If you take the coast road south out of San Francisco, shortly after Monterey and Carmel, but just before you get to Nepenthe, the gateway to Big Sur, you will find a little state park called Point Lobos, named by the Spaniards for the immense population of Lobos de Mar, sea lions, that gathers there. This is Steinbeck Country, the land of Doc Ricketts and William Burroughs, Joseph Campbell and all the rest of that brilliant literary scene that briefly flared up there in the years before World War II. Today these are partly eclipsed by the trendy boutiques and gelato shops of Carmel, the Asilomar Institute and Clint Eastwood. But Punta Lobos is much older, a small peninusula of Monterey Formation sandstone and crumbling Sierra Nevada granites that juts out into the ferocious Pacific. Now, just remembering it and writing these words, it has brought tears to my eyes, tears of loss and regret and frustration, as I realize that there is a very good chance that I will probably never see the Point of Wolves again.

If you go there during the week and during the tourist off-season, you can beat the crowds, and although you won't have the place to yourself, it will maintain its wild character for you. It is a place of rolling meadow, pine forests, and groves of Monterey Cypress (a species of cedar, actually). In springtime there are flowers, before the green of the California winter slowly turns into that endless golden autumn that marks the state for nine months of the year. The deer are not tame, but they are everywhere, and the signature sea lions, and harbor seals too, still take their midday rest break on the rocky shores, belching and farting and growling at each other in what passes for pinniped sociability. The sea is never more than just a few hundred yards away at Point Lobos, and what a sea it is. The waves never stop, they only come from different directions, perhaps spawned by a low pressure system in the Behring Sea, or the never-ending torus of winds surrounding Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. At any time of year or day they are there, regardless of the local weather. The old greybeards lose themselves in the deep waters just off the narrow continental shelf, but where California rises abruptly from the abyssal plain the big rollers feel the tickle of the bottom rocks and quickly arch up like a young lover on the brink of orgasm, only to lavish their foam release on the welcoming stone embrace and the secret damp tangled kelp thickets on shore. I've seen the Atlantic storms of the tropics, but here on this coast, the sea never stops making love to the land. To see it is to experience the infinite first hand.

So pay the nice ranger as you drive in, he will show you where to park your car, and give you an informative brochure describing the natural history of the place, with a useful map printed on the back. There are many trails and paths for the biker and hiker, but the best goes around the perimeter of the peninsula, where the water meets the land. It takes a couple of hours to see it all, so wear stout shoes and tuck your trousers into your socks, there are ticks in the tall grass. There is much to see, the quiet little bay where a recent rain-caused landslide once revealed to us a neolithic midden of abalone shells, a reminder that these shores have known the presence of Man since way before the Dons clanked through here in their rusty armor and their rough woolen cassocks, crossbow and Holy Cross, on the way to the mission at Carmel or the Presidio at Monterey. Further up the trail is the protected cove where the old whaling station was and where the boats sheltered from the seas. When the lookout at the top of the ridge signaled, the whaleboats would pull out on their bloody errand of killing, to intercept the grey whales offshore, also on an errand, but of life, heading to far off Scammon's Lagoon. Fortunately, only a tiny museum commemorating the whaling days is all that remains today of that cruel fishery. The trail travels along the edge of a cliff, thick forest of oak on one side, a steep drop to the breakers below. At one point, a huge stone the size of a building has calved from the body of the Point leaving a narrow cleft betwixt cliff and rock where the sea rushes and swirls in a cauldron of kelp and anemones and starfish. The sea birds, safe by a few yards of impassable air, have claimed the rock and covered it in guano, and they squawk their outrage and indignation at the tourists on the trail opposite them.

We are less than half way around the trail, we have yet to see Cypress Grove where it juts out into the Pacific, the extreme point of the Point. And further on is the shallow bay where the retreating tide reveals the twisted contours of rock layers, a reminder of California's catastrophic geological history, an avalanche in slow motion as the the two great tectonic plates collide and slide over each other, a few inches every year. Let us pause for a while, just past Bird Rock, just before the cypresses, at the reason we came here: Bluefish Cove. The Cove is a natural amphitheatre, a deep hole in the side of the cliff, dropping precipitously to the water. The trail skirts the upper edge, almost a perfect circle, broken only by the narrow opening where the sea rushes in continuously to replenish the waters inside, The air is so clear, the detail so distinct and sharp it is difficult to mark the scale, the size of the place.
Is that a tree half way down the slope? Or just a shrub? What kind of flowers are those that carpet the cliffsides? How big are they, how far away? Even the standing waves crashing against themselves in the circular pool below, constantly pumped by additional hydraulic energy from the ocean outside, do not reveal their true size or dimension, only their shape distorted by the confined space. The water is unlike anything else I've seen on this coast, an unearthly aquamarine perhaps more at home in Bermuda or Jamaica, not on this cold Pacific. It is some queer combination of the inky Pacific blue, the brown-green kelp, and the rare white sand bottom, plus some trick of the light, for the cove is in shadow except for a few hours each day. This is a holy place, a sacred place. It is like no other place in the world.

The giant oaks shelter the edge of the cliff, the narrow path hugs the space between the forest and the precipice, and below, that unearthly blue sea boils unceasingly, as wave after wave crashes through the narrow opening from the ocean outside. The cliff is too steep for climbers, the entrance too rough for kayakers, too treacherous for divers. Man can look into the cove, but he cannot safely descend into it. It is the navel of the world. And in the center, the very center, a sea otter floats on his back on a raft of kelp, pounding an abalone shell on a flat rock balanced on his chest. He eyes us on the clifftop, but knows we are no threat to him. It is the very remoteness of the place that guarantees that there are still abalone here. We are the interlopers here, and this is his world.

And there is life everywhere. My God, what a planet we live on.