What We Do, Ocean Version

It feels like we are living in a culture spiraling through retrograde. We fight and we fume against the injustices that are piling up; it's exhausting.  Sometimes we need to take a break from the endless cycles of outrage and fury. Because we have to be in this for the long haul.

 So - out to the coast to let ocean waves drown my fulminating thoughts. This fall day is a mix of distinct patches of cold and hot, like cold milk poured into a tall glass of hot coffee, before the stirring. A sweep of hot sun, then a whisk of brisk, cold air; golden light on the hillsides and dark, damp shadows under the trees. 

In Northern California, fall is not a gaudy season that clobbers the eyeballs; one has to learn to recognize it, to feel it in the softening air. There's a brittle dampness to the morning fog, a certain depth of blue in clear skis, then a dense ceiling of moisture-laden clouds.  There's a  splash of yellow along  a short row of birches, a carpet of gold under a ginko tree.  Perhaps a maple flaunts orange and red here and there, but for the most part, it’s a subdued season, the fields cropped down to dusty greyish dirt, oak leaves browned and compacted into slippery layers, a faint dust raising underfoot. The hillsides are dun-colored and scrubby, exhausted after the golden riot of summer’s end. And fires have left their black scars in pitches and patches, in ditches and dells, along roadsides, across vales, over slopes. 

Just past noon, I pull into the parking lot at North Beach in Pt Reyes National Seashore. This is the closest and wildest of the beaches along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard – not the more famous North Beach district in SF. The smell of ocean rushes my opened window, fishy but fresh.  Yellowish scum smudges the break lines of the waves, crab guts, perhaps -- or who knows? The sand is about 60-grit, a dermabrasion on the soles of my bare feet as I walk. I welcome the dermabrasion of my mind, too, as the waves pound and the wind skates along the shore. Snarls and coils of kelp, speckled with tiny black flies. Grey skies and grey ocean, but still a commanding brightness.  

Walking on the loose sand buckles my knees; walking along the wet sand chills my feet. Waves boom and thrash. Fast waves catch my lazy feet, soak the hems of my pants. I sit on a windchuffed log, and shove my feet deep into the grainy sand for warmth. Behind me, the ochre dunes are runneled by water and wind, capped by ice plants, splotchy with a brickish red.  Pelicans trace the leylines along the shore, first up, then down, gliding imperturbably - somehow prehistorically smug. Groups of plovers flash up the shore, swirl and swivel around as one and continue on, black sides, white sides, flicking, flickering.

  

Here, in the boom and thrash of wave, a kind of silence sits, a caesura between these days.  

So needed.

Because tomorrow, we'll be right back at it.