The Christmas season is a parade of delicious meals punctuated with cookies. By yesterday afternoon I was feeling like a stuffed goose and there were no ballet shoes in my immediate future. The search for exercise in some form took me to the beach.
My feet don’t touch earth often enough in the winter. Cold weather keeps me boot-clad and indoors. It was a December afternoon, chilly by my standards, though not so bitingly cold as it has been. I was wearing two shirts and a sweater, but I still rolled up my pants and stripped off my shoes. I’m California born and bred. Never lived outside the state lines and never much intend to. The ocean is a touchstone for me. A place to which I periodically wander back. I like to walk the line between water and land to remind myself that there isn’t a line.
It was low tide and the receding waters left pockets and pools in the sand. I turned over scallop shells with my toes and did rond de jambes in the sand leaving large D-shaped crescent depressions behind me. Shannon was here. It was a lot like tide-pooling, without the slippery rocks. Sea glass and abalone bits and kelp polyps.
My beach memory from childhood is sharing Taco Bell nachos with my sister in the sand on a summer afternoon, just the two us. That would have been a southern beach, Huntington or maybe Newport. The kind of warm beaches that everybody who doesn’t live here thinks California is full of. I don’t know if the memory is of a specific adventure or amalgam – neither the beach trip nor the Nachos Bel Grande were unusual for us. But I remember sticking to the black leather of my sister’s car on way home, salty and sandy. I remember my very pretty teenage sister in the sunshine, who was never too cool to drag her kid sister along with her. I remember sand in the nachos and a wet ponytail on my neck and laughing over beans and olives.
In high school, when I ditched class on spring days I drove out to Bodega. Those are cold Northern California beaches. Too cold for bikinis and sun bathing but we did it anyway because we were in high school. My partner in crime back then was a girl named Denise. I remember the drive out there with her in my mom’s old Rabbit, me behind the wheel and her in the passenger seat with her feet up on the dash. There was a roadside shop along the way that sold cherry cider that would be warm and sticky by the time we got where we were going. I haven’t made that drive in years but I can follow the route well enough in my mind. It’s not the road less traveled – I bet a fair portion of my readers know the very cherry stand – but it’s part of my personal geography regardless of how many other maps it may fall on. Those beaches were sand dunes and grass tufts and sheltered spots from the wind where you set up camp for the day with turkey sandwiches and dreamt about high school romances that would actually be romantic. We’d lie in the sun that wasn’t quite warm enough on a Wednesday afternoon and think how much better this was than history class.
College, on the other hand, took me to the beach by curriculum. Back when you could easily define who you were by the well-designated bounds of majors and minors, I was rooted in land, air, and water science. Not much bio, no more chem than I could strictly get away with, but elements that you could see and touch and smell. One geology professor I had, nicknamed Fair-Weather Dave, drug us all over the coast on cold winter quarter field trips cataloging shale deposits on frigid beaches up and down the coast. Cold fingers smudging in “Rite in the Rain” notebooks on a rainy afternoon. After one of these grueling hikes, we happened upon a deli in Pescadero with fresh artichoke garlic bread coming out of the oven. We bought them out with masses of quarters and nickels and stood in pairs and trios ripping chunks out of too-hot-to-touch loaves and shoving it straight in our mouths.
By the time I left the beach yesterday the sun was beginning to think about setting. It came out from behind clouds long enough for me to stand there to face it with my toes in the water and the light of the expanse in front of me too blinding to focus on. I’ve met people before who have never seen the ocean. I can’t get my head around that. These waters have rounded my edges the same way that they soften sea glass, all my life.
Trips to the beach always end the same way. Sandy feet climbing stairs and landing on asphalt in parking lots. Brushing the sand from between your toes until you can swaddle them again in shoes and socks and carry them away to the world of carpet and linoleum. The tide releases you and off you go, albeit with souvenir sand grains under your nails and on the floor mats of the car. Grains that travel far from the coast and end up back there again, sooner or later.