Carmel Valley: Of Young Men and Motorcycles

This article was originally published in City Bike magazine. 

May your heart always be joyful and may your song always be sung. May you stay forever young. –Bob Dylan

In the early 1960s, Carmel, California, was sanctuary to a Bohemian assortment of singers and artists that would soon leave an indelible mark on American culture. The protest singer Joan Baez had taken up residence on a rocky outcropping overlooking the Pacific, in the Carmel Highlands. There, she was joined by her lover, a precocious young singer by the name of Bob Dylan. Nearby, her sister Mimi, enchantingly beautiful at just 17, had rented a cabin with her new husband:  singer, novelist and poet Richard Fariña.

It was a time of remarkable potential, the folk music scene just then unfolding like a chrysalis, taking an entire generation on its wings.

It’s not hard to imagine Dylan, the Baez sisters, and Fariña plying the roads of Carmel and the Big Sur coast, prior to the current tourist inundation, while laying the groundwork for 50 years of folk music in America (an epoch chronicled in David Hajdu’s  book, “Positively 4^th Street”). In the spring of 1966, it seemed almost anything was possible.

They could have no way of knowing what the next few months would bring.

Aura of Invincibility

In recent years Fariña had played music with Pete Seeger and Dylan. He had toured and lived in Europe, and played and recited poetry in the creative cauldron of Greenwich Village, New York. He had married (after 18 days), and quickly divorced famed folk singer Carolyn Hester. Now, married to the lovely Mimi Baez, and armed with a penchant for self promotion, he found himself nestled among the cultural iconoclasts of the day.

But while he had been cavorting with the famous, as of late, Fariña had also been facing demons. Deep down, he was bitterly envious of Dylan’s soaring success on a world stage, and the ease with which he wrote songs—a great font of creativity that continues to this day. Moreover, Fariña had struggled for years to publish his novel, “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me,” a fantastical fiction that stylistically resembled the work of his college friend Thomas Pynchon, author of “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

After years of rewrites and petty squabbles with publishers, Fariña’s great project finally came to fruition in 1965, when Random House agreed to publish the work. With this news, and the undying support of his young wife, Fariña was positively flying. A book signing was organized to celebrate the great event, at the now-defunct Thunderbird Bookstore in the Barnyard Shopping Center, at the mouth of Carmel Valley. The date: April 30, 1966—his young wife’s 21^st birthday.

It’s easy to envision Fariña, then in his 20s, heady with the publication of his new book, and intimate with some of the world’s most famous and influential artists, conducting himself with the certain aura of invincibility that accompanies youth and accomplishment.

The event started in the afternoon. There is a haunting image of Richard and Mimi Fariña, taken on a sunny deck outside the Thunderbird. She seems proud, yet strangely skeptical, as if his new trajectory in life couldn’t quite be possible, or if she was witnessing some implausible hubris.

For his part, Fariña is looking skyward, slightly askance, as if he knew some strange visitation was in the offing. It was.

Zoom

After the intoxicating experience of the book signing, and with another one planned in San Francisco the next day, Fariña was primed for adventure. According to Hajdu, each book he signed at the Thunderbird had been accompanied by this simple inscription: Zoom.

After the signing, he and Mimi both attended a party, in honor of the book and his wife’s birthday, a few miles up the valley. A friend, Willie Hinds, then studying at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, had arrived on a new, red Harley-Davidson Sporster. Fariña imagined that a fast ride on that beautiful road would be the perfect capstone to his day—a fitting harbinger of the great future that lay before him.

One can only imagine the mental state of the driver of the new Harley-Davidson, Hinds, infected with the enthusiasm of his famous passenger and the power of what was then one of the fastest motorcycles on the road (if a bit ill-handling), on one of the best motorcycle roads in America.

Did Fariña—in his unbridled enthusiasm—urge him on, the pair conspiring toward speeds that made the big bike weave and groan in complaint? Or was it all Hinds, the driver?

It’s impossible to know, but within half an hour, according to Hajdu, sirens could be heard in the distance. They had taken a corner too fast. Or, Fariña was fighting Hinds in the corner, leaning the opposite way, a common urge of self preservation that actually has the opposite effect, making the bike nearly unmanageable for the driver, like an unwieldy snake.

