Dear Fellow Traveler: A Close Reading of the Magnetic Guest Journals at Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn

Love Shack. Tool Shed. Cabin of Dreams. Doll House. The Cabinet. The travelers who stay at Castro Cabin, the smallest and most remote guest cottage at Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, often invent their own names for the nine-by-twenty-foot rustic structure. The earliest cabins at Deetjen’s date from the late 1930s, when the Inn’s founders, Helen and Helmuth Deetjen, purchased nearly four acres of forested canyon in Big Sur from Rojelio and Bertha Castro.

Helmuth, a Norwegian builder and poetry lover, and Helen, a Southern transplant to California and britches-wearing proto-bohemian, set up camp in Castro Canyon—a landscape Helmuth called “a dimple in the planet.” The pioneers lived in tents and cooked from an open-air kitchen on their property until they completed construction of the Inn just before the start of WWII. Even now Deetjen’s conjures a folksy, twilit village out of Peer Gynt, jutting its rough-hewn Norwegian-style cabins through Castro Canyon’s shaded redwood grove. In the middle of the canyon Castro Creek ruptures the hushed and spongy acoustics of five-fingered ferns, mosses, lichens, and sorrels as it dribbles toward the Pacific. In addition to Deetjen’s candlelit restaurant (home to a brick fireplace, a carved wooden unicorn head, a bronze bust of the poet Robinson Jeffers, porcelain knickknacks, and Fabio the cat), modest library-hut, and assorted staff rooms and sheds, six guest cabins—most containing multiple rooms—ramble up either side of the canyon’s rolling slopes. The Inn resembles a rugged Gold Rush settlement made rococo with thatched wisteria and wrought-iron lamp fixtures, the wooden planks’ streaked patinas steeped in sea-mist.

Castro Cabin sits at the upper left edge of the canyon’s horseshoe, no more than 15 feet from the creek—the Inn’s only standalone guest cabin. While a number of other rooms at Deetjen’s offer wood-burning stoves, fireplaces, bathtubs, and an eclectic array of antiques (china plates, vases, English teapots), Castro Cabin is as plain as a Franciscan’s cell. Amid the raw redwood walls and sparse furnishings lies the slim room’s single extravagance: a pillow-sized skylight above the bed from which guests can pick out a few stars barbed to the black treetops at night or watch the looming trunks in the morning as their auburn bark brightens to pumpkin. During rains, the drops clatter on the skylight’s glass pane, making a primeval, oddly soothing racket. “Next time, we want to experience a severe winter storm in this small protective womb with a periscope,” joke the visitors Tom and Michal in a leatherbound volume of one of Castro Cabin’s 14 guest journals—the current volume placed on the dresser and the rest stacked like library books on a shelf beneath the bedside table. Their entry is dated June 20, 1994, several years after management transformed Castro Cabin from its decades-long stint as a woodshed into Deetjen’s distinctive creekside shack.

My husband David and I’ve stayed in Castro Cabin three times over the past four years. Although I look forward to trekking down to McWay Falls as it crashes from a panoramic seaside cliff into the cove’s teal waters; wobbling across fallen logs that bridge Partington Creek; and wandering the violet-striped sands of Pfeiffer Beach at high tide as waves froth through the Keystone Arch, I return to Big Sur to experience a smaller drama. I come back to read the entries other guests have left in Deetjen’s communal journals.

*

David and I usually sit side by side on Castro Cabin’s double bed—leaning on pillows—to read the journals since only one wing chair will fit in the former woodshed. When the electric heater shuts off intermittently, regulating the temperature, the only noise comes from the quick percolations of Castro Creek.

“You have to read this one,” I said to David during our most recent visit, passing him an entry by a guest named Miranda, who stayed in Castro Cabin with her boyfriend Jonathan (May 5 and 6, 2014). Both guests were 12 when their mothers died. Coincidentally, Miranda confides, the first day of their visit falls on her deceased mother’s birthday. “We did not come here to grieve,” Miranda writes, but as she reads other guests’ stories she’s moved to reflect on her loss. Halfway through her entry, Miranda addresses her mother directly, through a vibrant catalogue of self-styled “confessions”:

–I cut those green velour pants and hid the bit I cut behind the fridge because I hated that outfit.

