Heyday Books | 2022 | 672 pages
Last summer, my family and I drove out of my beloved home state of California for a road trip across the Southwest. Everyone groaned when I showed them the stack of road atlases I’d bought for the trip, each of them almost as big as a bed pillow—a very, very thin bed pillow. I didn’t care. They could use Google Maps all they wanted, but looking at the small square of a map on a phone makes me carsick. And it’s not only the queasiness that gets to me—finding my way by phone across such a vast landscape feels myopic. I wanted a wider view that showed me the mountains we passed, the rivers we crossed. A map that could take me through not only space, but time, so that I could understand how the places that we moved through came to be.
In his most recent book, The Coasts of California: A California Field Atlas, naturalist, writer, and illustrator Obi Kaufmann has created a distinctive, generously-sized guide to California that provides the kind of view I seek. In 2017, his first book in this series, The California Field Atlas, showed the state in all of its layers—from watersheds to wildflowers to its returning wolves—through text and illustration, hand-painted maps and handwritten notes. The Forests of California, published in 2020, turned to the region’s trees and how they interact with water and fire, with species and sky.
Kaufmann’s newest installment follows the same tradition, wandering through the state looking at the species, geology, topography, and phenomena of the place where land meets sea. In words and charts, in watercolors and maps, this field atlas takes the reader on a tour from the microscopic plankton that create the richness of the California Current just offshore, to the large-scale ocean weather patterns that carry storms and create the coast’s temperate Mediterranean climate. The book is an exploration of the varied, three-dimensional, and inseparable forces that make this coast what it is today, and could shape its future.
This is the kind of map I’ve been looking for, one that takes me both further in to the landscape, and into myself. Early in the book, Kaufmann writes of his home state, “I always wish to be more from here.” This is something I’ve often felt, too, along the coasts. My understanding of what I see feels like it skims along the surface, the way I’ve seen California brown pelicans flying with their wingtips almost touching the waves. How do they know, I’ve often wondered, when to stop cruising and dive in?
So I did the same thing that I told my kids to do when, a few hours into the first leg of our trip, they got bored enough to look at the atlas: Start with where you are.
Photo by Cameron Walker.
In writing this book, Kaufmann walked the partially-completed California Coastal Trail, which will eventually connect the state’s 1,230 miles of coastline. He writes and paints this journey, dividing it into 24 coasts from north to south. I found mine—a section entitled “Of Sandstone and Sky: The Santa Barbara Coast.” A watercolor map of this 45-mile stretch of coastline is followed by text that delves into a few of the region’s beaches, peaks, and other ecologically important sites. These few pages cover everything from the groves where my family has seen overwintering monarch butterflies—fewer and fewer each year—to a 2015 oil spill at Refugio State Beach that killed birds and marine mammals, to a local effort to improve the ecological footprint of a coastal landfill.
These were all places I knew, but seeing them described in unison brought together the connections between them. And then I turned the page and saw an unfamiliar view of a familiar coastline—a map of the creeksheds that were once home to Southern California steelhead. The text that accompanies the map both lists the presence or absence of steelheads in these creeks, and chronicles their story, and our role in it:
Along the approximately fifty-eight miles from Point Conception to Rincon Point, the south-facing edge of Santa Barbara County, there are at least thirty-three creeks that historically held Southern California steelhead, a distinct population segment of Oncorhynchus mykiss irideus… What a terrible failure of stewardship—where there were tens of thousands of returning salmon to the creeks only fifty years ago, now populations dwindle to just a few hundred, and of those thirty-three creeks, perhaps only fifteen still have populations at all.
The blue veins of the creeks on the facing page suddenly seemed even more fragile. The next time I visited one of these creeks, I saw it differently—as part of a forgotten body of the coast which could be brought to even greater life, as a place that has the potential to thrive beyond what I’d imagined.
While I began this journey by orienting myself to my home waters, readers from beyond the coast can find their path through the book by starting at the beginning. Kaufmann opens the book with an overview of the connections and cyclical patterns that shape the coast, from the cycles that draw the tides up to the land, the currents of wind and water that create both weather and habitat, along with the pattern of fire that’s becoming increasingly insistent through every California season. This introduction to this region provides the context that underlies each unfurling chapter, which follow rivers, explore wetlands, and traverse the coastline and its species.
Along the way, Kaufmann brings in handwritten musings that appear like quilted squares of poetry among the watercolors and more straightforward lists of sites and species. It’s here where I felt like I’d really found what I look for in a map. These pieces not only are guides to the land, but to what it all means.
Photo by Cameron Walker.
Across the blue lines of a piece of college-ruled paper, one of the most affecting handwritten pieces explores the lingering absence of the grizzly bear, a species that was last seen in the state in 1924:
I was born with a bear-size hole inside me. The last California grizzly was killed fifty years before I was born, and I still miss the beautiful, precious being that she was. The fight against the simplification, the fragmentation, and the infirmity of our shared ecosystems, the habitat spaces we all rely on, is both the most joyful and the most painful thing I know. This philosophy is all wrapped up, draped in the raiments of what I aim to live, a self-examined life, focusing always on a better understanding of how to die…
This excerpt reads like it’s been pulled from a dream journal—and the kind of dream, perhaps, that’s shared by all those who love landscapes that are riddled with absence. That feeling of loss, that we’ve lost so much that we haven’t even experienced, that so much is slipping through our fingers, runs alongside this book’s bounty. Even the soft watercolors that depict the endangered California condor and the great white shark give the sense that all this, too, could vanish with a few strokes of a wet brush: an elegy not only for California’s wild species, but for our own.
The Coasts of California is also a map for how to find our way into protecting what remains. After providing an overview of policies and protections in place for many of these landscapes, Kaufmann wades into the “chaotic sea” of challenges to the coast’s ecology and how what might happen on these shores is intertwined with issues from climate change to systemic injustice. Kaufmann’s final full state map shows California as it could become with a trajectory of unchecked warming. The mouth of San Francisco Bay has opened, and water fills the Central Valley from Redding to Fresno, drowns out fields, state capitals, and almond orchards and any creature who may have lived on land.
Kaufmann is not without hope: there’s a softness to the image and the new lines of coast it paints that suggests this future is not inevitable. But the coast to come will likely never be the same as the one we know now. We won’t be the same, either. “We are going to get through this, but we are not going to get through this unchanged,” he writes.
But perhaps this is the nature of the coast, a place that is never static, that is always shifting with the rise and fall of tides, seasons, and centuries. Turn a few pages, and there is another image of California ten million years from now, when Baja has broken away from the mainland and shifts northward so that it lies offshore from San Francisco, now its own archipelago. For a moment, it’s frightening. And then it becomes fascinating, another place to wander into, map in hand.
Cameron Walker is a writer in California. Her essay collection, Points of Light, is forthcoming from Hidden River Press in 2023.
Header image, Kelp Forest, by Obi Kaufmann, from The Coasts of California. Photo of Cameron Walker by Sara Prince.
