Searching for Los Alamos

Over the weekend my wife and I drove up to the Central Coast town of Santa Maria to shoot another California Air Museums episode.

The day was blustery, with rain squalls rattling the roof of the old hangers that house the Santa Maria Air Museum. It’s a fascinating little museum, more displays than airplanes, but, if you’re a movie buff, it’s one to not miss.

We got there late in the afternoon, just an hour before they closed at four. Once done, we weren’t quite ready to rush back to Ventura, and decided to visit a little burg called Los Alamos.

Now, here’s a story: back in California’s stagecoach days, a bandito named Solomon Pico stored his loot in a bunch of caves near Santa Maria. Of course, the loot’s never been found, and now the caves are buried under the Main Street of Los Alamos – oh, to have a sinkhole!

We got lost trying to find that little town and found ourselves in the even littler town of Casmalia.

A town so small that it literally has more letters in its name than it does buildings on its main street.

A post office, a boarded-up feed and grain store, and a big building that used to be a hotel back in the stagecoach days, rather swank from what we could discover. Now it’s a high-end steak house.

Having postponed our search for Los Alamos and Solomon Pico’s gold, we decided to find Point Sal Beach, and Point Sal Road turns out to be the main drag in Casmalia. In fact, it’s the only drag.

Jutting off from Highway 1, Point Sal Road quickly becomes one-and-a-half lanes, and takes you straight through Casmalia’s sleepy downtown, and, just about half a mile later, dumps you out in front of a Dead-End sign.  

It has nothing to do with Point Sal.

We dove into the steakhouse to answer the call of nature and spotted a lady sawing away on a steak that was easily the size of a baseball catcher’s mitt, except much thicker.  We tried not to stare, but, shoot, lady. What part of the cow was that thing?

And, here’s a stunner, there was no cell service in Casmalia! Like a scene from the Twilight Zone – we could get in, but couldn’t find our way out. Picture, if you will…

Eventually, after we figured out that Point Sal Road had nothing to do with Point Sal Beach, we retraced our steps back out of Casmalia, found the real Point Sal, and followed the looooong road to get to the parking lot at the bottom of the hill.

A hill? I thought Point Sal was a beach. Yes, yes it is. But you have to hike 5 miles over the hills to get there! Well, now it’s six o’clock, and the wind and rain and setting sun, and the… still, we gave it a go.

And got a mile and a half into the hills before the rain came and the clock hit seven and we realized that it would be dark before we got back to the truck.

Cold, wet, windblown, and muddy, we dragged ourselves into the truck in the moonlight that squeaked out between the rapidly moving clouds.

Trying to find our way home, we found Los Alamos, and had a lovely and elegant dinner at the only place open, a place simply called Pico, in the lobby of what was the rather swank Los Alamos Hotel. You know, back in the stagecoach days.

Is there point to this ramble about our ramble?

Yes, and the point is this: no matter where you are, you are always just minutes away from some far flung, wacky adventure.

Our jobs, yours and mine, as writers, is to seek out this crazy moment and use them to illuminate the worlds of our characters.

You know, like they did back in the stagecoach days!