The Caveman of Laguna Beach
One never knows quite what to expect when going to meet someone who lives in a cave in a rock.
I did have some apprehensions about meeting John Parlette, though. All I knew about him, other than that he lived in a rock, was that he is a Laguna Canyon artist, and that seemed a fearsome combination. I expected to be greeted by some egocentric beret-head who most likely had developed a tedious manifesto linking his cave, the arts and man’s essential isolation, and who probably only lived in a hole to keep his “eccentric” credentials intact.
Much as I hate to let facts cloud my perceptions, that’s not quite Parlette, and even if it were, with him standing 6-foot-4 and weighing a muscular 265 pounds, I wouldn’t be the one to tell him.
The 54-year-old former lifeguard and lifetime surfer’s philosophy of art is simply that he makes what he likes, which happens to be tiki gods carved in pumice stone and sculptures of animals and cresting waves. Similarly, he’s lived in a rock for 26 years because he likes it there.
Actually, the only part of his home that might be called a cave is the rock overhang under which his Spartan foam mattress bed resides. That overhang forms one wall of his comically small but functional home, the other three walls being made of scavenged wood and glass. The whole thing--perhaps 50 square feet--sits on a shelf near the top of a large, cliff-like sandstone rock that rests just off Laguna Canyon’s narrow, winding Castle Rock Road.
His floor is sloping bare rock, into which he has carved a couple of small channels to direct the rainwater. For running water, he has a hose that runs to a spigot above a beaten zinc bucket. He also has run electricity in, powering a small fridge, lights, a hot plate and TV. You don’t want to know about his toilet provisions.
Most of the wall space is given over to windows, with a sweeping view of the canyon. Much of the remaining surface area is covered with photos of friends and postcards of unclad Polynesian women. One of the corner uprights was formerly a volleyball net post at Laguna’s Main Beach. Some of the roof beams have Japanese writing on them.
“That’s dunnage from Japanese freighters, what they used to pack their cargo in,” Parlette explained. “In the late ‘60s while studying industrial arts at San Diego State, after school I’d walk the beaches down there and would find this stuff washed up. Then the plywood used in here was from the form lumber used in making South Coast Hospital that they let me have.”
Aside from the beers he gave to some friends to help build the fireplace, his sole expense in constructing the house was $50 for roofing shingles. Though the house has withstood the elements and earthquakes for a quarter-century, it’s not necessarily a building inspector’s dream, not that one has ever seen it.
“When I first built here, it was county territory and they didn’t give anybody any crap. That was kind of in the hippie years, and people were doing their own thing. Plus, there was a big dog living up here, and he didn’t let people get out of their cars too much. So you’d see these officials’ white cars drive up, and then just drive away,” Parlette said.
His eagle’s nest of a home is reached by coming over the top of the rock or climbing a rock path from below. Assayed without a degree of caution, either route could afford visitors a 30-foot plunge to the base of the rock.
It’s down there that Parlette first began living in a cave, in a wide, shallow cutout at the rock’s base. When Parlette and his lifeguard buddies began having lobster boils there in the late ‘50s, the cave roof was already deeply smoked-stained by its previous Native American inhabitants.
Parlette rented a cabin near the rock, but during the summers another lifeguard and his wife wanted the cabin, “so I’d move out and just throw my sleeping bag in the cave. I’d wake up in the mornings and there’d a be a little trail of ants going across my hand,” he said.
He eventually found the digs too claustrophobic, noticed the comfortable depression in the rock shelf above, and moved up a few floors, building his present home there in 1968. The property was owned by a lifeguard friend’s mother, who said he could stay there as long as he liked. Parlette eventually bought the property.
He’s built a decidedly more typical house on the lot next to the rock but has never lived in it. Instead he leases it out to cover the mortgage on the property, permitting him to lead what he jokingly refers to as his “bon vivant lifestyle.”
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Parlette was born in Albany, N.Y. His family moved to South Laguna Beach when he was a child, and he immediately took to the rustic beach life.
“There was a little village market down there and not much else. We didn’t have much guidance, so consequently my brother and I would just take off into the hills and got to know where the snakes, Indian caves and rabbits were. The San Joaquin Hills were so beautiful, a complete little ecosystem with foxes, barn owls and badgers.
“And then there were the Hawaiians here. One was Pua Kealoha, a famous beachboy, a diver, a surfer, a 300-pound pure-blooded Hawaiian who swam with Duke Kahanamoku in the Olympics and got gold medals (in 1920 and 1924 in the 100-meter backstroke). When he’d play his ukulele at the beach, there might be 100 people gathered around to hear him, and no one would leave until he’d finished. He was a real hero to me, my No. 1 hero. He was hot.
