Big Sur Stories launch party lets a legendary place tell its tales.

A former Highway Patrol officer recalls getting shot on Old Coast Road and the outpouring of support from the Big Sur community. A woman reminisces about a day as an 18-year-old when she and a friend hopped on the back of a couple Hell’s Angels motorcycles and were introduced to Big Sur’s elegantly cursive highway. (She moved to Big Sur shortly after that experience.) A man remembers a ride down Big Sur’s Highway 1 as a child and how he leaned out of the window of a vehicle speeding past its stunning scenery and yelled “Boo!” A group of people remember a whole hippie community being flattened by a resident’s bulldozer.

It’s Sunday night, and the lights are out in Big Sur’s Grange Hall as a room full of the area’s longtime residents listen to recorded stories about their neighbors by candlelight. It is the launch party for Big Sur Stories, a project spearheaded by the Henry Miller Memorial Library and Executive Director Magnus Toren, to collect tales and anecdotes from locals who have lived in the rugged region for decades. At moments, the packed community center is so quiet that you can hear a redwood needle drop, while at other times, laughter spreads through the building like a backcountry wildfire.

Funded by a grant from Cal Humanities, Big Sur Stories began this past June when Toren began recording interviews with residents including Bette Sommerville, Kodiak Greenwood, Micah Curtis and others. Tonight’s event showcases a 22-minute recording and a 24-minute recording of edited segments of the interviews that were cherry picked from around 40 hours of material.

Many of the narratives detail the times that individuals fell in love with Big Sur for the first time and decided to relocate to the area, essentially what is the first chapter of their own relationship with the region. But other segments hone in on less monumental moments, like a woman recalling several times that she threw up while riding down the highway in a Peugeot or a man being amazed with his friend’s ability to light farts in front of a fireplace.

“I was attempting to make it entertaining by having farts and barfing on cars,” Toren says to the crowd.

One anecdote that gets one of the evening’s most enthusiastic responses concerns an incident that occurred during a major flood in 1972: Walter Trotter trying to save the Coast Gallery from mud and debris with a bulldozer. While other locals looked on, legendary character Doug Madsen rode up on horseback buck naked to check in on the commotion. (A later account reveals that Madsen was in fact clothed but wearing an incongruous foxhunting outfit.) Without missing a beat, Trotter looked over at Madsen and remarked: “I have never seen a horse’s ass on a horse’s ass before.”

It’s obvious that the previously heard recordings are not the heart of the enterprise, but that they are really just the prologue to this project. Toren says the event was to introduce Big Sur Stories to the community and to create an interesting, entertaining evening.

There’s also hope that learning about the project will inspire some locals to contribute to Big Sur Stories, whether it is by telling their own stories or helping to document the stories of others.

“Many of you guys in this room are going to be victimized by the recorder,” Toren says to the gathered crowd.

“How do the stories go out,” someone asks. “Where do they go?”

Toren says that they will be posted online at the newly created www.bigsurstories.org for all to hear. Currently, the website is up but no audio has been uploaded. In addition, there is the hope that a Big Sur Stories podcast will be created and that the production will be broadcast over the Henry Miller Library’s lawn next year on a summer’s evening. Or maybe there would be an event where some of the local storytellers spin their yarns in front of a crowd.

As the evening reaches its concluding chapters, the discussion in the Grange pivots from the past to Big Sur’s current tourism explosion, which one resident in the crowd refers to as “an algal bloom.” Other locals express concern Highway 1 will soon be gridlocked with traffic and people will view Big Sur as an amusement park-like destination.

Ken Wright, a former Big Sur Highway Patrol officer who has lived in the community for 45 years, sees real potential in the Big Sur Stories project. “I think it’s going to illuminate what a really unique place this is, how inspiring it is, and how it embraces people,” he says.

But he feels like the most important part of Big Sur’s narrative has not yet been written. “The real story,” he says, “is what we are going to do in the future.”

More at www.bigsurstories.org