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Environmental History, Oct 2003 by Chiang, Connie Y

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.

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.

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.

The real estate promotion involved in the 17-Mile Drive suggested that autotouring 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

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.

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