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Gallery
Connie Y. Chiang On 'Mother Nature's Drive-Thru'
| "VISIT MOTHER NATURE'S Drive-Thru," proclaims this 1999 magazine advertisement for the 17-Mile Drive at Pebble Beach, California.1 With the Pacific Ocean in the distance and sunny skies overhead, the road winds along the rugged Central California coastline. Perched on an outcropping at the center of the image stands the Lone Cypress, the registered trademark and logo of the Pebble Beach Company and one of the many landmarks that visitors can see along this famous drive. Their skin rosy from the sun, a young blond couple dashes by in a sporty convertible and continues to "drive-thru" even more nature on this scenic road. |
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This colorful advertisement illustrates how central automobiles and roads have become to Americans' relations with nature. Devoid of traffic and skirting dramatic scenery, the road itself comprises and frames much of the image, while the slogan, "Visit Mother Nature's Drive-Thru," encourages people to experience nature by driving on the Pebble Beach Company's picturesque thoroughfare. The "drive-thru" reference also implies convenience, a quick-and-easy tour of the coastal landscape; motorists could enjoy the Monterey Peninsula's most breathtaking vistas in the amount of time it took to drive roughly seventeen miles and without even getting out of their cars.2 In conveying the freedom, adventure, and beauty of the open road, then, the advertisement is not that different from images that appeared in, say, Sunset magazine in the 1910s, when articles about the growing popularity of auto touring were common.3 But the ad also suggests new ways in which technology and machines—in this case, computers—shape twenty-first century Americans' encounters with the natural world. |
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Originally a carriage road, the 17-Mile Drive began as a diversion for guests at Monterey's Hotel Del Monte, one of the grand railroad hotels of the late nineteenth-century American West.4 In 1879, the Pacific Improvement Company, the construction and real estate development arm of the Southern Pacific Railroad, acquired over seven thousand acres of prime Monterey Peninsula land and built the luxurious seaside resort as an outlet for a new branch line connecting Castroville and Monterey. Beginning and ending at the hotel and meandering through forested thickets and along the rocky shore, the drive was one of many amenities developed for well-heeled visitors. While the road provided entertainment, it also served as kind of a billboard to sell land. By the 1910s, the entire route was choreographed with scripted stops, where drivers showed passengers available real estate in Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach, an elite enclave that the company established in 1907.5 Ideally, a short stay at the Hotel Del Monte coupled with a journey on the 17-Mile Drive would lead to a permanent investment. |
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The real estate promotion involved in the 17-Mile Drive suggested that auto-touring was an activity limited to select groups of people.6 Although the Pacific Improvement Company responded to the influx of less affluent motor tourists in the late 1910s by opening a no-frills auto camp, the 17-Mile Drive remained an exclusive destination, the gateway to the tony Pebble Beach neighborhood.7 Indeed, only certain tourists could afford to buy the villa lots that drivers pitched along the route, as the company aspired to make Pebble Beach into "one of the most fashionable as well as the prettiest resorts on the coast" and consciously tried "to attract wealthy people there."8"Wealthy people" implicitly meant white people, and up until the mid-twentieth century, Pebble Beach deeds also included restrictive covenants that prohibited people of African, Asian, and Jewish descent from property ownership. In 1999, homeowners continued to limit entry into its community of mansions and golf courses, balking at plans to build low-income housing for Pebble Beach's predominantly Hispanic employees.9 |
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The advertisement confirms that the 17-Mile Drive still attracts tourists of some means. The man and woman in the image are the All-American couple: white, attractive, and, judging from their sports car and the woman's jewelry and fashionable sunglasses, probably middle- to upper-class. This is just the demographic that most likely would have enough income and vacation time to travel to the Monterey Peninsula and pay for lodging, food, gasoline, and the eight dollar entrance fee required to tour the 17-Mile Drive, one of nine private toll roads in the United States and the only one west of the Mississippi.10 Much like its predecessor, the Pacific Improvement Company, the Pebble Beach Company is clearly selling the 17-Mile Drive to a target audience. The road and its stunning views await those who can afford the trip. |
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This complex relationship between automobiles, roads, and nature in American culture has an extensive history. In the early twentieth century, car ownership still was limited to the wealthy, but the increasing affordability of automobiles in the 1920s brought more Americans to the road. No longer limited to the scenery along the railroad tracks, car drivers could go "anywhere the combination of imagination, wheels, and a dirt track might lead," as Hal Rothman explains.11 The automobile soon ended the dominance of the railroads, and as a result, tourism shifted from elite tastes to those of middle-class auto tourists. Rather than lounging in Pullman cars and well-appointed railroad hotels, these new tourists embraced outdoor recreation and sought adventurous experiences. For them, motor-touring provided independence and mobility and came to exemplify their individualism.12 |
