Come dawn it was a sunny Thursday—crisp, windless, the sky vast. Songbirds and woodpeckers fussed in the trees. Soon, at the nearby school, small rural children would yak before the first class bell rang.
Imagine your life as a child in Big Sur—Monterey as New York City and Carmel as Manhattan. To the south lay the urban sprawl of San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay, and before you lay two hundred and fifty square miles of wilderness, the only land you could ever trust.

I finished my coffee, packed the car, and headed down the coast. Highway 1 was deserted. The first spot I checked was misty and equally empty, warbly with the high tide, bullwhip kelp clogging the lineup. Night had delivered the season’s first real swell, the reef here at last redeemed from the flat months of summer.

A faded blue pickup truck pulled up beside me. Its driver was Billy, a ragged diesel mechanic, age forty-six, in overalls and a flannel shirt, short and stocky, with frizzy red hair and a round, bearded face punctured by two sensationally bloodshot eyes. He looked like an Irish sailor and reeked of sweat. He was smoking a joint. In his truck bed was a red 7’10” pintail. “My winter special,” he said.
For the last twenty years Billy had lived in a shack near the tiny retail strip at Gorda. I said I had been camping nearby for the past several days.

“People are always trying to get me to go camp out,” he said, watching the waves, his faced shaded by his faded blue baseball cap. “But I live under the trees, off mountain water, off my generator and kerosene lamps. I camp out every day.”

This day he left his shack at dawn to look for surf, first stopping at a beachbreak that was unsurfable because the swell was too big. At least twice weekly, he drove up to Santa Cruz, a two-hundred-mile round-trip and several hours spent in the car..
“That’s a lot of driving just to surf,” I said.

“Yes, but the wind skirts the shit out of this place every day,” he said, raising his voice, lifting his cap and rubbing his forehead. “It starts at about ten-thirty in the morning, as soon as the sun heats up the land.”
“You must surf early most of the time, then.”

He scratched an eyebrow. Then he sucked on the joint, held the smoke in his lungs for a moment, and blew it at the gulls above us. “It’s just such a waste of time checking all these spots, and then checking Carmel and the whole Monterey Peninsula. So I say screw it—just drive straight to Santa Cruz. Start at the east side and head north until I find a break. I’m telling you, ninety-eight percent of the time I go to Santa Cruz, I surf. Whereas here in Big Sur, okay, I go to the north end, which has, like, two fickle surf spots. And then down the coast, to this area, if there’s any waves here. If not, then I go down to San Simeon, which is always windy. And it’s like, what’d I just drive? Four hours to get shut out?”

“So being a surfer here is frustrating.”
“It is for me.”
“Why don’t you move elsewhere?”
“That’s too easy.”

Despite the surfable waves in front of us, Billy left, probably bound for Santa Cruz, and I was again alone in the tiny parking lot. Gulls spiraled above, squawking at each other. As I considered the afternoon’s combination of tide, wind, and swell, an abrupt onshore breeze pushed fog in from the west, the sea’s greeny-blue vanishing within minutes. With that, I decided to bushwhack out to a little-known reefbreak in a tiny cliff-shrouded cove not far up the coast.

There the sea was sheet glass, and the inconsistent head-high peaks, tripped by shallow reef, pitched mere yards from black boulders lining the shore. Of course, ill-placed rocks are the bane of the Big Sur surfer’s existence; a friend of mine once said that, wave-quality wise, the place is a million years from perfection.

The rides were brief but steep and challenging. Surfing backside, I had a good view of the rocks I would hit if I fell. The waves were laced with boils and kelp, but it was the kelp that kept the sea glassy, and sitting in the water between waves, I reflected about how special the whole experience was, surfing a hidden reef on a foggy weekday in remote Central California.

After the session, stuffing my board into the back of the small rented car, I was approached by a Spandexed pair of skinny Asian male cyclists. They were riding the length of Highway 1 from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo, a dangerous trip, especially through Big Sur.

“I didn’t know there was a surf break here,” one of them said. “Is it good?”
“Rarely.”
His friend laughed. “Barely or rarely?”
“Same thing.”
“Where is the spot?”
I said, “You must be kidding.”

Cold and hungry and wanting to flee the fog, I drove north to a campground along the leafy banks of the Big Sur River. By nightfall I had made another fire with eucalyptus kindling and hunks of fir, crackling and spattering while I sat on a stump, swigging from a bottle of cheap merlot. Only the racket of crickets for sound, with the occasional frog and the shooshing of wind through the redwoods. The fire boosted my spirits, chilly from the day, the torquing oranges and yellows thinning the darkness of my private campsite.

An hour later the sky opened, stars winking between shreds of cloud, framed by the trees and the silhouetted Santa Lucia Range. Eventually the fire reduced itself to a gentle murmur of ash, sparks rising in the smoke. The wine drowsed me, and as the clouds again claimed the sky, I thought of tomorrow.
Big Sur’s natural world speaks loudest, I wrote in a notebook while cocooned in my down bag, minutes from sleep. Its animals, its trees, its cliffs, its sea. There is nothing else. A soul’s sanctity is born from not what is created, but what is innately inherited from eons of living time—a lifetime. A metaphor, Big Sur is life. And so existing here, ultimately, is a white canvas, a surfer’s life the everlasting watercolor.