It rhymes with “mucus”….

 

Cayucos, California will be my new home as of two weeks’ time.

I consider myself extremely fortunate for many reasons, but moving to Cayucos surely counts among them. It’s the town in the background of the photo behind this text. It nestles at the north end of Estero Bay, roughly halfway between L.A. and San Francisco. The pushpin on the map shows where, but only roughly. You could be dropped at a location covered by the pushpin on that map and still have a two-day walk to Cayucos.

Actually, it’s not the world’s best map. You have to appreciate that the distance between Cayucos and L.A. is the same as the distance from London to York. That cartoon drawing pin is probably about half the size of Wales. Well, probably not, but probably about thirteen-seventeenths the size of Rutland. Bigger than your average drawing pin, anyway.

Here (right) is a more useful scale map. Here you can see Cayucos in the top-left, at the north end of the bay, playing book-end to the slightly larger town of Morro Bay further south. Actually, Morro Bay has four times the number of inhabitants of Cayucos. The considerably larger university town of San Luis Obispo is off to the east. Even by the standards of small-town California, Cayucos is a fairly small place.

The town website calls it the ‘Last of the California beach towns’. Obviously this isn’t literally true. It’s at the other end of the beach from Morro Bay, for a start. But Cayucos, more than perhaps anywhere else, has retained the style and character of a real American small town.

Bill Bryson once went looking for “Amalgam, USA”- the perfect small town of the films of his youth. This was in the 1987 and 1988, following the death of the author’s father and, in his view, Reagan’s America compared poorly to Eisenhower’s. Bryson had yet to mellow into the cuddly, professorial uncle of his later books, and while his jokes were funny he was nothing if not acerbic in his criticism. He never did find anywhere resembling Amalgam, where

“Bing Crosby would be the priest, Jimmy Stewart the mayor, Fred MacMurray the high-school principal, Henry Fonda a Quaker farmer. Walter Brennan would run the gas station, a boyish Mickey Rooney would deliver groceries, and somewhere at an open window Deanna Durbin would sing. And in the background, always, would be the kid on abike and those two smartly striding men.”

                                  -The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson

But I always feel that he’d have been slightly less disappointed if he’d spent any time in Cayucos. It’s a town of 2,000 people; there’s next to nothing there. A few shops and restaurants. But the charm seems to seep up from the cracks between the paving stones and makes the whole world look better. The town was founded by Captain James Cass, a Bristolian by birth, who came to California via New England in 1867. His house, reputedly haunted, is now a rather classy-looking restaurant. If Bryson shifted his gaze a decade later into the twentieth century, and looked for somewhere where the protagonists in the Beach Boys’ songs might get around, possibly looking meet a California girl who’s had her driving privileges revoked, then he’d do worse than to take a stroll along the beach at Cayucos.

This place has an almost mythical quality in my imagination. Or rather, my memory. The sand is pale and almost powder fine. Just walking along it makes the soles of the feet perfectly smooth. Occasionally a bit on the black and sticky side too; natural tar, seeping from the sea bed in pleasantly mineral-smelling lumps, is washed ashore, melts in the sun and clags to the feet of walkers who may or may not care.  I do know that it’s the most remarkable public beach to simply walk along and watch wildlife from. The pelicans treat it as their own and I believe I had been there four or five times before the dolphins failed to put in an appearance.

The place absolutely oozes quirk from every pore. Having decided today, for example, that taking a crappy, half-plastic ukulele halfway around the world is not an efficient use of space on an oceangoing freighter, that I shall be able to replace it at Alternate Tunings Ukuleles? Oh, on closer inspection it seems they only do lessons and re-stringing now. Never mind- I can console myself by indulging in a bit of retail therapy at Bugga Boo Clothing, a shop selling "Tie dye baby clothing specializing in onesies and tees for ages newborn to 2 years old." Who knew?? 

And so we’ve managed to find a place to rent there. When I say "we", I do mean, of course, that Stacey was the one who did the hard work of finding the place, sorting out the lease and moving all the furniture down over a period of weeks. It’s a fair assumption that any time someone achieves something in concrete terms, it’s going to have been Stace rather than me. It’s small, but there’s just the two of us and the cat. There is an antique marble worktop whose stand needs painting. The grass needs cutting and the garden needs a bit of attention generally. There are shelves which need putting up, but I think Stace might just have saved them for me to do as a sop to my masculine pride after she shifted all the furniture.

I can’t think of a better place for two people who’ve been apart for far too long to settle down. I defy you to look back down the pier here and tell me I’m wrong.