Lucia

Lucia is a cliff-top settlement that for generations was a store, a few cabins and a lodge above the Pacific, on land the Harlan family settled in the 1880s. The name is a girl's: Lucia Dani, a daughter of Gabriel Dani, whose place was the shelf above here where the Hermitage stands now. I wrote once that the view from the lodge drew thousands of guests a year, and the view has not gone anywhere.

The lodge still takes guests, but the store and restaurant burned in 2021 and are still being rebuilt, so there is no fuel and no meal here at the moment. The headland running out below is Lopez Point, named for early settlers I wrote about too. The cabins hang on the cliff a hundred yards north of where the store stood, ten of them, each with the whole Pacific in the window, and a bench on the terrace above the sea where you can sit with your coffee and the grab-and-go breakfast from the office.

Lucia was where you could always find abalone on the menu, breakfast, lunch or dinner, at a price. Bring your supper with you. The nearest meal is Gorda to the south or Nepenthe to the north.

The Harlans mean to rebuild, and the fifth generation is still at the desk. Lopez Point below keeps the name of Manuel Lopez, who came straight from Mexico about 1870 and built close to the sea just south of the point, on a flat that had been an Indian camp; the ground gave up mortars and spearheads for years. Eight children, all of them riders.

His daughter Marie, Natcha to everyone, rode in the rodeos and won her trophies at Salinas Big Week. The boys went out for fish with Wilbur Harlan in the rowboat he built himself of yellow pine from the high ridges and kept in the little cove by Harlan Rock, and when a big sea took the boat, Mr. Harlan, with infinite patience, built another.

I worked at the lodge myself, and so did a good many of the family in the summers, my grandson's cousin among them. One summer when my grandson was seven or eight, they sent him down the stairs behind the restaurant, steep as a ladder, with a case of Coca-Cola in bottles. The bottles went.

Everybody came running to his rescue, all of them hoping the manager would not be angry with the boy. Whether he was, nobody now remembers. What my grandson remembers is the whole lodge coming to help him, and he calls it a fine day.