Living Life to the Fullest in the Coastal Slow Lane

Living in Southern California, we may feel that the entire Earth is being submerged under automobiles, mini-malls, apartment houses, slums, fast-food stands, palaces and people. The Sunday drive through the countryside is no more. We are being merged into a six-county metropolis, from Ventura to San Diego.

My wife and I have returned from a drive up the coast to Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo and San Simeon, and I am relieved to report that there are still uncrowded roads and freeways, small cities, open ranchlands, bare hills, and scintillating seascapes.

I had speaking dates in Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo on successive nights, with a day in between to look around. The trip was as refreshing and reassuring as an ocean cruise.

We started out when Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu was still closed by the landslide. I decided to avoid the Ventura Freeway by taking the Foothill and Simi freeways to the north of San Fernando Valley. Simi Valley, of course, is encrusted with commuter houses. At Moorpark, the freeway ends, but we enjoyed the road to Ventura through horse ranches and green truck farms. Beyond Ventura, the ocean comes suddenly into view. The day was clear and sunny, the ocean travel-ad blue. The Channel Islands were pale blue lumps on the horizon. Clouds of birds wheeled over the shore. The beaches sparkled. The surf foamed white against the rocks. As we neared Santa Barbara, the offshore drilling rigs looked like pirate ships sailing in to burn and plunder. I remembered the panic that gripped the villagers of Penzance when they spied the skull and crossbones off their headland.

We pulled off into Carpinteria for lunch at a Bakery Square, one of those places that advertise free desert if they don’t serve you in 10 minutes. We lost, but my wife had a piece of cream pie anyway.

Beyond Santa Barbara, we drove along the coast, then turned north through a world I had almost forgotten still existed. Brown hills, round and folded like dough prepared for the oven; groves and scatterings of oak trees; lines of towering old eucalyptus, their leaves green, red and silver; tidy ranch houses on hilltops; miles of fences; dry creeks and gnarled arroyos; brown cows standing alone or herded in the shade of solitary oaks; red or white barns, some falling apart, some restored and freshly painted.

Santa Maria came almost too quickly. It is a horizontal town with big schools, the all-American town whose modest homes were used in Samuel Goldwyn’s “The Best Years of Our Lives,” the classic 1946 film of soldiers returning from the war.

Santa Maria is still an all-American town, but like every other attractive California town it has growing pains, caused in part by the influx of retired persons from Los Angeles who sell their Los Angeles homes at astronomical prices, buy cheaper homes in pleasant towns, and live off the difference. One Santa Maria woman, who had moved there many years ago from Bakersfield, told me that wealthy and idle Angelenos were driving her and her friends off the golf course.

We had reservations for the night at the Santa Maria Inn, an elegant and charming hotel that was built in 1916 by a traveling salesman who was frustrated by the lack of decent hotels for men of his profession. From a typewritten history I learned that among its previous guests were Herbert Hoover, William Randolph Hearst, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Ignacy Padereweski, and Cecil B. DeMille, who filmed much of “The Ten Commandments” on the nearby sand dunes. It also accommodated Douglas Fairbanks during the filming of “The Thief of Baghdad,” and Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich during the filming of “Morocco,” the sand dunes also serving for that improbable last scene in which Dietrich takes off her high heels to follow her Legionnaire into the desert.

I spoke that evening at Allan Hancock College in the “Living Life to the Fullest” lecture series sponsored by the Santa Maria Hospice. There was an audience of 450, which suggested to me that there isn’t much to do at night in Santa Maria.

In the morning we ordered bacon and eggs and a Belgian waffle and orange juice and decaf coffee and had it served in our room. We were living life to the fullest.

It certainly beats camping out.