Dear ones,

Car Week and 1927 — August 19, 2026

Last week the Monterey peninsula filled with engines. You could feel it before you could name it — a low hum under the fog, the particular hush that settles over 17-Mile Drive when it is not, for once, quiet. By Sunday it was over. The tents came down. The velvet ropes were coiled and driven away in trucks like everything else. This morning the cypress are back to doing what they always do, which is stand there, remembering.

I want to tell you what that hum was, and where it came from, because it did not begin last week. It began a hundred years ago, on the same six miles of coastline, under the same fog, and the throughline is not a metaphor. It is a corporate lineage, traceable in deeds.

In 1919, a young man named Samuel Morse formed the Del Monte Properties Company and bought eighteen thousand acres from the Pacific Improvement Company — the Hotel Del Monte, a stretch of coastline, and two golf courses not yet finished being born. That same year, the Lodge opened, and the Pebble Beach Golf Links opened with it. By December of 1926, Del Monte was putting up a five-thousand-dollar purse to draw the country's best golfers to its new links. And in 1927, that same company printed a map. It called this place California's Playground. It was a beautiful map. It did not say for whom.

I keep returning to that word — playground — because I don't think it ever stopped applying. Car Week didn't invent anything new last week; it simply switched the frequency back on. There is a kind of consciousness that lives underneath a place like this, low and patient, the way roots run under a lawn whether or not anyone waters it. Most of the year it is quiet enough to forget it is there. Then the tents go up, the ropes come out, the engines arrive, and for eight days it surfaces — the same instinct the 1927 map was drawn from, the same choreography of who stands inside the rope and who stands outside it, running now in engines instead of ink. Nothing about the choreography had to be relearned. It was never actually forgotten. It was only resting.

This is not, I want to be careful to say, a story about cars, or even really about money. It is a story about who gets to be a guest on this land and who gets to be the host, and how a company that once sold golf memberships to keep certain kinds of people out learned, eighty years later, to sell that same exclusivity back to us as heritage, as craftsmanship, as elegance. The word changes. The fence does not move.

I notice this without wanting to hand you an answer for it, because the moral remembering isn't in the accusation — it's in the noticing itself, and in staying present to what the noticing brings up in the body. If you stood at that rope line last week, or if you only saw the photographs on your phone, I'd ask you to check in with what moved in you. Admiration, probably — those machines are extraordinary, and there is nothing wrong with your eye following a beautiful line. And underneath it, maybe, something quieter and less comfortable: an awareness of the fence, of who built it, of what it has always been built to do. Both are true at once. The body knows how to hold both, even when we'd rather it just pick one.

That same doubleness scales up, too, if you follow it past the rope line, because this was never only a local story. Morse broke from the East Coast model of a golf club that only members could enter — he opened Pebble Beach Golf Links to any paying visitor, which sounds generous until you notice what it actually accomplishes: it takes a fence that used to say members only and rebuilds it to say whoever can afford it, which is a fence that gets to look like an open door. The Monterey Peninsula Open arrived in 1926. The U.S. Amateur came in 1929, and again in 1961. Bing Crosby's tournament, restarted in 1947, put this coastline on television screens across the country. By the time the U.S. Open finally arrived in 1972, Pebble Beach wasn't just a golf course anymore — it had become a national template for how you sell exclusivity as accessibility, how you make a velvet rope feel, from a distance, like an invitation. Car Week is that same export, still running, at full volume, on the same six miles.

I think often, too, about the fact that Samuel Morse is remembered, accurately, both as the man who developed this coastline and as what more than one historical account calls an environmental conservationist — someone who spent decades fighting to keep the cypress standing and the Del Monte Forest from being logged, who in his later years set aside the easements that still protect hundreds of acres of this coastline today. Both of those sentences are true. I don't think 1927 experienced them as a contradiction. The same eye that could see land clearly enough to profit from it could see it clearly enough to want it protected — for the future he had in mind, and for the people he had in mind living in it. Developer and conservationist were not opposing roles in that culture. They were often the same civic virtue, worn on different days.

Which is really what I want to sit with, more than anything else this year's Car Week surfaced. The 1927 map didn't invent the values printed on it. It reflected them — the ordinary common sense of who a place like this was for, the kind of thing nobody in 1927 would have thought to apologize for, because apologizing requires first believing there is something to apologize for. That's the harder question underneath the noticing, and it isn't really about Samuel Morse at all: what does our culture currently hold as too ordinary to question, the way exclusivity here was too ordinary to question in 1927? What would a map drawn honestly today say about who this place is for? And is there anything in that answer we might actually want to change, now, while we're still the ones holding the pen?

I ask that question as someone who has been holding it a long time, since before I knew any of the deeds or the dates. My own inquiry into all of this started at a school bus stop, in my first year living on the peninsula. We'd moved to California in January of 2013, back to my husband's hometown, and by August I was walking my daughter and the neighborhood children up the road each morning to wait for the bus to the local elementary school. One of those mornings, the Ferraris came through — some event at a winery nearby, and it was plain that no one on that road was going to be the one to ask grown men to slow down. I stood there watching cars driven by men who would answer to no one, alongside a cluster of children not yet ten who had nowhere to go if a driver misjudged a curve. And I remember thinking, in those exact words: whose lives is this community actually organized around? It was not the children's. I had that confirmed in writing a year later, when the schools simply canceled classes on the Friday of Car Week — the families rearranging their whole week so the road could keep doing what it wanted to do, rather than the men on the road being asked to change anything about how they drove past a school bus stop. That was 2014. I don't think much has moved since. The instinct never needed signage. It just needed an occasion.

We are still tracing this same six-mile geography in the work on The Map — 1827 to 1927, and 1927 to now — because every map is a story, and every story is a set of decisions about what gets drawn in and what gets left off the page. Car Week didn't draw a new map last week. It read the old one out loud, at volume, in engines instead of ink.

This is early, living work — a play still finding its shape, made in the company of others rather than alone. If any of this stirred something in you, or if you carry pieces of this history yourself, I'd welcome hearing from you. Write to us at info@maijawest.com. Consider yourself invited into the conversation.

May we keep listening past the noise of it, into what the land remembers underneath.

With care, Maija

Sources: Pebble Beach Company History · Samuel Finley Brown Morse — Wikipedia · 100 Years of Pebble Beach: In the Beginning — LINKS Magazine · History of Monterey Car Week

🌿 Matriarch Makeover

Maija Danilova West is a governance practitioner, peacemaker, and the author of Matriarch Makeover: A 30-Day Invitation. Her forthcoming book, From the Triangle to the Circle: Matriarchal Governance Design, is addressed to practitioners of law, peacemaking, and governance who are earnestly seeking a way to practice that is more life-affirming.

Original content by Maija, copy edited by Claude.

Last updated: August 20, 2026