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Automobiles and roads opened up traveling options, but they also defined tourists' encounters with nature. As Earl Pomeroy explains, the automobile "brought [the tourist] into the wilderness, but it also brought him out again in a hurry, and in a cloud of dust."13 While Pomeroy points out the quickened pace of travel, David Louter examines how Americans actually communed with nature in their cars. Focusing on Washington State, he has coined the term "windshield wilderness" to describe how roads became a central feature of the national parks. As motorists drove through the parks, the roads framed panoramic views and provided "scenic narrative." Automobiles and roads, then, seemed to become part of the landscape, suggesting that nature and machines were mutually beneficial and could coexist. "One made it possible to appreciate the other," Louter explains.14 Similarly, the 17-Mile Drive also blended into the California coastline. Much like many national park roads, the drive, with its carefully selected vistas, became a destination in and of itself. |
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Roads and automobiles, however, also threatened the very "wild" areas that people drove to visit. While Stephen Mather, first superintendent of the National Park Service, jumped on the road-building bandwagon to cater to the growing recreational demands of interwar tourists and ensure public support for the park system, the flood of visitors caused damage and overuse in many park areas. Some individuals, moreover, saw efforts to provide access for automobiles as contradictory to the purpose of the national parks and other wilderness areas. Paul Sutter argues that the increasing incursion of cars and highways into the parks and once-undeveloped public lands gave impetus to the modern wilderness movement, a movement that adopted roadlessness as a principal tenet. The founders of the Wilderness Society, who established the organization in 1934, were united by a belief that automobiles and roads destroyed "what was left of wild America." Wilderness should be a sanctuary from modern developments, they maintained, and kept free of asphalt and combustion engines.15 |
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As a corporate, for-profit enterprise built on private land, the 17-Mile Drive was outside the realm of these wilderness debates. Nonetheless, the drive demonstrates how Americans continue to enjoy nature through automobiles and roads, with all of the attendant environmental and social implications. Yet as much as this advertisement shows continuity with the past, it also illustrates a new highway that Americans travel in the twenty-first century, the virtual highway of the World Wide Web. The website address for the 17-Mile Drive is emblazoned at the bottom on the advertisement, and after typing the URL into a web browser, one can see digital images of the famous landmarks and picturesque views along the road. This is not to say that computers can break Americans' ties to their cars or replace the experience of driving to the national parks and other scenic areas. After all, this advertisement appeared in Via, the magazine of the California State Automobile Association. But this virtual world does suggest another way in which technology continues to shape human encounters with the natural environment. Now it seems that one can "Visit Mother Nature's Drive-Thru" with a click of the mouse and without ever getting behind the wheel. |
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Connie Y. Chiang is visiting assistant professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College. She currently is preparing a book manuscript on the environmental and social history of tourism and fisheries in Monterey, California.
Notes
1. Via, 120 (September/October 1999): 69.
2. The original drive traversed seventeen miles, but the mileage of the trip is now roughly fifteen and one-half miles. See Tracie Cone, "But 15.5 Mile Drive Just Doesn't Have that Ring," San Jose Mercury News, 5 February 1994.
3. A good example is a vivid color image of the 17-Mile Drive (with a car in the foreground) that appeared in Sunset in 1914. See Sunset (February 1914): 298.
4. For the ties between railroads and tourism in the American West, see Hal K. Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 50–112.
5. "Interesting Points To Be Explained," no date, Box 53/9, Pacific Improvement Company Records, JL17, Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California (hereafter PICo. Records, JL17). For the Pacific Improvement Company and the Hotel Del Monte, see Connie Y. Chiang, "Shaping the Shoreline: Environment, Society, and Culture in Monterey, California" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 2002), 37–57; Anne Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 161–174; John Walton, Storied Land: Community and Memory in Monterey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 150–151. For Pebble Beach, see Chiang, "Shaping the Shoreline," 78–80; Walton, Storied Land, 181.
6. Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First; Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 232–234; Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York: Knopf, 1957; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990, reprint), 127.
7. "Del Monte Forest Camp: Pacific Grove by the Sea," no date, Box 35/11, PICo. Records, JL17.
8. Monterey Daily Cypress, 30 March 1907; Pebble Beach, Monterey, brochure, Box 69/ 50, Pacific Improvement Company Records, JL1, Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California.
9. Walton, Storied Land, 182–183, 268. For Pebble Beach's famed golf links, see Neal Hotelling, Pebble Beach Golf Links: The Official History (Chelsea, Mich.: Sleeping Bear Press, 1999).
10. http://www.pebblebeach.com/17miledrive.html.
11. Rothman, Devil's Bargains, 148.
12. This discussion draws from Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 125–127; Anne Hyde, "From Stagecoach to Packard Twin Six: Yosemite and the Changing Face of Tourism," California History 69 (Summer 1990): 154–169; Rothman, Devil's Bargains, 143–158; Shaffer, See America First, 130–137, 224; Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT university Press, 1979), 7–39.
13. Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West, 210.
14. David B. Louter, "Windshield Wilderness: The Automobile and the Meaning of National Parks in Washington State" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 2001), 1–25; David Louter, "Glaciers and Gasoline: The Making of a Windshield Wilderness, 1900–1915," in David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long, eds., Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 248–270.
15. Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 4–6, 100–111.
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