Robinson Jeffers arrived at Carmel Point in 1919, contracted a stonemason, then signed on as apprentice to learn the work himself. By mid-August the granite cottage stood. Then he spent four years dragging boulders up from the beach by wooden plank and block and tackle to raise Hawk Tower alone — and it was during that labor, the record suggests, that he found his voice as a poet. Something about this coast kept pulling people toward that kind of effort. In 1944, Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth bought a cliff-side cabin on a whim, measured the windows for curtains, and vanished; the Fassetts bought it in 1947, hired an architect trained under Frank Lloyd Wright, and opened Nepenthe on April 24, 1949, 800 feet above the Pacific. Esalen opened on the same coast in 1962. Henry Miller's friend Emil White turned his own house into a library after Miller died in 1980. The place keeps making keepers.
