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Doc Mishler last rode the coast road fifteen years ago with the two horses pictured on the right: Chief Free Spirit and Keep The Faith. At that time, Doc trotted from Montana to Washington D.C., by way of California, after surviving a cancer diagnosis and its treatment and reading the book, How Then Shall We Live, a text that weighs the question, “How shall I live, knowing I will die?”
What was then a personal journey to celebrate life after beating a terminal diagnosis is now a ride to raise our awareness of hunger, in particular regard to starving children. Doc says, “There are children in the world who are so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of food.”
This ride is Doc’s mission. For more information about his church community, please stop him on his way south along Highway 1.
Doc can use a place to board his horses each night, so stop to offer your place when you see him. Today he’ll depart Pescadero to travel to Santa Cruz, then on to Monterey, and then El Sur Grande, a day’s ride southbound until San Diego, where he will then head east-northeast to D.C.
This post written by Anneliese Agren
Not often one sees a horseman riding on Highway 1.
Not often, as in, Never.
Almost 100 years ago, J. Smeaton Chase, an Englishman who lived out the second half of his life in California, started from San Gabriel Valley, then rode south to San Diego, to then ride north to Mendocino.
Published in 1913, Chase’s California Coastal Trails
gives the modern reader a view into California’s sparsely populated coastal past.
But now we have Matthew and Hampton, our current equivalent of Chase and Chino (later, Anton, when he traded a tired Chino in Jolon). Matthew and Hampton are traveling the California Coast Trail, aka State Route 1, but their mission is not a horseback tour to see the sights. Matthew and Hampton are riding the coast to raise awareness for the Akha people in northern Thailand who are being displaced by Thailand’s Queen and mistreated by the police. Matthew first learned about the Akha in the early 90s when traveling Thailand. He was disgusted by the treatment of the Akha by their fellow countrymen, the policemen, who take ownership of Akha lands in the name of the Queen of Thailand.
The creek smells of damp leaves and dirt. The creek that runs through town carries the rich mix. The waterflow pushes the earth to sea. Deposits of rich soil line its banks, deepen its bed. Pacific wind blows creek scent through town mixed with bakeries baking and coffee roasteries burning beans. It was a town in which an old lady could walk unmolested down Main Street. The greasy, redolent air of Popeye’s Chicken House hovers the organic, vegan, range-fed grocer’s parking lot. Inland, on freeways, drivers don’t let dogs stick noses out open windows inhaling sea scents and low tide as they do on Highway 1.
