Curiosity 38: Jaime De Angulo, Big Sur denizen

I spent the day with a few Volunteer Wilderness Rangers down the Big Sur coast checking out the De Angulo Trail, which heads from Highway 1 up to the first ridge, a hike of about 7.5 miles round trip. (I forgot my phone, so no photos today, alas. It was a beautiful hike.) 

One of our number, Bobby, has studied up on the man the trail was named for, Jaime De Angulo (1887–1950), and when I asked about him, he said something to the effect of, "He was a Spaniard who was born in Paris; he was a cowhand, a physician and a psychologist, a linguist and student of North American Indian languages, an ethnomusicologist and ethnographer. He was a bohemian and a cross-dresser, a poet and novelist," writing such works as Indian Tales, Coyote's Bones, and the hallucinogenic The Lariat. He arrived in California on the eve of the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906. In the 1920s, he homesteaded a plot of land on Big Sur's Partington Ridge, overlooking the Pacific, where he continued to live off and on until his death. The trail we were on runs just beneath that property. 

He sounds like quite the character. He was friends with such personalities as composer Harry Partch; writers Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, D. H. Lawrence, and Kenneth Rexroth; and the psychologist Carl Jung. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams greatly admired his poetry. He had close contact with anthropologists Franz Boas, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Edward Sapir, and studied ethnography at UC Berkeley for a time, but ultimately his scholarship was rejected and he abandoned the field. 

There are various online accounts of Jaime's "erratic genius," as the Berkeley Historical Plaque Project characterizes him. In 2017, the writer Andrew Schelling published a book titled Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo and Pacific Coast Culture, and High Country News featured a brief Q&A with Schelling about his subject. There's always Wikipedia, of course. And here's a 1960 article by a Big Sur native, Mabel Plaskett (there's a ridge named after her family), reminiscing about "Jaime de Angula," so take it with a grain of salt... Still, it gets at his obvious colorfulness. I also found an informative blog post about him. And yes, he was a character in Jack Kerouac's books ("Valencia," "the mad Spanish anthropologist sage," in Desolation Angels). And (apparently?) Allen Ginsburg wrote about him too.

Here is one of De Angulo's poems:

wildcat
you who walk the trail in broad daylight
contemptuous and haughty

puma
you who unseen follow people on the trail
curious and shy

which of you
last night
uttered that long cry
so full of longing

Bobby recited a few others while we sat on the ridgetop eating our lunch. And for only $249.52 on Amazon right now, it seems, one can purchase Home Among the Swinging Stars, a full collection of his poetry. 

It was so interesting to hear about this larger-than-life man as we hiked through the landscape he himself prowled.

Here's a picture that Beth took of Connie and me at the top of the 3.8-mile trail. It was all downhill from there!