BIG SUR — In the '60s, I grew to manhood, moved to California and learned what my sign is.
I picked up new words, such as \o7 karma, mantra, chakra \f7 and \o7 ashram.\f7 I heard wondrous tales of a magical retreat on a bluff over the Pacific, a place where I might find George and Ringo and Ravi and the Maharishi.
And then I heard something just awful, just disgusting. There were middle-age people there, and they ran around naked. Turned my stomach.
Now, many wrinkles later, on a crisply clear December afternoon, I was checking into the Esalen Institute for the first time, with my wife, Bobbie. Bobbie had just celebrated her 50th birthday, we had just become empty-nesters, and it seemed the perfect time and place to reflect on our lives.
We had signed up for a seminar called "Experiencing Esalen," available about 10 times a year for newcomers. It offered a combination plate of therapies using games, massage and free-form dancing based on the Gestalt psychology of Fritz Perls. Perls was one of many '60s psychotherapists--Abraham Maslow, Alan Watts and Carl Rogers were others--who worked and experimented at Esalen during its heyday. Simplistically put, Gestalt psychology is based on the theory that the whole personality is more than the sum of its identifiable parts.
Bobbie and I had driven up on a nippy day, followed the soaring curves of Highway 1, and taken a dirt road on our left to Esalen. We checked in by picking up two towels at the gate and pulled up in front of our assigned room in Maslow, one of two dozen weathered brown wood buildings scattered over Esalen's 53 acres.
We loved our room. Through a huge picture window, we saw the surf crashing below us. Out front a romantic balcony beckoned. Our furniture, in wicker and Danish modern, took us back to the '60s. Through a skylight in the angled knotty pine ceiling, our room was bathed in light. I put a bottle of Chardonnay on the balcony to chill. "What is it out there, 50 degrees?" my wife asked. "I'm not going outside with no clothes on."
Thus I headed down the dirt path to the legendary hot tubs alone. The very public changing room was packed, and no hooks were left for my clothes. I left them on a bench. As I marched out to the tubs, no drums rolled. No one even looked up. I had worked out for nothing. Now I faced a bigger problem. Every inch of space in both pools was taken.
