When I was just a gawky fourteen-year-old, my dad shoved a backpack into my hands and informed me I was not to come back to the house until the sun had set.

“Where am I supposed to go?” I had asked, staring at my father like he’d gone insane.

“Out there,” he’d said. “The woods. Where we live.”

“By myself?” I’d asked in the endlessly petulant tone of teenagers. “And do what?”

“Walk,” he shrugged. “Find a trail and follow it. You know your way around this forest.”

Which was true. You couldn’t really live in Big Sur and not be familiar with the wilderness. I’d spent the majority of my formative years under a canopy of redwoods, leaping over logs and climbing branches and running through creeks. I knew, because of television, that a lot of kids played on things called jungle gyms. Or on street corners or small, orderly patches of grass called backyards.

But in Big Sur, the Ventana Wilderness was your backyard, and there wasn’t anything small or orderly about it.

So I was familiar with the forest. I wasn’t familiar with what I was being asked to do.

High school had started a few months earlier, and so far the experience had been atrociously awkward. My friends had grown a foot overnight, were going on dates and sneaking out to party.

Meanwhile, I was a late bloomer: still at five-and-a-half feet tall with no facial hair, and every social interaction felt like it was happening in a foreign language.

Things that had once come easily (like talking) now felt like a giant mystery. A mystery that everyone else seemed to have the answers to while I was left stubbornly in the dark.

I’d been listless and sulky. Even my siblings, Max and Isabelle, didn’t want to be around me.

My parents definitely noticed.

“Learning to embrace nature, to search for stillness. It changed a lot of things for me,” my dad had said, indicating the great big world outside our window. “And I learned to embrace it at a very important time in my life.”

He glanced at my mother, eyes softening. She winked at him.

“This is going to sound like complete and utter nonsense to you right now. But focus on your surroundings. The grandness of it, the sheer size.” He placed his hand over my heart. “The stillness.”

“What the fuck?” I asked. Puberty had made me aggressively defiant.

But my parents were nonplussed by my teenaged antics. “The woods,” he repeated. “Go. And don’t come back until you’ve learned something. I packed you lunch and dinner.”

I shrugged on the backpack, wincing at the weight on my shoulders. “Fine,” I said miserably, slouching off to the door.

“Also, don’t die!” my mom called back sweetly.

I had ignored her. My feet crunched along the worn trail that extended past our house. The landscape continually changed, making it even more beautiful. I kept walking, staring at the trees. The way the sun lilted through the branches. The call of birds all around me.

I hiked some more, for over an hour, and found I was thinking less about what was going to happen in school tomorrow. Thinking less about the upcoming dance and if the girl I liked was going to go with me.

I was really only focused on my feet. The trail. The sounds. The slight ache in my back from the pack. The burn of my muscles as I climbed a hill. An exhilaration, an aliveness that I hadn’t felt slouched in front of the television and endlessly ruminating on the perils of being a teenager.

When I finally trudged back, triumphantly, my parents were waiting with amused expressions.

“Well?” My dad said. “What did you think?”

I rolled my eyes and shrugged, having prepared a dozen sarcastic remarks. But I finally settled on a casual: “It was cool. I guess.”

They exchanged a smile, and that night, they sat on our deck beneath the stars for a long time, holding hands.

Things began to slowly change. I was still fourteen, and the realizations I’d come to that day didn’t entirely obliterate the challenges of puberty. I was still awkward and weird and worried night and day that I’d never be normal. Or attractive. Or kiss someone.

But… when those thoughts threatened to overwhelm me, I went for a walk in the woods. And something about it calmed the core of my anxiety.

Gave me tranquility.

I’d been coming to the woods to make sense of my thoughts for almost twenty years now, the hiking trails as familiar as an old friend.

And this morning, I’d woken with that same thirst for absolute stillness. For rushing streams and birdsong. To be completely alone. As I hiked, the rocky, jagged coast of California stretched out before me. It was still early, the sun rising behind the forest, turning the Pacific Ocean a rosy pink color. Fog caressed the beach, curled against the waves.

I hadn’t seen a single soul in more than two hours. Had breathed deeply and noticed the complex beauty of my surroundings. Tried to let my thoughts move and sway like the wind.

But it wasn’t fucking working this time.

Last night I’d taken a woman home—a tourist. A complete stranger. The sex had been fine, and she’d left immediately afterward, but we had zero connection. We’d barely spoken, just exchanged the basics. She was nice, about my age, and cute. That was about it. No passion or fire. No possibility of seeing her again—she was just passing through on a road trip down to Mexico.

And when I woke this morning, I’d felt… unsettled, like my skin no longer fit right.

Maybe it was because my natural inclination was romance. Love. Neither of which had a place in the throes of a one-night stand. And when I was younger, it was easier to quiet that urge. But Sasha and I had been broken up for almost ten years now, and life was rushing full speed ahead.

Yet I was stubbornly stuck searching for the one thing that continued to elude me.

A branch broke beneath my feet, startling the quiet. I was hiking past the tree that still held our old tire swing and the tree next to it where my parents had built a fort for us, high in the branches. Which meant I was close to The Bar.

I checked my watch, sighing. I needed to clean and prep to open by noon when the boozier locals came by for a lunchtime beer. Maybe a quiet forest wasn’t what I needed. Maybe I needed the comforting hum of bartending, of gossip and conversation.

Except I knew the fact that Gabe Shaw had taken a stranger home last night would be all over the Big Sur Channel—the locals’ affectionate nickname for what was essentially a network of endless gossip.

Goddammit.

That thought propelled my feet, and The Bar appeared in the distance. I’d inherited ownership of Big Sur’s only dive bar from my father, who’d inherited it from his grandfather. The only true sanctuary for local residents looking to escape tourists. Looking for a place that was truly theirs.

From the outside, The Bar looked drab and shabby. A gray, two-story building set back into the forest with a small parking lot out front. The sign was worn and illegible—my grandfather had given this establishment a name, but no one remembered it, and The Bar it remained.

Intrepid hippies had taken paint to the side wall in the early seventies, designing a psychedelic mural that bothered the eyes if you stared at it for too long. And in the middle, a quote from Thoreau: All good things are wild and free.

The very essence of Big Sur and people who made this place their home. The very essence of this isolated town, perched on deadly cliffs. Of the ocean and the trees and the heavy fog that greeted us every morning.

Wild. Free.

There was no other place like it in the whole world.

I’d never live anywhere else.