Jerry Morissette, Monk 280: Place-making and creation as a practise
What do you write about when you have no ideas?
What do you write about when you want to write but your mind is an overcast day in April and the rain hasn’t spilled over yet to reveal whatever exists behind the clouds? I’m fairly sure I’m not the only person in the world who has stumbled into a creative block before. In fact, I know I’m not. It would be unfeasibly egotistical of me to say otherwise.
It’s easy to sink into the sensation of boredom or uselessness. It’s easy to forget that most people have, at some point, felt devoid of thought or care or ability. It’s easy to believe that there’s no way out of it either. I’m curious about the act of creating as performance versus practise and how capitalism and societal expectations of productivity interact with creativity negatively. Performance implies an audience, which centres the creator rather than the thing they create as the focus for outside evaluation of skill, craft, or productivity. The idea of burnout only exists because our society demands near-constant productivity and if you’re a creative person, especially one who relies on your craft to pay rent, then it can be difficult to separate yourself from your creativity and the performance of creating for an audience. Practise, on the other hand, does not imply a timeline or an audience, the focus remains on the act of creation itself, not the end product.
With all that being said, writing about Not Writing isn’t particularly therapeutic, nor is it particularly cathartic so I’ll stop here. I don’t want to talk about writer’s block or motivation, or anything else remotely to do with Not Making Stuff, at least, not so directly. I want to talk about the people who do make things, who make places, who practise creation rather than perform it and what happens when they stop.
I want to talk about Jerry Morissette.
And to do that, we need to talk about Interstate 280.
The I-280 stretches out for about sixty miles across the San Francisco Bay Peninsular connecting San Francisco to San Jose. There used to be a sign labelling it the most beautiful highway in the world, and though this has since been taken down, I can understand the sentiment. If you take the scenic route and look west you’ll see the Santa Cruz Mountains. If you look east you can catch glimpses of the San Francisco Bay caught between the hills and cities in the distance.
Most of what you’ll see though, is sky and space and the hazy outlines of mountains and valleys that cut through said sky and space. There is something about the sky in California that leaves me feeling so small. It’s the kind of sky that swells up and out, too big and too much and too blue to ever fully be able to comprehend. Because it’s California, the sky is probably going to be that specific shade of blue that tempts you into metaphor (unless it’s June when the chances of it being overcast and cloudy increase dramatically).
The I-280 itself is all cracked asphalt and flaking yellow lines. Occasionally you’ll drive past an exit sign and then you’ll drive on and the exit never seems to materialise. Eventually though, if you drive for long enough, you’ll spot signs for a rest station. The signs are a kind of artificial blue that doesn’t exist in nature so they stand out against the grey tarmac and the dusty green roadside vegetation. Maybe you’ll keep driving but maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll pull up into the parking lot of Crystal Springs Rest Area known to locals as Father Serra rest stop because of the (genuinely weird) statue of the Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra that crouches next to it.
The Father Serra rest stop today is about what you’d expect. There are public bathrooms, concrete benches and tables, trees and a few bedraggled shrubs, and a sign letting travellers know that the I-280 is a Blue Star Memorial Highway in dedication to the ‘Armed Forces that have defended the United States of America’.
It’s not a destination, just a pit stop on the way to one.
However, for about thirteen years, the Father Serra rest stop was a destination. Never the end goal, never the terminus, but still a destination for anyone who found themselves in need of a break on their journey. And that was all down to Jerry Morissette.
An ex-Navy medic-turned-Benedictine monk-turned-drifter, Morissette parked his beaten-up van in the Father Serra rest stop parking lot one day in 1990 and never left. He was contracted by Social Vocational Services to maintain the rest stop, along with a team of three other workers to maintain and clean the grounds and bathrooms; what he wasn’t contracted to do was transform the rest stop that was a space fit-for-purpose and not much else into a place.
There is a beautiful simplicity to how he managed it. Morissette and his team planted groves of flowers and fruit trees; he put vases full of fresh-cut flowers in the bathrooms; he was there to serve motorists freshly brewed coffee free of charge at any time of day or night; he bought picnic tables and chairs that the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) have since replaced with the concrete benches you’ll find there today. He created an oasis out of the rest stop, a place that held meaning to more than just himself.
It’s unclear Morissette had fully turned away from religion by the time he settled in Father Serra but there’s a reason that anthropologists are so interested in religious sites of place-making; almost anywhere can become a site of pilgrimage if enough people believe in a miracle and whilst Morrissette never claimed to be a saint, he did refer to Father Serra rest stop as his monastery and he looked after it with a similar kind of ascetic dedication.
As a small aside, I am endlessly fascinated by the differences between spaces and places, and what turns one into the other. I could probably get lost in the semantics if allowed but I think it largely comes down to meaning and how we ascribe it. There is an abstraction to the idea of space; we conceptualise it through quantifiable measurements like geographical markers or mathematical measurements that elide the cultures and peoples inhabiting a space. A place in contrast is somewhere to be — it is space that has been given meaning to and invested in by its community. Place-making is an almost agnostic consecration of time and being and living, if you will.
