Building Home "Where do you think of as your home?" My father asks me. We are sitting on a blanket on 'Our Land', staring out over the ocean.
I know instantly what he means, and it is not quite as unusual or rhetorical a question as it might seem. I have not seen my father for the last 10 years, and for the last 12 years, I have lived in England--about 9,000 miles from this ocean, this place, the place where I grew up. And because of that, it is a difficult question to answer, but it's also one I've thought about and asked myself many times.
"Our Land' is a piece of wilderness on the edge of the Santa Lucia mountains, just north of Big Sur on the California coast. It is a place where sea and land and sky meet with a drama that has inspired generations of artists and poets. There is a famous photograph of Hunter S. Thompson, standing debauched and glamorous, his motorcycle to one side, staring at this land. It is the "wild surmise" that Cortez's men meet with in the Keats poem. The beginning of the Pacific. The edge of the world. It has a mystique and beauty that is unavoidable. It had a life even before my parents gave it theirs.
My parents bought this land nearly 40 years ago now, at a time when you could still buy property on this coast. They bought it from friends, hoping to build a house. A place they could live their lives. At first it was where they would raise their family, then where they would live when their children went away to school, and finally where they would retire. Plans for the house metamorphosed over the years. At first there was no money, then there was no time, and finally, when most of the coastline was bought up by the government and nearly all new 'development' halted or strictly controlled, there just seemed to be no way. Still my parents hung on to it, in spite of the pressures to sell-up or abandon their dream for it.
'Our Land' was a fixture of my childhood. When I was 5, my mother and father planted pine and cypress seedlings--to help control erosion and act as a windbreak supposedly--but in lovingly looking after those seedlings, I think they at least felt they were starting to 'build' something, if not the house they wanted. Year after year, sometimes every weekend, sometimes every other, we would troop up, climb the steep ravine to the grassy plateau with its border of tiny trees, have a picnic and water the seedlings. Sometimes my sister and I went willingly, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes indifferently, but we always went. Sometimes we had to replace a tree or move one after winter storms or herds of wild deer took their toll.
During these years, my parents would continue to submit house designs to the government's Coastal Commission for planning permission. They were unsuccessful in the main, although they had the occasional 'triumph'--being allowed to sink a well when water was discovered underground, a dirt 'driveway' in exchange for allowing highway workers on to the land to repair one of the frequent landslides that take the road out during heavy rains. But permission to build their house eluded them.
In the late 80's, when my sister and I had long since moved away from home and were living our own lives, I got a letter from my mother to say that they had finally been given permission to build 'in principle'--provided they could design a house that could not be seen from the highway. Years of applications had allowed them to escape the Coastal Commission's ban on a technicality. And ironically, it was the same trees that they had looked after all those years that would now look after them. The pines and cypress had grown over forty feet high, and would screen their house from the road.
And today I'm here again, sitting on a blanket, having a picnic. I've done this hundreds of times before. Today though, instead of sitting on scrub & wild grass, I'm sitting in the beginnings of a forest. Trees rustle overhead. Pine needles carpet the ground. There are other changes. A portaloo. A concrete slab for a generator. And a few feet away, crisp and raw like newborn ruins, the foundations of my parents' house.
Inspite of being in their 60's, my parents run around like eager children, showing me everything, asking me to dream with them. My father makes sweeping gestures in the air, showing me where walls and windows will be. My mother examines trees and asks me which I think she might have to replant. They both gather things, a bit of flowering grass, wild sage, cypress and pine cones. Things I can take with me when I go back to England.
When the poet Robinson Jeffers first saw the coast near Carmel, he wrote that he had found his 'inevitable place'--the place where he belonged. The place he thought of as home. But I'm not sure yet how to answer my father's question. There are some things in England and some things in California that make them seem like home. Maybe I have not yet found my 'inevitable place'. Or maybe, like some animals do, I am one of those creatures that takes home with them. But if I don't always know where home is, I at least know what home is. Because sitting here, on this blanket, with my parents, on our land, I can feel it.
Montageby Mark Love
©Stephanie Thomson, 1999