–I ate the tomatoes from the garden, not the deer.

–I sprinkled morning glory seeds into every garden we sowed… not just that one time when they actively took over.

–ate dog biscuits in the bathroom when nobody was looking and I liked it… so I did it again. You caught me the second time.

–I opened the science kit you gave me for Christmas the night before and acted surprised on Christmas morning.

–I ate all the pâté, not knowing it was pâté.

–Jacob’s 4th birthday I was punched in the stomach by one of his friends for losing a ninja turtle in the ivy, though I pretended to be fine.

As Miranda flips the page and begins a new list, the tone of her entry shifts and her disclosures deepen:

–I was embarrassed when you picked me up from school bald. Later in life I felt guilty for being embarrassed, and sorrowful I didn’t understand fully what was going on with your cancer.

–wish I had been there with you the moment you passed away. I was home. I was too young and naïve, just in my room.

–I hate that I didn’t spend more time with you at home the year before your death.

–days after your death I went back to school. Someone I didn’t know told me they were sorry for my loss. I just smiled, pretending nothing was wrong because I was too awkward and startled and in shock of what they were saying. I was trying to cope. They didn’t understand.

–I read all your journals.

–The day you died I went into your room to say goodbye, I reached out to hold your hand and it was cold, I quickly retracted it because I was so frightened. That was a true confrontation of death.

“I’m sorry to burden you with this sadness,” Miranda adds. “I sat here planning to write about love, but a lost love came through. I guess that’s what these journals of Castro Cabin are for: intimacy, thoughts that have been hidden, and the security of writing to a stranger.”

*

Guests devise various ways of addressing the strangers who’ll prop themselves on the same double bed in Castro Cabin to read their reflections. Maybe these future readers will arrive tomorrow. Maybe 15 or 20 years from now. Maybe they’ll be first-timers, new to Deetjen’s, who’ll discover by accident the cache of journals in the bedside table, or perhaps they’ll be “repeat offenders,” as many seasoned guests call themselves, who’ll make a beeline for these intimate volumes, like me, as soon as they unpack their bags and switch on the heat. Some visitors preface their journal entries with a salutation: “Hello,” “To anyone searching for the ultimate high,” “To Dick and his beloved Mary Grace regarding Dick’s entry of 8/1/2001,” “Hi!,” “Dear Castros,” “Dear Deetjen’s,” “To all who share this wonderful place and some of themselves,” “Dear future guests of Castro Cabin,” “Hello, fellow Castro Cabin-ers,” “Lord,” “Hey there,” “Dear Reader,” “Fellow Big Sur Visitor,” “Deetjen’s!,” “Hello Guests,” “Greetings!,” “Dear Fellow Traveler.” Others conceive of their entries as self-dialogues rather than epistles, forgoing a formal address. One entry waits, mostly blank, save for the date (June 30, 1994) and a single piece of rose-pink thread embroidered into the shape of an S.

*

“There seem to be four types of entries in these books,” Captain Unlucky and Princess Scatterbrain write in one of the cabin’s journals (June 26, 2006):

1. Flowery lovemaking prose
2. Drawings
3. Recommended sights in Big Sur
4. Genuine, earnest recollections

Some visitors’ entries seem perfunctory, an afterthought, as if they hadn’t managed to absorb the character of the journals at all or dashed off a few sentences five minutes before checkout. Others—honeymooners, anniversary-celebrators—leave ecstatic, idealized, and fairly generic homages to their lovers, which I speed-read or skip to get to the deeper, more particularized reflections. I’ve noticed that the nature of a journal’s first entry often affects the rest to come. If the debut page begins “Stayed for two nights and had a great time,” the following entry often conforms to the conventional “guest book” genre: a note of thanks that’s breezy and brief. If a journal’s initial entry contains idiosyncratic or startling revelations, however, the next guest often assumes an intimate tone and attempts to reach a more meditative, reflective depth: “What is the date? Does it matter? Not here.”

