Hugo Schwyzer

I’m back in the office, busy working up my fall syllabi. (And for those of you who have seen my office, it’s just been cleaned, top to bottom. You won’t recognize it.)

My wife and I spent the weekend visiting my mom in what I consider to be my hometown, Carmel by-the-Sea. I was born in Santa Barbara, but following my parents’ divorce, my mother, brother and I moved to Carmel. It was 1973, and I had just turned six. A lot happens to a person between the ages of six and eighteen (the age at which I graduated from Carmel High) and so it’s that community that I call my home.

Carmel, in my childhood, was much more socio-economically diverse than it is now. It began its life as an artists’ community, and in my childhood, was filled with more “mom n’ pop” grocery stores and gas stations than art galleries. There were certainly plenty of wealthy people around, but there was also a notable “bohemian element”, a fine group of “hippies”, and more than a few people in the middle class. Growing up, I wore Tuffskin jeans and my mother drove (for years) a ‘75 Ford Pinto. There were more Fords on the streets than Cadillacs or BMWs, and the streets were filled with children who actually lived in this fog-shrouded, woodsy paradise.

This weekend, with a car show in nearby Pebble Beach, I counted more than a dozen Bentleys. I saw no Ford Pintos, and very few Hyundais or battered old Toyotas. We’re down to two gas stations in town (from eleven thirty years ago), and we’ve got so many art galleries that my mother is convinced that they all serve as money-laundering fronts for the Mob. The high school today has 1/3rd fewer students than it did when I was a student. The streets are filled, as one wag put it to me recently, with “old people who’ve come to visit their parents.” There were very few children playing in the streets this weekend; the few children I did see were wearing Lacoste and Abercrombie rather than Sears, and they were all under the careful supervision of hovering parents.

On Sunday, we went through nearly a dozen “open houses”. Prices have come down a bit in recent months, but there’s nothing in my old neighborhood under $1.4 million (and that was for a 2 bedroom, 1 bath, 1000 square-foot board and batten cottage.) Most of the newer places were in the range of $2.5-$5.0 million, and were largely devoid of charm. It was more than a little depressing, though we took not a little pleasure in making loud and censorious remarks within earshot of all available realtors. (What’s with all these damned pillars everywhere? OKOP don’t put up pillars.)

I never go to Carmel without walking the half-mile from my childhood home to “Tor House”, the stunning stone cottage built by my beloved Robinson Jeffers. Though his place is now a protected monument, what was once his isolated little corner of Carmel Point is now surrounded by the homes of others eager to claim (for several million dollars) their spot of paradise. But how can I condemn others for wanting to do as my family did? Those who got here first have no particular moral claim. Nevertheless, I always say the lines of one of Jeffers’ most famous poems to myself as I walk away. This part in particular is always with me:

…people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve…

I find more comfort in that than perhaps I ought.