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I am not without hope of delighting to find the essential Coast Road novel. Expectations defined in a previous post on two Coast Road-titled books ended with a request that, at the very least, when a book is titled, “The Coast Road,” then the reader better find plenty of setting along the Coast Road.
Elizabeth C. Ward’s 1983, Coast Highway 1, has it all: A pissy, Stanford alum, University of Irvine comparative literature professor who translates nineteenth-century Spanish novelists, and intentionally grades his best student’s extraordinary paper a B+. Jake Martin finds the extraordinary student lying dead one foggy morning, under the bougainvillea of his Spanish stucco courtyard.
“It was too late to go home, even for a change of clothes. I bought a map of the coast highway and headed south.” Jake Martin exits his next locations (Balboa Bay Club, San Juan Capistrano, Encinitas, even Ensenada), always in the nick-of-time. Bullets prod his every departure.
A twist in the plot turns Jake northward, and soon he is north of Santa Monica, above Malibu, “Point Magu [sic]. One last strange rock, alone and seaward, like some forgotten giant or a period at the end of a sentence. Beyond that are the flats of the Ventura Valley, the firing range, the naval base, the Pacific missile range, pale fields with only the tips of the summer crop greening the land. Highway 1 hurries across it as though to get to the other side quickly, before the sea sweeps in again and wipes it clean.”
The reader finds plenty of setting along the Coast Road. In Pismo Beach, Jake races through Oceano Dunes to evade a dune-buggying pursuer. To reach some inland locales, such as Jake’s side-trip to Stanford campus, Elizabeth Ward writes, “I left the sea at Pescadero and turned inland through the artichokes and up into the redwood canyons that wind up to Skyline Drive.” At Fort Point, Jake exchanges words under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge with the sergeant assigned to the case.
Penciled edits in the copy that I read, made me laugh out loud. The first edit is found when Jake Martin carries his investigation to Pacific Heights in San Francisco. Elizabeth C. Ward describes the streets of his location as, “…on California, between Jackson and Clay.” A savvy reader before me penciled in three parallel lines next to this paragraph, and named each: California, Clay, Jackson. To the right of the paragraph, this editor/reader wrote, “BETWEEN?” and then, for good measure on the page, a deeply-leaded “!”
Later, the same scribe slashed an “r” in “Monterrey,” with an admonishment, “One “ARE” in our Monterey!”
Elizabeth C. Ward includes the environmental movement and Robinson Jeffers in her Coast Highway 1. In the victim’s photography book on estuaries of the California coast, “Jennifer had used Jeffer’s words as the only text in her book and the photographs were worthy of a poet. The eye that had looked through the lens had lingered on the detail of wing and seed and ripple of water. Had recorded the reflection of insect and reed and marsh grass. It had gloried in the sweep of sky and the boundless still-spaces of the estuary.”
The gnarliest chase scene occurs, briefly, as a coast road run through the Big Sur coastscape. “No backwoods roads lead to the safety of highway arteries further inland. There is no escape except by foot into terrain where only the wildcat and the red-tailed hawk survive. Once committed, there is no way out. Set a roadblock, one at each end, and a man is trapped here forever. Fugitive, he is defeated, finally, not by the men at either end, but by the mountains themselves and the sea swirling below.”
Elizabeth C. Ward’s Coast Highway 1, is fairly essential as a Coast Road Read. It is certainly a bunch of fun to vicariously romp along its settings up and down the California coast. Elizabeth wrote two other books, both published in the 1980s, A Nice Little Beach Town and The Lost Day. Ms. Ward has lived in Newport Beach for most of her life.
A little article on Ms. Ward.
I come back to the cottage in
Santa Monica Canyon where
Andrée and I were poor and
Happy together. Sometimes we
Were hungry and stole vegetables
From the neighbors’ gardens.
Sometimes we went out and gathered
Cigarette butts by flashlight.
But we went swimming every day,
All year round. We had a dog
Called Proclus, a vast yellow
Mongrel, and a white cat named
Cyprian. We had our first
Joint art show, and they began
To publish my poems in Paris.
We worked under the low umbrella
Of the acacia in the dooryard.
Now I get out of the car
And stand before the house in the dusk.
The acacia blossoms powder the walk
With little pills of gold wool.
The odor is drowsy and thick
In the early evening.
The tree has grown twice as high
As the roof. Inside, an old man
And woman sit in the lamplight.
I go back and drive away
To Malibu Beach and sit
With a grey-haired childhood friend and
Watch the full moon rise over the
Long rollers wrinkling the dark bay.
“Only Years” by Kenneth Rexroth, from Sacramental Acts: The Love Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. © Copper Canyon Press, 1997.
Posted today on The Writer’s Almanac.
Thank you, Toni, for sending this poem to me today, telling me that it made you think of me. 🙂
Passive pensive scene with Palos Verdes at the horizon. Seemingly sublime, no?
Harry Mattull paints this seaview from Palisades Park – a popular park precariously placed atop an impermanent bluff, overlying a gully-riddled, hollowed-out badland, caused by wind and water erosion on a steep clay and sandy slope.
Notice how the artist paints out the Coast Boulevard? Romantic.
An early 20th century wasteland at the beach bejeweled by black Southern Pacific railroad tracks leading towards the wharf and a skinny sandy road for the newly popular automobile.
The Coast Boulevard was built over the tracks and road, and then enlarged to 2 to 4 to now 6 lanes below this ancient sand dune and river plain. The beach widened and replenished with sand so that tourism to the beaches became an economy for Los Angeles.
