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 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.