Coastal Traveler - Spring 2008 - (Page 53)

The Coastal Traveler guidebook manifesto Essay and photo by Robert Plotkin In the 20th century, man learned to harness Arabian oil instead of Arabian horses. Roads made from oil-based asphalt linked a federation of small states. Families packed into bulbous sedans and went on driveabouts. Each town had its own regional speech, dress and cuisine. Then Eisenhower came back from WWII wreathed in laurels, and became president. He kept some money from what he called the “military-industrial complex” by diverting it to an almost Roman system of This is what most of the world has become. In the 1970s, I took pioneering road trips with my dad. Even then, each town was different. The downtowns hadn’t been eviscerated by Wal-Mart. Young people won’t believe this, but each and every bookstore, restaurant, and haberdashery was totally unique. There were no others like them on earth. Everywhere you went it was like this. You could Lewis-and-Clark all over the place. Most road trips now are very predictable: the grim post-modern cities of the Soviet Union. Many of the hippies who moved to these towns were the scions of educated East Coast families and picked unusually scenic spots to build their utopias. Here, you can skinny-dip with counterculture revolutionaries living in oceanfront redwood forest, taste the wine produced from Internet bubble profits, cage dive with Great White sharks, browse independent bookstores, chase your girlfriend down a trail, lie on your back in the grass and let the hawks teach your boy about predatory behavior. You may huff up the trail, but a car never gets out of shape. It also needs something other than stop-and-go driving from home to mall to work. Give your car an Italian tune-up. Compress the suspension. California highways are better than any Austrian pass or German Autobahn. The sinuous roads follow valley streams or are cut into oceanfront cliff. They are shaded by oak and redwood and lead to small villages. We offer this magazine to tourists, so they may go home spiritually fortified against the onslaught of banality – so that they may see how it once was, and can still be; when they go home they may try a smaller film at an independent movie theater or find a café that hand-pulls the espresso, and customers argue about the editorial page. Heretics and iconoclasts retreated and dug small pockets of eccentricity. superhighways. The G.I. Bill financed homes for returning veterans, which birthed suburban large-scale development for the first time in human history. Until then, man lived in cities or the countryside. Because there were no stores to serve these giant housing developments, malls were built, and in order to produce stores at the same rate as the housing developments, they had to be standardized. Efficiencies were introduced. Eccentricity was ruthlessly eliminated. Ceilings were lowered from ten to seven feet. Objects made from brass and steel became hardened oil named plastic. drive until tired and stay at the Motel 6, turn on the television until sleep, wake up and drive to the nearest Starbucks (where at least the coffee is good and you can get the New York Times), proceed down a highway lined with the same 20 stores over and over again. Gaze out the window as you pass Home Depot, Blockbuster, T.G.I. Fridays, Circuit City, McDonalds and Subway sandwich shops. Heretics and iconoclasts have retreated and dug small pockets of eccentricity. This magazine is a guide to towns that are the Stalingrads of anti-corporate resistance. They fortunately share no resemblance to

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Coastal Traveler - Spring 2008

Coastal Traveler - Spring 2008 Contents Coastal Connoisseur Coastal Picks Coastal Scenario Coastal Art Coastal Driver Coastal Roadkill Coastal Eco Coastal Hotel Coastal Desert San Diego La Jolla Laguna Beach Malibu Santa Barbara San Luis Obispo Big Sur Carmel Monterey Santa Cruz San Francisco Sausalito Mill Valley Stinson Beach Bolinas Olema Point Reyes Station Fairfax Inverness Marshall, Tomales Sebastopol Petaluma Sonoma Coast Redwood Coast

Coastal Traveler - Spring 2008

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