The 154 (Part Two: Painted Cave)

If you missed Part One of this segment, head over here!

Well, it turns out I’m going to have to stagger my op-ed commentary on the 154 as a three-parter. There’s a clear and present reason for that. I have a truck-load of descanso photos taken about that roadway, because as mentioned in Part One’s Cold Springs, the 154 is my most traveled road of all time, and as such, I’ve collected a good number of pictures over the years from its frequent roadside memorializing.

While Pearblossom Highway and the 62 in Yucca Valley easily eclipse the 154’s annual averages of descanso construction, 154 has the benefit of seeing me traverse its pavement pretty much weekly, whereas the 62 and the 18/138 lay under the wheels of my truck on a far less frequent basis, perhaps once or twice a year.

Like Cold Springs, this second entry stemming from the 154 focuses on a particular aspect of ‘The Pass.’ Herein I’ll spotlight a trio of descansos at the very top of Highway 154 near Painted Cave, a tiny homestead mountain community in the Santa Ynez Mountain range, and a handful on the outskirts of Los Olivos, a small, wine-tasting hamlet at the 154’s northern end where it meets the northbound 101.

Painted Cave is an interesting little borough here in Santa Barbara County. It’s a sheltered melange of artists, bohemians, ultra-conservative ranchers, and long-time back country families. The tiny community is centered near the Chumash Painted Cave Historical Park, where there is indeed a small sandstone cave sheltering Chumash petroglyphs, supposedly painted in the 1600s by Chumash shamans appealing to higher powers to intervene in human affairs (I do that a lot myself, I’m forced to admit, but so far, no dice). Indigenous archaeologists were forced to bar the entry to the cave decades ago because in standard dummy human fashion, people were adding their own graffiti to the existing art.

I came upon this first descanso pictured above while taking East Camino Cielo, the road leading up to and through the Painted Cave community. It was erected overlooking the entire city of Santa Barbara and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Again, much like the Rincon flats, because of the descanso’s specific geo-location, it was equally probable the unknown decedent had either perished because of high speeds in taking the admittedly twisting, winding road leading up the mountain to Painted Cave, or its erectors wanted to place a marker where there was a sweeping vista view.

This anonymous descanso carried a little more weight to yours truly, as it was situated only a stone’s throw from a personal descanso site of mine. Loyal readers may recall my diatribes about my doggies in my two-part segment in The Road concerning doggie memorials, and how I adhere to some of those practices in marking the passing of our furry kiddos, like my custom of cremating their bodies and spreading the ashes at a local beach.

Jack was an exception to that practice. It’s a decision I occasionally wrestle with to this very day. Ya see, Jack died quite unexpectedly, on a Saturday morning. His seizure disorder, so I thought, was fairly mild, having only one or two a year, and his recoveries afterward were expedient and seemed not too disruptive to his cognition or functioning. I had him taking a number of holistic preventatives, fish oil omegas and the like. Nonetheless, he had what we thought was a standard episode that day, but he succumbed to it. To say that me and the wifey were devastated would be putting it mildly. He was only ten years old. It still grinds my gears, some six years later. Early demises tend to do that to me. I’ve experienced a fair share.

I was so out of sorts, riddled with grief, I didn’t quite know what to do, concerning his body and how to deal with his shell. The other three dogs were upset as well. The only reason I didn’t immediately take him to my vet to have them prepare him for shipment and cremation was because again, it was a Saturday morning. All the local vets that deal with cremation procedures would be closed until Monday. The hard truth was, I couldn’t stand the idea of stashing his body in the garage with a tarp, letting his body decompose for 48 hours plus. The rigor mortis set in quickly with Jack, for some unknown reason. The dogs were already smelling the scent, as were we. The only alternative intervention I could think of to do was to bury him right quick, just as me and my father used to do at my parents’ ranch. We always used to inter our animals on our land. We couldn’t do that at our place of the time, because we were renting.

I scooped his body up in my arms, gave his still form to my wife, loaded them up in the truck, and took him to the mountains, taking East Camino Cielo Road, the way to the town of Painted Cave. It wasn’t necessarily one of the spots I’d have preferred given a choice, but all his most favorite places to hike were near the beach and wouldn’t have passed muster. You can’t exactly haul the tarped bodies of dogs, along with shovels, out to those dog friendly areas without scrutiny, not that national park land is any less forbidden, and where I laid him to rest is within the bounds of the Los Padres Forest. But I was desperate, grief-stricken, quite frankly outta my goddamned mind, in losing one of my furball children so unexpectedly.

