Peeling back the billboards
Peeling back the billboards to discover the communities who put California's culture in motion — across its countryside, shores and mountains.
Communities have informal goals and codes that members cherish and transmit from generation to generation, so the community never ends. That is the beauty I want to understand.
Say hello, give the wave, come back on Saturday — nobody writes these rules down, and everybody knows them.
Beyond Billboards gives a voice to the people who, through their community, make California's land a place like no other — the chefs, winemakers and farmers who taste it, and the surfers, climbers, riders and fishers who ride it.
We hand the pen and microphone to the people who are building these local souls and can testify to them.
© Benjamin Baillou — Mount Eden
The people who read California’s land through taste — told through in-depth interviews and field conversations, in the vineyard, the kitchen and the field.
5 stories — read them
© Benjamin Baillou — Pacifica
The people who read California’s land through the body — surfers, rock climbers, mountain bikers, fishers and rodeo riders who know a wave, a granite wall or a trail by feel.
1 story — read it Waves · granite · trailsEvery story starts in a real place. Tap a pin to meet the story that belongs there — then read it on Substack.
Behind every place, a community: the same faces, gathering week after week, year after year — and the old generation handing what it knows to the young ones.
California is a melting pot of local souls from the land — born of its vineyards, its waves, its granite, its trails.
From seashores, forests, pastures and vineyards — California's land is not only tasted. It is ridden, climbed, read.
We hand the microphone to the people who know a place the way you know a person.
Excellence grows out of ground — we show you the ground, and the hands.
Read the story. Then come taste it yourself.
You know California from films and series — the romantic dream, or its hostile twin: factory farms, GMOs, everything oversized. Both images are exports. We take you to the real place underneath them: the small producers, makers and towns the cameras never visit.
You live this culture every day — the taco truck on the corner, the surf break before work, the bottle on the table — without ever being told where it came from, or who made it. We connect your daily life back to something genuine, and to the people behind it.
I'm Ben, Franco-British, living in California. After a career in big companies, from PwC to Starbucks, I traded my office badge for boots — to meet the people who make and ride California.
But what defines me the most is that I grew up in the French countryside and was part of a local community myself. It gave me a sense of belonging, an extended family, and the pleasure of meeting its members in the daily routine.
Living first in Britain and now in California has made me realise how important this sense of community is for our well-being. I am myself trying to settle into a new community — my children's school, and surf — and I feel the beauty behind it.
I share it with you through my dual-nationality eyes: for you Californians, and for you in Europe — to better understand what lies behind Californian culture.
Every community anchors itself in a place, with its people, within a day trip of the Bay Area. We go there, we meet them, we listen — then we write.
The place, the water, the light, the second chance — and the community it gathered around them. What they received from the land before they gave anything back.
The vineyard, the craft, the school, the gathering — the shared life that only became possible here, and what it cost them to build it.
What leaves their hands and enters other people's lives — the knowledge, the table, the welcome — handed to the young ones coming up behind.
Field stories from California’s small places — the winemakers, farmers, surfers and climbers behind the culture you thought you knew.
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