pelicans float, clams roll, kids wander
Early Saturday, quiet and still amidst the meditative call of breaking waves. We take a long Half Moon walk on a coastal path, both sides covered with low brush and a few wildflowers, ten million small bunnies scooting one way or another across the path. Here one moment, invisible the next.
Then it is off to Mavericks Beach, in hopes of finding the high ground from which onlookers watch the crazily brave surfers of Mavericks’ monster waves. We park in the lot along a wetland, walk out to the beach and a jetty, it’s too foggy and marine-layered to see anywhere near the half-mile out to where “Mavericks’ takes place when the right winter swell appears. Along our walk we come across a couple of fabulous, inventive benches, including this one, and my nearly-always-present thought of ‘taking the bench’ smiles and waves at me, one more time.
Ann drove south, toward home, in the direction of our last stop on this long-researched-and-planned schedule. Down the 1, a funky rural route to the 101, back through agra-business and bending brown bodies, salad for America. We rested at a Starbucks in Soledad, which was lovely and warm in the late morning sun, with friendly baristas. I didn’t see any particular sign of Eldridge Cleaver, probably because I was of faulty memory in an earlier post – he did time at Folsom and San Quentin. It was The Soledad Brothers. Oh well, all the brothers and sisters at the Starbucks in Soledad just off the 101 were plain old friendly this Saturday..
Ann had reserved yet another fabulous room in Pismo Beach, second-floor above a Pacific stretched out from cliffs plunging below our windows, our room on a flight-plan latitude with seemingly never-ending squads of pelicans. We checked in around 2 and walked down a whole bunch of sand-drizzled stairs and out onto the beach for a long walk toward, and up onto, our last pier.
The beach was wildly littered with what we discovered to be sea clams, their shells rings of color, their striations like age-rings on a sawed-through tree (a thing we learned on a poster on the pier.) The clams would roll in, flipped over and over by each wave, until deposited above the water line, and would survive (we also learned) until it was time for the inevitable returning tide.
We walked out on and to the end of the pier and back, too beat to get back in the car in search of another bookstore. We’ve already lived book large, and supported the economy of our state in so many ways. Tomorrow’s another day, just over 300 miles to our Banker’s Hill neighborhood.
Later on, shortly before sunset, on a walk in front of pastel-colored cliffside hotels, we discovered a world of resting and nesting pelicans. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, an aviary magic neither of us had ever quite experienced. Photos can never do justice to the ‘now-ness’ of the way it was that Saturday night. But this one points toward it.