So, I did that.

I found a spot, dug a hole, and I assembled a cairn, and I marked the assembly with a {REDACTED}, and I buried him, weeping all the while. The only reason I’m not adding a photo of Jack’s doggie descanso to this segment is because I don’t want people to know his location. As you Road loyalists know, Jack is also memorialized down at Gwen’s Garden in Del Mar, and I’ve deposited his dogs tags in various places of our shared communion in Big Sur, Lake Tahoe, and the Mojave desert.

Despite all that, trust me when I say your author has often considered convincing his human sons to dig up the bones of what remains of Jack, even now six years later, just so I can cremate them and spread his ashes in the same oceanic tide line as the rest of his pack, as I’d have preferred. It’s my obsessive compulsiveness, obviously, and my wife definitely won’t let me do it. Nonetheless, part of me considers it all the same, on occasion. I admit it. Don’t worry, I won’t do it. Mostly because I’m unsure I could bear witnessing his skeletal remains at all, and naturally, it feels disrespectful to dig up buried bodies no matter what kind of species they are.

Not long after his burial, one of Santa Barbara’s commonplace megafires torched a good portion of Painted Cave’s surrounding environs, including the hillside where I interred Jack. As such, a huge swath of acreage filled with chaparral and manzanita overgrowth about his grave site was torched, including his cairn itself. That didn’t exactly thrill us, you might imagine, but what could we do. For years afterward, we visited the site amidst barren hillsides of blackened rock and ashen soil.

Maybe I do indeed concern myself too much with memoriams. Ha, ha. Any half-assed shrink would tell me it’s a defense infrastructure of the mind, in dealing with death and loss. I don’t need them to tell me that. I know. Apparently, I need to do things with my hands, and seek out tangible constructs, after incurring a loss. I doubt I’m alone in that regard. I suppose I might feel some semblance of closure, in working within the corporeal, when faced with the maddeningly insubstantial ethereal, doing things like spreading ashes, or dropping dog tags, or erecting Dia de los Muertos altars.

Anyway.

Taking East Camino Cielo all the way through will eventually lead one back to its second junction at the 154, at the very top of the pass. It was here that the two descansos below remain erected to this day, as far as I’m aware, and I just took the 154 a couple days ago. This first one honors a young man named Ryan Bollay. I’ve seen it in three different incarnations at this point, each successive one more elaborate than the last. His family certainly seems to want his marker to stand the test of time.

The second one lies along a guardrail about two hundred yards north of Ryan’s cross, where the epitaph offers a message, rather than the specific identity of the decedent, rendered on each side of the cross in both English and Spanish. Of course, the message speaks for itself.

This last quintet of descansos were all placed alongside the 154 near its northern end junction to Highway 101, past the city limits of Los Olivos, a small town in the Santa Ynez Valley.

Me, I know Los Olivos like the back of my hand. I remember it as a place where a number of my best pals lived, where we played and cavorted all about in grade school revelry, back when it was just a tiny suburb constructed in the midst of one huge walnut orchard. The town of Los Olivos was often where me and the first love of my life went and ‘parked,’ in that quaint fifties Happy Days sort of fashion (one of those times not subtly portrayed in my Doggies Part One segment), seeing as how she and her family lived on the fringes of ranch country surrounding Los Olivos. Nowadays, Los Olivos is a wine-tasting mecca of considerable note, what with the Santa Ynez Valley’s explosion of wineries, former ranches converting their vast swaths of cattle grazing pastures to vineyards.

One of these descansos was anonymous. The second honored one Milton Diaz. The third and fourth were two weathered white crosses situated right next to each other, one marking the passing of ‘Larry,’ the other a physician named Jeffrey Williams.

I bid all thee, Larry and Jeffrey and Milton and Person X, to fare well in your journeys ahead.

Jack…I miss ya, buddy. I couldn’t stand the idea of your body rotting in the garage all weekend. I had to put your stardust into the ground.

I’ll see you again soon enough. - Dad