For this peculiar time, there may be no more desirable California place than that small strip of coastal Monterey County, within the city of Pacific Grove. Asilomar is more than just an unusual state park that includes a state beach, and a historic hotel and conference grounds. It’s also a versatile refuge where you can either isolate yourself or be with others.

And in a state as crazy and wired as ours, Asilomar is the rare place where Californians might actually find some peaceful sleep.

I’d been pining for the pines of Asilomar long before the coronavirus shut down our daily lives. A few months ago, I made reservations for my family to spend a long weekend of the kids’ early April spring break there with my mother-in-law and father-in-law, who have never been. My wife suggested the trip because Asilomar is that rare location where I, an annoyingly energetic person who works all the time, can actually shut down and relax.

Two weeks ago, however, Gavin Newsom blew up our plans. The governor invoked his power over the state park to close the conference grounds and hotel so they could be used to quarantine passengers exposed to COVID-19 on the Grand Princess cruise ship. As many as two dozen passengers may already be there. And there are strong hints that Asilomar could become a major center for quarantines as the pandemic worsens.

This prospect has sparked considerable Monterey-area media coverage, with county officials and citizens raising questions about what’s happening at Asilomar. Adding to the concern have been unexplained patrols of the property by U.S. marshals, and temporary layoffs of hotel employees.

Such worries, while understandable, miss the point of the place. That Asilomar would play a comforting role in this crisis is completely in keeping with its history; just as California has been a refuge for people around the world, Asilomar has long been a refuge for Californians. In that sense, it’s long been one of California’s Californias.

Merrill Hall at Asilomar. Courtesy of Wayne Hsieh/flickr.

Asilomar’s origins lie in the story of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and its efforts to shelter young women as they relocated from farms to cities in search of jobs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the YWCA offered not just housing but training and education in subjects from finance to typing. That created a need for spaces in different parts of the country where YWCA leaders and the women they served could gather, rest, and strategize.

Asilomar was the result of the efforts of some of the leading women of early 20th century California—among them Phoebe Apperson Hearst and Ellen Browning Scripps, both from famous publishing families—to create a West Coast conference grounds for the YWCA. The Pacific Improvement Company donated the land and the architect Julia Morgan, later famous for Hearst Castle, was hired to design it. In 1913, the grounds opened for a YWCA student leadership conference. For a contest, a Stanford student, Helen Salisbury, invented the name Asilomar by combining the Spanish words for refuge (asilo) and sea (mar).

In subsequent years, more land and more Morgan-designed buildings were added to Asilomar, allowing the property to accommodate more than 500 people. By the 1920s, Asilomar was being used year-round, by camps, colleges, churches, conferences, and gatherings of all sorts of Californians seeking refuge.

In those days, the summer still belonged to the YWCA, with its leadership conferences and summer camps. Meanwhile, a distinct and enduring vibe of “quietness” had formed. A 1931 newsletter produced by camp workers described the “differentness” of life where the sounds included “the moan of the wind and the drip of water from the fog-clad pines” and the sights consisted of “the whiteness of the sand dunes, the blueness of the ocean, and the rare beauty of the sunsets.”

The document observed how refuge at once removes us and connects us:

Jobs and folks and life in general are new to each other, and for these reasons a certain amount of adjustment is necessary. Selfish desires must be given up for the sake of the group. But as the summer moves on week after week, this adjustment is soon made and the individuals are moving as one united body, ready to work or to play as occasion demands.

Asilomar nearly didn’t survive the Great Depression and Second World War. In 1934, the YWCA, unable to keep funding its conference facilities, voted to close Asilomar and sell it. But no one would buy it. And so Asilomar was leased for a few years to motel owners. As the country moved into war, it became a National Youth Administration training camp and then a temporary living quarters for the military families of Fort Ord and the Defense Language Institute.

Post-war, the YWCA reopened the grounds as a money-making conference facility, even as it was trying to sell the place. By the 1950s, Pacific Grove residents and other local communities, who were afraid the property would be sold to a glass company interested in sand extraction, formed a Save Asilomar Committee. That touched off a series of conversations and state legislation that led to Asilomar becoming a state park in 1956.

