Hot Springs Eternal

One of the glories of the winter months in California is the presence of natural hot springs. I don’t get to run off to the hot springs whenever I want to, but I have enjoyed significant times at four of them. Because the springs are located in isolated places, they are vulnerable, especially during our drought years. Two of them have had devastating fires in the last year.

Tassajara Hot Springs is the most beautiful. It has been an arm of the San Francisco Zen Center since 1966, and is a training center and monastery, but it opens its gates to visitors in the summer. It is located off Carmel Valley Road in the mountains at the edge of the Ventana Wilderness about four hours south of San Francisco. The gravel road in from Carmel Valley is so steep, that four-wheel drive should be used, but the first time I went, I drove a rental car, very slowly, taking an hour to drive the fourteen miles!

The monastery occupies a meadow beside Tassajara creek and the hot springs issue from different places along this creek. A Soto Zen temple for meditation and study is central to the complex. There are several kinds of accommodation for guests, including cabins and yurts. The oldest stone building is used as a dining room. Pools for men and women are separate for most of the day, except late at night. The woods around the area are typical of California, with manzanita, laurel and madrone, though gardens and non-native trees have been brought into the resort area. Kerosene lit the night when I was first there, but solar power is increasingly used. I volunteered for a Zen Center “work week,” working mostly on the lawns and in the garden, being rewarded with delicious vegetarian meals and baked goods. Don and I have been back, to find that a sojourn in this luscious place makes up for the difficulty in getting there.

I went to Wilbur Hot Springs several times in the 1980’s, where healing waters spring up in Cache Creek, near Williams. It is also isolated, but easier to get to. When I was there, we stayed in the hundred-year-old lodge which had been restored by its owner, Dr. Richard Miller. He found the place derelict in 1972 and began to offer free Esalen workshops in exchange for work on cleaning up the place. The hot springs, which are 140-150 degrees F., have been channeled into pools which are increasingly hotter. Clothing optional, the resort has an etiquette of modesty and respect which benefits its reputation as a place of healing and rejuvenation. Tasteful wooden fences screen the pools and the area is now a nature preserve.

When I brought Don to Wilbur in 2001, to cheer him up the first Christmas we were without Jesse, we also stayed in the lodge. Guests bring their own food, which is stored in propane refrigerators, and cook it on the enormous gas ranges available in the kitchen. It did revive Don’s interest in cooking. In March 2014, the lodge at Wilbur burned and the top two floors were lost. But Wilbur has re-opened, the ground level of the lodge has been restored and new cabins brought to the site.

Harbin Hot Springs was burned to the ground, along with much of Middletown, by the Valley Fire of September 2015. All the structures were lost, but of course the springs and pools still exist. At this time the place is closed, but, like a phoenix, it is rising from its ashes. I made a meditation retreat at Harbin in 1998 at Thanksgiving using Sylvia Boorstein’s book: Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There. I was alone and not terribly comfortable, but it did work. I spent quite a bit of time in the warm heart pool, steam rising into the cold air, and practiced walking meditation along the paths.

In the 1980’s, when we were most mad for hot springs, we found several public pools in Calistoga, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco. Our favorite for day use was Dr. Wilkinson’s Hot Springs Resort which had a big, indoor pool. I’m not sure whether you can still go there just for the day, however. Calistoga has hot springs all around it, and it has become a spa town, just above of the wine country.

These hot springs are part of the colorful geography and history of California in which Line and Marty and their families reside. Marty has more chance to make use of them, and more need for them, as it turns out.