Tagged — Jamie Lyons
I get my license and suddenly the world cracks open like some cosmic egg, and there's Bolinas: this raggedy little secret tucked behind the torn off highway signs, the locals pulling them down faster than CalTrans can hammer them back up.
Nobody wants me here, which is precisely why I need to be here.
Sleeping on that beach with sand in your teeth and the Pacific howling, I'm 16 and immortal and so goddamn alive it hurts. The bluff at dawn: that's church, that's the confessional, that's where I kneel before something bigger than my suburban cage of a life and get baptized in salt spray and the kind of cold that reminds me I've got a body, I've got lungs, I exist.
Those morning swells don't give a shit about my SAT scores or my parents' disappointment or whatever girl broke my heart last week. The ocean's utterly indifferent, occasionally violent, and if I'm lucky enough to catch the rhythm, transcendent. I paddle out in the grey dawn and it's just me and the seals and the occasional pelican who's seen a thousand kids like me come through, thinking they've discovered something.
But here's the thing: I fucking did discover something.
Freedom tastes like kelp and gasoline and the stale burrito I ate for dinner. It tastes like consequence and possibility mixed together in the predawn dark. Bolinas doesn't care if I find myself there. It just watches me look.
Adventure 2022
Bolinas doesn’t want you to find it. The locals keep tearing down the highway signs, a middle finger to the hordes from San Francisco who’d otherwise choke this place with their Range Rovers and organic kombucha stands. It’s deliberate, this obscurity. And I respect the hell out of it. You wake up at five-thirty. It’s […]
ReadWanderlust 2015
WANDERLUST: Bolinas sunset… This raggedy edge of the continent, where the Mesa drops into the Pacific like God’s own ashtray has the kind of beautiful decay that makes you understand why people become insufferable about places. The light here doesn’t apologize. It just bleeds out across tide pools and driftwood and the barnacled pier pilings, […]
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Wanderlust 2009
I open my eyes and the first thing that hits me isn’t the Pacific light knifing through those salt-stained windows or the fact that you’re horizontal in a room where somebody once fucked their way through the Summer of Love, no, it’s the absolute silence. The kind of quiet that makes me understand why people […]
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