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HURRICANE POINT HOUSE, CALIFORNIA

Hurricane Point House was built, totally illegally, without permit, but with love and passion and whatever materials came cheaply to hand, at the beginning of the twentieth century by two naturists wanting an escape from the world. They were shortly joined by a fellow traveler who built his own illegal house fifty yards away. Over a century of occupation had granted legal status to the houses, and Gwen Boudain and her elderly neighbor, Marilyn Shanahan, were the current happy incumbents and owners.

Both houses were to be found at the end of a private dirt track, a hundred feet back from the sea. Like most of the structures in Big Sur, they blended into its landscape. They were single story, spacious but not enormous, built of rugged wood and stone, weathered by the elements. A low, jutting roof soared out over large French windows that gave onto a deck of gray wood.

Below the houses, a hill of grass and scrub fell away fairly steeply to the sea. At the ocean’s edge the land was pared down by the force of millennia of crashing waves to bare black rocks which formed a low cliff, about ten feet high, keeping the sea at bay.

On a wild night Gwen would imagine the storm-driven waves leaping over the cliff, roaring up to the houses, sweeping them away into blue oblivion. It had never come close so far, but as she had just said in her meeting, the weather was getting wilder, and if the dreaded ARk storm ever did come, she and Marilyn would be on the front line.

To the right of the houses, the meeting between land and sea was gentler, with a wide, long beach sloping down to the waves. It was the view and this beach, effectively private, which had drawn the naturists and which Gwen loved with a passion.

Gwen’s golden Labrador, Leo, was waiting as she pulled up on her stony drive. Gwen had rescued Leo from the pound when he was just ten weeks old. He’d been hit by a car. The vets didn’t think he’d survive. He did, and for that as well as the glint of comradeship in his eye, Gwen had adopted him. He had repaid her with a loyalty that went beyond dogged.

“Hey, Boy, whaddya say to a run?”

Leo yelped his agreement, tail whirling like helicopter blades.

“OK, OK, give me a minute.”

Gwen pulled off her clothes, threw them on her bed, and changed with a sigh of relief into shorts and a tee.

Barefoot, shadowed by Leo, she walked out onto her deck, skipped down the steps, and broke into a run.

She followed the hill down to the beach, aimed for the harder sand of the seashore. She ran with her dog through the shallows, kicking up droplets of water. The sun beat warm on her shoulders, but a fresh onshore breeze cooled her. She ran off her tension, reveling in the feeling of movement as her body sped across the sand. Thirty minutes later, she turned and walked back, thoroughly purged and starving.

She quickly checked her neighbor’s house. Marilyn was away for a week’s visit to her sister in Sacramento, and Gwen was checking up on her house as they always did for each other.

Back in her own home, she took a quick shower, muttering darkly at the lukewarm trickle of water that seeped from the showerhead. Then she fed Leo and dug around in her freezer.

“Pepperoni pizza! Feast time, Leo.”

She popped it in the microwave and five minutes later sat down on her deck with a cold beer, feeding slices of pizza to herself and peeling off a few spare pepperoni circles for her dog. She stared out pensively across the sea. She imagined mile after mile of ocean stretching from here to the cauldron of the equator where something truly terrifying was brewing.