John McAbery carves out a life on the Lost Coast LIFE STUDIES

John McAbery, guided by experience and a window of natural light, works on a carving in his one-room cabin near Petrolia, Calif. John McAbery, guided by experience and a window of natural light, works on a carving in his one-room cabin near Petrolia, Calif. Photo: Terrence McNally, Arcata Studios Photo: Terrence McNally, Arcata Studios Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close John McAbery carves out a life on the Lost Coast 1 / 15 Back to Gallery

Humboldt County -- Gretchen Bunker laughs from the backseat as the car bumps across a green stretch of windblown hillside. "You can park here. The sign says 'Road Ends,' but we like to say 'Continent Ends.' "

Bunker and her longtime partner, John McAbery, tumble from the car and eagerly collect their walking sticks. McAbery, 67, deftly maneuvers down the steep path leading to his beachfront cabin. He stops to scan the horizon for whale spouts. "This is what I have to look at every day. I've been looking at it for 34 years, and I'm not tired of it yet."

A thick band of ocean and sky wraps around cliffs nearly a thousand feet high. The view extends from Cape Mendocino to the Punta Gorda Lighthouse and east to miles of pastureland and wilderness.

Without power or phone, McAbery's cabin in rural Humboldt County rests on the largest stretch of undeveloped Pacific coastline in the continental United States. With the perfect combination of high tide and winter storm, the ocean sloshes under the floorboards and appears at his back door.

Putting his experience as a contractor to use, McAbery built the 288-square-foot cabin himself. "Originally there was a shearing shed here, which is where I lived when I first got here. Me and a million mice and my kids. I gathered all the materials for the cabin off the beach. Old barns, old corrals, poles that used to carry a telegraph line down to the lighthouse. I split all the shakes from logs off the beach. I did it all by hand, no power tools. It was quiet and I took my time and it was just me all alone and little by little I put all the pieces together."

Collecting trash from the beach is an important part of McAbery's daily ritual, "I keep it very clean. About a mile and a half of it on either side of my cabin is as spotless as any beach you'll see in the world." Immersed in his contented solitude, he plants hundreds of native trees each year, listens to NPR on his solar radio and reads lots of books. But mostly he carves.

McAbery hauls blocks of wood as heavy as 100 pounds down to his cabin and produces elegant sculptures that can be more than 30 inches tall and weigh as little as 4 ounces. His work is inspired by decades spent with the sea at his doorstep, "I don't believe I could do this any place else ... it just wouldn't happen."

His task is not easy, and many of the fragile sculptures break before they're completed. "When I start a piece, I don't know that I'm going to finish it. It's up to the wood and up to me. I make my share of mistakes, too. I make a lot of firewood.

Bay laurel

"Bay laurel is best for the job," he says. "It's got an interlocking grain so I can carve very delicate pieces out of it. It is indigenous and abundant in this part of Northern California. There are windfall trees every year, so I never have to cut down a tree to produce my work. I like that."

McAbery's humble collection of hand tools is gathered in a tattered cardboard box. His pride is the Japanese keyhole saw, which rests among various rasps, chisels and gouges. At times he conjures up tools from the beach: whale bones, pumice, bent willow branches. "Whatever it takes, you know," he says.

McAbery produces a dusty reddish-brown spoon from the corner of the cabin and beams paternalistically. "Here's my original. I found this piece of mahogany on the beach and it was kinda shaped like a foot. I picked it up and brought it home. I sharpened a screwdriver and bent it with a propane torch so I had a tool to work with. I didn't have any carving tools. But I had time."

On his next trip to town he ordered a few basic tools. Over the course of six months he carved 30 or 40 spoons, some so delicate their bowls were translucent. A friend asked him about carving art pieces and McAbery brushed him off. He didn't consider himself an artist. But that suggestion planted a seed and soon after, McAbery plucked an abalone shell from the sand and ventured to replicate it.

'My dog liked him'

One afternoon in the winter of '95, McAbery took a break from carving and headed out to the beach. There he discovered Gretchen Bunker hiking near his cabin with her dog. He invited her in, and 16 years later, they are still together. "My dog liked him. So we stayed," Bunker says, smiling.

An artist herself, Bunker was inspired by his work and presented him with broken shells and wild curls of seaweed to carve. With her encouragement, McAbery says, he "went from being a wood carver to being an artist." His pieces now sell for $2,000 to $5,000 online and in galleries across the West Coast.

