Ocean Elegy

When we were little kids, my folks used to pry us out of bed before dawn on summer weekends, bundle us in the back of the Buick Estate Wagon, and drive us over the winding hazard that is California’s Highway 17. I don’t remember anything about the transition from bed to car, but I can imagine sitting in the back seat, watching a blur of trees go by. I can picture Santa’s Village, a ramshackle theme park at the town of Scott’s Valley where the road straightened out. There was a dinosaur park on the opposite side of the road – a giant made out of concrete peered through the trees and across four lanes into the elves workshop. I wonder if the elves thought they were hallucinating.

We never stopped at either place, heading straight for the state park on the beach in Santa Cruz.Weather on the Pacific Coast is unpredictable at best in summer time. There’s a strip of cold, wet, fog that likes to sit just on the edge of Highway 1, across the street from the beach. You can cross the coast range and get all the way to the highway in a blaze of summer sunshine only to freeze your behind off on the beach. We never knew if it would burn off or not when we headed out, but because it was so early when we left home, we’d always spend the first part of our beach days shivering on damp sand, wrapped in mist and blankets.

I feel like I am making it up as I write this, but my memory of childhood is patchy and everything feels like something I might have read in a book once, a long time ago, while traveling, so fuzzy is it. It seems to me that we’d pay pay our admission fee, park the car and trudge down to the sand. We’d be wrapped in hooded sweatshirts and towels, we’d be lugging ice chests and paper bags full of snacks. Once we’d staked a claim on the sand, we’d gather driftwood. My dad would start a fire. Magically, pancakes would appear out of a cast iron skillet. I have no memory of boxes of pancake mix or squeeze bottles of Log Cabin maple syrup, but I do have the flavor of browned corn meal pancakes with maybe just a little bit of grit from the sand. I don’t know how many times we did this. I don’t know if we gave up and went home when the fog decided not to lift, stopping for ice cream back on the hotter side as a consolation prize. I don’t know if we slept off our sunburns in the car on the way home. I do know that I like a foggy beach nearly as much as a sunny one.

And that when people stopped putting me in the car to take me to the beach, I started taking myself or recruiting others to drive me. I got the Persian student who lived in the apartment opposite mine while I was in art school to take me. I’d borrow a car and go by myself with a book, a bottle of water, and a snack. When I was super fit, I’d ride my bike out to the ocean, just because I could, doing the steep climb over highway 84 or Page Mill Road, then I’d stuff myself on snacks at the San Gregorio general store. I worked for a tiny startup and on a particularly unproductive day when I confessed to the founder that work was Just Not Happening, we jumped in his car and drove to the beach to eat donuts on the sand.

More recently, we took some European friends out to the Washington Coast. We parked the car and walked out in to a dense fog that obscured everything. We could not see where we were going; the car disappeared behind us in very little time. Every now and then a person – or a dog – would appear out of nowhere. There was a calm surf sighing in the distance, but how far out was anyone’s guess as the sky and the sand and the water were the same color. It was exactly what I imagine walking in a cloud would be like.

We do not live exactly on the Pacific Ocean now; Puget Sound is a huge body of water connected to the Big Blue, but it’s not quite the same thing. It is a grand compromise, however, and though it might not have a crashing surf, the Sound does have other very fine qualities. There are the obvious tides, the sea life, the smell of seaweed and salt, the crunch of sand and seashells.

The fact that I can see water right here from my couch, even if it is only a tiny reflective patch of blue gray, is a source of endless delight to me. I can see more water if I walk out on to the front steps and ever more if I walk one block north and one block west. The street dead ends, so cars can’t get through, but there’s a footpath. And some kind people – maybe the people who live at this little spur of road – have placed a bench there. It’s a perfect spot to look out across the great expanse of the Sound, to watch the ferries and freighters and weather coming and going, and to see the water that connects all the way out to the Pacific.

People are surprised when I tell them that I’m a California girl but I am, through and through. I’ve never run on the sand with a surfboard under my arm, never danced on on the beach like Frankie and Annette. But when I breathe deep of the Pacific, I am in a summer night when I’ve driven to the ocean just for the smell. In my mind I’m winding over the Coast Range and turning south, the surf smashing the shore to my right. I spend a mere hour on the sand just to sense the pale heat of the sun through the marine layer. I remember sandy feet stuffed in to wet sneakers so I can cross the hot asphalt without burning my feet. I taste that first warm pancake, just this side of burnt, seasoned with a tiny bit of salty sand.

I can smell the edge of the Pacific from my front steps. I can imagine the water opening up and stretching west.