The place has grown and changed in the years since. In the 1960s and ’70s, new structures were added, as part of a master plan created by San Francisco architect John Carl Warnecke, perhaps best known for his “eternal flame” memorial to John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery. The state acquired nearby land for environmental reasons, extending the park beyond 100 acres, and has worked diligently in recent decades to preserve and restore Asilomar’s dunes.

Over time, Asilomar has developed a reputation as a good location for serious thinking—especially for Californians getting together to talk over the future of science and technology. Most famously and controversially, in 1975, a meeting there produced a historic agreement in which scientists ended a moratorium on recombinant DNA research and designed new “Asilomar Conference” guidelines for genetic manipulation that effectively constitute a voluntary honor system. More recent Asilomar conferences have examined the risks of everything from artificial intelligence to climate change interventions.

The ethos of this collection of small buildings and small dunes remains simple and rustic, which is part of what makes the place so versatile and valuable. It also feels gloriously disconnected. The rooms don’t have phones or televisions. The beds are simple and comfortable. The rates are reasonable.

You don’t do much at Asilomar—you can walk the trails or the beach, do some bird-watching, rent a bike, play volleyball, or play pool at the tables at the main lodge. Those guests now in quarantine can’t leave their rooms, but, for that, I somewhat envy them. Asilomar is a terrific place to catch up on sleeping and reading.

On my last Asilomar visit, I re-read Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and underlined this passage: “Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.” 

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Joe, who had been my colleague at the Fair Housing Council of the San Gabriel Valley for nearly two decades, told me that we had never failed at anything, and we weren’t going to start now.

I put on my community-organizing hat and tried to get to know the movers and shakers around the park. I knocked on doors of Neighborhood Watch captains, at the neighborhood churches, at nonprofits, at local businesses, and at City Hall. Most of the people I met didn’t trust me at first, not even the street vendors we were trying to help; I was new and from Pasadena. Who was I, they asked me again? And would I stay?

I didn’t tell them the whole story, but I wasn’t someone who gave up easily. I was born in 1954, in Santa Monica, to Helen Flores and Casiano Romero. They divorced when I was 2, and I lived with three generations of women: my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. My great-grandmother, Alicia Gutierrez, who was originally from Michoacan, raised me until she passed away when I was 10. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she taught me about culture, often via food. The best memories of my childhood involve going into the garden in our backyard and picking fresh vegetables and herbs for cooking, and then coming inside where my grandmother would be baking, making atole, a warm corn drink, and plucking feathers to get the chicken ready for cooking.

At 14, I got pregnant and had my beautiful daughter. Instead of stopping me, becoming a mom made me more determined to focus on what was important, which was to be a loving, positive person who contributed to community. In times of struggle and hardship, I tried to learn from mistakes and put my faith in God.

After my husband died suddenly, in 1990, I reevaluated my life and left my position as executive director at the Fair Housing Council. I spent time working in Washington, D.C. on fair housing and traveled to China and to Chiapas, Mexico to work on women’s issues. Then, Joe and I joined forces and established a new nonprofit, the Institute for Urban Research and Development, through which I ended up in MacArthur Park.

Joe and I had never done anything like establishing a vending district before—and we couldn’t find anyone else who had, either. So we put the vending district together ourselves, from scratch. Joe found a designer and a manufacturer to build the vending carts. He also engaged the designer of the Santa Monica Promenade to help in redesigning the vending district. We didn’t want a swap meet feel. We wanted a real cultural hub, a destination that people from all over would want to come and visit!

That meant cleaning up the park, too. Every morning, before the carts would go out, I would go into the park and ask folks—mostly homeless people with shopping carts—to leave in order to make space for the vendors. Each day was a battle. Some of the homeless would become intoxicated and disturb the peace. I would pick up needles and empty wine and beer bottles and ask gang members to please step away to the other side of the park. Eventually, I got a special permit that gave us leverage, which helped. People still ask me all the time if I was scared, but I was never afraid and was never threatened.

