Traveling the Highways & Byways with Bill Graves

This fabled highway runs up the California coast, at times right at the ocean’s edge. It passes by Los Angeles and San Francisco almost unnoticed. Then in towns like Newport Beach, Malibu and Corona DelMar, it is the main street. Officially called Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway was built when America’s cars first needed roads to run on, a need that still determines how wide it gets. Where traffic has mandated its expansion, its personality as a twolane scenic byway disappear, and its highway number becomes an also ran. For example, once out of the Los Angeles maze, the northbound Coast Highway temporarily becomes U.S. 101, the first superhighway to San Francisco.

Beyond Santa Barbara at Gaviota, U.S. 101 heads north and Highway 1 gets back its identity and takes off on its own. It swings inland for about 55 miles, leaving ocean-view, coastal travel exclusively to Amtrak passengers on the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Highway 1 joins the ocean again at Grover City and Pismo Beach.

On this inland passage, the Coast Highway cuts across Vandenberg Air Force Base. This space flight and missile facility covers about 100,000 acres, which includes 30 miles of raw coastline. Vandenberg is the largest piece of oceanfront property on the West Coast – probably the whole country – that is pretty much as it has always been. Part of the Pacific Missile Range, this expanse of land, which is bigger than many European countries, is more a physical barrier than anything.

Lompoc, California

Jalama Beach, Lompoc, California.

Photo courtesy explorelompoc.com

Falcon 9 at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Photo courtesy SpaceX and Wikimedia Commons/CC 0 1.0.

The Air Force does not traipse around on it like the Marine Corp or Army would, conducting training exercises and war games. As a result, plants and wildlife live there relatively undisturbed. I was on that inland passage tracing the El Jarco Creek through the rounded hills and long shadows of the Santa Ynez Mountains. It was a lazy drive until just short of Lompoc. There the road took on shape, mostly curves, and the oncoming traffic became a frenzy. The workday was ending. The highway took me into the center of Lompoc on Ocean Avenue, which is “subject to flooding” according to warning signs posted along it.

The person who named it, obviously, had been on it a day when it did. Nothing so fanciful happened, of course. Ocean Avenue merely leads to the ocean. So I let it take me there. It was nine miles to the empty beach and a place called Surf, little more than a railroad crossing. Heavy fog enveloped us like a vaporous cocoon. I parked, got out Rusty’s leash and pulled on a jacket. We walked the hard sand to the very edge of the American continent. The light surf rolled out the unbroken roar of a waterfall. We walked to the fence that closed off Vandenberg to the public. A few feet over our heads, sea gulls hung in the low fog like ceiling fixtures. They were watching my dog Rusty, I think. She seemed oblivious to everything except the frothy

Mural friends.

Photo courtesy explorelompoc.com

Highway 1 along the Pacific Coast.

Photo courtesy visitcalifornia.com.

water that rushed toward her feet and then disappeared. Were it not for the defense needs of our country, this beach would surely be lined with high-rise condos and restaurants draped with decorative fishnets and colored lanterns. Beside saving the world from a few disasters, our military has quietly preserved this piece of Pacific frontier for generations to come. Obviously, it is not the mission of the Air Force to be a land conservator. They got the job here by default, and they have done it well by just maintaining the fence. Leaving the beach, we passed through a curtain of fog. The sun and Lompoc lay on the other side. This town is not a saltwater tourist mecca like the others tethered to it by Highway 1. I don’t suppose a Snoopy beach towel is even sold here, nor the knickknacks you buy a third cousin who is getting married again. Lompoc appears focused on its people, not those coming in off the highway. That was good enough for me. We stayed. I stopped at the open-air farmers’ market, a once a week occurrence at Ocean and I Streets. Vegetable shoppers clustered around stands, shaded by wide umbrellas.

Behind them, like a colorful stage curtain, was a huge mural with sweeping waves of blues, reds, greens, and browns. It was painted on the side of a building and took up half a block. Even a door left open did not make a significant void in the picture. It was that big. The Lompoc Murals Project began in 1988 and probably will go on forever. It now numbers 20 works of art on buildings around town, depicting events in local history. I found 10 of them, all within five minutes of where I parked. One alley is a two-walled, outdoor art galley with murals of persons and porpoises. We settled at the town’s RV park next to the Santa Yenz River. The river is dry, but a sign warns again of sudden flooding. Guess it could happen, but not tonight. The next morning, thick fog made the day look chillier than it really was. Although the people here can’t see the ocean, their weather is controlled by it. This marine influence, with days beginning and ending in moisture-laden fog, has made the Lompoc Valley ideal for growing flowers. It has been the sole crop here for most of this century. And Darrel Schuyler has been here the whole time. “I am a third-generation farmer,” Darrel said. “We grow flowers for seeds, not for funerals and things like that. But much of that seed production has moved to Chili and China. The hottest crop going now is asparagus.”

I met Darrel in the Hi Restaurant, where he and a group of fellows gather for coffee most mornings. Every town has a place like Hi’s. If there is one group recreation that remains exclusively male, in this increasingly unisex world, it happens every morning in small-town America around Formicatopped tables. Like an all-night poker game, the composition at the table changes one at a time. “It takes two years to get a crop of asparagus,” Darrel was saying. “They cut it by hand and wrap in a wet blotter that feed it going to the market, which is a good ways off-in Japan.” He began telling me how hard it is to grow seedless watermelon seeds. “That’s why the seeds sell for $1,500 a pound.” “You mean more like a ton?” I was sure that one of us had gotten it wrong. “No, a pound. That’s about a quarter full.” Before I could pursue this question further, we got sidetracked saying goodbye to the judge, who was leaving for court. Everyone was very courteous to the judge, the only man in the restaurant wearing a tie.

The fellow across the table changed the subject to diatomaceous earth. He mined it, which involves scraping it off the sides of mountains. “It’s used in filters. Actually, it’s a few million layers of a few million years worth of dead marine life, like crustaceans and algae,” the miner explained. “Out of here, most of it goes to the brewing industry. You find it too in swimming pool filters and the stuff they put in boxes for cats pee on.” The Lompoc Valley is the world’s largest producer of diatomaceous earth, or diatomite. Obviously, this was ocean bottom eons ago. In spite of drying in sun since then, it is still 50 percent water, which is cooked out in its processing. Darrel drifted off somewhere. I never got a chance to talk with him again. The price of seedless watermelon seeds still hounded me. I wanted to get it right. So I spent much of that day working at it. My search led me all over town. I drew a blank at the Chamber of Commerce. They made some phone calls, tried to help, but couldn’t. I asked a lady at a plant nursery. She thought I was nuts, I think, but referred me to the Bodger Seeds Company at the edge of town. They only knew about flower seeds, and they showed me multiple bags of those. I even called the Santa Barbara County Growers Association. Their answer: “We don’t grow melons in this county.” As a last resort, I logged on the Internet and tied in with the Froese Seed Company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Kathleen Froese wrote me that she sells seedless watermelon seeds to truck farmers for 11 or 12 cents apiece. “By the pound, they could run as high as $1,500,” she wrote. But the ones she sells retail for about $750. I guess if you plant them one at a time, it doesn’t seem like so much.

About the author: After seeing much of the world as a career naval officer, Bill Graves decided, after he retired, to take a closer look at the United States. He has been roaming the country for 20 years, much of it in a motorhome with his dog Rusty. He lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, California and is the author of On the Back Roads, Discovering Small Towns of America. He can be reached at Roadscribe@aol.com.

Flower fields

Photo courtesy Jeremy Ball and eplorelompoc.com.