Where the Oaks Roam

DESTINATION: Central Coast Loop

TOWN: Paso Robles

ELEVATION: 735 feet

POPULATION: 27,477

MEDIAN AGE: 33

CLOSEST HIGH WAY: 101 Freeway

NEAREST AIRPORT: San Luis Obispo

TEMPERATURE SWING: 33° (winter low) to 94° (summer high)

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In Paso Robles, cattle ranches that go back to the 1800s border vineyards that were planted five minutes ago. The same downtown deli where cowboys eat tri-tip has a better wine selection than many L.A. restaurants. And the tasting rooms at the wineries are larger--and better decorated--than most of the locals’ houses.

I love the variety, although at times the pace of change is bewildering. When I first came here as a child, the family ranch in nearby Templeton was populated by cattle, deer, oak trees and the neighbor’s gypsy goats (a sore subject for years). For a brief time, we grew almond trees, and one Easter our family received a giant bar of almond-studded chocolate from the growers association. A rancher neighbor, sensing a shift in the economic tectonics, talked about putting in a few vines.

I remember, fondly, wine-tasting in the pre-boom ‘80s, when a few wineries huddled like a pioneer town not far off the 101. Their tasting rooms were humble, almost apologetic. Or eccentric: For the Bonny Doon tasting room--now closed, a victim of its own success--Randall Grahm wrote tasting notes that were gems of japery, so cleverly composed that I taped them next to my computer.

I hold fast to these memories because they are being obliterated by the flat-screen TV, upholstered armchairs, marble fireplace and sexy glassware inside a tasting room on Highway 46, Paso Robles’ main wine drag. The TV is off, which sets me to wondering on this fall day what would be playing if it were not. CNN? Too much of a buzz kill. Football? Has potential. What Viognier goes with Green Bay?

To my sensitive eyes, the 46 is looking more and more like Beverly Hills. I head over to Vineyard Drive and it’s the old world, still lined with oaks and laurels, the occasional winery. Time to catch your breath, remember that a $50 bottle of wine brings only fleeting happiness.

I also find some inspiration in the way old ag is striving to become new ag here. At Paso Robles’ Windrose Farm, you can stay in a rented RV on the property and learn to grow the sort of organic tomatoes and apples sold at Whole Foods and farmer’s markets. Just off 46 on Vineyard Drive is Willow Creek Olive Ranch, a vigorous olive oil operation with public tastings, apparently bent on defying the mercurial history of the olive industry in California.

But every time I visit it looks as if another big spread has been carved into ranchettes too small to sustain a cow. I am conflicted here, because I know many Angelenos who have bought pieces of the Paso Robles dream. But I compare this development to my own home: When did the clutter take over?

Just north of Paso Robles, near Bradley, is the cutoff to Ft. Hunter Liggett, where I have an epiphany.

I will probably be buried alive in a field of California poppies for saying this, but I think we need a co-state tree. Know that this is said in full recognition of the redwood’s glorious hugeness. That tree is big. But like us, the oak has a million faces. On the coast, the trees creep along the ground like primordial creatures that have just crawled out of the ocean and are thinking of crawling back. As they make their evolutionary march inland, they rise up and up until, standing tall in the valleys, they explode like fireworks.

Maybe my Central Coast childhood is to blame, that I’m hopelessly imprinted like one of Konrad Lorenz’s geese. I’ve been to the great redwood groves of the north and never felt the rush I get at the sight of Quercus agrifolia floating on the Santa Ynez Valley floor, standing sunstruck on a Templeton hillside or dripping fog on the Cambria coast.

I am at Hunter Liggett because of my friend Susan. Years before, on a trip to Monterey, I took her advice to cut over from the 101 to Highway 1 on a country road that just happened to run through a military base. There was an oak savannah there I would never forget, she predicted, and I haven’t.

Much of this Army installation in the San Antonio Valley was once the ranch of William Randolph Hearst. Near Bradley and also at King City, cars can exit the 101 and use the Jolon and Nacimiento Fergusson roads to pass through the base to the ocean. The check-in at the guard post is painless, as if 9/11 never happened. I ask about travel time and am told two hours. Weaving west, I pass the occasional military building and paraphernalia. They look surprisingly vulnerable, as if the high grass--ungrazed and untilled--could swallow them up.

John Steinbeck probably gazed on the many graybeards among the oaks. In his novel “To a God Unknown,” he’s writing about the San Antonio Valley, which he calls Nuestra Senora, “the long valley of Our Lady in central California.”