“Pua was in a few movies. He’s hang out with a girl named Irish McCalla who played Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, on TV. They took me out to breakfast once, and I was pretty impressed, sitting there with Pua Kealoha and Sheena of the Jungle.”
To please his father, Parlette played football in high school. “I just did it because it was expected of me, like going to college later,” he said. “My dad was a big stud who had played pro football. My brother and I were more like nature boys. I couldn’t wait to get done with football so I could go hang out in the tide pools or go surfing. I’m not a team-oriented guy, which kind of works against you in society.”
He first started coming to the rock where he now resides in the late ‘50s with his lifeguard and surfing buddies. Sometimes they’d have a lobster boil in a manner they learned from Mexicans they’d met in the Baja, filling a 55-gallon drum with lobsters and water and setting it to boil over a burning car tire.
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Back then the lobster-to-human ratio was ideal. The county was still so sparsely populated that a car (possibly missing a tire) might only come down Laguna Canyon Road once every 10 minutes, instead of the constant torrent of them now. Meanwhile, in local waters Parlette could go diving on a single tank of oxygen and come up with enough lobsters (then selling at $1 a pound) to pay his $50 rent on the cabin.
Since 1960, he said, “I was surfing my brains loose, up until 1985,” when a herniated disc requiring three operations curtailed his aquatic activities for a time. He’s been doing his sculpting since the late ‘60s (earlier if one counts the tikis he carved for friends as a kid), but doesn’t pretend to make a living at it, though he still aims to. In the meantime he takes on carpentry and odd jobs to get by.
Most of his art celebrates the natural world, from dramatic horse heads to a bronze wave and surfer he’s crafted as a monument for his friend the famed comic surfer Hevs McClelland, who died in 1992. His tikis, which he’s sold for up to $2,000, haven’t earned him much respect form the local art community, but to him the grave sculptures are all about respect.
“The feeling I get when I see one is what islanders call tupuna , a respect for ancestors, a way of respect for how they did things, a respect for what’s been here before you. It says to me that somebody’s already been here and done it.”
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The rock he lives upon may be something of a weather-hewn sculpture itself, but it has it’s drawbacks. The stone heats up in the summer and stays hot at night, and its a conduit for cold in the winter.
Raccoons, mice and scorpions stop in for visits, but there haven’t been many girlfriends on the rock of late. Parlette has never married, and perhaps not many people living in caves do.
“I don’t think this house has been an influence on relationships, though,” he said. “I think it’s me that has been, because I’m always going my own direction and don’t want to take side trips to mini-malls and delis and all that. I just want to get out on the beach or in the hills and get some fresh air.
“I have a girlfriend here and there, nothing serious. I don’t really want to live with one. I’m just better being a hermit type of guy.”
One girlfriend did live with him for four years in the tiny space. “We were never more than four feet away from each other,” he said. He initially built the other house on the property with the intent of them moving into it, but he wound up balking at the idea of marriage. The woman is now married to his best friend.
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How has living on a rock alone shaped his thoughts?
“I think if you have what Zorba called ‘the whole catastrophe’--wife, kids and the whole Sheboygan--you don’t have time to contemplate things. Not that I have any great thoughts here. My one recurring thought is how much we’re screwing the planet up.
“I keep thinking about the tikis on Easter Island (Parlette’s next project is to carve a couple of fridge-sized ones of his own). They’ve been there some 3,000 or 4,000 years, and now in just a few years people have denuded the island of trees and everything. That’s what is happening to the whole Earth. We have to do something about all this breeding going on. Go ahead and have plenty of good sex, but you don’t have to produce another being every time, because we’re just flooding the place.
“The nature I’ve seen here really influenced my thinking. I’m not pro-development on anything. I like the weeds better. This canyon is such a tapestry of different colors. To me the most beautiful time here isn’t in the spring, but right before the rains and rebirth starts. The buckwheat turns a rust red, and the mustard when it gets old gets a silver color. It’s already starting to come back from the fire.”
He says he has no regrets about never opting into a more conventional lifestyle.
“If I should die today it would be with a big smile on my face, because of all the beautiful things I’ve seen. If I was making the corporate move to my little office in L.A. every day, I wouldn’t have been able to catch all those waves or watch the little opal eyes and eel grass and critters on the reefs, the leopard sharks, everything you see when the water’s clear. Those are the memories I have in my brain, all-star days.”