A scavenger with personality makes his way by stacking rocks at McAbee Beach in Monterey.

Calloused hands twist and fold a leaf of New Zealand flax into the shape of a rose before securing it with metal wire. The entire process, while intricate, takes less than a minute.

“And that’s why they call me The Monterey Rose Man,” Ronald O’Brien says, spinning the flower on his finger after adding a few drops of rose oil.

He can make about 15 roses in an hour, charging anywhere from $5 to $50, “depending on their shoes,” he says. That would be this heavily tanned man’s strategy for setting prices as a homeless artist who frequents McAbee Beach on Cannery Row. Near the Hoffman Avenue entrance to the beach is a stack of rocks, another favorite art medium of his. At the base of the stack sits a bowl in which people donate money. Above the bowl is a sign reading, “If I had a dollar for every photograph taken, I wouldn’t be homeless.” A few passing tourists drop in their spare change, one drops a bill.

A native of the San Jose/Cupertino area, O’Brien traveled between Hollister and Santa Cruz after high school, becoming officially homeless in Santa Cruz in January of 2012. He left for Monterey sometime in early 2013, citing Santa Cruz’s levels of gang violence and drug abuse as his motivation. He likes McAbee Beach for its relative safety, saying that he does his part to discourage drug abusers and gang members from hanging out there, maintaining a good relationship with the police as he goes.

O’Brien lives eight blocks away, in the garage of a women he met at St. Mary’s Church in Pacific Grove. He has coffee at Starbucks almost daily at 5am, before heading to either the library to update his social media, or to a store to buy metal wire, glue or beach toys for kids. Popular items include miniature stacks of rocks glued to abalone shells and necklaces made from sea glass or jade. Most of his profit is invested into either art supplies or sand toys, which he loans out to children who play on the beach.

At high tide on a spring afternoon, O’Brien isn’t stacking any rocks, instead handing out business cards advertising his social media accounts to promote his art. He uses magnets to affix the cards to the metal railing near the entrance to the beach, and sometimes sets up small bamboo tables on the grass directly behind the same railing where he displays the rock stacks he has for sale when the tide is low. He’s trying to start an organization to promote other homeless artists in Monterey named “HUSTLE,” an acronym for “Help Us Start To Live Empowered.” His goal is to raise enough money to rent a space in Monterey for homeless artists to sell their work. He doesn’t work with drug users, or people who spend the day getting drunk. He throws in a few anecdotes about helping people in the area, homeless or not, overcoming their problems with substance abuse or stress by teaching them how to balance rocks of different sizes and shapes on top of one another, a feat more difficult than it sounds. While the people he’s helped come from all walks of life, he says they each describe a sense of inner peace when they stack rocks.

“They forget what you said, they forget what you did, but they remember how you made them feel,” he says, paraphrasing poet Maya Angelou. He’s had vacationing parents tell him that their hyperactive children calmed down and stopped playing on their smartphones once they discovered rock-stacking. According to O’Brien, stacking even helped a scuba diver from Pleasanton recover from suicidal thoughts stemming from a hostile divorce, and he funded O’Brien’s trip to a rock stacking competition in March as a thank you.

On Feb. 10, 2016, O’Brien was stacking next to the fishing boat mural with Ka Lani Santiago, a local artist and documentary filmmaker he taught to stack, when their hands encountered a mysterious black sludge. After digging in the sand and discovering there was oil seeping up from the ground, O’Brien called a local security guard, who in turn called the fire department.

O’Brien claims the firefighters didn’t act very quickly to contain the seepage; as the fire department slowly worked to clean up the oil, O’Brien labored for 14 nights in a row, mostly by himself, stacking rocks and sandbags around the oil pit to direct the waves around it and prevent the oil from contaminating the ocean. He moved a total of 50 sandbags donated by friends and nearly 700 rocks, taking pride in this accomplishment, telling himself that, if a simple man can contain an oil seepage, then other people can take the initiative to solve problems in their own communities.

A documentary about O’Brien’s art, Zero Gravity, can be found on Santiago’s YouTube channel. O’Brien, meanwhile, can be found at the beach, folding leaves and stacking rocks.

View the YouTube video at www.youtube.com/user/JourneyKaLani/featured