A vignette…
I am a California Girl. And like California Girls are wont to do, when the day is stressful, when the sun is out and the sky is perfectly blue, we run to the beach.
I drive in my little white car down backroads because the highway won’t take me there, and I park along the street, a quick walk to the beach with a scratchy towel under my arm and a tote bag on my shoulder, the leather strap warming enough to prick the skin with a burn.
Through the parking lot and under the overpass where the Coaster train occasionally rides, skating across the coast, the Los Penasquitos Lagoon comes into view, sitting on the side with brush and water, quiet and tepid.
I notice first that the lagoon is full, brimming up with aquamarine water — and it shouldn’t be, because that means the tide has risen up far enough, eaten up enough beach that the ocean is slowly edging towards civilization.
When I reach the beach, I’m right. What I remember as a full and bustling beach, a great stretch of sand dotted with umbrellas and people, as you might imagine when you think of it, is only a slice of sand now, the water creeping up and up and up.
The coast is disappearing. We know this, we talk about it, but now I see it, the water eating up places where kids used to dig holes, slopping sand over their shoulders, build sandcastles with attention, now there is only a width of beach wide enough to allow a jeep or two through and not much more.
Even so, I climb under the walkway railing and down the crunching of rocks that make up a mediocre cliff until my feet hit sand, warm and welcoming. The lifeguard on his tower pays no attention, his binoculars trained on something out to sea.
Down the beach, I walk in the wet sand, and it’s softer than I’m used to, like a mattress pressing in with every fall of my feet. It’s grabbing up my ankles, asking me how I am and where I’ve been. There aren’t many people on the beach — not the usual bustle of a tourist summer because it’s the middle of a Wednesday, and everyone is in school or at work.
There is a father playing in the water with his two toddler daughters. A pregnant woman walks with her husband, belly out in the sun. Two friends walk the beach in black clothes, they sit on a rock and talk, one of them showing the other something on their phone. A woman sits beneath a watermelon umbrella.
A surfer walks his board out, one hand guiding it over the barely forming waves. He tries to ride it, but the surf is low and lazy and not making much of anything but noise.
I put my towel and bag down in front of a rock big enough to sit on, and I decide to walk in the water today. I let the water get up to my knees, below my cotton shorts, and it’s cold but nothing startling. Refreshing when it sluices across my feet and so blue, on for miles.
It is loud and quiet, and that’s what I’ve always admired about the ocean. Allowed to be so many things at once.
I sit on my towel, the water drying, and read a book (Bel Canto, Ann Patchett). She’s going on about opera, and I look out on the water and think about drowning.
It will be cold when my head goes under, and the water will feel velvet on my face. Cold water filling my mouth and lungs. It tastes sweet, refreshing. I’m confusing the salt taste with chlorine, but I can still feel it in the back of my throat. The water relieves the pressure.
I wonder why I think of dying when I don’t want to. But then, the thought was of drowning, not dying. So, it probably makes sense.
On the beach, there is a strange coming back to myself. I had the instinct to run and I acted on it, and this is where I ended up. Twenty minutes from my house and yet so vast and different. I’m tired of the suburbs, they make me think of nothing but the secrets neighbors hide and benign life.
If the water keeps rising, it will eat up the beach and the lagoon, then it will hang around the rocks for a while, trying to figure out just how to hop over them. Eventually, it will find the perfect technique, and then it will be up in the road, under the cars, washing away beach apartments and houses like toy blocks in a sewer.
I think, even though sometimes I hate it, I will always be a California Girl. It’s in my blood now, rooted so deep there that someday, in another city in another state, I will say the stereotypical, “I miss the beach.” But it will be true.
On my way back up the beach, there are more people gathering, watching their children skip in the water. I think I am a native here, and they are visitors. I think I know this beach like the muscles on the back of my hand. My skin is warm by the end, so I walk in the wet sand again, letting the water cool.
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