This is a follow up essay from my bike trip down to Big Sur last month – The Henry Miller 2025 – Bicycle to Big Sur.
Recently, I tried to explain to a friend why I like doing these weeklong bike trips, camping out, eating in diners, living the simple life. I explained that what is really valuable is that the trips make me much more aware of the world. When you get done with the trip, you notice things in your everyday surroundings that you did not before you left. You start hearing things that you had somehow ignored. You see things about your city that you never noticed. Trees. Graffiti. People waiting for the bus. It helps to make a person fully alive.
When I was on the ride I discovered an interesting theme – the crucifix. While I was not riding El Camino Real, the road that the first missionaries traveled, I did pass by a number of old churches. In the end, I realized that there were three crosses that told a story of my journey and of the time and geography I had pedaled.
ACT 1: RIP Our Beloved Eurovan
You would never see this cross from a car. It is along Skyline Boulevard, about 20 miles outside of Santa Cruz, high on the road, before you make it to Highway 9. If you were in a car you would have zipped by it and never knew it was there. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and had to stop, thinking it was a cross for some poor person who had perished in an automobile accident. I paused and drank some water and took it all in. Fortunately, it was just a van. Obviously, the climb up the coastal range finally did in the German engineering. The Eurovan surely had a good life and was much loved but maybe overheated and the engine seized? The twentieth century and into the twenty-first was a time when the internal combustion engine became something often more loved than other humans. At some point we are all guilty of this fetish. We all at one point gave our cars names and bathed them on the weekends. Cleaned their hubcaps. Worried about their overdue oil changes. That we anthropomorphize them to the point of an afterlife is a bit strange but it sort of makes sense. This must have been a Christian Eurovan. Surely Catholic.
ACT 2: Mission Carmel Basilica
Of course, Mission Carmel Basilica was the second mission in California, and was one of the places where in California the “saving of souls” all began. In this land where all the manmade things are so new, something that has a bit of history stands out. I wonder what the first Indians thought of this place and the cross that adorns the top? The story of the tragic demise of the native peoples and the history is well-known at this point. RIP dear friend. I am sorry you got one of those nasty viruses that came over on the boat. Some day your great, great, great grand daughter will be able to drive a Ford F150 pickup and get vaccines for the diseases that wiped your people out. Let us pray.
ACT 3: Henry Miller Library
The third cross that I came across, that really grabbed my attention, was this sculpture above at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. The cross is made out of old Apple MacPlus computers, stacked up so that you do not realize what you are looking at. Jesus, is but a twist of wiry vines, dried and dead. Is this a statement on the futility of progress and the modern life? Is it a complex diagram of our soulless world that has been usurped by technology, where even Christ gets eaten up by the mayhem of technology and becomes but a tangled mess? Is it a battle between the inorganic and the organic, where the machines always win and both sides die in a tragic death? One obsolete trash. The other just a tangled mess of organic wires impersonating their master? Who’s to say, but it does seem like a tragic omen to our feeble chances of survival.
This genre of art I like to call technomacabre. Along the coast you see it every now and then. Found objects from our recent technological past that are turned into a statement of demise, oppression, humor or even violence. There is no service out here anyway. These things are useless.
There is no ACT 4. There is no coda. That is all.