Carmel suffers from the curse of the commons

By Carl Heintze

When the poet Robinson Jeffers rode down over the hill from Monterey a century ago and saw Carmel for the first time, he fell in love with it.

He loved it so much he lived there for the rest of his life, mostly in lonely isolation, a stone tower he built with his own hands in which he sat and watched the Pacific from a rocky point south of Carmel Bay. There he wrote his gloomy but moving poems, on the edge of the continent, surrounded by rocks, pines and ocean.

Today a host of other folks fall in love with Carmel each year. They come, they see, they'd like to stay. They come for many reasons: the view--the same view Jeffers saw--the scenery, the supposed serenity, the weather or simply because Carmel is there.

They come in such numbers that they are, in fact, in danger of loving the place to death. Most come and leave.

The hamlet Jeffers found is besieged each summer by cars and people, and it finds itself determinedly, but with great difficulty, trying to remain the way it was.

The way it was is a little different than any place else and being a little different is clearly one of its charms.

But then it's always been the haven for the eccentric--and more recently for the wealthy. It costs a lot to live in Carmel. Not everyone can afford it.

But it has its compensations.

Where else has a movie star (Clint Eastwood) been both its mayor and principal benefactor. Where else can one find houses that have no street numbers, a place where you get your mail at the post office, where there are almost no sidewalks, no strip malls, few grocery stores, where buildings are mostly one-story, houses mostly two-bedroom and where the architecture is an odd mixture of California Spanish and pseudo-English.

In Carmel a popular lunch place is called The Tuck Box; there is a shop that sells Scots tweeds and tartans, and you can get cited for jaywalking across Ocean Street to the post office.

Despite its eccentricity and supposed quaint charm, however, Carmel has many of the same problems from which two other California icons, Yosemite Valley and Lake Tahoe, suffer.

Like San Francisco, it has almost nowhere to park and resolutely refuses to do anything about it. Unlike San Francisco, there is, alas, no BART.

Like most of the Monterey Peninsula it is chronically short of water. And it has traffic. The traffic is worse than it might be because of the width of its streets.

Carmel is as likely to widen them as it is to build sidewalks.

East of the main part of town the four-lane section of Highway 1 comes to a sudden and screeching halt and narrows to two lanes. It continues that way to the entrance of Carmel Valley and beyond, to the Carmel River bridge.

At one time there were plans to eliminate this bottleneck by making the road four lanes, at least as far as the turnoff to Carmel Valley, but Carmelites resisted the change. Now the only possible land that could be used for widening the road is an untrammeled park, forever denied the crunch of automobile tires.

One lane of the entrance to the highway is being widened to make getting out of the Carmel Valley a little easier, but otherwise, residents of both Carmel and Carmel Valley are going to have to live with lines of cars backed up for a mile or so every day.

But that's the way Carmelites like it. A mixture of the retired, the wealthy, the not so wealthy--the town is determined not to change.

Each year Carmel throws itself into the Bach Festival, a couple of weeks dedicated to the music of 16th-century composer Johann Sebastian Bach .

Somehow it seems fitting that the town that won't accept the 21st century seeks to preserve composers who wrote music three or more centuries ago.

Still Carmel remains everyone's dream of a seaside village. It hasn't changed. It's the world that's different.

It is a living reminder of the lesson Garrett Hardin once called "the tragedy of the commons." In Hardin's analogy the commons once was wonderful and bucolic. Everyone could walk on its green surface. But then everyone grew in numbers and more and more people came to possess the commons.

Unfortunately, the commons didn't get any bigger, but the number of people did. And the more it was divided among those who came to enjoy it, the less they found to like.

The same thing is happening to Carmel--and to Big Sur and Yosemite and Lake Tahoe.

Soon, alas, we will have hugged all of them to death .

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times. A collection of his essays may be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. He can be reached by email at feodorh@juno.com.

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