In the story are several passages about the groves. In one, homesteader Joseph Wayne rides into the valley, his horse “swishing with its hoofs through the brittle oak leaves.”

“As he rode, Joseph became timid and yet eager, as a young man is who slips out to a rendezvous with a wise and beautiful woman. He was half-drugged and overwhelmed by the forests of Our Lady. There was a curious femaleness about the interlacing boughs and twigs, about the long green cavern cut by the river through the trees and the brilliant underbrush. The endless greens halls and aisles and alcoves seemed to have meanings as obscure and promising as the symbols of an ancient religion.”

Early in the drive I stop at Mission San Antonio de Padua, founded in 1771 by Padre Serra and also once part of the Hearst ranch. Painted on the walls of the chancel is a perfectly rendered border of acorns and oak leaves. Like Lompoc’s La Purisima, Mission San Antonio has a haunting, trapped-in-amber quality. Hearst money helped protect it from deterioration. There are 46 families registered in the parish, the caretaker says. In the summer months, swarms of retreat-goers come to pray in peace.

There’s a surprise waiting as I exit Hunter Liggett. The road on which I gently swung up to the crest of the valley is about to snap me down. No mercy. No guardrails. I am not looking down, not looking down, not looking down. Focus on the ocean. Remember that I survived the Amalfi coast. Highway 1, exhale.

Look to the north and Big Sur and a sky like jade. Turn south and head for the land of otters and elephant seals. Along the way pass coastline that looks nothing like the moonscapes of L.A. Here the ocean takes bites out of the land, leaving its fang marks in the cliffs.

Otter spotting is one of the joys of the Central Coast. Who can resist beating extinction? I spent high school geometry class reading “Ring of Bright Water,” the first of Gavin Maxwell’s seminal books about otters. It was the 1970s, and the southern sea otter was on the endangered list, saved from oblivion by a Central Coast colony that had survived the fur massacres. Now the floating clowns--confident and numerous after 30 years of strict protection--put on a show within yards of Moonstone Beach in Cambria.

Cambria is where the New Agers came to escape the city and stayed. You might have outgrown references to wizards and mystical emporiums, but they still have economic mojo in the arts and crafts shops that invoke them here. Tourists use Cambria as a base for day trips to Hearst Castle and Paso Robles’ wine country. As luck would have it, I went on many Girl Scout and school field trips to the castle. By my fourth, for an art history class that only confirmed Hearst’s dubious connoisseurship, I had seen enough.

On this last trip to Cambria, I drive Santa Rosa Creek Road, which ambles east out of town and, many curves later, connects with Highway 46 (not a road for the carsick, a local tells me). The incentive is olallieberry pie at Linn’s Farmstore. The scenery is enchanting. Old oaks keep company with old farmhouses in slumbering fields. This is what the Central Coast still offers: solitary drives where you can leave the clutter behind.

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Trip Tips

Check In

There are lots of sea otters at the Sea Otter Inn. This nicer-than-average motel is one of several owned by Moonstone Properties along Moonstone Beach Drive in Cambria. It also has lots of harbor seals, easily spied at a vista point steps from the inn. The springy wooden boardwalk is easy on the knees should you be out for a seaside walk or run. (800) 965-8347 or (805) 927-5888.

Check Out

Real peacocks lurk at the peacock crossing on Vineyard Drive, which winds up a Santa Lucia mountainside to Tablas Creek Vineyard, just off Vineyard on Adelaida Road. The winery excels in the Rhone-style wines coming out of Paso Robles. The heritage of this winery is French (two of the owners are from the Rhone region) and the tasting room layout is smart; there are several “stations” instead of one bar. (805) 237-1231.

PHOTO OP

If Cecil B. DeMille had shot for National Geographic, he’d eventually have found his way to the beach at Piedras Blancas, along Highway 1 just north of San Simeon. There, between November and March, passers-by can get a ringside seat as thousands of creatures the size of Ford Explorers fight, bellow, molt and carry on the elaborate high drama of elephant seal courtship and procreation. To find out more, visit www.elephantseal.org.

ROADSIDE SPECTACLE

You have to be selective when approaching the produce explosion at the Avila Valley Barn in San Luis Obispo. A lot of the fruits and vegetables were mass-grown in places like Fresno, but the stand does have local goods, such as berries, grapes, beans, onions and squash in the fall, and they are worth hunting for. The strudels, pies and other sweets baked locally are also sensational. And the kids will love the petting zoo. www.avilavalleybarn.com.