by Brad Herzog
We all know what setting does for literature. From Gone with the Wind to Cannery Row, location is the one indispensable character. But if we’re lucky, the opposite can be just as compelling. I have found, in my travels, that the only thing better than a sense of place is a sense of place commingled with some literary magic.
It’s one thing to drive through Montana, marveling at the massiveness of it all. It’s quite another, however, to read A River Runs Through It while you’re there. Suddenly, every fly fisherman wading in the Blackfoot River suggests his own little novella under the Big Sky. Read To Kill a Mockingbird while journeying through Alabama, and you gain an understanding of the growing pains of Montgomery. Let Thomas Wolfe tell you about North Carolina. Bring Mark Twain to the Missouri riverbank. The classic pages come to life.
So it is that I prepare for a hike around Point Lobos State Reserve having just read Treasure Island.
Legend has it that the author, Robert Louis Stevenson, based the location of his classic children’s tale on this “greatest meeting of land and water in the world” on California’s Central Coast, just south of Carmel. Stevenson lived here for a few years, far from his native Scotland, just before he wrote the book that made him famous (in 1883) and did for pirates what Oliver Twist did for orphans.
Granted, Point Lobos isn’t an island at all. But place Stevenson’s fictitious sketch of his fabled isle next to the modern-day rendering of Point Lobos, and the similarities intrigue. Bird Island? That could be Stevenson’s Skeleton Island. Big Dome bears a resemblance to his Spyglass Hill. And that grove of cypress trees nearby? The author calls it the Cape of the Woods.
It’s one thing to drive through Montana, marveling at the massiveness of it all. It’s quite another, however, to read A River Runs Through It while you’re there. Suddenly, every fly fisherman wading in the Blackfoot River suggests his own little novella under the Big Sky. Read To Kill a Mockingbird while journeying through Alabama, and you gain an understanding of the growing pains of Montgomery. Let Thomas Wolfe tell you about North Carolina. Bring Mark Twain to the Missouri riverbank. The classic pages come to life.
So it is that I prepare for a hike around Point Lobos State Reserve having just read Treasure Island.
Legend has it that the author, Robert Louis Stevenson, based the location of his classic children’s tale on this “greatest meeting of land and water in the world” on California’s Central Coast, just south of Carmel. Stevenson lived here for a few years, far from his native Scotland, just before he wrote the book that made him famous (in 1883) and did for pirates what Oliver Twist did for orphans.
Granted, Point Lobos isn’t an island at all. But place Stevenson’s fictitious sketch of his fabled isle next to the modern-day rendering of Point Lobos, and the similarities intrigue. Bird Island? That could be Stevenson’s Skeleton Island. Big Dome bears a resemblance to his Spyglass Hill. And that grove of cypress trees nearby? The author calls it the Cape of the Woods.
Or consider Stevenson’s description of Treasure Island from afar: “Away to the south-west of us we saw two low hills, about a couple of miles apart, and rising behind one of them a third and higher hill, whose peak was still buried in fog.” It sounds like the view at Pebble Beach, from where Point Lobos seems a wild jut of land a world away from the nine-irons-and-knickers set. (Spyglass Hill is now the name of a treasure of a golf course in Pebble Beach that has sent many a Titleist to a watery grave).
Stevenson’s tale is written from the point of few of Jim Hawkins, a brave young lad who proves to be the hero of the story at every turn. As I park my car on the shoulder of Highway 1, I recall that in the first sentence he explains that he’s left nothing out of the story except the bearings of the island itself—“and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted.”
Convinced that my Point Lobos is Stevenson’s Treasure Isle, I’m transported back two centuries to the days when the black flag of piracy flew brazenly. And I want to be one of the pirates—like Billy Bones, whom we meet on page one, a “brown old seaman” with a “sabre cut across the cheek.” I imagine myself plodding into a lonely inn, savoring a rum, throwing down four gold pieces and—like ol’ Billy Bones himself – shouting, “You can tell me when I’ve worked through that.” I want to describe the rum as “meat and drink and man and wife to me.” I want to shout, “I’m not afraid of ‘em. I’ll shake out another reef, matey, and daddle ‘em again,” and have no idea what I just shouted.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to suffer the same fate as Billy Bones, being struck dead by “thundering apoplexy” and leaving a bag of gold, some old clothes and the untapped map of Treasure Island.
