Monterey Cypress, Big Sur

We were rerouted before we arrived. A landslide on Pacific Coast Highway was Mother Nature’s first of many reminders that she sets the terms here. We checked in at Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, a collection of Norwegian cabins hand-built between 1936 and 1961. There was no signal. No distractions. That was the point. At sunset, we drove the twisting road to Pfeiffer Beach. I raced down to the sand following the sun’s final glow. Running and laughing, I thought of the girl who glued National Geographic maps to her walls. She would have loved this.

It was the night of a full harvest moon. My eyes moved from moon to Earth to sea. Despite all the beauty, I ached for something to happen. What makes an interesting photograph is a peculiar moment that tells a story. Out of film and nearly out of light, it was time to head back. Where the sand meets the land, dense brush and trees line the pathway. A Monterey Cypress, still visible in the twilight, caught my attention. The tree leaned in a diagonal line from decades of surviving harsh elements.

I took a single photograph and left with the darkness. Later, reviewing the images, I kept returning to it. The highlights and shadows illuminated the trunk and pulled the eye from one corner of the frame to the other. I wondered whether it was near death or full of life. Big Sur does not answer questions like that. It only shows you the thing and leaves you to sit with it. The photograph was, in fact, the peculiar moment I had been searching for.