time flies
My most hated month, the dreaded month of February, is at once living up to all horrible expectations, but at the same time, isn't as bad as it could be.
For one thing, at least I'm not freezing my ass off.
I can deal with 50 degree mornings.
But I have grown obsessed with the sea.
My trip up PCH (aka California Highway 1) seems to be echoing through my soul. I finally finished Christopher Moore's Cambria (aka Pine Cove) Trilogy which includes
Ah, the Central Coast. I'm not really sure I could live there, only because I know there are some sheet-wearing, ignorant-ass, racists lurking in the bucolic pastures and meadows. But that is another story.
On my partial weekend off, I grew obsessed with the fact that the Santa Monica Mountains, whose eastern end, Mt. Hollywood, faces my parent's house, runs straight west and off into the ocean, becoming the Northern Channel Islands, which includes Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. Given the proximity of the hill that my parents live on to Mt. Hollywood, I wonder if my parents' hill is part of the same piece of rock. I descended into websites dedicated to geology, learned that the Palos Verdes Peninsula used to be an island until the San Andreas Fault raised up the Los Angeles Basin from sea level.
On Sunday, I helped my dad and my brother take my uncle and my godmother to LAX, after which I was to head off back to San Diego. But, as the sun glowered in the western sky, I decided to head west down the Imperial Highway (which immediately makes me think of centurions and conquistadors and colonialism) and ended up on the shore, which really didn't have anywhere nice to stop. The entire coastal route was lined by chemical factories and petroleum refineries, and the view didn't much improve until I got to Manhattan Beach. Eventually, I decided to get out of my car at Hermosa Beach, where I watched the sun dip behind the clouds and the sky turn dark purple above the crashing waves. To the north, the Santa Monica Mountains seemed to head west off into infinity, and to the south, I could see the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the dark, hazy shadow of Catalina Island (which is a place that I want to return to someday, to try to recapture the very fleeting sense of happiness I had there as a teen-ager.)
Since it was growing late, and would soon be my bed time (since these days, I have to get to sleep by 8pm if I wanted to be up and functional the next day at work), I thought I would just get on the monstrous 405 and head back to S.D. Instead, I foolishly took a detour down Palos Verdes Drive and cruised down the seashore. By then it was pitch black, but I could makeout the lights of the city of Santa Monica and of Malibu to the north, and could later see the flickering lights of Avalon, the one-square mile settlement on the northern shore of Santa Catalina. I don't know what it is about islands. I don't believe in racial memory, but these sensations make me wonder sometimes. Is there something in my blood inherited by my ancestry that gets stimulated by the sight of the sea, and the idea of island-hopping?
I returned to civilization on the southern portion of San Pedro, wondering faintly if I could possibly live there. In San Pedro, I could still have that feeling of insularity, sheltered from the ravenous megalopolis, but still be technically in the City of Los Angeles. (I certainly don't want to live in the suburbs on the Palos Verdes Peninsula itself.) In any case, I drove across the Vincent Thomas Bridge, the only suspension bridge in Southern California, skimmed by Downtown Long Beach and headed down the 405.
For that short while, I was happy.
One day, I will learn how to sail, and I will buy a boat, damn the rest of the world.
Until then, I need to promise to myself that I will visit the ocean whenever possible.