Whatever the cause, the bike tumbled off into a vineyard, at an estimated 90 mph. Hinds was badly hurt, but survived. Fariña, the passenger, was not so lucky. Unhelmeted, he died instantly of massive head and internal injuries.  He was just 26.

When Mimi Fariña returned to the home on Mount Devon Road in the Carmel Highlands days later, she discovered that Fariña had set out a gift and card for his young wife, trying to make amends for the fact that he had forgotten her birthday.

Life at the Apex

I find myself fascinated by these events, perhaps because of the small ways in which my own life intersects with that of the man I never knew and have only read about. Like Fariña, I also know the Carmel Valley—I would even say intimately—from the seat of a motorcycle. Like Fariña, I have also written books—though not nearly as grand in scope—and I know the elation that comes with taking the first copy in hand, and the likelihood that one might feel just a little invincible, and prone to excess—vulnerable to the certain opiates of speed and two wheels.

Like Fariña, I have reveled in the sinuous curves of that road, and have even stiffened with the anticipation of a fall which—fortunately for me—never came. It seems every California motorcyclist knows that road, and has scraped hard parts trying to execute a perfect line among its hundreds of turns. From the ocean, it gently courses through the open valley, then tightens to a thin rope past Carmel Valley Village. In spring, the pastures reveal dizzying expanses of wildflowers. It then passes the tortuous road to the famed Tassajara Zen Center, established by the groundbreaking monk Shunryu Suzuki, author of the seminal book of Zen in America, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.” Eventually the road snakes its way to Cahoon Summit, before plunging down through a delectable series of decreasing-radius turns to Arroyo Seco, a ride of almost 50 miles. I have done it dozens of times, and never tire of it. I am so fond of the ride that I even wrote an article about it, published in “Rider” magazine.

There are those who have done analyses of the location of Fariña’s accident, calculating the exact patch of road just outside the village, a series of left/right decreasing-radius turns, bordered by a low stone wall. It’s a place that has nearly caught me out on occasion, during my own riding. Was that the spot? Another more commonly accepted account puts the accident site a few miles from the ocean, at a point called Steinbeck’s Pool. This section, with its long, sweeping curves in an open valley, looks to be nothing either spectacular or particularly challenging for a motorcyclist. However, when traveling at an estimated 90 mph, with a passenger fighting to keep the big bike upright, any curve is dangerous.

Is it an obsession? A desire to avoid the same fate? Or a little of both? It is in any case an investigation borne of necessity—a compulsion, even. It lingers in the mind, like a recurring dream.

All motorcyclists know these thoughts. We ride these roads, we know the quality of the pavement, the turns, the braking points, and the gear required to accelerate cleanly out of each apex. When done right, it’s a thing of beauty, poetry. When done incorrectly, or in haste, it’s a mess, an abomination, a source of embarrassment. And maybe death.

Postcript

Richard Fariña is buried in the Monterey City Cemetery, which I view every morning over my right shoulder, while riding to work. His small, flat stone is emblazoned with a peace sign. Judy Collins sang at his funeral. Mimi Fariña died of cancer in 2001. Her sister, Joan Baez, built a home on Miramonte Road, not far from the spot where her brother-in-law died.

Richard and Mimi Fariña’s house on Mount Devon Road is still there (and is shown on this page): a low, flat structure that’s unspectacular in comparison to the multi-million dollar estates that now surround it. It nonetheless still  commands a striking view of the rocky coast, and it’s easy to see how it would impel the writing of any book, as it did for Fariña.

Dylan, the genius of his generation, seemed to have learned nothing from the tragic incident, if he was aware of it at all. In an ironic twist, just months later, he crashed his Triumph on a country road near Woodstock, New York. Afterward, he dropped from public view for years, though it has always been said that the accident merely served as an excuse to remove himself from the public eye, and that his injuries were not serious.

Such things happen,  sometimes at the absolute apex of your life. Or the moment becomes the apex of your life, simply because of what follows. Either way, you are remembered for it. And hopefully, for many other things. Richard will be.

 (David Hajdu photo)