Drifter Leaves No Stone Unturned

This time around, Stuart Finch hopes to stay in Ventura a few years.

Last time, he left after a few months. That was early in 2000, when success knocked him for a loop.

People loved the amazing stone sculptures Finch put up at the beach. They flocked around the soft-spoken, homeless ninth-grade dropout, donating money, food and clothing. They sent angry letters to City Hall when workers knocked down some of his taller creations, claiming they could fall on children. A hotel even gave him a room for 30 days and a job as a maintenance man.

That was the final straw.

“It took me away from my rocks,” Finch said, back on the patch at Surfers Point where his efforts as a rock-stacker started in earnest.

As suddenly as he vanished four years ago, Finch, 41, showed up again in the last couple of weeks -- along with a new crop of stone spires and minarets and whimsical whatchamacallits that vaguely resemble frogs, penguins and you-name-it.

Here, the corner of a cinder block was impossibly balanced on a stone the size of a golf ball; there, a gravity-defying stack of rocks fringed with seaweed looked like something a bored hobbit might have put together on his summer vacation.

“People need this,” Finch said, surveying dozens of his creations arrayed a few yards from the waves. “It’s all about the smiles.”

Just as they did four years ago, camera-toting tourists came by, asking Finch to pose with them.

Carrying her little dog, Honey, retiree Barbara Hunnel of Spokane, Wash., watched Finch gingerly balance a chunk of concrete on a small stone and called over to her husband: “He gives me goose bumps, Larry! I’ve never seen anything like this!”

Joggers slowed down to take in Finch and his works. Stan Shaw, a 71-year-old juggler whose white hair was tied in a ponytail, came over and shook Finch’s hand.

“You’re an inspiration,” he said. “You’re a special event!”

Finch said he felt more confident. Now, he has a roof over his head, thanks to a photographer who was intrigued with his work and needed a roommate. Beset with ulcers, Finch said he has put aside his Pepsi-and-vodka. Onlookers used to make him nervous, but no more. He even hands out business cards.

For Finch, it’s not a bad life.

He has a Bible and hand-rolled cigarettes, plenty of sunshine and no shortage of rocks.

“Every rock I pick up is a challenge,” he said. “I won’t let it go.”

Strangers always ask him to explain his technique. And he always answers with a simple-sounding formula: “You just look at the rock; every rock has a center. Just line up the center of the rock with the center of the other rocks. You just line them up -- and then do a little fudging, back and forth.”

Winds, waves and occasional vandals knock down his creations, but Finch said he never meant them to last forever.

“They change, just like life,” he said. “If I had the same stuff to look at all the time, people would get sick of it.”

As for the city, parks manager Mike Montoya said Finch won’t have to worry as long as his creations don’t get too tall.

“We don’t want people to get hurt, but we certainly don’t want to get in the way of anyone’s artful expression,” Montoya said.

Finch crouches over works in progress with the intensity of a bomb expert laboring over a ticking box. He picked up the art from a stacker he came upon years ago in Pismo Beach. He doesn’t know how his pieces will turn out and is amazed that they do at all.

“There could be a little holiness in it,” he said.

Finch first came to Ventura when he was hitchhiking through the area. He had been on the road for nearly 25 years, ever since he left upstate New York to escape his troubled home. He started stacking rocks after spending a couple of days in jail over a lunch tab that went unpaid.

Within a few months, he was the toast of the town.

But for reasons he finds tough to pin down, Finch headed up the coast on his old bicycle. He stopped for a week or two at every seaside town with rocks on its beach. In Santa Cruz, he settled for a while, earning a “Critic’s Choice” award for his rock art from Metro Santa Cruz, a local weekly newspaper.

But like spires of cleverly placed stones, life changes unpredictably.

A car hit Finch, shattering his shoulder. Recuperation was long and painful, but Finch said he knew when it was complete: “The good Lord woke me up one morning and said, ‘Your arm’s better. Time to go!’ ”

And he left as suddenly as he had shown up.