(Much of this page was gleaned from orphan newspaper clippings—both fragments and articles often without dates or provenance—this is a pastiche of reportage and paraphrase, my own journal fragments—as well as some of my memories of Pat telling the stories of the artist colony that made Big Sur famous. Journal entry notes were collected from various sources, Pat Wall, his daughter Micaela, and other friends of Pat’s over the years.)
In the late 1970s, early 1980s, I also edited several of Rosalind Sharpe Wall’s manuscripts, one eventually became a book. When the Coast was Wild and Lonely: Early Settlers of the Sur 1987. The manuscript was a right mess as I recall, so her son, Chris, must’ve worked on it too, as it was reprinted. As we went over the manuscript, Rosalind would fly off into tangents on Egyptian scarabs, living Mexico, Henry Miller, the Tarot and John Cooke—scraps of stories with lots of middles, with no beginning, and no ending in sight. Only later, long after Roz died, was I able to make any sense of her stories.
Many of these orphan fragments came from old newspaper articles. I grew fatigued, and abandoned the project, as I had never properly recorded, or lost the sources. Someday I’ll get back to it. Micaela and I were hellbent on recording Pat’s oral history before it was too late. Then it was too late. So these are mostly from Micaela’s scrapbook collection. I was going to shape these notes into a fourth piece on Pat, but too much time had passed, so I can’t reconstruct it from these rough fragments—that strangely create their own story. So it’s a pastiche, a collage of sorts.