Bunker, 48, designs about a third of McAbery's sculptures. She photographs and promotes his art and manages his online business. She also gives him the time and space to do his work uninterrupted. "He doesn't like having people around, not even me, when he's carving."

She frequently visits McAbery but lives in Petrolia, a small town 11 miles yet nearly an hour away. When they first met, Bunker was at the cabin full time. She would spend hours on the beach with a fishing pole. "We were basically living off the ocean. I caught rockfish, greenling, cabezon and the occasional steelhead from the creek," she says.

"We tried everything out of the ocean," adds McAbery. "I figure if it wiggles it's edible. I tried chiton once, and limpets, urchins and barnacles. Barnacles taste like crap. And I wasn't real excited about urchins. Mussels are the ones I get the most. It's pretty bountiful out there."

A simple life

In his tidy one-room cabin there is a bed, a table and two chairs. "I like living as simply as possible," he says, making a cup of black coffee on his one-burner camping stove. A solar panel runs two 12 watt lightbulbs. To keep food chilled, holes are drilled into the back of a cupboard to catch the north wind. About 30 yards from the cabin an outhouse is tucked into the bottom of the cliff, "It's got a great view. And it flushes!" says Bunker.

Lurking near the cabin doorway is a huge wood-burning stove. "The stove is great because back here there's an oven," explains Bunker. "I can cook a whole chicken or a fish right in here. I bake breads, pies, all kinds of things."

McAbery adds, "I designed it and built it. It's neat 'cause I got 30 feet of hot-water coils in there, and I get so much hot water that I've actually got a steam room and a shower." A rusted claw foot tub sits in the garden, perfectly situated for watching sunsets.

Bunker found that gardening on the beach wasn't so much an issue of climate, but dirt. "I've grown potatoes, that was really easy. Onions, garlic, kale, the basics. I tried broccoli and cauliflower but they required more soil so we had to haul it down and mix it with the sand and use seaweed for fertilizer. The key was getting the right kind of soil and then figuring out what plants could grow well in that soil. And everything had to be caged because of the critters."

Critters are abundant down at Fourmile Beach. They've seen mountain lions and bears, harbor seals, whales and the occasional errant cow. McAbery animatedly recalls the time a bobcat attacked a sea lion pup on the beach, "The sea lion was probably about 80 pounds and the bobcat couldn't have weighed 15 and that bobcat was on his neck and they were flopping over and flopping over and that bobcat wouldn't come loose. He finally won, but he looked like he'd been through a washing machine. You know those cartoons with the finger in the light socket? He looked like that.

"Raptors and seagulls"

"This is a great place for birds, too. They're all over the place. Raptors and seagulls and lots of migratories. Hank comes around all the time. He's a neat bird, stands like 5 foot tall, which is big for a heron. He's an old guy, he's been down here as long as I've been here."

McAbery is perhaps more at ease with the local wildlife than the humans who intermittently hike past his cabin. "Most days in the wintertime I don't see a soul. If I'm locked into my wood, if they're quiet, I don't see 'em even if they're out there. Mostly people give me a pretty wide berth.

"The Lost Cost is fairly busy these days. We call it the Lost and Found Coast. When I first lived out here I didn't see 50 people a year. Now there's tour groups. But I meet some neat people; from Japan and Germany and from Russia, Poland and England.

"I first came out here in 1963, I was just 18 or 19. I didn't know anything about it. It was just a blank spot on the map and I just had to go see it. So I hitchhiked up here with a sign that said 'Utopia.' And I found it. At the time I never really thought about living here. Then I came back this way when I was older and had a little more money. I thought it was time to make an investment, and I just lucked out."

A local ranch

McAbery bumped into a local rancher at the general store, and they hit it off. "He was getting old and he had five ranches, so he just decided to give up one of them, and the one he gave up was the one that I wanted.

"I put cash down on the place without even knowing if I could find the rest of the money. It was probably the most irrational thing I ever did in my life and it worked out perfect." He eventually sold off most of his land to the Bureau of Land Management, and now lives on the remaining 30 acres.

McAbery hasn't left Humboldt County in six years. He visits Bunker in Petrolia once a week and travels to Eureka three times a year to get supplies. "That's plenty. I do my best to stay right at home. I mean, if I could, I'd never leave the beach. My whole world is here."

"The carving allows him to be here and being here allows him to carve," adds Bunker.

"Yeah," McAbery agrees, "but I think it's being here that's the most important, carving is second. I'm very fortunate. I'm probably the most fortunate person in the world. To have this place, to have my work, to have Gretchen. I grew up making all the wrong moves, but they landed me in the right spot."