*

“Here build your homes for good,” Walt Whitman writes in his poem “Song of the Redwood-Trees,” “establish here, these areas entire, lands of the Western shore…” According to the writer and photographer Anita Alan, in her book Big Sur Inn: The Deetjen Legacy, Helmuth Deetjen loved poetry and read it in four languages. He felt summoned by Whitman’s words and left Norway in the late 1920s for that “flashing and golden pageant of California.” Born in Bergen, Hordaland County, in 1892, to a Norwegian mother and German father, a wealthy tobacco merchant and 33rd degree Mason, Helmuth initially settled in Carmel, California, 20 miles north of Big Sur. He worked as a builder, becoming a handyman for his future wife Helen Haight, who was born in Georgia in 1889 and moved to California’s Central Coast in the early Jazz Age. In Carmel, Helmuth also befriended the famously misanthropic poet Robinson Jeffers. After moving to Big Sur, Alan notes, Helmuth would bring a wreath of woven albino redwood foliage each Christmas as a gift for Jeffers, because of the poet’s fascination with the anomalous white tree.

During the 1950s Helmuth and Helen kept a single “guest book” on the coffee bar in the Inn’s reception area, so visitors could leave notes of thanks to the innkeepers (known to guests and staff as “Grandma and Grandpa”) or quick impressions of their adventures in Big Sur. Journalist Jessica Lustig describes the evolution of the guests’ entries in her article “Books of Revelation,” from The New York Times Style Magazine (September 20, 2010):

By the summer of 1960, visitors were scrawling “thanks for all the cosmic bliss” and “dharma bums forever”; by ’62, “really swings!”; by ’63, “real beat place we stumbled upon.” Deetjen’s became known as a way station where one tuned in to freaky frequencies, if one had a taste for that sort of thing. “This place offers one great vibes,” wrote a visitor in 1978, amid paeans to mushrooms, astrology and chanting—and it wasn’t just the vibes that were great. People began to recount how they’d experienced “energy,” “healing,” self-realization—and steam-up-the-windows sex.

*

Along with these increasingly personal testimonies, visitors during the 1960s and 70s also began leaving behind gifts, mementos, or other markers of their journey through Big Sur: inscribed books, letters scrawled on the backs of framed pictures, notes or poems folded and stuffed in a teapot. According to Alan, guests began bringing journals of various shapes and sizes and leaving them in their rooms, for other visitors to enjoy. At some point toward the end of the 1970s, each room at Deetjen’s contained an archive of journals unique to that cabin and its former inhabitants, the current volume waiting on top of the dresser, bookmarked with a ribbon.

*

“It’s hard to believe (and heartening) that ordinary people have so much to say upon presentation with a blank page in the woods,” writes Monica (September 25-27, 1998), in one of Castro Cabin’s journals.

“Reading some of the previous guests’ entries,” Alex notes (March 26, 2007), “makes me realize I’m part of a special group of people now.”

*

The entries I find the most captivating range in style and subject, though all of the ones to which I return exhibit a quality of candid warmth and a willingness to risk exposing one’s vulnerabilities or contradictions on the page—to circle, trouble, or confront some human wonder. The “true confessors,” Gore Vidal suggests, “have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one’s failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.”

Joanne, a charmingly neurotic woman raised Catholic in Amish country who keeps referring to her partner as “my hon-bun,” confesses her belief that other guests at Deetjen’s keep gawking at her, wondering if she’s just had sex (June 29, 1995). She scours Castro Cabin’s journals, hoping to find a few dirty drawings or lascivious tidbits: “Lots of God and kids. And that’s great. The lack of sex talk (not to mention illustrations) is an observation, not a judgment.” Joanne’s bewilderment about the body and sexuality permeates her stay in Big Sur, where she and her hon-bun encounter a photographer with a tripod taking pictures of a naked woman posing on the beach. “She was draped over some rocks with her butt in the air,” Joanne writes. “I aspire to that degree of comfort with my person,” she muses, “although maybe I can be excused because I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania… around the Amish and other assorted German types. They are a rigid crew.”

