Charting Cheerful Pilgrim’s Progress Up the Coast

Despite the presence of the California Men’s Colony, a walled prison where 6,000 men languish in low cream-colored cellblocks under sinister guard towers, the Chorro valley between San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay might have been the setting for Shangri-La.

In fact, the original “Lost Horizon” was filmed in the Ojai valley, which is even more fruitful and benign in its ring of protective mountains, but the Chorro valley links an amiable small city with a picturesque harbor, and it affords the traveler a pleasant passage indeed.

Institutionalized though it is by the prison, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the Sheriff’s Operational Center, Cuesta College and Camp San Luis, the home of the California National Guard, it still seems amiable, bucolic and pristine.

Its most dramatic features, surely, are the steep, sudden, pyramidal mountains that arise periodically, in single file, from the valley floor. They are the Seven Sisters, thrown up from the Earth in angry volcanic eruptions eons ago.

Morro Bay’s charm comes in part from the fact that it is still a working harbor. Restaurants and souvenir shops parallel its waterfront, but the wharves themselves are clogged with scabrous fishing boats. Sun-darkened men with tattooed arms work at rusty winches and thick hemp lines, oblivious of the tourists.

Still dominating the town, however, are the three towering slender smokestacks of the blocky concrete Pacific Gas & Electric power plant, just inland from the famous Morro Rock, the last of the Seven Sisters, that rises from the bay like half a loaf of French bread. By today’s environmental standards, the power plant is an abomination, a fatal blight on a setting of rare natural beauty; when it was built in 1960, though, it showered prosperity on the village, enriched the school district, and was greeted by the citizens with joy and thanksgiving.

In previous visits, I had always despised the power plant and its towering chimneys; this time, however, it seemed to have become a part of the natural landscape, a feature of Morro Bay’s identity. I was sure it would be a shock to return some day and find it missing. (God forgive me.)

We decided to drive on up to San Simeon, not to visit the Hearst Castle, but to see it from the highway. We drove through Cayucas and Cambria Pines. I remembered a radio campaign promoting Cambria Pines in the 1930s. In a sonorous voice worthy of the Songs of Solomon, an announcer daily described this paradise “where the pines meet the sea.”

He was not exaggerating. We drove down on the coastal side of the road to find hundreds of cozy homes and mansions among the pines and clinging to the cliffs above the ocean. We hardly saw a person or a moving car. I wondered if everyone was inside watching television.

Up the road a few miles we came to a sign that said “Harmony: Pop. 18.” We turned off. We had to see a town with a population of only 18. I wondered how they kept the population stable, so they didn’t have to keep changing the sign.

Harmony was one block long, but it was livelier than Cambria Pines. It had gone slightly artsy. There were half a dozen cars and pickups, a few ramshackle houses, a cafe, a pottery store, a creamery and a post office. A man and a boy were working outdoors on a piece of machinery. There was no compelling reason to stay. We made a U-turn and drove back to the highway.

The Hearst Castle stands on a peak in the Santa Lucia Mountains high above San Simeon harbor. A pier runs out into the cove, and it was this pier, I believe, that received all the European stones and treasures that now reside in the castle.

Having visited it before, we did not drive up to the castle, but one can sense its extravagance by looking up from the gate. The twin Renaissance towers of the Casa Grande gleam in the sunlight. The castle soars and bulges in flames behind them.

William Randolph Hearst had plundered Europe’s castles and ruins to build his pleasure-dome. He had even purchased Richelieu’s bed--an egregious vanity. George Bernard Shaw, one of its many celebrated visitors, had observed of San Simeon: “This is the way God would have done it if he had had the money.”