Gorda

Gorda. A store, a restaurant, cottages, and the dearest gasoline on the coast, which nobody who has run dry between here and Big Sur begrudges. In 1886 two of the Plaskett family's ore mills were landed at Point Gorda.

My husband's people, freighting machinery ashore through the surf for the gold country in the hills just inland. Everything this coast owned came over the water or over a trail. The resort here is Gorda Springs, and it is the last bed for a long way in either direction.

There are cottages and houses along the bluff, each its own: the Rock House with two bedrooms and a wood fire, the Redwood House for two, the Creek House, the Palm House, most with kitchens, and every one of them looking at the ocean. The restaurant by the road serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, and there is an espresso bar and a store for whatever you forgot, and showers and a laundry, the only ones for the campers at Kirk Creek and Plaskett Creek. From the lawn in winter you can watch the grey whales pass on their way south, and in spring on their way back with the calves.

Gorda began as a café. When the coast road was finished in 1937, John and Lillian Evans, of the Evans ranches to the south, opened the Gorda Café and Service Station on sixty acres by the point and ran it themselves until 1940; everything here grew from that. Book ahead.

Gorda fills up when the coast does. A word about the mail, because the coast has always run on it. The post office that opened in 1890 in Byron Plaskett's own house above Jade Cove was Plaskett, California, though the records often wrote it down as Gorda, which was close, and my husband Ed, born in that house, is recorded as born at Gorda for the same reason.

Billy Plaskett was the first postmaster, and Byron held the contract to carry the mail from Gorda to Jolon and back, twice a week, rain or shine, for seventeen years, with his sons Ed and Lawson helping. The boys told of swimming the icy rivers in winter with the pack mule, and of a mule rolling over in the stream with the whole coast's letters on its back. Old George Ames carried it with them to the end of the contract.

On the map the place is still Plaskett, California. In my last years the mail came in a van driven by Ed Culver of Pacific Grove, the first of the modern mailmen: a rolling store that filled your grocery order, cashed your check and carried your child to town, driven by a man who played bass viol in the Monterey County Symphony, with his wife Darlene driving the route on concert nights. My grandson rode with him to Monterey many times.

And it is the same coast today. When the fires of 2026 shut the road, the Big Sur postmaster, Andrew, kept the coast's mail safe under the Monterey post office and had it carried south of the fire line twice a week, and the day the road opened the mail came down it. The coast said thank you, out loud.

In those years Gorda belonged to Luneta Thelen, a very good friend of mine: the cafe, the service station and the cottages were hers. She was a miner too. I wrote her up in 1960 with four claims on the north side of Willow Creek, the old Logwood, that Joe Logwood located in the nineties below the Goodrich, and the Blackbird, the Buzzard and the Crow, which she bought from Fred Vaugh.

A claim had to be worked to be kept, the law said so, and as a very young boy my grandson went up with her people to clear brush around the mines so the claims would stand. He was a happy participant, he says, and he still is when he tells it.