New Camaldoli Hermitage

Just south of Lucia an open gateway on the mountain side of the road is the way up to the New Camaldoli Hermitage, the only foundation of its kind in America. Watch for the gate itself; in my day a mosaic sign stood there, the work of Louisa Jenkins of Partington Ridge, but it cannot be seen from the road and I would not promise it is still there. The road weaves up the mountain to thirty-one hundred feet, and around an abrupt turn the monastery lies before you in a little valley of redwoods.

The monks have kept their silence there since 1958. Before the monks it was the Dani place, and I wrote its history. Gabriel Dani settled that shelf in 1867, a thousand feet above the sea with redwood and tanbark oak on three sides, and raised fruit and garden for the whole countryside; he lost his right arm to a threshing machine in the Salinas Valley and worked on with the one so ably that everyone marveled.

Ten children, and two of them married Pfeiffers of Sycamore Canyon at Big Sur, so the two first families of this coast are one family further back. The Danis and the Plasketts were friends for generations. Albert Dani and my husband Ed were fast friends all their lives, and known to enjoy a shot of whiskey together at an age when their doctors would have said otherwise.

The monks sell fruitcake, and they will take a retreatant who books ahead. The gate is open to anyone who will drive the two miles up. The bookstore and gift shop at the top is open every day, and it is a good one: the monks' own fruitcake and date-nut cake, which they have baked and mailed all over the country for sixty years, honey, granola, cards, and books on the contemplative life.

The monks sing the hours in the chapel and a traveler may sit at the back. There are retreat rooms, each with a garden and a view straight down the mountain to the sea, but they book months out, and the rule is silence. Even if you have ten minutes, go up.

The view from the top is worth the road.