A humbling pair: harsh coast, darkening sky

I can see the storm approaching.

As I look out toward the ocean from my room, I see a thick blanket of fog along the horizon, and the darkening sky over it, both moving slowly inland.

It is already beginning to sprinkle and meteorologists are predicting that the worst is yet to come. There is a forecast of 2 to 4 inches of rain along the Central Coast in the next two days, with winds of 50 miles an hour. I believe that.

The very air crackles with alarm.

A storm signals its approach with scattered drops of rain and a breeze that whispers through the treetops. Only when one is looking directly at the ocean does the weather front appear in dramatic outline, moving in from the west.

We are at the Ragged Point Inn, which is 15 miles north of Hearst Castle, where the mad genius of newspapering once ruled. The influence of William Randolph Hearst was felt from New York to San Francisco. His property here ran from the hills to the sea. They called him the Lord of San Simeon.

Our inn, a combination of lush gardens and a striking view of the Pacific, sits on a rise off Highway 1, just as the road begins to wind upward from the flatlands toward Carmel, past Big Sur and past the stone tower where the poet Robinson Jeffers once looked out to the expanse that inspired his work.

We came upon this place a year ago driving south from San Francisco, looking for a place to stay after an exhausting trip down the coast. The fog was so thick I couldn’t see the hood of the car, adding to the peril of an already precarious route. The road is known for both its striking vistas and its dangers. It devours the careless and spits them onto the rocks far below.

Ragged Point Inn was the first lodging we came across, and it immediately became a destination in itself. Ensconced in a corner room overlooking a cove, we were awed by the drama of the surf that crashed against rocks carved into an arc by the ocean’s relentless pounding.

We’re here again, looking down at waves that surge into the opening, spraying shards of gleaming crystal high into the flattening storm light. The glass wall of our room offers a full view of the ocean, looking south along the ragged shoreline, and westward toward the blurring horizon. The coming storm is in full view.

There was already a thick fog on the coast as we drove here past Cambria. It lined the route like a silver marker, requiring the kind of concentration that makes driving less than fun. You just want to get there.

We stopped for dinner with a friend, Kathe Tanner, who writes for the local paper, the Cambrian. The house she shares with her husband, Richard, is just a few feet above the ocean, close enough to have had half of their yard torn away by an El Nino-fueled storm.

Kathe feared that all hell was going to break loose that night too. She fed us and patted us on our way before the storm was due.

Cinelli sees shifting patterns of weather as nutrients for the blossoms that adorn her garden. The suddenness of a storm’s occurrence provides the thunder that drums out a drama of Shakespearean magnitude. “Look on the bright side,” she says, rain or shine, “without weather the world would go gray and flowers would die.”

I am more into doomsday scenarios than sun-nourished posies when meteorologists begin predicting the mother of all storms. A moment ago, I was listening to History Channel disaster theorists speculate on the destruction of Seattle if it were hit by an earthquake, a landslide and a tsunami in a simultaneous union of biblical proportions. There would be a hole where Seattle was. It could happen here too, even as I watch the weather watching us.

There are no telephones in the room at the Ragged Point Inn and cellphones don’t get a signal up here, but we didn’t drive hundreds of miles to call anyone.

We are here to contemplate the harsh beauty of a coastline that slopes from the green hills of spring to a diminishing shoreline, where time has buffed the protruding rocks into a deep glow.

The sky is darkening with an intensity that is turning day into night, filling us with the uneasy notion that something ominous is approaching from the distance, like the ship from beyond the grave in the movie “The Fog.”

The compelling nature of wild weather fills the moment that it occupies and reduces other concerns to specks at sea.

My mother used to say I was born in a gale. Maybe she was right. There’s something about the growing power of an advancing storm that thrills the heart and toughens the soul. We’ll soon find out. The wind is moaning like a woman in pain. Trees are doing a witch’s dance. Get ready. It’s coming.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.