The Perspective Fresh Eyes Bring

On a recent road trip, I rounded a bend along a ribbon of highway twisting through central California’s coastal hills, and the familiar bulk of Morro Rock—which looks like a 700-foot aquatic snail shell rising from the sea— loomed into view in the distance. Morro Rock is part of a series of low-lying but craggy and rugged volcanic peaks running west to east called the “Seven Sisters.” Those small “m” mountains formed a backdrop for my entire life as I was growing up. If I had to calcuate, I’d guess I spent something like 75 percent of my waking life from birth to my late 20s bobbing around in the surf on Morro Rock’s northern side and fishing for rock cod and surf perch on the other. It’s the landmark that defines my life more than anywhere else on this earth. If the apocalypse comes during my lifetime, that’s where I’d retreat to make my last stand. It will forever be home.

Yet somehow when Morro Rock came into view on this drive, it shone with such beauty it was as if I’d never seen it before.

Morro Rock’s “sisters” were regular parts of my young outdoors life. My friends and I learned how to ride mountain bikes and how to shrug off brutal, lip-splitting spills on the twisting, root-choked paths leading down from Black Mountain’s summit on Morro Bay’s eastern edge. We ate the wild onions and blackberries that grew on the mountain’s flanks. We fished for steelhead and resident rainbow trout in the creeks that fed the massive estuary on Black Mountain’s southern foot.

In college, I scrambled across as much of Bishop’s Peak, rising above San Luis Obispo, that I could reach without ropes and caribiners. I learned orienteering amid the boulders and sage brush there. Fell in love with the seemingly impossible dual sensations of exhilaration and soul-crushing exhaustion that come with trail running on the paths ascending its slopes.

I first guerrilla backpacked in Montaña de Oro State Park, outside the town of Los Osos, just south of Morro Bay. Learned how to surf over shallow rock shelfs amid burbles and boils in the tricky, dangerous reef breaks that line the state park’s shores. I cut my teeth overlanding there as a teenager, when you could still drive four-wheelers in the dunes and sandstone cliffs just outside the park.

Growing up, I was proud that I never took any of that bounty of outdoors riches we enjoyed on the central coast for granted. Couldn’t imagine that I ever would.

Then, one day, I did.

I started to take it all for granted. Sure, Morro Rock was beautiful and dramatic, but the jumbled surf that broke below it was cold, windy, often uninspiring, and there were too many tourists. And yes, sunsets from the roof of Bishop’s Peak were pretty, but after while they all just sort of looked the same. Then the fish stopped biting in the creeks. And the reefs got a little too crowded to surf. Just like that, the wild places I grew up cherishing grew stale. At times, I resented them for keeping me anchored to a place I’d grown bored with. So I moved north.

After a decade after living in San Francisco, and even after many, many trips back to the central coast, something has changed when I return home. Some strange alchemy transformed the wild spaces surrounding my hometown into something far more beautiful than I’d remembered. A rediscovered wilderness.

I’d begun to take those spaces for granted because I’d had so little to compare them to. Until I’d spent time picking my way over the craggy reaches of mountain chains like the Pyrenees, I hadn’t truly noticed the beauty of the Seven Sisters’ Hollister Peak, rising majestically above Little Morro Creek. It took fly fishing on grand rivers in Montana to fall back in love with the small streams of Estero Bay. Weeks long backpacking treks through the High Sierra somehow made camping trips in the wild hills overlooking the sea just south of Big Sur feel equally as dramatic. Ten years of adventuring and travel gave me a grand library of beautiful places within which to catalog the wild places where I grew up.

When I go home now, I’m struck with just how magnificent the central coast is, and a little embarrassed I grew to take it for granted. Somehow seeing grander, wilder spaces have created a greater appreciation for the local wilderness I was surrounded by. The perspective fresh eyes can bring means the wild places I grew up with have become wild all over again.

Photos: Top: Sheila Sund; Bottom: Jesse Palmer