I also began organizing community meetings for anyone interested in making MacArthur a safer, more beautiful place. These meetings led to the birth of the Rediscover MacArthur Park Alliance, which combats crime in order to revitalize the park and neighborhood. We got the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks to assign rangers to patrol the park and to help me clear out the homeless in the morning. Eventually, the LAPD partnered with us and patrolled on a regular basis.

As the Alliance worked on the park, Joe and I tried to figure out how to help the vendors make a decent living. In addition to crime, we had a difficult time getting the city health department to approve hot foods. The vendors wanted to sell elotes, champurrado (Mexican hot chocolate), tacos, and hot dogs, but the health department was worried about cross contamination and food poisoning.

We needed a staple that everyone could sell but that would allow each vendor to distinguish their cart. One day, Joe called me and said, “Tamales.” We called a meeting with our vendors—from Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua at the time—and Joe proposed that each vendor make tamales from their respective country. They were resistant at first, but opposition disappeared when the health department gave its approval.

Joe suggested that in addition we start a café—also selling tamales—that would make people more comfortable with the vendors and the neighborhood. Joe, an Italian-American, told me that every good Italian restaurant has a “Mama” who comes out to ask how everyone is enjoying the meal. He asked me if I minded being called Mama. I didn’t. Mama’s Hot Tamales Café opened in 2002 by the south corner of the park.

One day that year, I was walking home from work at around 7:30 p.m. My path took me through the entire park—around the lake and through two tunnels—until I emerged at the opposite end from the café. I sat down and looked around and saw families and children playing, happy and laughing. Newly installed lights illuminated the park. It was hard to believe it was the same space I had spent so long battling over with gangs and the homeless.

That same year, William J. Bratton’s arrival as LAPD chief accelerated the improvements in the park. Back in 1998, I had counted around 700 arrests in the park alone, not even including the streets or surrounding neighborhoods. In December 2005, I called the senior lead police officer for the area and asked him how many arrests the department had made in MacArthur Park that year. The answer was zero.

The vending district closed in 2006, so we invited the vendors to come and prepare tamales for the café; they’d be reimbursed for all their tamales that we sold. The café also became a small business training center for local people as well as anyone in L.A. needing the support, guidance, and love it takes to build the confidence to start one’s own company.

In 2010, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and a year later I underwent surgery. At the end of 2011, I closed Mama’s Hot Tamales Café and took a year off to go through treatments and heal.

Now I’m back in action, with a catering business, Mama’s Hot Tamales. I’m still very involved with community development and economic activities around MacArthur Park. The park has slipped a little bit, and some of the issues we tackled more than a decade ago are back. But trust Mama with her watchful eye: In a couple of years, we’ll see the park return to full strength. We’re not going to start failing now.

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“What’s that?” I asked my guide, suddenly alert. She confessed that fungi weren’t her forte. Hmm… If I had an Internet connection or 3G I could look it up right now, I thought, bursting my Alaskan wilderness bubble.

I’m not the only hiker who secretly fantasizes about holding up my phone and taking a picture of a flower to have it identified; comparing a picture of Old Faithful today to Old Faithful in the past with a simple stream on my iPad; downloading audio tours; navigating maps; and learning social history routes along my way.

The tastes of the public are changing and those of us in the Great Outdoors business are all considering how to negotiate a wired generation, reliant on iPads and cell phones. Young, diverse audiences–the future park attendees–have grown up with technology as a second language. Traditional interpretive materials-books, brochures, booklets, DVDs, visitor centers, rangers–are losing traction as people turn to the Internet to get park information.

Maybe technology will soon become nature’s primary curator, enhancing the visitor experience in the National Parks. But doesn’t the very definition of nature carry with it a presumption of being unplugged?

Don Kim, Program Associate for Web and Social Media for the Association for Partners in Public Lands (APPL), a nonprofit that works with the agencies that oversee public lands, says there is no easy, absolute answer to the question of how much technology is too much, outdoors. “There are two different worlds with conflicting ideologies,” he said. “One is that you’re out there on your own. Nature. The other is that technology is inevitable…but you have to understand that as a park, you still have to be able to market yourself. The idea is to get people there.”

