From the Library: Tracks Along the Left Coast

"Houses of wood and cement with large windows facing west over the ocean.There's a corral and a chicken coop. A burnt-out school bus. Someone has mounted an old Flyer bicycle on a metal post. The thing is faded and rusty and has only one wheel (who would ride a bicycle where the rutted dirt roads pitch up and down at dizzying angles?)".

The name Jaime de Angulo has long been a familiar one to me. During various readings and research we had crossed paths, in a literary sense, many times from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s; as an anthropology student, and then working within the field, there was no surprise in that. His figure, though, was always a murky one, shrouded, mysterious, held cautiously at arms length. His primary area of interest - linguistics, was not mine. In other words, I didn't really know that much about him. 

Skip forward a couple decades; up in Nevada City for the Bicycle Classic this year, I popped into one of my favorite bookstores during a lull in the action. It is the kind of place that has largely disappeared from the larger metropolitan areas, the kind of place that should never be allowed to disappear, the kind of place where you browse the shelves and are guaranteed to find something unusual and of interest - in this case a book about the life and ways of of one of California's most eclectic figures.

This is an anomaly for "From the Library," where I have, here-to-for, limited the contents to cycling-specific books; in the entirety of the pages of Tracks Along the Left Coast there is but a single reference to bicycles, and I have not yet decided whether this post will be a one-off, or whether the boundaries of the library will continue to expand, reflecting the entirety of my readings, including those beyond the world of cycling.

Incidentally, and as far as I am concerned, the question of who would chose to ride in such a place, or why, was answered three pages later (beside the dizzying angles of rutted dirt roads, that is):

"... he knew it was the place for him, a freedom-loving anarchist. Abundant wilderness, free from crowds, far from noise, lights or dust of the cities, practically without law. It was a wild desolate gorgeous region, where he could live as close as possible to the land, surviving with only the most necessary tools of civilization, wholly without luxuries."

This book is for anyone interested in Big Sur history, California anthropology / linguistics, fonetics (phonetics), poetry (de Angulo was also a poet). De Angulo was an interesting figure simply for the range of people he met, and knew during the breadth of his life (1887-1953), and though a reader might get bogged down in some of the linguistic / fonetic portions of the book, these were such an important part of de Angulo's life it does make for a more complete, and accurate story when used the way they are.

Schelling, Andrew   Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture   Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2017