We hummed and ha’d about where we should stay in Big Sur, everyone seems to go for the big lodges like Post Ranch Inn which for a mere $675 a night offers modernist forest luxury with amazing rooms with sheer cliffs below and unparalleled views. We felt that it was not just the cliffs that were a bit steep for us, how can anyone justify spending $675 a night on anything?
We decided to try Deetjens an old wooden collection of cabins built by Grandpa Deetjens around 1930, being of German origins Grandpa Deetjens was clearly more than a bit eccentric and in a world of his own, the cabins are rather beautiful, broad panels and boards rise some 4 metres high forming mono pitches and dual pitched roofs, each cabin has a log burner and table lamps, the spaces are dark, wooden and warm.
Our cabin is called the antique apartment and smells strongly of egg inside, even with every window open and the burner lit the yellow egg pervades everything, is it sulphur or sewer? Nonetheless after just a few moments inside you become vaccinated with egg, no longer able to detect the putridness of the smell, the air is sweet and warm, it is a beautiful place with many staff from different generations, but all glowing and with a look of living a satisfied life, they all smile when they see you and inform you of how good life is, how wonderful Grandpa Deetjens was.
We awake the first morning to find a massive rainstorm is over out heads and unlikely to abate all day, and so we decide to go for breakfast in the main house. As an embittered Englishman I found a different world in our Big Sur Deetjens breakfast like a sort of cult experience. The waitress was so happy, oblivious to the world in general, in her head there was no refugee crisis, war, nor threat of any kind, her world was about necklaces, bright coloured clothes and flowers. She moved around the breakfast room chattering and laughing, telling everyone that she had left her cumbersome architectural internship and entered a far more enjoyable place of warm coffee, fireplaces, vases of flowers and fun. She didn’t need to wash, merely tie her hair up and throw on yesterday’s clothes, coffee pot in hand she danced a euphoric dance of superficiality with her audience of customers: ‘I love your neckless, is that jade or onyx?’ ‘Oh yes I am learning my precious stones and crystals very quickly!’
Deetjens is a bubble, Big Sur is a bubble, maybe California is a bubble? Insulated from reality, obsessed with appearance, gymnasia, cosmetics and me, myself, I. The whole place smells of egg, yellow sulphuric egg, self obsessed, masterbating egg. No other world exists inside the bubble, the bubble is eclectic with Chinese vases, Buddhas, Ganesh and paintings from the 1930s, that other time in history when nothing mattered, a blind eye was turned to fascism in the hope that it would leave of its own accord in favour of the communal artistic life. The eclecticism hides a lost direction, nowhere to go and no new imagining just reliance on what has been before: the smell of egg.
Mark, Big Sur, California, USA, 22 January 2016
