OCR Text |
Show RIVER down the Columbia. We began our last long, slow straggle to the coast and down to Santa Cruz. Oh, the damn bicycle disaster! The trip broke something between Rosie and me that we never managed to patch up. Rosie had come to distrust my nearly lethal combination of naivete and craziness. Almost immediately upon our return to Santa Cruz, we took separate lodgings. My bicycle was soon stolen, but I didn't give a damn. I didn't get on a bicycle again for almost twenty years. Later, on the Mississippi, I'd lie in my rowboat in a stiff wind, cold and lonely and find deep consolation in the fact that I was in a boat and not on a bicycle. * * * * * * * * * * * When we got back to California, I was burnt. All I wanted to do was build a shack up in the hills and retire to it and write. I remembered a place Stockdale had shown me a few years before, the old hermif s shack on Lonestar Peak in Bonny Doon, about ten miles north of Santa Cruz. Lonestar Peak is a white sandstone outcropping jutting up two hundred sudden feet from a flat, open meadow. It is covered with odd rocks and manzanita, chinquapin, and a very rare breed of cypress. Wind, rain, and time had sculpted the mountain's soft sandstone into weird shapes that resembled dinosaurs, mushrooms, and the landscape of the moon. Lonestar looked so wildly western that film companies had made silent movies at the peak. Tom Mix had carved his name on the top of the mountain. From the ridgetop the view encompassed two hundred degrees of the Pacific Ocean and the vineyards and orchards of the Bonny Doon district. Across the bay the town of Monterey decorated the Big Sur Peninsula like a string of pearls: sometimes in the morning the mountains floated above the bay as distant and -119- |