The self-dubbed sage “Erica the Wise” (February 11, 2001) writes of her bodily insecurities, too, as she opens a bottle of red wine and begins a meditation on aging that’s by turns plaintive and wry, unguarded and funny: “I turned 48 and looked in the mirror and said ‘Who is this old woman… what happened to the beautiful Erica with the slim hips and long brown hair?’” Erica came to Big Sur to heal, she says—to practice yoga and read about “what the White Man has to say about finding the ‘inner self.’” “I have come to realize,” she writes, “I am just me, Erica—a black woman with large hips and an even larger heart. And if Jerry doesn’t recognize that or honor that after 23 years of my own physical sacrifice then let him continue his affairs with AT&T and State Farm. He will get his!!!”

*

Many guests compose original poems for Deetjen’s journals, even if they haven’t written any since high school. Most of the poems tend toward the descriptive-meditative lyric, populated with majestic redwoods, giddy lovers, and a “babbling brook.” Quite a few of them take on the flavor, if not the line breaks or syllabic count, of the Japanese haiku. Hank and Nancy write: “The trees are peeking at us through the skylight—that’s ok—we’re watching you, too, old friends” (July 20-23, 1998). Andrea evokes the groan of raindrops on the cabin’s roof, which “reminded me of / an old, creaky leather jacket I used to wear” (January 18, 1999). Her poem’s sinuous and whimsical final line: “The world is full of sweet beasts.”

*

Kymberly expected to find peacefulness and restorative seascapes during her stay in Castro Cabin (October 13, 1995). “What I didn’t expect,” Kymberly confides, “was to have my faith in humanity restored by a guest journal.” “I came here to clear my mind—instead it is full,” she writes. “I came here to escape from people—instead I have found them.”

“Thanks to everyone who wrote in these journals,” Carl writes (November 8, 2011), “your words helped restore my faith in humanity.”

“I’ve been inspired by the words of total strangers,” notes Chase (March 3, 2012), “people I’ll never meet, faces I’ll never place.”

*

If guests at Deetjen’s could access Wi-Fi or peck away at cell phones in their cabins, perhaps fewer people would spend hours curled up with the journals. (The isolation from the breaking-news feed is total: Berto, for instance, who stayed at Deetjen’s on September 11, 2001, mentions only cheese and wine and Castro Cabin’s cozy front porch.) It’s become commonplace to ruminate on the ways social media estrange us, or how emails confound style and epistolary grace. But each time I visit Deetjen’s I’m reminded of the extraordinarily deep connections I feel with these other vulnerable, wondering pilgrims. I see their ropy cursive, their off-kilter printing, their gestural sketches and I touch the pages with my hand. None of which I could do at my computer screen. None of which has anything to do with humble-brags, polemical rants, or gratuitous selfies. Here, there’s a tangible space—nine-by-twenty, creekside—for the self to slowly unfold.

*

Instead of the Barbara Kingsolver novel she’d brought with her to Deetjen’s, Sharon reached for a journal and began to read aloud to her new husband as they lay in bed. Her tears soon alarmed her partner. “My husband suggested I stop reading,” Sharon writes (August 2, 2001). “Where he understands the tears as pain,” she notes, “I am heartened and opened like my everyday life does not seem to inspire. I say no, I can’t stop now. It feels good to feel! Even in sorrow for Dick, or joy for Kimberly…”

I lay in that same bed in Castro Cabin, occasionally reading selections aloud to David. The most rewarding aspect of spending time with Deetjen’s journals lies in discovering a powerful voice or uniquely striking vignette. Charlie’s entry (November 9, 1995) seems fairly ordinary at first—he “stepped out of [his] myopic job search and into the big picture”—before he reveals that his friend Ian has been diagnosed with an inoperable malignant brain tumor. Charlie brings his five-month-old son with him to meet Ian for brunch, lifting the baby toward his sick friend as if to conjure a miracle. “I raised my cherub and rested him on Ian’s left lobe,” Charlie writes, “the promise of life!” “My son now lies next to me,” Charlie continues:

naked and squirming. My beautiful wife next to me to the left, pumping milk in the miniature kingdom of the Castro Cabin. I dedicate this page and a half of chicken scratch to my family, my friend Ian, and strangers unknown. May we all live our lives with the hopefulness of a five-month-old and the clarity and purpose of a young man with months to live.

