golden state of mind

 It’s a damp morning as I leave San Francisco. Canary-yellow schoolbuses putter down wet streets, ferrying kids across the city; commuters make their way to work on electric scooters; and lycra-clad joggers ignore the drizzle to plod along rain-streaked pavements. It’s just the start of another ordinary day for San Franciscans, but the beginning of an adventure for me and the many others drawn to this sliver of Californian coast.

Highway One has reached ‘icon’ status the world over, promising travellers all the possibilities of the open road with the simple pleasures of salt water and sand thrown in for good measure. I plan to drive the highway down to Los Angeles over the course of a few days, with the wide spread of the Pacific Coast to my right, and the great heft of the American continent to my left.

The venture really starts when the red girders of the Golden Gate Bridge appear through the windscreen, striking through a sky considering its daily transition from grey to blue as the early fug burns off. Small fishing boats and giant cargo ships make variable progress through choppy waters beneath it. I can see why swimming across the bay is a terrible idea, made famously so by the escape stories emanating from Alcatraz Island visible in the distance - but people do it, bypassing California sea lions and the odd shark to arrive bedraggled and triumphant at the city’s Dolphin Club.

Headlights are turned off and sunglasses come on as the road ribbons south. Every other car seems to have a surfboard on its roof, and in each small cove, hundreds of wetsuit-clad surfers share the waves with seagulls. The distinctly odd silhouettes of California brown pelicans wheel on the wind above them.

At Pigeon Point, I get out to stretch my legs. The smell of salt and seaweed as I open the car door is almost visceral. There’s been a lighthouse here flashing its signal every ten seconds nightly since 1872, a reminder that the treachery of the coast is never far from its pleasures. It’s currently mid-renovation, and guide Joseph Carr Ritchie from California State Parks is a staunch advocate for its conservation, having fallen in love with the site while facing a particularly tough time in his own life.

‘It was a beacon of hope to me, literally,’ he says, pointing to a harbour seal flopped on a rock near to shore. ‘This place has always given me respite, and now I have hope that the lighthouse will be restored too, like it restored me.’ Visitors find their own respite in various ways at Pigeon Point, coming to gaze skywards at the stars on clear nights or downwards into miniature rockpool universes in the cove below.

Thoughts of shipwrecks and hardship fade as Highway One slides ever south. Signs for pie, jam and U-Pick berries dot the roadside, competing for attention with tall palms and viewpoint lay-bys. The holiday vibes ramp up a notch in Santa Cruz. People sit at beachside restaurants drinking beer, play volleyball on the sand, or stalk the boardwalk, wondering whether to spend their dollars on saltwater taffy or carousel cones.

At the town’s Steamer Lane, everyone is either surfing, about to surf, just finished surfing, or engaging in the wildly addictive sport of ‘staring at surfers’. Tiny children bob about on bodyboards in the shallows while adults swoosh in nonchalantly from the deep, feet apparently glued to their boards. Dreadlocked old hippies and buff teenagers alike lie belly-down on their boards and watch the waves roll in, like devotees to a strange god.

A fair number of them will be on boards made by Doug Haut, a legendary shaper round these parts. In a career spanning nearly 60 years, he reckons to have built over 30,000 boards, selling for anything from $2,000 to $20,000. I come across him at his workshop in downtown Santa Cruz, a riotous jumble of tools, paints, finished boards and unfinished templates, watched over by posters of Bon Jovi and the US volleyball team.

‘I’ve ridden some pretty big waves and I’ve been gobbled up by some – when I was young and stupid,’ he says running a hand down the spine of a fibreglass number. ‘All I do now is design surfboards, and that’s all I’m going to do for however long I have left. It’s a thrill seeing guys enjoying one of my boards now - that’s what keeps me going.’

Surfing started in California at the turn of the 20th century, but the culture really took off in the 1920s, when the fledgling car industry allowed surfers to travel the coast, scouting for the best beaches. In a hundred years, the culture hasn’t changed much; most of the people I meet along the road have half an eye on the ocean and a surf sticker on the rear bumper.