In his 1977 book, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan wrote that “place incarnates the experiences and aspirations of a people… it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning.” When Morissette pulled up to the Father Serra rest stop to do a job and ended up living there, I’m not sure if it was his intention to turn the rest stop into a place or if, simply by his living there and doing the things he did, he made it an inevitable.
Because the thing is, Morissette wasn’t on his own — the act of place-making cannot be one individual’s work. It takes a people to create and embody meaning. What started with one man turned into an exercise in community building. Hilsborough locals and regulars to the rest stop would donate money to Morissette who would in turn use it to buy more seeds for the gardens. Morissette himself spoke candidly about how the life he had created for himself had meant sacrificing privacy and free time: “All my actions are seen and reported in some way or another. Even my weekend time must be given up sometimes to help others. Thank God for my dogs.”
The work he put into creating and maintaining his roadside monastery was endless and sometimes unforgiving, but he wasn’t alone in it and his acts didn’t go unrecognised and unvalued by the people he did them for. He built an extended network of people, both locals to the area and visitors just passing through that he referred to as his “family”, commenting that the rest stop was “[their] garden, and our home”. It looks like it was a sentiment shared by more than just Morisette as pinned to the wall of one storage shed, was an anonymous letter written on a cut-out paper heart that simply read, “To the gardener — God bless you.”
When Caltrans tried to evict Morissette in 1995 the community he had built would successfully petition for his staying and Caltrans would eventually end up buying a trailer for Morissette who had been camping in one of the storage sheds up til that point. Caltrans spokesperson, Greg Bayol explained that it was largely a misunderstanding and that, “The place is immaculate — absolutely immaculate. We have got probably at least 100 letters . . . raving about the guy, what a great job he’s done.”
Other stories crop up in the scant few articles and news pieces I can find about Morissette and his family. Morissette was dedicated to keeping the rest stop safe, both for himself and for motorists and this would lead to some inventive deterrents like painting ‘Reserved for CHP’ (California Highway Patrol) on a couple of the parking spaces to put off vandals and petty criminals who had marked the rest stop as a safe spot for drug deals in the 1970s and 80s. There are also stories of people planting their own flowers in memory of loved ones and a couple who planted a tree in celebration of their newborn child. CHP workers gifted the rest stop a Christmas tree that they decorated and hung in the back storage area.
I’d love it if this is where Jerry Morissette’s story ended, with him and his dogs living peacefully in the Father Serra rest stop. Things rarely work out the way you want them to though, especially when state organisations more focussed on productivity than community are involved. In 2003, Morissette’s dog, Spike, died and he started drinking again having been sober since 1985. His productivity dropped and Caltrans issued a final eviction notice.
Bayol, the same man who had praised Morissette in 1995 now said in a press release, “Jerry has been very troublesome recently, not getting the work done, and then there was the incident where he threatened an employee.”
The incident in question was a drunken 911 call that Jerry made on the evening he found Spike dead which lead to a police search of his trailer and three firearms being confiscated.
Morissette admitted as much, stating that “I was in shock and grief… I don’t remember the conversation, I was crying so bad. But there was no merit behind anything I said.”
It’s impossible to know what the percentage of truth to lie is.
Whilst Morissette, fueled by alcohol and grief, indeed ranted to a 911 call operator and likely threatened them at some point during, it’s telling that Bayol’s first complaint about Morissette was the fact that he hadn’t been meeting the standards that Morissette himself had raised and not his staff’s safety. The dismissive attitude towards everything that Morissette had created in the thirteen years he’d been living at the rest stop speaks to the difference in how Morissette’s work was viewed; was it a performance, which would necessitate an evaluation, or was it a continued exercise in creative practise, which would necessitate nothing other than Morissette choosing to continue?
At the time of Morissette’s eviction, Caltrans had plans to install another live-in caretaker. In Bayol’s own view: “There are other people who can do this work.”
There aren’t gardens at the Father Serra rest stop anymore. The wooden picnic benches that Morissette put together himself have been replaced with concrete because they are easier to maintain and harder to steal. As far as I can tell, Caltrans weren’t able to replace Morissette with a different full-time, live-in caretaker, so I guess Bayol was wrong on that front.
As Morissette said, “There was nothing here before… I planted all of this. There was only oak trees before.”
There isn’t much information available on Morissette post-eviction. According to a local newspaper, The Mercury News, he died of cancer in roughly 2014 when he would have been seventy-one. There is still the occasional article written about Jerry Morissette, mostly composed of reader write-ins, remembering the gardens, the free coffee, and the safe community he created and thanking him for it.
Ultimately, his story, his family, and his creative practise has endured and will continue to endure even if the place, Father Serra became during his time there has since reverted to space.
