Editor’s Note: Lynn Freed is the author of the novel The Servants’ Quarters, just published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has written five other highly praised novels, a short story collection and an essay collection.

I turn sharply off the highway, up to the hotel, only to find my path blocked by a white Lexus. The couple in it gestures wildly at the bushy hillside. The man has a camera at the ready, the woman a pair of binoculars. I switch off my engine and wait. I am acquainted with this sort of behavior; it is practiced by game spotters in the African bush, citing a leopard, a cheetah, a lion making a kill. What one can hope for from a hillside in between Northern California’s Route 1 and the Pacific Ocean, I can’t imagine. A snake? A rabbit? Some more endangered creature given sanctuary by the ecologically correct, New Age barons of the tourist industry that have built this place?

I start my car, tired of waiting. But just then two pointed ears appear above the grass and the couple is riveted. A doe and her faun trot out into the road, change their minds, turn back again and disappear. The couple turns to me, triumphant. They smile. I smile back. To have lived in Northern California for 20 years is to be inured to the tyranny of Reverence. Its objects are legion — Nature, Being, Love, Self, Loss, Grief, Pain, etc. And now, of course, Our Planet.

At the reception area of the hotel, I am offered herbal tea and instructed to abandon my car. An attendant in an electric cart drives me up the hill to the hotel itself. It is windy and cold up there, 1,200 feet above the Pacific. Most of the clientele, the attendant tells me, come up from Los Angeles. They come here to Replenish. A pair of them in thick terry robes swans past us down the path. They are smiling beatifically — not, it seems, at us or at even each other, but simply at Life. They are going, the attendant says, to the basking pool, which is open 24 hours a day, whenever the spirit moves you. "In a place like this," he suggests ominously, "it is best to follow wherever the spirit moves."

As we buzz along the path, he points out certain guest rooms, built on stilts among the trees; others that look like bunkers, with sod roofs, buried in the hill. No trees were felled to build this resort, he points out. Not even the roots of the trees have been disturbed. In fact, there is a living bench made out of living trees from which to watch living bass swim around a pond. There is also a wedding palette near the edge of the cliff on which those who wish to do so can be married.

The attendant, I decide, would make an excellent New Age Brown Shirt. Apart from his earring, his uniform, his short-cropped, blonde hair and muscled, tidy body, he has perfected, in tone and delivery, an edgy hint of threat, a distinct air of moral superiority.