Monica Hudson, however, is not one of them. Her eyes are usually trained on the ocean, often through binoculars, but she’s looking for sea otters and snowy egrets not the next break. We meet at Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, an hour’s drive south of Santa Cruz. Gnarled cypress trees take the place of palms here, and rocky cliffs rear up from tiny beaches; the mood is altogether wilder.

A Swiss native, Monica married into the family that owned the land and gifted it to the state to preserve. ‘I didn’t know much about the area when I moved here as a bride, 6,000 miles from home,’ she says springing along a narrow coastal path ahead of me. ‘And I came to love it over the decades. It has almost a Zen quality.’

Having run guided walks in Point Lobos for years and written books about it, she bubbles over with stories, sharing tales of Chinese whalers, giant abalone and buried treasure. The thrash of the surf on the rocks below is a constant on our tramp, but there are guest appearances too: a line of brown pelicans kiting in the wind; a sea otter lying on its back in the water, grooming its face with tiny paws; a family of harbour seals basking on a beach; a great blue heron perched on drifting kelp. ‘Every time you come, you see something different,’ she says with a broad smile. ‘But the beauty never changes - it’s always breathtaking.’

Her words could apply to any one of the landscapes I pass through as I continue south. The road dips and weaves along the coast through low hills swathed in cedar and pampas grass, before diving into the cool gloom of a redwood forest. Bridges span deep canyons as the coast folds into a series of layers, disappearing into a haze some miles ahead. We’re a motley bunch out enjoying it: cyclists with heavy panniers; dudes out in their Mustangs; long-distance runners; leather-clad bikers; RV road-trippers; couples snuggled up on their tailgates, staring at the view.

Past Ragged Point, with its colony of elephant seals flopped on the beach, farmsteads and ranches appear, sitting on the crest of dry scrubby hills in scenes reminiscent of Andalucía. The change of pace notches up a gear as I turn off Highway One at the tiny town of Harmony in San Luis Obispo County and head towards Paso Robles. This is mellow country, a world away from the brasher, sun-baked pleasures of the coast. People come here to switch off a little, to buy cheese, avocados and honey direct from the farm, to drop into wineries and while away an afternoon with a charcuterie board and a bottle of pinot noir, and to shop for wind chimes and dreamcatchers in cutesie, clapboard towns.

A few miles inland, every piece of land seems to be a vineyard, every building a tasting room. Down a single-track road that twists through groves of California oaks draped in Spanish moss, one winery, Tablas Creek, is attempting to bring something a little different to the area. Viticulturist Jordan Lonborg, brimming with enthusiasm beneath a baseball cap, shows me around a few of its 280 acres. ‘We’ve been organic since 2006, and biodynamic since 2016,’ he says as we jump into a little orange buggy. ‘People have a misconception that this kind of farming is harder and more expensive but that’s not the case – it just forces you to think about things in a different way.’

We trundle around the vineyard, joined by the shadows of red-tailed hawks, Jordan leaning out to peer at the grapes as we pass. After a hunt, we find the winery’s 250 sheep on a shady hillside, guarded from mountain lions by a pair of boisterous Spanish mastiffs. Their compost is used as a natural aid to help the soil’s fertility.

The wines that result – subtler than the big Zinfandels for which California is known – have won multiple awards, but I suspect recognition isn’t Jordan’s main motivation. ‘If I’m ever having a bad day, it doesn’t take long to feel better,’ he says as we bump back to the tasting room. ‘This part of Paso Robles is so special. We’re all really lucky, the winemakers in this area. We work in the best office in the world.’

Tempting though it is to loiter in the area, hopping from winery to winery and buying more wine than is sensible to ship home, the coast draws me back. I rejoin Highway One at its most bleak. If the landscapes of Paso Robles felt ripe for a romantic comedy, this is where you’d come to shoot a Western. Winds buffet the car, sweeping down from arid mountains and out into the churning Pacific, drawing the eye to the oil rigs on the horizon. Out there, too, are the shadowy outlines of my next destination – if this stretch of the coast has an edge-of-the-continent feel, I’m about to jump right off it.

