field notes:

7.26.2003

I've really travelled this week. I've driven down and then up again between here and Laguna Beach, below Los Angeles. I've been to the city, San Francisco, and on Thursday, I drove to Pescadero, below Half Moon Bay. Is that considered the central coast? The coastline, the ocean here is so beautiful. Every time I see it I'm reminded of seeing it for the first time.

I'd spent my entire life close to the oceans of southern California, beaches that stretched like sandy extensions of the flat towns, pacific coast highway and the beach parking lots which line the coast. The walk across sand to the water could be endless, feet burning on the hot sand, trudging with laden arms the day's luggage of snacks and lunches and changes of clothing, books and boards and Coppertone. We'd find a choice spot not too close to others and construct our own shanty-town of blankets, towels, chairs, parents and kids. We spent entire summers in Newport Beach in what I now know to have been extreme good fortune. A summer rental with our best friends, with two moms whose presence I remember only vaguely: tan young women, extremely good-looking, chatting about something, applying sunscreen and giving permission for ice cream. On weekends, our fathers arrived, arriving Friday nights tall with rules.

Later, I spent my summers at Lifeguard Tower 3 on Big Corona, in Corona del Mar. I hung out in a loose-fitted group of teens and young adults, vaguely troubled and unparented. I took pride in my tan, and occupied myself with pre-sexual loves and scandals. I bodysurfed and one summer I stood up on a surfboard, once.

The most exotic and compelling beach I'd seen was in the movie 'Julia'. Dashiel Hammet and Lilian Hellman lived in a cottage on the beach in, where? the Hamptons, somewhere on the east coast. That beach too was long and flat and sandy, but was relieved by dunes. They wore sweaters and trousers rolled up to the calf, and ate clams around beach fires, they drank and loved and fought like the mythic word-slingers and drunks that they were. I remember wanting to live, not only on that beach, but like that.

My first adult trip up the coast of California came as a shock then. Beaches hardly existed. The ocean crashed on rocks and sometimes a sandy outlet far below the same coast highway of my youth. The ocean was forbidding, the air cold and wet with spray, the horizon lost in white. Around Jenner we had a picnic one evening, a cold affair huddled in rocks protected from weather that beat at the shore.

Could this difference be what divides the cultures of southern and northern California so heartily? Could it all come from weather and sand? If the weather here in the bay area turned tropical, how would it change us? Would we begin wearing capris and halters, and high-heeled flip-flops? Would we spend more time primping in mirrors, given all that lying around in the sun, checking out the bodies around us on the beach, each tan bod glimmering with mild oils? Would we stop putting political bumper stickers on our cars, so as not to break the line of the bumper? Hmmm.

I ate my eggplant sandwhich on a bluff overlooking a beach near Half Moon Bay. Below me, fully dressed families played on the beach. The sky was clear, and the cooled air by the water was a great relief from the hot inland temperature. The waves curled nicely. It would have been a great day to surf, but nobody was in the water.

Now I prefer the beaches of northern and central california. They require character...or perhaps they shape it. Either way, they're not easy and unending, but harsh and fortunate. The sand, each grain's hard-won hold on land a victory of geology, a scrap of land that all waves require.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 10:20 AM link | comments []

7.25.2003

The Delights of the Door
by Francis Ponge

Kings don't touch doors.
They don't know this joy: to push affectionately or fiercely before us one of those huge panels we know so well, then to turn back in order to replace it--holding a door in our arms.
The pleasure of grabbing one of those tall barriers to a room abdominally, by its porcelain knot; of this swift fighting, body-to-body, when, the forward motion for an instant halted, the eye opens and the whole body adjusts to its new surroundings.
But it still keeps one friendly hand on the door, holding it open, then decisively pushes it away, closing itself in--which the click of the powerful but well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.

translated by Robert Bly

posted by Lisa Thompson on 10:18 AM link | comments []

7.23.2003

I had an appointment in San Francisco yesterday and afterwards wandered over to Ocean Beach to see the Baird's Beaked Whale that had washed ashore the day before. I'd heard it was over 41 feet long, and that white and blue sharks had been feeding off its carcass in the surf.

As I rounded the corner by the Cliffhouse (stripped edifice tugging at my heart), I could see intrepid surfers in the water despite the shark warnings. But just offshore from the whale the waves were unmanned, probably due to enforcement and smell more than fear. Ocean Beach surfers are known for their fearlessness: cold waters, tough waves, and the constant threat of white sharks here requiring a tough northern california breed of surfer, part artist/athlete, part street racer.

I drove down the Great Highway until I saw the TV trucks, beach lined with cars, and dunes filled with people in the middle of an overcast day. I didn't have to leave my car to verify that I was in the right place. The stench was powerful, and went straight to my empty stomach. Driving from Crissy Field to Ocean Beach I'd heard that bioligists had hacked the beast's skull from its body the day before, but I was shocked to see the it nonetheless. Not only was it headless, the body had been covered by taggers.

Thanks KGO

The media is calling this "vandalism" and "devastation", but I had a different feeling about it. Taggers aren't pure vandals like window smashers, they're kids without a voice finding voice. Each tag saying, "I am here", "I lived". As they move through their neighborhoods tagging structures, they touch the city and claim its form as their home: it belongs to them and they to it. On Monday night, they came to the beach instead and tagged the whale. Nature, bloated and bitten, now beheaded, lay stinking on the shore of the city, and the taggers saw it for what it was -- it no longer belonged to the sea, it belonged to us now. We came to photograph it, to document its stink and compare its girth to our own. We came to catalog it and gut it and study the manner of its life and its death. We came to pay homage to its powerful form, each in our own way. In the end, we marked it with the strange writings of our youth's private language, and yesterday we buried it. A wholly human tribute.

Yes, it's shocking. They carved their names into the whale. Shocking also to hack at the whale's skull and use trucks to pull the cartilage and bones apart from the rest of its body. And I can't know who of those many hands that touched the whale did so out of what respect or what anger or what fear. But those hands will certainly never forget that whale, nor forget how it washed ashore and reminded us that it too had lived.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 8:23 AM link | comments []