Ah, the map. I find myself dreaming exotic dreams, just like young Jim Hawkins when he discovered it and embarked on a quest for gold. “I approached that island in my fancy, from every possible direction,” he recalls. “Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us; but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.”
Stevenson’s tale is written from the point of few of Jim Hawkins, a brave young lad who proves to be the hero of the story at every turn. As I park my car on the shoulder of Highway 1, I recall that in the first sentence he explains that he’s left nothing out of the story except the bearings of the island itself—“and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted.”
Convinced that my Point Lobos is Stevenson’s Treasure Isle, I’m transported back two centuries to the days when the black flag of piracy flew brazenly. And I want to be one of the pirates—like Billy Bones, whom we meet on page one, a “brown old seaman” with a “sabre cut across the cheek.” I imagine myself plodding into a lonely inn, savoring a rum, throwing down four gold pieces and—like ol’ Billy Bones himself – shouting, “You can tell me when I’ve worked through that.” I want to describe the rum as “meat and drink and man and wife to me.” I want to shout, “I’m not afraid of ‘em. I’ll shake out another reef, matey, and daddle ‘em again,” and have no idea what I just shouted.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to suffer the same fate as Billy Bones, being struck dead by “thundering apoplexy” and leaving a bag of gold, some old clothes and the untapped map of Treasure Island.
Ah, the map. I find myself dreaming exotic dreams, just like young Jim Hawkins when he discovered it and embarked on a quest for gold. “I approached that island in my fancy, from every possible direction,” he recalls. “Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us; but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.”
If I squint enough I can just see the tall ship, the Hispianola, dipping and swaying off the coast of Point Lobos. I can see a handful of innocents aboard—young Jim, a doctor, a lawyer, a handful of loyal mates. And the rest of the ship is filled with pirates of the most wonderful variety—“many old sailors, with rings in their ears, and whiskers curled into ringlets, and tarry pigtails, and their swaggering, clumsy sea-walk.” Jim adds, “If I had seen as many kings or archbishops I could not have been more delighted.”
Had Jim known that these so-called sailors had mutiny on their minds, his enthusiasm might have dimmed. Indeed, as it turns out, the man behind the mutiny is the pirate of all pirates, Long John Silver himself, hobbling around with a peg leg and a parrot perched on his shoulder. The parrot swears a blue streak, while Silver releases a parade of pirately prose—things like “Shiver my timbers!” and “Dooty is dooty, mates!” Until, that is, the Hispianola arrives at the island. And then Long John Silver is subdued. “Ah,” he says, “this here is a sweet spot, this island – a sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on.” And it is.
Had Jim known that these so-called sailors had mutiny on their minds, his enthusiasm might have dimmed. Indeed, as it turns out, the man behind the mutiny is the pirate of all pirates, Long John Silver himself, hobbling around with a peg leg and a parrot perched on his shoulder. The parrot swears a blue streak, while Silver releases a parade of pirately prose—things like “Shiver my timbers!” and “Dooty is dooty, mates!” Until, that is, the Hispianola arrives at the island. And then Long John Silver is subdued. “Ah,” he says, “this here is a sweet spot, this island – a sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on.” And it is.
I start my exploration along Carmelo Meadow Trail, my only companions being the occasional lizard darting across my path. The end of the trail brings me to Whalers Cove, where the sea is gentle yet loud, something young Jim Hawkins noticed, too. “I have never seen the sea quiet around Treasure Island,” he explains. “The sun might blaze overhead, the air be without a breath, the surface smooth and blue, but still these great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night; and I scarce believe there is one spot in the island where a man would be out of earshot of their noise.”
I skirt the eastern end of the cove, walking along a floor of pine needles to a spot known as Coal Chute Point. Before Point Lobos was designated a State Reserve in 1933, it was (at one time or another) the site of a coal mining business, an abalone cannery, a granite quarry, a military base, even dozens of movie sets, the films ranging from Lassie Come Home to The Graduate. Here walked Douglas Fairbanks, James Cagney, Errol Flynn … but are they really any match for Billy Bones, Black Dog, and Long John Silver?
Today, there are over 400 protected acres open to the public. There are otters playing in Whalers Cove, kayakers kayaking, divers diving, a couple of boats offshore, rising and falling with the waves. But as I sit on a bench at the point, I feel entirely alone. I feel like Ben Gunn, the ragged pirate discovered on Treasure Island, the man who’d been marooned there years earlier. Sure, he had no human contact for months on end. But hey, at least he had the run of the place.
