Partington Cove

A steep track drops to Partington Cove, where John Partington ran tanbark out through a tunnel he cut in the rock and loaded it onto ships standing offshore. The tunnel is still there, and you can walk through it. High on Partington Ridge above you, from 1913, lived the strangest of all the Big Sur characters: Jaime de Angulo, born in Spain, schooled in Paris, a doctor out of Johns Hopkins, who named his homestead The Sorrows and ploughed his fields in Indian dress.

An old-timer remembered him at the campfire at Whalen's in a long silky beard, a cape and a wide black hat, standing back in the shadows. He served in the war, taught anthropology at Berkeley, and came back in 1932 to build a house on the edge of the cliff after the old Spanish pattern, and to live free. I called him a symbol of a man's right to freedom, and I meant it.