Vacation Musings

Being in California brings back a lot of memories.

I think my grandfather is the patron saint of carrots. I have never had much success with carrots. But this year… wow. I guess I harvested about 1000 carrots. I turned it over completely to the Lord. But man, my grandfather could grow some carrots.

At the beach on the Central Coast (on your map, find LA. Then find San Francisco. Go halfway between them, to the beach and look for Cambria. X marks the spot) I remember lots of things. Like a sort of conversion moment or something. I am not sure what to call it; I looked at a sunset in the winter. The sun was just floating on the horizon. There was a sort of purply-orange shimmering trapezoid on the green-black water. I remember thinking that I just wanted to walk out onto it, thinking I could just walk forever, into everything. I did not care where I went so long as I went.

And then I think about the tide pools all over the Central Coast and Big Sur. The RUSH song Natural Science sums it up. The tide pools are full of creatures that are born, grow, reproduce and die between tides. The tide comes back and clears out everything and starts all over. The song imagines that the creatures “living in the pools soon forget about the sea.” Just like us. We don’t pay attention to where we came from, nor Who is coming to get us.

“Wave after wave will flow with the tide

And bury the world as it does.

Tide after tide, each will flow and recede,

Leaving life to go on as it was”

Ica asked me if this feels like home. Not anymore. My grandparents sold the ranch and moved into town. It’s nice to see everybody. But for as long as I needed it, I guess, this was home, the one place that did not change in my peripatetic childhood and life. Now the town is big (went from 6,000 to 32,000) and the jerks from L.A. found it and people who can’t tell asphalt from shinola come to taste wine and gawk at the locals.

I think I have Ica sold on this is the most beautiful place on earth. As we headed into the Adelaida hills, she just kept saying, how beautiful—the vineyards; almond orchards being restored; the oaks; the cattle on a thousand hills; the gravity of the Pacific—you can’t see the waves, but you feel them tugging.. It’s beautiful and still but not totally crowded. And tomorrow, we’re really going to get out there. We’re going to go across the Santa Lucia Mountains. We’ll go up Hwy 101, which is inland, then across a sketchy road to the Coast Highway on Big Sur.

Last night, we had a real Central Coast feast. My uncle Tim cooked a tri-tip, and we had garlic bread, rice, pink beans.

Here’s a story. So we’re at the beach. John, Joe and I are skipping rocks. The waves were coming farther and farther up, and occasionally one would really come in hard and fast. I told the boys to step back. But as a wave went out, Joe saw a cool rock and he dashed for it. I hollered at him to get back and next thing he knows, he gets rolled by the wave! It knocks him down and for a second I am thinking he may be getting tugged out. He rights himself on all fours and starts hollering for me. As he starts crawling in like a wet pup, I can laugh and get after him for not listening to me… it’s nice when there is an immediate consequence to his not listening… So that cut short our day of elephant seal watching. We had a good laugh on the way home—there’s Joe in the back, naked except for Ica’s windbreaker.