narrow and winding although not particularly high at 5200 ft. The rest of Wyoming was scrubby desert with lots of sagebrush and infrequent towns. The entrance into Utah was spectacular with red outcroppings and a huge descent into the Salt Lake Valley. Salt Lake City was clean and very orderly, and as I made my way west skirting the south shores of the Great Salt Lake, there were several salt processing facilities with the Morton Salt Girl trademark beaming forth boldly. As I passed from West Wendover, Utah to Wendover, Nevada, the contrast was striking. West Wendover was sedate and rather dour with its churches and quiet cafes, while Wendover was bodaciously brilliant with its strip of enticements for gambling, girls, and feasts of all sorts- a jolly juxtaposition of disparate approaches to ecstatic experience.

Nevada was amazing. Very dry and vast with so many mountains in every direction, it was a wonderland, other-worldly, but comforting in its quiet and unhindered horizons. Towns now seemed to wear their casinos like gas stations or fast food outlets, just part of the mix. Elko, Winnemucca, Lovelock- all had somehow integrated the “sin” industry into the larger fabric of the greater community life. Each town had its distinctions, Winnemucca its Western Heritage Museum, Basque flavor, and a possible connection to Butch Cassidy; Lovelock, seat of Humboldt Co., had one of only two round courthouses in the U.S. Through extensive irrigation, this is the alfalfa seed capital of the U. S., and the county is proud of its locally developed burrowing bees that pollinate the alfalfa crop. These towns, surrounded by miles and miles of open country, have, out of necessity, developed distinct personalities as places as they have struggled with the beautiful but often inhospitable environment of the Great Basin.

Climbing the mountains by Reno, Nevada means that California is over the ridge. Entering the Golden State on the old Truckee Trail is like a luge ride from 7000 ft to sea level when you finally approach the Pacific coast where again, traffic snarls, Targets and Wal-Marts decorate exit after exit, and theme-based sub-divisions crowd together, mile after mile- hopeful enclaves in service to the good life and the American Dream and then, of course, there’s the sea.

Way back in Nebraska, Mari Sandoz had lived her young years in a sea of grass. “About a quarter of Nebraska, 19,600 square miles, is covered by the Sand Hills, so called because the hills are entirely made of sand. The Sand Hills are Pleistocene sand dunes derived from glacial outwash from the Rockies, and now (mostly) stabilized by vegetation. (Dutch, “Nebraska Sand Hills.” P.1)

This vast unsettled area attracted Mari’s Swiss father. His lack of luck in love meant that by the time Mari was born, he was in his mid-forties with a permanent physical injury, married to his fourth wife, with irrepressible optimism about the potential for this vast untamed area and little interest in doing the everyday work of the farm. He hated fiction, saw it as the fodder of the lower class, and Mari had to hide her books in her straw mattress. Yet, Mari, for all of her early years, was an author in the making. She wrote 85 short stories, all of them rejected and when she had lost hope that any of her books would ever be published, she burned her stories and went back to the Sand Hills. It was only then that she learned that her book about her father, Old Jules, had been accepted for publication. In this book, which through the advice given in her many rejection letters, had been revised multiple times, she tried to capture both the brutality and beauty of her father and the place that she called home. She said of her father that “here was a character who embodied not only his own strengths and weaknesses but those of all humanity- that his struggles were universal struggles and his defeats at the hands of his environment and his own insufficiencies were those of mankind; his tenacious clinging to his dream the symbol of man’s undying hope that over the next hill he will find the green pastures of his desire. Further, I looked about me in life and in history and literature and I saw there were two kinds of men, the defeated and the undefeated, and that surely the last was the first.” (Sandoz, Hostiles and Friendlies, (p. xviii)

In writing her own story about her father and growing up, Sandoz captured the very essence of early Nebraska. Much like Cather in her admiration/criticism of the Nebraska trailblazers like her father, Sandoz once told a friend: “I consider Old Jules not so much a pioneer as a frontiersman. And he was that. He had the skill, the violence and the courage to cope with the unknown elements of a wild country; but not the patience for the dull road of the pioneer.” That Mari Sandoz understood and shared not just this personal revelation but a lifetime of stories and research that will forever illuminate the lives of the disparate people who settled, suffered, and grew in this distinctive place is certainly a fine and noble achievement. Her future is assured by the opening of the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center at Chadron State College, a learning center for the study of Nebraska and High Plains culture, literature, and history. As a meticulous researcher and a lover of good stories especially of the people from the Sand Hills, Mari Sandoz would be pleased.

Deep in the desolate and undulating hills south of Gordon, Nebraska on the last homestead of Jules Ami Sandoz and Mary Elizabeth Fehr, is the grave of Mari Sandoz. While she spent her last twenty years living in New York and writing the rest of her twenty two works on Nebraska life, when all was said and done, she returned to her first and now her final home in the Sand Hills. On a marble bench outside the Sandoz High Plains Center is the following inscription:

“Our place is our origin, starting point, and center to which we return when adrift.
Place is our bank of daffodils.
(Andrew Elkins, Teacher and Scholaar, Chadron State College, 1981-2000.)