Sunset Over Big Sur – Viewed from Nepenthe Restaurant, Monterey County, California

Nepenthe is a medicine for sorrow, literally an anti-depressant – a "drug of forgetfulness" mentioned in ancient Greek literature and Greek mythology, depicted as originating in Egypt. The word nepenthe first appears in the fourth book of Homer's Odyssey: "Then Helen, daughter of Zeus, took other counsel. Straightway she cast into the wine of which they were drinking a drug to quiet all pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill."

In 1947, Lolly and Bill Fassett moved with their five children into the Log House in Big Sur. Once a getaway for the Trail Club of Jolon, the cabin is perched on a hillside overlooking the south coast of Monterey County. Big Sur, with yellow genesta popping in August heat; purple lupine tangling with sage on mountains shrouded in fog, was a wild sanctuary. Bill and Lolly imagined an open-air pavilion with good food and wine and dancing under the stars. It would be a place where people from up and down the coast would come and forget their cares. Working with Rowan Maiden, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, they sketched out their vision. Legendary Big Sur builders, Frank and Walter Trotter built the structure using native materials; redwood, hewn from the canyons and adobe bricks, which Lolly made with her own hands.

People came, not just from the ridge-tops and canyons, but from all over the world: vagabonds, poets, artist, lovers. Many know of Henry Miller’s years in Big Sur, but few are aware that his first home on the coast was in the Log House, above Nepenthe. Novelist Lynda Sargent took in the penniless Henry Miller and gave him a place to set up his typewriter during the day and lay his head at night.