Ditching the car in Ventura, I board a boat for the Channel Islands, an archipelago 20 miles off the coast. The vessel rocks and lurches throughout the journey, causing its passengers to lunge shrieking for hand-rails. ‘Please stop screaming,’ comes the captain’s voice over the tannoy. ‘I can’t tell if you’re having a great time or you just broke your femur.’

The screams turn to oohs as we near the islands and a welcoming committee of some 200 dolphins appears, weaving around the boat, water frothing in their wake. Ranger Sean Picton, in khaki shirt and shorts, is no less enthusiastic in his greeting as we disembark on Santa Cruz Island. He dispenses advice to the new arrivals, directing overnighters to the campsite and pointing out walking options to the day-trippers, from casual ambles to determined marches. I opt for something in between, and we are soon striding along towering cliffs, staring down at brightly clad kayakers, honking sea lions and giant fronds of kelp wafting in the current.

‘The island has a great way of slowing things down,’ says Sean as we stop for a picnic, slightly hypnotised by the sun bouncing off the ocean beneath us. ‘You don’t have to worry about text messages or finding a parking spot. My hope is that everyone walks away thinking this is an incredibly special spot to them.’

One of the things that make the Channel Islands particularly special is its wildlife. It’s home to several endemic creatures, found nowhere else on Earth, from the spotted skunk to the island scrub jay and Channel Islands deer mouse. We’re lucky enough to come across its most celebrated: a tiny island fox snuffling around the campsite. Conservation efforts have pulled it back from the brink of extinction, and it now numbers in the thousands. ‘It’s pretty hard to feel envious of other people’s jobs when you work here,’ says Sean as we crouch down to watch the fox poking about the grass. It watches us back for a bit, then trots off into the bushes.

Sean’s accounts of island sunsets and views of the Milky Way have me dragging my feet back to the boat, but return I must. Los Angeles, and journey’s end, is just a few hours’ away. 

Back on the mainland and heading south again, there can be no starker contrast to the Channel Islands. Tall palms spear up on either side of the freeway as I zip past the million-dollar mansions of Malibu. Extreme facelifts and boob jobs are the only wildlife worth spotting, and there is not a patch of land not manicured. Idling in traffic on the outskirts of Los Angeles, I’m joined by skateboarders, cyclists, people on scooters and execs in sports cars, faces set with determined purpose.

It’s something of a relief to abandon the car in Venice, and pad to the beach as the long sticky day starts to sidle into evening. Basketball players practise hoops on the court as gym bunnies go through their paces on the equipment at Muscle Beach. Surrounded by sunbathers and selfie-takers, Brandon Henry-Snell is just ending his shift as a lifeguard at his station, a job he’s held for 15 years. ‘Between this pier and Santa Monica pier is very important to me,’ he says, pulling off sunglasses. ‘When I was a kid, this area used to be poor. There were a lot of gangsters. The ocean saved my life in a way, as I didn’t get into the drama. A lot of people I went to school with can’t even swim, but you couldn’t keep me out of the sea.’

I head up to Santa Monica, to try and grab a sense of what makes it so special for an LA man born and bred like Brandon. As the lights on the Ferris wheel start to come on, people throng Santa Monica pier, looking west at the sun setting over the Pacific. A giant cheer goes up when it finally disappears after a flamboyant performance cycling through gold, orange, crimson and violet. Show over, the crowds almost instantly thin out, the beach empties.

A thin crescent moon and a single star emerge in the sky as I make my way back to Venice. On a bridge over the highway, a lone busker sings a mournful song about shrimp boats, whiskey and homecomings. Beneath him, the traffic hums steadily through the night, bearing drivers southwards to San Diego and the promise of more sunsets, more surf breaks, more wind-whipped sea air. The desire to jump back in the car and join them has never been so strong.