*

Not all of the most moving entries foreground hopefulness or radiate a hard-earned awe. Maureen recounts, with a droll self-awareness, her botched “Vision-Quest” to Big Sur with her friend Sheilagh (unspecified day and month, 1994). The women decide to stay at Deetjen’s, since some friends had effused about the transformative experience of reading the journals—how the entries “helped them with their own problems and made them feel less alone with them.” Instead, Maureen quips, “Sheilagh keeps singing the blues while I’m trying to meditate.” Late at night they drive 12 miles south of Big Sur to the cliff-side hot springs at Esalen, taking advantage of the healing retreat’s free public night bathing between one and 3am, and pull into the parking lot. Sheilagh grows uneasy as the young man parked next to them gets out of his car and begins to lean on its hood:

She starts to panic and says to me that this person is going to bother us, she can feel it in her bones.

With a shaking feeling in my stomach and a growing annoyance I try and persuade her to overlook the situation. We end up shouting at each other in a very “unvisionary” way. She tells me that I scare her, that I have been cruel in not giving validity to her fears… Realizing that the situation was out of my control we drove back to Deetjen’s, her sobbing next to me, me feeling the terrible loss of something untouched and sacred in our friendship.

“I’ve woken up facing the wrong way in the feather-bed this morning,” Maureen writes, “she has gone off to breakfast, I’m thinking of what I can say that can make us what we were before.”

*

“After reading so many of these deeply personal pages,” M. Sullivan writes (February, 5, 1999), “I am overwhelmed by the common thread of humanity passing through this tiny one room shack in the middle of nowhere.”

“Friday was awful,” Jan declares (July 16, 2011). “Full of stress, arguments and mean people. I wondered about our humanity. By Saturday things [ ] seemed to [have] dramatically improved.” “I’m not wondering about humanity,” Jan adds, “not after reading these stories.”

*

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the word “journal” appears in late Middle English and originally denoted a book that contained the appointed times of daily prayers. The noun comes from the Old French, jurnal, which derives from the late Latin diurnalis (“daily”).

A number of the entries in Deetjen’s journals evoke the wishful earnestness or hushed entreaties of a prayer, and they repeatedly examine a moment of transformation or luminous epiphany that takes place on a particular day. “Today is my first day out of Heroin detox,” begins a man from Los Angeles whose ambiguous initials I’ve guessed spell M.D. (October 29, 2000). “My wife, the only one who is still standing by me after this two year hellish odyssey,” M.D. writes, “suggested we drive home. She—angry, but willing to forgive. Me—exhausted, ashamed. Nightfall, pouring rain, time to stop. One cabin left here @ Deetjens.” M.D. feels estranged from the dogma of his detox program, which assumes the existence of an omnipotent God. “I’m fighting the rehab thing hard,” M.D. admits:

because as an atheist, I find AA offensive. So I’m just in a daze, wondering what will happen to my life back in LA-LA-Land.

Then it happens. I stepped outside, wandered down the street, saw & smelled the ocean. There is no God, I’ll say this till I die, but after seeing Big Sur on a rainy misty morning, maybe I am getting, starting to get, a sense of what is meant by a higher power.

*

Even I find myself, like M.D., loosening my reflexive skepticism at Deetjen’s, losing a bit of my irony. Outside of Big Sur, in my ordinary life, I’d never use the phrase “totem animal,” for example, without making a wisecrack about the three-toed sloth. Yet after spotting so many Steller’s jays—those massive, meaty blue jays with black rockabilly pompadours—while hiking with David, I find myself writing in Deetjen’s journal, clearly regurgitating Annie Dillard’s treatise on her weasel (May 18, 2016):

I know this next action will seem silly, but I bought a carved wooden Steller’s jay posed on a branch, with a brass bell hanging from a black leather cord because I’ve decided that fierce arrow of electric blue & charcoal should be my totem animal. “These are my goddamn crumbs,” the Steller’s jay seems to say each time they alight near us. They are some badass, motivated avians. I was born in the year of the monkey, but this one will be the year of the Steller’s jay: grace & curiosity & movement toward desire with an acute & pointed focus.

