A STORY BY PAVEL GAZUR
The Light at Point Sur
A story of Big Sur
In 1935, a Navy airship nearly 800 feet long fell into the sea off Point Sur. It really happened. Almost no one remembers. This is its story.
A love that began in a rescue tent on a Big Sur beach, lost to silence and bad timing, and returned to the same coast half a century later.
A love that began in a rescue tent on a Big Sur beach, lost to silence and bad timing, and returned to the same coast half a century later.
THE STORY
On the afternoon of February 12, 1935, Esther Jameson stood on the windward point below her family's lighthouse and watched the largest thing she had ever seen come down out of the sky and lie down in the Pacific. The airship was the USS Macon. By morning there were tents on the beach, survivors brought in cold from the sea, and a young radioman from Idaho named Clyde Carter — alive when he had been certain the sea had decided otherwise.
What grows between them over the weeks that follow is the whole of this book, Garrapata, Pfeiffer Beach, the light turning above them, two plain rings exchanged on a darkening beach with no witness but the sea. Then the Navy, and distance, and fifty years in which each of them quietly decides the other has let go.
It's a story set on the coast I've painted my whole life, the cliffs, the fog, the lighthouse, the waves below Point Sur. The disaster that frames it was real. The people I built to carry you through it are not.
Why I wrote the book
I came to Big Sur for the ruggedness, the cliffs, the lighthouse at Point Sur, the sea hammering the rocks. I've stood out there with an easel for years, painting the Big Sur coast that doesn't hold still and doesn't forgive much.
Then I learned that in 1935 the USS Macon, a Navy airship nearly 800 feet long, went down a few miles off that lighthouse. One of the biggest things ever to fly, lost in twenty minutes in a storm. And outside of Point Sur and Monterey, hardly anyone has heard of it.
It struck me that this hard, beautiful coast had been keeping a secret, and that the wreck still sitting in the deep water had a story in it. So I wrote it. The coast I’d been painting for years became the setting for both a real disaster and the story I built around it.
USS Macon over Manhattan, 1933 — nearly 800 feet of airship above the city. U.S. Navy photograph.
THE REAL HISTORY BEHIND THE STORY
USS Macon (ZRS-5) was a rigid airship nearly 800 feet long, a flying aircraft carrier that launched its own fighter planes, and one of the largest flying machines ever built. On February 12, 1935, in worsening weather off Point Sur, a gust tore away her upper fin and she settled tail-first into the Pacific over about twenty minutes. Because she carried life rafts, all but two of the men aboard were saved. The two who were lost, Radioman First Class Ernest Edwin Dailey and Mess Attendant First Class Florentino Edquiba, were real men, and they are remembered here. The wreck still rests in deep water off Point Sur, where it was rediscovered decades later. Everything else in the story is fiction.
SELECTED WORK
The Big Sur Collection
The same coast that runs through the book: Point Sur, Garrapata, Kirk Creek, Plaskett Creek, Pfeiffer Beach.
Kirk Creek, Big Sur, California | Painting by Pavel Gazur
Garrapata Beach, Big Sur, California | Painting by Pavel Gazur
Kirk Creek, Big Sur, California | Painting by Pavel Gazur
Plaskett Creek, Big Sur, California | Painting by Pavel Gazur
Kirk Creek, Big Sur, California | Painting by Pavel Gazur
Pfeiffer Beach, Big Sur, California | Painting by Pavel Gazur
Visit the Coast Behind the Book
ABOUT BIG SUR
If this story or my paintings make you want to see Big Sur, go.
Take the book with you. Visit Point Sur. Walk Garrapata Beach. Look out from Kirk Creek — better yet, reserve a spot and camp the night. Find the fog, the cliffs, the wind, the waves below the bluffs. And if you stay over, look up: the stars out there are something you'll carry with you.
If you are planning a trip follow the link below, how to get there, where to eat and stay, places to visit and few tips.