“Geocaching” services are infiltrating parks, according to Kim. “You can map out your routes while you’re hiking and archive, collect photos, put them into the same route, same camping trip, all through the GPS on the phone,” he explains. Petrified National Forest, for example, has a National Park Service (NPS)-sponsored “EarthCache” program, leading visitors to some of the park’s significant geological resources.

Grand Teton and Valley Forge National Parks have self-guided cell phone tours. A Quick Response (QR) code at the Denali Visitor’s Center provides pertinent, on-the-spot information.

Self-contained apps available in real time can be downloaded before entering parks, like “Oh, Ranger!”, the American Park Network’s app sponsored by Ford. There are dozens of thorough Audubon Guide apps on nature on wildlife, including one on North American mushrooms (if I had only known!). There are also practical apps like the phone flashlight, which I’ve personally used on multiple occasions. (Apps don’t just replace paper, but battery-operated camping gear!)

But the tech world doesn’t always jive with park infrastructure or aesthetics. Many visitors understandably want to keep technology out. Based on public feedback in Yellowstone, Wi-Fi was banned from the Old Faithful Inn and the Lake Hotel, according to NPS. The public also complained that cell phone towers were eyesores at Old Faithful and Mt. Washburn.

Where technologies do proliferate, they even challenge the educational role of the classic National Park gateway: the visitor center. Last August, Yellowstone completed its new visitor’s center at Old Faithful. With a $27 million price tag, it’s state-of-the art and hopping. Nonetheless, in this age of self-guided, app-driven and GPS-oriented consumers, Park Service Director Jon Jarvis concedes that the fate of National Park Visitors Centers is precarious.

Perhaps Designated Wilderness Areas should remain the bastions of silence, and National Parks, which have always been the tourist’s darlings, should face the music and start planting cell phone towers and instituting Wifi.

Perhaps the real future is in the virtual world and not the tangible one; the $750 million of our recovery dollars dedicated to NPS shouldn’t be all spent on roads or new facilities. Some of it should be devoted to better technology and social media trainings for rangers, to meet modern needs and engage tomorrow’s visitors.

That is, if the technology doesn’t simply replace the need for rangers at all. Tim Merriman, Executive Director of The National Association of Interpretation, which trains Federal agency employees who work with natural resources, recently told me: “I don’t know if you can imagine going on a hike with a robot or a machine.” A smart phone won’t protect you from a bear or grab your hand when you fall into a stream. “We’re social animals and having that friendly interface with a person is still a value.”

Merriman doesn’t see technology and live interpretation as mutually exclusive, either. On the contrary, he sees them as mutually advantageous. Technology aids scientists through advances like GPS animal tracking, data projection, and sound amplification, he explained. But visitors need capable humans to help interpret technological data.

But Merriman isn’t sure where to draw the lines. “I’m the kind of person who wants Internet wherever I go,” he confessed, but also remembered the deafening noise of the small airplanes when they were first introduced in the Grand Canyon.

“Wow,” he recalled thinking, “this is not solitude.”

It is a beautiful idea that human beings might collectively decide to create sanctuaries away from the world of technology; where connection can be considered equally as strong through the fibers of the earth as it is through data in the air; where we can teach kids how to put down Angry Birds for five minutes and look around; where we can go to learn of the darkness. The quiet. The loneliness. The awe. The last sliver of a reminder of what was.

The conclusion of my Alaska trip took me to a modest, woodstove cabin, shared by three other traveling companions at the end-of-the-road in Denali. In the middle of the night, the rain cleared and I awoke to the alpenglow of Mount McKinley. Finally. I reached for my cell phone to take a picture so I could email it to my nephews in New York and post it on Facebook.

But I had to squelch my impulse to share such beauty:

My phone was dead.

It was just me and the cold, beaming mountain.

Deanna Neil is an award-winning author, singer and freelancer thinker living in Los Angeles.

*Photo by Deanna Neil.

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