Big Sur in the sixties and seventies was another world. This is how an old friend of my father’s remembers Karl Lee from those years, written by Teresa Bradford-Cole. Thank you, Teresa.
To visit Karl Lee, you first had to find your way through a little wilderness.
After parking the car up on Partington, you followed an untamed mountain path toward his front door. The brush had its own ideas about where a person ought to walk. By the time you reached his rugged, somewhat shack-like homestead, you had already left a good portion of the ordinary world behind.
Here was a master jeweler, tucked into the mountains of Big Sur, making exquisite amulets and talismans.
Karl Lee
Karl loved shiny stones. Color caught him. A gem held something worth looking into, something worth bringing out into the light. His work seemed to reach back toward the ancient jewelers, those patient makers who understood how to hold a stone in gold and let its beauty speak.
And yet everything that came through his hands had that unmistakable Big Sur way about it.
One of his rings stayed in my own collection for decades: a chartreuse-green tourmaline, bright as sunlight finding its way through a leaf. A rich gold bezel held the stone above a silver plate and band. Whether the gold was eighteen or twenty-two karat, I would have to confirm. What I remember without question is the pleasure of wearing it.
Karl understood something about fingers.
Look at your own. A finger is somewhat square, with its little changes of plane and shape. He made his rings with that understanding, giving the band a squarer structure that settled comfortably onto the hand. Such a practical bit of knowing, tucked beneath all that beauty.
His work
People wore his pieces as jewelry, as amulets, as talismans. Some simply admired them. If you were fortunate enough to have one, you could feel the care he had worked into it. For me, that was part of the magic.
Karl himself was a wild child, in my opinion.
He wasn’t a socialite, fluttering from gathering to gathering like a butterfly or skimming through every conversation like a dragonfly. He stayed up his mountain, and the world found its way to him.
Karl Lee
Visitors came from Nepal and Tibet, New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco. Old beatniks made the climb. So did people from Pebble Beach, diamonds dripping off them, picking their way toward that rugged front door. They came for a treasure, certainly, but often with the hope of spending a little time with the man who made it.
Karl Lee
Once you sat down, time could get away from you.
There would be tea, and Karl chewing on those sticks of ginseng, telling a story that somehow opened into another story. He could talk you into a trance. You would find yourself listening so closely that the mountain, the house, and whatever you had planned for the rest of the day slipped into the background.
A child or two might be running around. The woman sharing his life then, the mother of one of his children, would be there. We would sit and talk and laugh while his stories grew wilder.
Outside, he had built a kiln into the side of the hill. He would go out to stoke the fire, tending another part of his world of heat and transformation.
Karl Lee
And sometimes his wildness went well beyond storytelling.
In the middle of a conversation, he might pick up a revolver or shotgun and shoot holes into the ceiling. It was startling, dangerous, and enough to break whatever trance his storytelling had woven.
Are you listening? What did I just say?
There was certainly no drifting off after that.
I remember the laughter, the tea, the beautiful work, and that unpredictable streak all belonging to the same man. Karl was not someone you could tidy into a neat little portrait.
He was an alchemist, and his explanation of magic has stayed with me.
Take oatmeal cookies.
You gather the ingredients. You follow the recipe. You stir everything together, perform your little incantations, and put the dough into the oven at the proper heat for the proper time.
And then?
Oatmeal cookies.
There was your magic.
I loved the plain sense of it. The mystery had a recipe, and you still had to do the work. Gather, measure, stir, tend the fire. Pay attention to what your hands are doing.
He did it with stones and metal. I watched him do it with a roomful of people and a story.
Now that chartreuse tourmaline ring has left my collection for another hand, another adventure. Before I send it along, I find myself back on that untamed path, making my way toward his door.
There is tea waiting, a story already underway, and Karl Lee chewing on a stick of ginseng.
Somewhere on the hillside, a fire is being tended.
The Big Sur coast
