While standing on a beach waiting to photograph the evening light, Yasutomo Ebisu was approached by a young boy who asked, 'Could you spare a cigarette?' The boy said it was the first time he had ever seen the ocean.

The book brings together fragments of the American West Coast captured over thirty years, each shaped by a distinctly different approach and sensibility. From the boy meeting the sea for the first time, reading Ralph Waldo Emerson at its edge, to journeys tracing the footsteps of lifestyle pioneers such as Lloyd Kahn, Ricky Swallow and Richard Brautigan, the photographs form a personal homage to the seventies. The volume also includes a straight study made with Angie in Big Sur. Sentimental yet observant, it is a photographic anthology of Ebisu's California: an intimate portrait of place, memory and the enduring spirit of the American West.