Practical Demonkeeping Read Free

around the cove provided perfect fodder for his cows. The settlement, such as it was—two families and a hundred cows—went nameless until the 1890s, when the whalers came to town and christened it Harpooner’s Cove.
    With a cove to shelter their small whaling boats and the hills from which they could sight the migrating gray whales far out to sea, the whalers prospered and the village grew. For thirty years a greasy haze of death blew overhead from the five-hundred-gallon rendering pots where thousands of whales were boiled down to oil.
    When the whale population dwindled and electricity and kerosene became an alternative to whale oil, the whalers abandoned Harpooner’s Cove, leaving behind mountains of whale bone and the rusting hulks of their rendering kettles. To this day many of the town’s driveways are lined with the bleached arches of whale ribs, and even now, when the great gray whales pass, they rise out of the water a bit and cast a suspicious eye toward the little cove, as if expecting the slaughter to begin again.
    After the whalers left, the village survived on cattle ranching and the mining of mercury, which had been discovered in the nearby hills. The mercury ran out about the same time the coastal highway was completed through Big Sur , and Harpooner’s Cove became a tourist town.
    Passers-through who wanted a little piece of California’s burgeoning tourist industry but didn’t want to deal with the stress of life in San Francisco or Los Angeles, stopped and built motels, souvenir shops, restaurants, and real estate offices. The hills around Pine Cove were subdivided. Pine forests and pastures became ocean-view lots, sold for a song to tourists from
California
’s central valley who wanted to retire on the coast.
    Again the village grew, populated by retirees and young couples who eschewed the hustle of the city to raise their children in a quiet coastal town. Harpooner’s Cove became a village of the newly wed and the nearly dead.
    In the 1960s the young, environmentally conscious residents decided that the name Harpooner’s Cove hearkened back to a time of shame for the village and that the name Pine Cove was more appropriate to the quaint, bucolic image the town had come to depend on. And so, with the stroke of a pen and the posting of a sign—WELCOME TO PINE COVE, GATEWAY TO BIG SUR—history was whitewashed.
    The business district was confined to an eight-block section of
Cypress Street
, which ran parallel to the coast highway. Most of the buildings on Cypress sported facades of English Tudor half-timbering, which made Pine Cove an anomaly among the coastal communities of
California
with their predominantly Spanish-Moorish architecture. A few of the original structures still stood, and these, with their raw timbers and feel of the Old West, were a thorn in the side of the Chamber of Commerce, who played on the village’s English look to promote tourism.
    In a half-assed attempt at thematic consistency, several pseudo-authentic, Ole English restaurants opened along
Cypress Street
to lure tourists with the promise of tasteless English cuisine. (There had even been an attempt by one entrepreneur to establish an authentic English pizza place, but the enterprise was abandoned with the realization that boiled pizza lost most of its character.)
    Pine Cove’s locals avoided patronage of these restaurants with the duplicity of a Hindu cattle rancher: willing to reap the profits without sampling the product. Locals dined at the few, out-of-the-way cafes that were content with carving a niche out of the hometown market with good food and service rather than gouging an eye out of the swollen skull of the tourist market with overpriced, pretentious charm.
    The shops along
Cypress Street
were functional only in that they moved money from the pockets of the tourists into the local economy. From the standpoint of the villagers, there was nothing of practical use for sale in any of the stores. For the