By the middle of the nineteenth century the coastal region of Central California was drawing people to its seemingly endless stretches of ragged shoreline framed by the Santa Lucia Range and the open sky reaching to the Pacific horizon. Spreading to the east of these mountains were the rolling farms and rangelands which still pre-dominate for roughly seventy miles, to the flat, parched, San Joaquin Valley.
“Progress”, however, is colonizing this world, especially inland. Upscale homes and vacation homes, big-box stores, new malls and establishments cater to the influx of a more affluent and transitory populace. Most of the home-grown businesses have been crowded out; roads are being added, improved and widened, Escalades, Range Rovers, Hummers, and other luxury SUVs are more common than pickup trucks. But for today, at least, much of the region’s hardy, earth-bound authenticity persists.
The attractions of the coast, the mountains and interior remain, but so do the myth and reality of the old American West which still feels close at hand. It is no accident that television commercials frequently feature new cars and trucks traversing those same coastal and interior roads on unfenced, curb-free byways that meander along, rather than cut through, the natural landscape. To this day, there seem to be few people who don’t in some way harbor a weakness for the American West, real or imagined. Wells Fargo Bank figured that out long ago. So did Marlboro cigarettes—still the most popular American brand throughout the world.
For those unfamiliar with the countryside east of the Santa Lucias and wanting to have an accurate image, the John Travolta film Phenomenon was shot there and captures a true, if somewhat romanticized, image and sense of the land.
Highway 1—also known as State Route 1—was built along the coast in stages through the 1930’s and enabled quicker, easier access to the area. When possible, the road followed close on the shore, but as one travelled north toward Big Sur and Monterey, the mountains crowded the shores, and the highway had to be carved into the mountain face or rely on engineering marvels such as the Bixby Creek Bridge.
Bixby Creek Bridge—one of the most dramatic, elegant, and recognizable bridges in the world—was completed in 1932 and considered to be so crucial both economically and strategically that locals were conscripted to guard it with rifles from the banks of the gorge during the Second World War. An image of this bridge is used on the cover of Losing Ground, and the bridge is referred to several times in the novel.
Newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst succumbed utterly to the unspoiled beauties and seclusion of the region. Rather than build a mansion in an established enclave for the rich and powerful in the east, he chose to add to the land his father had purchased in 1865. That land was near the present site of Hearst Castle, which looks down on San Simeon and the Pacific Ocean from the mountain top. Ultimately, about 250,000 acres were amassed, and the castle he built over many years is now a famous tourist attraction and the only State Park that makes a profit. People are staggered by its opulence, not to mention the views in every direction. Entire portions of churches and mansions, furnishings and art from all the ages and parts of the globe, were disassembled, shipped, and masterfully combined by architect Julia Morgan. The Irishman George Bernard Shaw—a socialist and prolific, vaunted author, was said to have commented that Hearst’s Castle was “. . . what heaven would be like if God had the money.”
On the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, the controversial and revered author Henry Miller chose to live on Partington Ridge, south of Big Sur and high atop the same Santa Lucia mountains that hold Hearst Castle to the south. Miller and Hearst were two men who could not have been more different, but who both drew strength, inspiration and comfort from this realm. The Henry Miller Memorial Library is tucked into the hills just off the highway south of Big Sur.
The region also harbors many tensions: ranchers and farmers vs. land developers and vintners; middle, lower, and affluent classes vs. each other; Native and Latin American predecessors vs. others who came later, and many other frictions. Stories are about conflict, and there are countless stories to be found in the area; Losing Ground is fiction, but traffics in many of these contentious issues. In Germany—primarily Berlin—darker histories emerge which both protagonists must contend with, but Central California remains at the heart of this drama.
Losing Ground focuses on Anna Greene—a local landscaper and environmentalist—and Cal West—a local heir to a vast ranch and fortune derived from his late father’s land development. Despite the deep and personal issues that pull them apart—and push them together—their lives are inseparable from their environs and their devotion to the land and its inhabitants—human and otherwise.
But the land plays its own role in the story, suffering human follies with patient dignity, knowing its wounds will heal after its tenants are gone.