Besides The Bus To Wal-Mart

 

 

 

 

An Ocean View Spoiled

Adding to the Adventure

More than once I have traveled for a medical procedure.  Not as extreme or distant as discounted heart surgery abroad, but often finding the right physiological provider did require a flight to a doctor’s destination (and once included a bump up to first class – how simply awful for me).  And as is common with most of my travel, I insert sightseeing into my itineraries.  Whether it is for business, joining a family reunion, completing my degree work (see “An Education at Gettysburg,” March 2013), or for a medical procedure, I stop at a historical marker, I voyage via a unique mode of transportation, or I take in a baseball game to add a little spice to my travel.  It’s what makes a routine trip a memorable outing.

Once I cruised Hollywood Boulevard after a two-day workshop in Southern California and happened upon a press-lined red carpet for a movie premiere at the Grauman’s Chinese Theater.  I dined on the waterfront after a meeting in Annapolis when I took with a side trip to Chesapeake Bay (see “The Ice Machine in the River,” July 2012).  I squeezed in a landmark outing in the City of Brotherly Love (see “The Vet,” November 2011), and I added a full day’s drive to the northern tier when I had just planned an overnight outing to Omaha (see “North Dakota on a Napkin,” November 2011).  My travel always has multiple purposes and selfish sightseeing.

Missed Sunsets

I land on Monday night and reach the hotel after sunset, sadly, since my hotel stands near the beach in practically perfect Santa Monica.  I barely close the door to my room and receive a call from the front desk updating me on the score from the Tampa Bay Rays game (why, yes, they did sweep the Red Sox).  Clearly this hotel will exceed my expectations if they can keep me apprised of the early-season series.  Hued in tans, browns, and white, with highlights of trendy green, this hotel may not ooze medical motif, but it certainly brightens my visit’s purpose.  I may not get to enjoy the fancy first-floor nightclub, but just being in Santa Monica will be a treat.

Morning begins with my trying to complete my homework in advance of finals week.  But certainly I will get a chance to get out to the beach or down to the pier.  By midday I am on my way to appointment one of two, followed by a social call from friends checking on me.  When adding in a little recuperation time, another sunset comes and goes without me.  Day two takes a similar course, substituting work on my final term paper for the conversational pop-in.  And by the time I lie down, I have caught only a snippet of the sun’s departure and none of the ambiance of the ocean.  The coastal taxi ride back to LAX affords me my only scenic pleasure during an excursion-less escape.  The sun metaphorically set on Santa Monica.

Between Here and the Channel Islands

Enriching My Life

Out on the water it’s mystical.  When sailing under a brilliant sunny sky, a trail of reflecting beams sparkles and flickers its magic upward.  Elsewhere, guided by the fierce strength of plummeting pressure, the water churned by a typhoon spins its moist madness into a churning fury.  And at its frozen edges, the coldest waters surround the polar caps tossing bergs effortlessly and angrily during their longest, darkest seasons.  Regardless of the weather, the tilt of planet earth, the illumination from above and the sea life living below, the oceans challenge and nourish the wellspring of the human spirit.

My passion for the sea, as I often profess, stems from my birth just blocks from the ocean’s edge (see “My Oldest Memory” from April 2012).  I still cling to numerous memories of the most powerful moments of my life and how the beach called to me to cross over from soil to water – my first pregnancy and later a lost pregnancy, an exotic cruise to slip away briefly from parenthood, an epic vacation from Canada to Florida – each a faceted gem that stay with me and enrich my life.  And when I part from its beckoning spell, I taste the brine left from the breeze wafting invisible salt against my lips.

Escaping My Life

Driving out to Ventura County, we find a small building marking the tiniest land-based tip of the Channel Islands National Park.  The surrounding docks lead us to boarding ramp towards the multi-hour excursion westward, and

today the mystical ocean, while clear at the shore, hides beyond the cloak of fog draped before the horizon.  Once away from the shore, the dolphins racing us towards the mist swoop above, below, and back above the water effortlessly and triumphantly.  In the distance, an oil rig appears ominous in the watery haze and the closer we approach, it reveals a less-menacing stature fixed and immovable against the contrasting, bouncing water.

When we cross the shipping lanes ferrying goods across the Pacific, the monstrous vessels tote hundreds of stacked semi-trailers floating away to China.  But we scoot on our double-decker minnow as the massive cruiser fades into the fog and we pull into the cove of the first island with only a ladder to reach the dock.  Shrouded on nearby rocks, we hear the barking of the seals pointlessly harassing each other as a few hearty campers disembark the craft for an overnight on the island. We aimlessly cruise around the smaller islands with their unique fauna and humble heights.  But most notably, these formations, surrounded entirely by the mystical, magical, magnificent source of my constant inspiration, peek out of the beautiful blue ocean, pointing skyward allowing me to feel a million miles away from my life.

You Can See Forever



My Oldest Memory

Theoretically

I have this theory that people are drawn to the types of climates into which they are born.  Granted my theory resembles other less-concrete ideas, like cookie fortunes and paranormal activity – only believable if they apply to you personally.  In my case, my theory applies to me personally.  Born in the sunshine and near the ocean, my ideal environment remains shore side.  I like driving along the ocean, staring at the ocean, listening to the ocean on my white-noise sound machine, and, of course, taking pictures of the ocean.  And to be clear, I am mesmerized by the ocean, but somewhat less delighted by the beach – it’s a sand thing.  But just sitting and looking at the ocean tickles me aquamarine.

And I love the moon.  In all its phases, when hiding in the brightest daylight or illuminating a dark road, when it is waxing or waning, when it saddles up to a planet to make a smiley face, when it dominates the skylight upon rising, and during the less-frequent occasions when I get to see it set, I absolutely adore it.  I often wonder if the correlation between the moon and the tide create a sort of bi-fortnight parallel in my brain.  Most likely, I love the size or distance each represents and how small I feel in comparison to both.

The Turtle

At some point in every person’s mind, when reaching back into the deepest consciousness, a thousand memories of the experiences of a life time are stored.  The brain – the world’s greatest hard drive – categorizes these memories and can cross reference them by date or time or place or people or emotions.  Say, for example, that I wanted to gather all of my great memories of the ocean.  I would retrieve a mental picture of a recent excursion with friends to Vero Beach, I would recall the boat ride to the Channel Islands with Son #2, I would think about the view of the Atlantic between Europe and North America from 30,000 feet, and I would reach all the way down to the bottom of the stack of memories and pull out my earliest recollection.

At less than two years of age, filed under both “beach” and “California,” the image of a moment exists in my mind when I try fervently to make sand fit into the shape of a plastic, yellow turtle mold about the size of a saucer.  For the life of me, every time I remove the turtle, the sand falls away from the mold and looks nothing like the shape in my hands.  In hindsight, I do not know if I feel frustration at the dry sand remaining faithful to its physical properties, or that an adult does not assist with the activity by adding water to my sculpting.  And so the pile of loose grains remains every time I lift the yellow plastic shell to my toddleresque dismay.  Perhaps my lack of success in creating the shape of the turtle in the sand explains my lack of excitement about the beach.  More likely this oldest memory resembles my fascination with the ocean, because whether two or twenty-two or forty-two, I try to wrap my head around how small I really am.

On A Clear Day

In Bloom