Carmel by the Sea

Carmel by the Sea is a pretty swell town. You run down steep Ocean Avenue to the very bottom and catch your breath at the brimming sea, the sound of crashing waves and unexpectedly turquoise waters. You turn left at the scenic road, unimaginatively called Scenic Road, and run past plenty of expensive houses facing the ocean, including one house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. A real beauty. You see middle-aged and elderly surfer dudes pulling their boards from their vans, gawkers in their Honda Civics, gardeners and carpenters and plasterers parked every which way, tending to the perfection of each house. Everyone wants to live here and you can see why.

Yesterday I learned that Brad Pitt, a movie actor, just bought a house in Carmel for forty million dollars. It’s somewhere up in the hills. Most expensive houses are invariably up in the hills, or on the coast.

Alas, Carmel is also weighed down by plenty of rules. For instance, one bylaw says that women cannot walk on city streets in high heels. (Doesn’t say anything about men, though.) The law specifies the height and width of the offending heels. To my mind none of this makes much sense, because you can find any number of fine-looking pairs of women’s high heeled shoes in the shops around town. You just can’t wear them outdoors. But then it gets even loopier. This being a free country, you can go to city hall and get a certificate that gives you a temporary exemption. The certificate is free.

There was another law, too, about ice cream cones: Not allowed, on account of the mess they make on the sidewalks. But when Clint Eastwood, an actor, became mayor of Carmel in the late eighties, he immediately struck down that law. In fact he campaigned on doing exactly that. The restriction on high heels still stands.

Yesterday we found ourselves browsing the menu outside a steak restaurant. It had high ceilings and great big windows, and looked like it could easily seat two hundred people. It was early and still eerily empty. Most steaks were in the sixty to seventy-dollar range, with one topping out at ninety dollars. These are U.S. dollars, mind. If you want a side of brussels sprouts, that will set you back sixteen dollars. A potato, eighteen dollars. It was cold when we were reading the menu and we were shivering. What would stop us from entering the heated restaurant and ordering up a plate of brussels sprouts, with two forks, and a glass of water? After all, this is a free country.

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When I was in my adolescence, a distant cousin of my father’s came to visit us in Montreal, and as he stepped out of his Cadillac he handed me a hundred-dollar bill. That was when a hundred dollars really meant something. Until then, I had no idea there were such people and that these people were so very nice.

A few years later, when we visited that distant relative in the States, he asked me what I’d like to drink. He asked me from the other side of a bar in his impressive home. I remembered the hundred dollars and the Cadillac and for some reason wanted him to believe I knew a thing or two about drinking and about living large, so I asked for Metaxa brandy, seven-star, neat. He pulled out an unopened bottle of 50-year-old Metaxa, a bottle I had not known existed. He broke the seal and poured me a stiff one.

While in Carmel, I am rereading the short stories of Ernest Hemingway. I gave away my paperback copy of his complete stories a long time ago. And the only reason I’m reading them again now is because they just entered the public domain and cost only ninety-nine cents to download. They are worth the revisit.

In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway says that another American writer, whom he declines to name, wrote somewhere that “the rich are different from you and me.” Of course they are, he writes. They have more money. The writer Hemingway declined to name was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was besotted with the rich.

The streets in Carmel by the Sea are paved with gold and its fairy tale cottages studded with precious stones the size of grapefruit. The skies are always blue and the people here, God bless ‘em, live forever.