Who is this blue jay-gazing vision-quester, this Dillard ripper-offer, this grotesque sentimentalist? And since when do I allude to the Chinese zodiac? Yet I’ve noticed that many guests seek similar “signs” arising from Big Sur’s forests. Kathleen writes of her surprise encounter with a lost pet (April 16, 2004):

Yesterday, while walking on the grounds, a parrot landed nearby, and came to me. It was tame. It climbed on my hand, then my arm. Someone from the Inn came, and I gave her the parrot, who appeared to have been frightened on its own in the wild. Later, I was told that the owner had been found, and they were so glad to find their beloved fly away parrot. I ask myself, why me? Is this a sign of something? Yesterday, a mantra kept repeating itself in my mind—stay—this is now your home. My rational mind dismisses this as crazy, and my heart says, “Is it?”

*

Jennifer reflects on her visit to Castro Cabin with her four-year-old son, Luke (September 25, 2006), and their surprise exchange with a New Age acolyte. The woman recognizes Luke as a precocious “Indigo child,” one of the psychic Nancy Ann Tappe’s personality types (categorized according to the synesthesic hue of the child’s “aura”), who possesses an acute memory, a desire to live instinctually, “unusually large, clear eyes,” and will supposedly lead civilization into the new millennium. (Tappe’s book Understanding Your Life Through Color appeared in 1982.) “I have wished we had that special person here with us to complete our family,” Jennifer writes of Luke’s absent father:

but as today came to a close, I realize that this is our family; he is my little man. He is such an old soul. A woman at the Phoenix gift shop today stopped us and started crying and said that he was an “Indigo child.” Have to look that one up, but I’m sure I have a good idea. His eyes look so experienced and wise… The other day he asked me (again) about death and what happens to us—I told him I wasn’t exactly sure, but that I’d be there waiting or be fast behind him.

*

I’ve noticed that the visitors who mention particular journal entries by other guests tend to recall Dick’s reflection (August 1, 2001), in which he mourns his wife, M.G., of 48-and-a-half years. They’d been coming to Deetjen’s together since 1955, Dick said, and M.G. had died suddenly during their vacation in Rome the previous May. “This visit has been difficult,” Dick writes, “for every place I go was many times with her. There is a tightening of the chest and tears to come.” Dick brings with him a yellow rose, M.G.’s favorite flower, and points guests toward the journal that contains her final entry (October 22, 1997), urging them to read her words. “We came to Deetjen’s almost 43 years ago,” M.G. writes:

meeting Grandpa, and the warmest and most welcoming Grandma, who then spent most of her days propped up in bed, dispensing cheer and advice. We instantly fell under her spell, and remained here a few days with our two year old, enjoying the quiet unspoiled beauty around us. We have since raised five children with grandchildren still coming, been almost all around the world and lived through more careers than I even came to remember. It is hard to believe that so many years have passed since we first visited this blessed spot.

As for the young lovers who have written of their joyous happiness—do become “best friends” and your love will last forever!

Beneath this last sentence Dick taped two photographs (one of M.G. posing in front of the ocean, one of both of them standing on the beach—his arm around her shoulders) and a prayer card from her funeral, turning the journal page into a memorial, an act I find both moving and quite a bit eerie. “Will I come here again,” Dick wonders in his entry. “Probably not. With all its beauty the Big Sur will only painfully remind me of her.”

*

Whereas Dick anticipated the acute and elegiac character of his solo stay at Castro Cabin, grief seems to sneak up abruptly on other guests. “Today my mother gave me a birthday card from my deceased Dad,” Kathleen writes (November 21, 1995), “which he had prepared for me knowing that he was dying of cancer.” “Reading his card today,” she continues:

and especially his shaky handwritten words “and I’m real proud of you. –Love Dad” threw me into tears—tears at lunch with Mom in San Luis Obispo and tears over dinner in Deetjen’s dining room with my man. The grief of missing him just poured out here in front of the warm fireplace with the waiter Bob being so gracious and my man being so patient & supportive as I cried over cheesecake. I had no idea all this would gush forth today, especially tonight.