It was Ben Gunn who dug up the buried treasure and carried it, load by load, to a protected cave. Jim Hawkins later described the sight with awe: “English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider’s web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieced bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection.”
I skirt the eastern end of the cove, walking along a floor of pine needles to a spot known as Coal Chute Point. Before Point Lobos was designated a State Reserve in 1933, it was (at one time or another) the site of a coal mining business, an abalone cannery, a granite quarry, a military base, even dozens of movie sets, the films ranging from Lassie Come Home to The Graduate. Here walked Douglas Fairbanks, James Cagney, Errol Flynn … but are they really any match for Billy Bones, Black Dog, and Long John Silver?
Today, there are over 400 protected acres open to the public. There are otters playing in Whalers Cove, kayakers kayaking, divers diving, a couple of boats offshore, rising and falling with the waves. But as I sit on a bench at the point, I feel entirely alone. I feel like Ben Gunn, the ragged pirate discovered on Treasure Island, the man who’d been marooned there years earlier. Sure, he had no human contact for months on end. But hey, at least he had the run of the place.
It was Ben Gunn who dug up the buried treasure and carried it, load by load, to a protected cave. Jim Hawkins later described the sight with awe: “English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider’s web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieced bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection.”
But the cave I saw, carved into a cliff at Granite Point, was awash only in seawater, the waves rushing greedily in and out of it like so many soldiers of fortune. And the only gold that caught my eye was the sun glinting occasionally off the swirling cities of giant kelp in the cove.
I hike to the other side of Whalers Cove, where I find Whaler’s Cabin. It was built by Chinese fisherman in the 1850s and is now a cultural history museum. But I can only think of the old fort the sailors discovered on Treasure Island, the site of a bloody battle between the good guys and the mutinous crew. It’s the place where Long John Silver declares that if they give him the treasure map, he’ll leave them alive. When he’s refused, he spits and shouts, “There! That’s what I think of ye!” And then a few lines later: “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”
I hike to the other side of Whalers Cove, where I find Whaler’s Cabin. It was built by Chinese fisherman in the 1850s and is now a cultural history museum. But I can only think of the old fort the sailors discovered on Treasure Island, the site of a bloody battle between the good guys and the mutinous crew. It’s the place where Long John Silver declares that if they give him the treasure map, he’ll leave them alive. When he’s refused, he spits and shouts, “There! That’s what I think of ye!” And then a few lines later: “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”
Making sure no one’s looking, I repeat it to myself—Them that die’ll be the lucky ones”—as I stroll down Whalers Cabin Trail, past one tree twisted like a serpent’s back and another sprouting arms in all directions like a giant squid. Continuing west along North Shore Trail, peeking through Monterey pines, I catch a glimpse of the entire southern side of the Monterey Peninsula. It’s quite a view, but I shake it off and imagine empty ocean in its place.
By the time I climb Big Dome and reach Cypress Grove Trail, the fog is beginning to move in, providing an appropriate mood as I walk in the footsteps of Jim Hawkins. “I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd, outlandish, swampy trees,” he recalls, “and I had now come out upon the skirts of an open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with a few pines, and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.” These—Stevenson’s odd, outlandish, contorted trees—represent one of only two naturally growing stands of Monterey cypress in the world, which is why the grove has been designated a Category 1 Rare and Endangered Species.
By the time I climb Big Dome and reach Cypress Grove Trail, the fog is beginning to move in, providing an appropriate mood as I walk in the footsteps of Jim Hawkins. “I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd, outlandish, swampy trees,” he recalls, “and I had now come out upon the skirts of an open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with a few pines, and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.” These—Stevenson’s odd, outlandish, contorted trees—represent one of only two naturally growing stands of Monterey cypress in the world, which is why the grove has been designated a Category 1 Rare and Endangered Species.
With the fog now rolling in fast and furious, the headlands are enveloped in an air of mystery. The sun is gone, replaced by wisps of smoke and, in the words of our hero Jim, “a chill that pierced into the marrow.” I can’t see beyond the headlands, so much so that it could be an island, surrounded by nothing but perhaps a black flag—the “Jolly Roger”—rising from the mist. The barren branches of the cypress trees reach out like the ghostly arms of the pirates left to die on Treasure Island.
