As a child in Encinitas, I often sat in my dad’s den and
pored over Automobile Club maps of California’s counties, dragging my fingertip
along the convoluted coasts of Humboldt and Monterey, thinking, Damn, I would love to go there. At the
time, one family vacation to Sonoma’s Russian River and a handful of Hollister
Ranch trips were the extent of my state travels, yet with adulthood arrived
freedom, kick-starting my first big surf trip from San Diego to Oregon. There
was Imperial Beach, San Onofre, and the crowded Orange County boardwalks. There
was Long Beach, Palos Verdes, and the urban South Bay sandbars. There was Santa
Monica, Malibu, and the fertile Ventura nooks, unfurling to Rincon and sunny
Santa Barbara. There was Gaviota Pass, the windy rainbow bridge from southern
to central California, where homely San Luis Obispo crept into view, soon
fading to Morro Bay and the San Simeon coast, accelerating into the steep wilds
of Big Sur, the Monterey Peninsula, the stunning diversity of Santa Cruz, and the
vast San Franciscan cosmopolis. North of the Golden Gate Bridge was esoteric
and elucidating, purely magical if not for the random town names—Honeydew,
Timber Cove, Mendocino. Names like these could latch my young mind to the
sensations, the vivid auras of outdoor wonder, the cold and undrying wetsuit,
woodsmoke, rain and fog, morning dew on green campground grass, loud surf,
birdsong, and the sweet, earthen scents of forest: fir, redwood, pine sap,
moss, fungi, ferns, bramble berries, rotting bark, the stillness of wood. For a
San Diego-bred surfer, weaned on crowds and warmth and acres of concrete, this
was good stuff.