Devil’s Slide is the kind of place that makes you understand why people drive off cliffs. Not in some morbid, suicidal way, though Highway 1 has claimed its share of souls who got hypnotized by that impossible blue, but because beauty this raw, this uncompromising, it does something to your brain chemistry. It rewires the circuits.
You come around that bend south of Pacifica, and suddenly you’re clinging to a ribbon of asphalt that some maniac engineer decided to carve into a mountain face that clearly wanted nothing to do with human ambition. The Pacific is doing its thing three hundred feet below, eternal, indifferent, crushing rocks into sand with the patience of a god who has all the time in the world and knows you don’t.
That WWII bunker up there… Some military genius decided this godforsaken, beautiful stretch of coast needed defending. From what, exactly? Japanese submarines? The relentless assault of pelicans? It’s been abandoned for decades, covered in graffiti, slowly being reclaimed by ice plant and salt air. A concrete monument to the temporary nature of everything we build, everything we fear, everything we think matters.
Standing at Matchstick Cove, so named because when you look down from the right angle, the rock formations look like spent matches scattered by some giant’s hand, you understand that nature doesn’t give a damn about your Instagram feed or your curated experience of authenticity.
This is the California they don’t put in the brochures. Not the sanitized, wine-country, Travel & Leisure where everything is optimized and disrupted. This is the California that kills you if you’re not paying attention. The California that was here before the Spanish missions, before the Gold Rush, before anyone decided that manifest destiny was a good enough reason to pave paradise.
The thing about Highway 1 through here, and they’ve since built a tunnel to bypass the worst of Devil’s Slide, because apparently we’ve lost our taste for mortal peril during the morning commute, is that it forced you to confront your own insignificance. Every winter, chunks of the road would just slide into the ocean. The earth was quite literally saying: “I don’t care about your need to get to the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay.”
You want the real California experience? Pull over at one of those dirt turnouts where there’s no railing between you and forever. Get out. Feel that wind coming off the Pacific, air that’s traveled four thousand miles from Japan without touching land. Listen to the waves hitting those rocks—the same sound the Ohlone people heard, the same sound that’ll be here long after our whole ridiculous civilization has collapsed into the sea.
That’s the thing about places like this: they don’t need you. They don’t want you. They’ll be here, indifferent to your passage, your photography, your attempts to capture or commodify or understand them.
…innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child – with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder.
Minor White