The trail leads me to an overlook, where Pinnacle Rock -- “an isolated rock,” the Treasure Island narrator describes, “pretty high, and peculiarly white in colour” -- stands tall like a natural lighthouse jutting into the Pacific. Finally, I approach a clearing … “A few steps farther I came forth into the open borders of the grove, and saw the sea lying blue and sunny to the horizon, and the surf tumbling and tossing its foam along the beach.”
I head for Sea Lion Point Trail, toward Devil’s Cauldron, where the waves crash and spray with full fury against the rocky point. Beyond the waves, through the spray, is where young Jim “beheld huge slimy monsters—soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness—two or three score of them together, making the rocks to echo with their barkings.” He later understood it to be a colony of sea lions, and their barks still echo across the headlands. It is this noise, in fact, that gave Point Lobos its name—Punta de Los Lobos Marinos or “Point of the Sea Wolves.”
I walk on. South Shore Trail brings me to a series of tide pools, each its own little world. Staring at a tide pool is like reading a novel. Every stone is a promontory; every clump of seaweed is a kelp forest; every tiny snail is a silent sailor at the bottom of the sea. As I’m reading, a big, black crab (the pirate of the tide pool) wanders across the bottom, poking and digging for buried treasure.
South Shore Trail leads to Bird Island Trail, which takes me to Pelican Point and a view of Bird Island. There, hundreds – no, thousands – of seabirds scream in unison, a haunting chorus amid the fog. To Stevenson, it was Skeleton Island, and it’s as white as a skull. I peer past the island, into the vast beyond. “Not a man, not a sail upon the sea,” recalls Jim Hawkins. “The very largeness of the view increased the sense of solitude.”
And as I stare, my thoughts return to the pirate’s plunder that gave Treasure Island its name, the great heaps of coin and pieces of eight and bars of silver, some of which is said to still be buried on that fateful isle. “How many had it cost in the amassing.” wonders young Jim, “what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell.”
I leave Point Lobos, the crown jewel of the California state park system, wondering if perhaps I just found the treasure after all.
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum.
The trail leads me to an overlook, where Pinnacle Rock -- “an isolated rock,” the Treasure Island narrator describes, “pretty high, and peculiarly white in colour” -- stands tall like a natural lighthouse jutting into the Pacific. Finally, I approach a clearing … “A few steps farther I came forth into the open borders of the grove, and saw the sea lying blue and sunny to the horizon, and the surf tumbling and tossing its foam along the beach.”
I head for Sea Lion Point Trail, toward Devil’s Cauldron, where the waves crash and spray with full fury against the rocky point. Beyond the waves, through the spray, is where young Jim “beheld huge slimy monsters—soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness—two or three score of them together, making the rocks to echo with their barkings.” He later understood it to be a colony of sea lions, and their barks still echo across the headlands. It is this noise, in fact, that gave Point Lobos its name—Punta de Los Lobos Marinos or “Point of the Sea Wolves.”
I walk on. South Shore Trail brings me to a series of tide pools, each its own little world. Staring at a tide pool is like reading a novel. Every stone is a promontory; every clump of seaweed is a kelp forest; every tiny snail is a silent sailor at the bottom of the sea. As I’m reading, a big, black crab (the pirate of the tide pool) wanders across the bottom, poking and digging for buried treasure.
South Shore Trail leads to Bird Island Trail, which takes me to Pelican Point and a view of Bird Island. There, hundreds – no, thousands – of seabirds scream in unison, a haunting chorus amid the fog. To Stevenson, it was Skeleton Island, and it’s as white as a skull. I peer past the island, into the vast beyond. “Not a man, not a sail upon the sea,” recalls Jim Hawkins. “The very largeness of the view increased the sense of solitude.”
And as I stare, my thoughts return to the pirate’s plunder that gave Treasure Island its name, the great heaps of coin and pieces of eight and bars of silver, some of which is said to still be buried on that fateful isle. “How many had it cost in the amassing.” wonders young Jim, “what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell.”
I leave Point Lobos, the crown jewel of the California state park system, wondering if perhaps I just found the treasure after all.
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum.
Brad Herzog is the author of more than three-dozen books, among them a trilogy of travel memoirs -- the bestselling States of Mind, Small World, and Turn Left at the Trojan Horse.