When a food writer pitched Big Sur to Anthony Bourdain and found heart.

The first time in my travels I was rendered speechless by the sheer soul of a place – in Patagonia’s Tierra del Fuego – I panicked. I didn’t know how I could leave. It was that magical.

Then I realized how I could cope: I could go back to Big Sur.

I’ve been thinking about Big Sur since Anthony Bourdain’s passing, partly because I pitched No Reservations on visiting for an episode. The South Coast shares Bourdain’s stubborn independent streak, and its taste in food ranges from world-class restaurants to tight-knit Fernwood party potlucks, as did his, in swinging from fine French cuisine with Michelin chefs to munching raw sea lion eyeballs with the Inuit. The setting would be cinematic gold for Bourdain’s Emmy-winning eye. Big Sur’s mudslides, wildfire and isolation present perfect fodder for his parables of resilience through food and community. Most potently, though, I felt Big Sur’s edgy literary heritage evokes his own – particularly Big Sur pilgrims Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. It was Miller who wrote one particular phrase that could’ve dropped right into a Bourdain voice-over. “One’s destination is never a place,” Miller said, “but rather a new way of looking at things.”

One line which Bourdain penned in Nasty Bits gets at what I felt in Patagonia and feel in Big Sur every time I go: “Many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there – with your eyes open – and lived to see it.”

Bourdain found inspired ways to describe the indescribable. He also defied description, and now his suicide in France while filming Parts Unknown defies a comfortable way to frame what’s happened. We can’t know his private narrative. But as saddened as I am by his passing, I’m happy he’s helped us learn to be here, eyes open, seeing the world in brilliant and breathtaking depth.

Now a treasured soul has gone traveling, forever, into the ultimate parts unknown. I never heard back on the pitch. We may never know what he struggled with, but thanks to Bourdain, I’ve gained a new way to look at things.