Some guests divine the presence of the dead through engaging with tangible relics of their vanished voices. “Our cousin Lauren brought a tape cassette she found when cleaning out Grandma Sylvia’s things after she died,” Sara recounts (December 30, 2013). “We listened to it last night,” she writes:

on an old Walkman hooked up to some speakers. I know people come here to escape electronics, and we savor the time without “service” but I have to say, it was very serene, and peaceful, all 8 of us huddled around this little BOSE speaker, listening to the faraway voices of a grandfather long gone, a grandmother recently gone, and child versions of my husband and sister in law. She was trying to be greedy with some candy and Grandpa was teaching him to barter and trade with her. I realized I don’t remember the sound of my Grandfather’s voice at all. I guess I can hear it a little in my own parents’ voices but it’s not the same. Everyone should make and save some recordings. We are lucky Lauren took the time to listen to all the tapes because of course they were not labeled! No one ever properly labeled cassettes!

*

“It’s funny what happens once you have been moved so deeply by so many people’s entries,” the solo visitor O. writes as she sits on Castro Cabin’s front porch in the early morning, “once you stop being aware of how many tears are squeaking their way from your eyes and making your coffee salty.” “You stop caring what you many have to say,” O. observes:

stop caring if it’s profound or poetic enough to grace these pages. Instead you’re driven by something deeper than intellect. You know that to pick up this Deetjen’s pen and flip to the next empty page, and to share anything—your situation in life, details of your journey, a poem or picture, or just a kind wish to a future reader—is tapping into the very well from which springs the magic of Deetjen’s.

O. shares her own story, describing her “state of near-perpetual longing” for her fiancé Jacques, who lives in Cape Town, South Africa. A week after O. and Jacques became engaged, seven months earlier, they spent a night at Deetjen’s, a place that now helps her feel close to him. O. hopes her “solo getaway” to Big Sur will be “a sort of vision-quest” to help her reflect on and withstand their separation. “The current phase of our relationship is marked by a tone of waiting,” O. writes:

Waiting to be able to live together, to be together. Trudging through the headache of visas, regulations, governments, immigration lawyers and endless paperwork. All things that frankly should never enter the picture when LOVE is involved. But spending time in girlish fantasy about our someday-wedding sure helps to pass the time and soothe the lonely heart. So I pull up to Castro Canyon and what greets me but a wedding—intimate and breathtaking, happening in this very creek! It was quite overwhelming to sit, a stranger and accidental guest, on the deck of the cabin with a glass of wine, and listen to the touching handwritten vows of the young bride and groom as they began their lives as partners, all the while feeling the spirit of my faraway love beside me, drinking his favorite kind of Malbec, hearing the stream and the birds in a way only he has ever taught me to be able to do.

*

“What I love the most about Big Sur,” writes J.C. (January 1, 2016), “is that it cradles you. If you are heartbroken or madly in love, or somewhere in the middle—it takes you into its arms and you are safe…”

*

David and I first came to Deetjen’s in March of 2012, nine months after we’d eloped. Compared to our more recent entries, the initial one seems embarrassingly fanciful and idealistic: a collaborative poem about a couple lying in bed, musing on the view and listening to the rain. At first I didn’t recognize our poem (March 12, 2012) because the title was printed in David’s handwriting and the stanza he’d composed came first. “‘The View from Castro Cabin’—pretty good title, for a newbie,” I thought, moving along to David’s first line: “The view from Castro Cabin looks in all directions.” I then glanced at the second stanza, realizing it was in a different handwriting, and recognized my own scrawl and its double-story lower-case “a.” I yelped, waving the journal at David. Although we’re both poets and regularly seek the other’s advice on a draft, David and I don’t ever write poems together outside of Deetjen’s. David often collaborates with photographers, composers, printmakers, jazz musicians, painters, and singers, while I’d abandoned the only serious joint project I’d ever attempted: the libretto for a New Music opera based on the life and work of Sylvia Plath. At Deetjen’s, however, I didn’t need to worry about the work being perfect or about stifling my impatience as I waited for the composer to apply for another grant or finally set one of my duets. If I drummed up a colorful image or charged turn of phrase, then my lines would amuse or intrigue a future guest.

