Today started with a bang, literally.A ten pound limestone cliff rock fell upon my big toe and split into two pieces! (The rock, not the toe.)
How does a woman manage to have a massive rock fall on her foot while at home in her bedroom? Well...
The rock is a keepsake from my childhood spent living above one of California's prettiest and least known beaches. It is a secluded beach that you have to scale down a forty foot cliff to reach, which I learned to do at a very early age thanks to my father. He taught me how to "crawl like a spider" down the rocks and crags, look carefully at the ground around and below me to see what might be likely to crumble soon, and how to judge the tides to determine the right times to descend and ascend the cliff so that I would not be trapped on the beach below at high tide.
When I was very young I began to collect shells laying on the beach and wedged between its boulders with my dad. A Nebraska farm-boy by birth and heritage, my father never failed to be amazed that he lived in California and could walk along its shores every day of the week. He loved this so much and his enthusiasm was contagious.
I looked forward every week to the weekend day when my father and I would carry plastic shopping bags and sturdy metal spoons down the cliff to spend hours poring through rocks, looking for beautiful shells (empty of their creatures) to bring like treasure back to my mother.
The most beautiful of the shells were the empty abalone shells we would sometimes find stuck beween two large boulders, washed in with the high tide and then trapped as it ebbed away. Their gleaming iridescent inner surface was smooth, polished and sometimes resembled mother-of-pearl. Finding an abalone shell was rare and always a special thing for us, since much of the local abalone was harvested for sport. My father would varnish and save these shells to use them around our home to store small objects, in lieu of jars.
Clearly, this beach was a special place for my dad and I ~ we spent a lot of time there together.
My girlfriends (and later, boyfriends) and I traversed its jagged cliffs like they were gentle garden paths when we were growing up. We liked to sunbathe there because it was mainly free of people we girls considered to be threatening or lecherous. The local beach was watched over by a band of surfers older than we were, one of whom was my older brother. Thanks to his influence, all of the local surfers left me alone as well... which was mainly fine. I always had the sense that if I had gotten into trouble or danger on that beach or cliff area, any one of them would have come to my assistance based on their respect for my brother and I really appreciated that.
This private beach became my safe spot, the one place where I felt most connected to the Earth. I could read or sleep, unperturbed by most animals and insects - feeling the deep warmth of the sand beneath my back and basking in the sunshine that cascaded over us. The gentle roar of the ocean filled my ears, even when I would listen to my "walkman" LOL! full of girlish love songs. Over the years, that sound of ocean became the most soothing and reassuring sound in my life. I began to feel like the hum of the tides flowed in my veins, as part of me.
As teenagers we held parties and bonfires on that beach. We kissed boys on first dates there, we shared secrets and confessions, we cried there. When a close high school friend died of leukemia, my best friend and I spent the entire afternoon after her funeral digging our friend's name into the sand in letters so large you could see them from "heaven" - or at least from the top of the cliff. I have photos from that experience which are very precious to me.
Time passed and one day I woke up to realize that I would soon be leaving to attend a college an hour's drive away from any ocean. I sat at the top of the cliffs gazing out into the sunset and wondered how I would ever thrive away from my most sacred space.
At the time I wasn't worried about missing my native city but I was quite apprehensive about leaving behind 'my' beach. I took photos of it at different times of day and framed them for my dorm room. My best friend gave me a small box full of heart shaped limestone cliff rocks so that I would always be able to hold a piece of home right in my hand. (Thank you so much K, I still have that box including the lyrics you enclosed to Lenny Kravitz's song "Believe"...)
I thought I had prepared myself to leave the beach well enough. "I'll be back," I reassured myself, "I'll return here every summer and on all major holidays." I don't think I understood yet just how deeply those sands had crept into my very core.
There is no way I can encapsulate my college experience in a sentence or even a paragraph. All I can say is that despite the academic excellence and prestige of the university that I was lucky enough to attend, I spent a miserable few years trying to recapture the magic of my childhood in southern California.
Stuck without a car so far from the water, I walked a thousand laps around the manmade lake at my college and dreamed that I could hear waves crashing. I borrowed cars whenever I could to head for the beach an hour away, even though the water was frigid there and it proved to be an entirely different experience. I partied at the only place where I felt at ease and understood, with the only collective of people I actually felt comfortable with - a fraternity full of southern California boys who surfed and played volleyball and water polo. It wasn't because the boys were cute (they were)... it was because with their dialect and wit, their beach culture and clothing, their skateboards and luau parties, they made me feel at home.
I thought a million times about transferring back to a state school closer to my beach, and the main reason why I didn't do it is that my parents had mortgaged their house to send me to this fancy school and I didn't want their sacrifice to end up being for nothing. I took as many classes as I could each quarter and stuck it out, graduating several months early and hightailing it back home... after stopping off for a week in Hawaii to decompress on its sultry shores.
I have traveled extensively since graduating college and lived very briefly in three other California cities, each time powerfully impacted by the intense yearning to get back to my roots. Finally I realized that this town and its particular combination of sky, sun and surf are at the very heart of my heart. As much as I kvetch and moan about moving to Canada when I don't like the politics of our government, and despite our current family plan to move for one year to Italy, this is the town for me. Without it, I am not the best of myself. I somehow need the stability of this location as my base in order to spring forth with confidence and a vivid personality. It's funny because I am not a small-town girl, but it turns out that I may be a one-town girl.
I have been so blessed to meet and marry a man who also grew up here ~ who actually attended the same college that I did, at the same time that I did ~ and who yearned just as strongly as me to return to our town.
Like me, he has lived in many different neighborhoods in this city at different times of his life and he knows, as I do, that it has such a wealth of options both geographically and culturally for all types of folk. My husband loves this city as much as I do, and while the rhythm of the ocean may not flow in his veins the way it does for me (he prefers its mountains, so perfect for cycling) he is actually more entrenched here than I am. We each have our parents here and extremely close friends that we have known since elementary school, junior high and high school. We have also established our careers and professional reputations here.
I love my husband, I love this city, and I love this piece of ocean. When my father died two years ago we actually scattered his ashes at sea far off the coast of the shores of my special beach, on a sunny summer day. The experience was so profoundly moving to me that I resolved to be buried "with him" someday - and it is now written into our living trust that my own ashes will be scattered by my husband and children in those same waters.
I don't like thinking about this on cold, dreary mornings when I imagine how chilly the water out there might be... but in the glorious summer when the air is clear and you can see for miles into the horizon from the cliffs above my childhood beach, I smile knowing that some day I too will be part of the sparkling waters and supple sand that I love so well.
Perhaps this explains why, for years, I have kept a sizeable chunk of limestone cliff from my childhood beach with me. Wherever I go it gives me a tangible reminder of who I am and where I come from. Especially since becoming a mother and losing track of much of my former sense of self (education/career/independence) it is quite lovely to have something as grounded and solid as an actual rock to hold onto.
The story of how the rock was randomly placed in a spot where it could randomly fall on my foot this morning is rather long-winded and dull; suffice to say, I'll be looking to find a much safer spot (low to the ground) to store it so that it doesn't manage to impale or crush any of my children or their precious teeny toes.
I can't wait until my kids are old enough to introduce to my beloved beach so that I can teach them how to scale down its massive, ever-crumbling cliff; how to place their ears against its grainy sand so they can hear the heartbeat of the Earth below. This is just one more part of me that will last for them forever.
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