Esalen Institute

I wrote about this place at the very moment it was becoming itself. The Esselen people knew these hot springs for centuries. Taki-tak, they called it, the place of healing.

In 1880 a Monterey man named Tom Slate, so bent with arthritis he was carried in on a litter, soaked in the waters, and six months later walked out on his own legs. He homesteaded the point, and old-timers said Slate's Hot Springs ever after. When I wrote it up, it was a lodge famous for its Monday night smorgasbord, and I noted, almost in passing, that seminars had begun that spring.

Professors, painters, poets. Those seminars became the Esalen Institute, where a great deal of what the world means by the word Californian was worked out. You come as a guest or not at all.

That means a workshop, a few days of what they call a self-guided exploration, or a massage by reservation, and any of these gets you the cliff, the garden, the lodge, and the hot baths on the edge of the sea, in the same water Tom Slate soaked in. Plan it before you leave home. But even driving past, you are driving past centuries of the place of healing.