I yelped in surprise at finding a subsequent entry of ours, too. I thought David and I had stayed in Castro Cabin only two years earlier, but three had passed. I’d ransacked the wrong journal (2014), excited to uncover the entry and confused as to why it had apparently vanished. Did someone rip out the pages and take them? I’d noticed, here and there, a rare torn page. A couple of hours before we checked out to drive to the airport in Monterey, I picked up a journal from 2013—one I’d already read—and flipped to our entry. The pages must’ve gotten stuck together the night before. Now we could revisit our creation: a two-page spread, formatted in columns, meant to evoke the front page of a newspaper. I’d titled it The Morning Wood: News from the Love Shack and drew a few phallic redwoods to complete the logo. One of our columns features a limerick:

There once were two guests at the Castro
Who said, “Man, time sure does move fast-o,”
So they packed up their gear,
Saying, “See you next year!”
And drove off through the hills green as pesto.

Some of our headlines make in-jokes with other visitors, drawing on shared experiences: “Helmuth: Name of Deetjen’s Founder & Your New Email Password” or “God, Buddha, Allah, and Krishna Agree: Pfeiffer Beach Is a Site of ‘Stunning Badassery.’” Our advice columns included “Ask Fabio the Cat” and “Hung Like a Redwood: A Sex Column.” One cartoon features a birds-eye sketch of Castro Cabin, with a guest’s bare butt-cheeks visible beneath the skylight and two squirrel-voyeurs peering at the spectacle, one of whom says to the other: “Now, that’s what I call a full moon!”

This middle entry, two years into our marriage, seems a lot more like us than our initial poem: cheerfully potty-mouthed, impish, and resourceful. The Morning Wood also turns toward Castro Cabin’s future guests and reinforces the kinship that arises from our shared experiences at Deetjen’s. The final entry during our most recent stay—written by me—drops the hammy doggerel and examines the nature of Castro Cabin’s journals, branching into intertextual references as I mention particular visitors by name and the corresponding dates of their entries, as if to curate a selection for future readers: Miranda, Joanne, Andrea, Charlie, Erica the Wise.

“I’ve been struggling to come up with a name that characterizes the collective voice and cumulative impact of these journal entries,” I write (May 19, 2016):

but “collective voice” seems inadequate—too “loud” & too homogenous for these singular meditations, confessions, poems, impressions, rants, lovelorn testimonies, or bittersweet litanies. I think it’ll take me a while to find the phrase that gets it right, so, for now, maybe we’ll go with “shared dialect of reactive intimacy” arising from our common cabin.

*

Each time I think of my three visits to Big Sur, the scale of my recollections surprises me. It’s not the vast and craggy coastline off Highway 1 that comes to mind. Not the dank, sweet cathedrals of ancient redwoods. Not even the full horseshoe-sprawl of Deetjen’s Norwegian fairy tale as its cabin roofs slant through the dusky grove. It’s Miranda secretly eating dog biscuits in the bathroom or reckoning with her childhood self, remembering her mother’s cold hand. And it’s Charlie raising his baby to Ian’s forehead, as if to cure his friend’s brain tumor. It’s Andrea’s metaphor of the rain that recalls her old leather jacket’s creaks, or it’s Joanne and Erica the Wise who each speak of the body’s yearnings, its bristling vulnerability.

“I could go on celebrating & appreciating the diverse & dazzling collection of shared experiences,” I write toward the end of my last entry:

but I’ll wrap things up on this—my last night in Castro Cabin (for this third stay, anyway). I like how my first entry a few days ago included breezy poems meant to amuse, while my second entry grew more interior & candid, and my final one turned outward & toward the other Castro Cabineers. Feels like an apt trajectory!

I’ll close with a list of other folks’ names for this cabin: Farewell, Love Shack, Tool Shed, Doll House, Cabin of Dreams, Cabinet. Until next time, Castro Cabin, I’ll be thinking of your modest frame & all the vast & expansive stories you contain.