Odds and Land’s Ends
Unrelated to what follows:
Someone recently showed me the album Some Dusty, and I really have been enjoying it. I find it especially funny when people turn you onto new music. I never forget who showed me it and it always feels like I am borrowing it from them even though in the case of this particular album I am streaming it and first heard it when a record was spinning. Whatever, it sounds great especially with Indian Summer in session and my favorite month of California having now started. Oh the sweet life!
“This is where it begins and ends. The city has no dominion here. There is only the land and the sea and the place where they come together, a seething encounter as old as the planet.”- Gary Kamiya, Cool Grey City of Love
“To be a Californian was to see oneself, if one believed the lessons the place seemed most immediately to offer, as affected only by “nature”, which in turn was to exist simultaneously as a source of inspiration or renewal and as the ultimate brute reckoning, the force that by guaranteeing destruction gave the place its perilous beauty. Much of the California landscape has tended to present itself as metaphor, even as litany…” Joan Didion, Where I Was From
Perhaps growing up on the West Coast predisposes you to having an affinity towards sunsets as opposed to sunrises. The poetics of a day ending tend to put me into much more of a swirl than that of a sunrise. Both have nods towards possibilities, sure, but a sunrise is a kickoff and a sunset is a proper punctuator. And have you seen the sun melt into the Pacific horizon before?
Autumn in California has a special sunlight and it is hard to articulate what happens after September twenty first. The sun comes up a bit later, falls a bit sooner, making the blue sky exposure a brief moment of the day all the while the light leans towards white. Once the sun gets heavy enough, it starts to fall into a milky honey golden citrus shine. In San Francisco, once the eucalyptus and cypress trees begin to glow the Indian Summer starts up again. The time of year that is denoted with a title that has uncertain etymological roots, but is used to describe a time after summer has ended, but the air gets dry and the temperature finally rises. This particular phenomenon is Californian, but means different things depending where you are. When I was in the Southern half of California I tried to write about it, My Mother would always say certain words when the air would change. The descriptive phrase that always stuck out in my head was “Indian Summer.” It occurs in autumn, when the air stays hot and dry and the ocean won’t cool down. It is a disorienting pleasure. It is the forgotten season of legend that is the closest thing to mirages on the coast.
Last Friday was the first inkling that the secret season was beginning. I went to where the land is falling into the crashing sea. I thought back to a July that belongs to the phrase “two years ago.” That was the last real summer, the kind with minimal at best responsibility, tan skin, and an imminent senior year of college. I remember that was the first time I heard Jack Kerouac say,
the end of the land sadness end of the
world gladness all you San Franciscos will have to fall eventually
and burn again.
(‘October in the Railroad Earth’)
while Carly drove me to the beach. But on a Friday in San Francisco that lacked fog over the ocean I walked myself to an edge overflowing with a rising sun. I looked over the edge watching the ocean crumble into white wash, reminiscent of a good portion of my childhood spent tangled in that white washed sudsy sandy salt water. Getting tossed, tangled, and spit out by the mouth of the Pacific.
The explanation of how waves form and crash and form again has been explained to me over and over, but it never has stuck with me and I think it is because it will never change what I think of the waves. When I see waves, I see momentum rising, falling, and crumbling. Then what was once the wave gets pulled back and it happens again and again. Some are bigger than others, and it is just like anything else that happens. The same kinds of things happen and sometimes hurt or heal you. Everything comes and goes. Leaves and stays.
Eucalyptus silhouettes started to multiply and the ocean’s blue grew saturated. This was going to happen rain or shine, but was instead happening on a warm late September Friday morning while I stood on a cliff edge spray painted with dumb faded neon phrases. The sun was rising and I just so happened to be there. I felt small and the worries of what someone said to me should not matter because the ocean is big and the sun is a great ball of fire, but those choreographed thoughts kept rising and falling in my head. I looked out to find a rock with a heart shaped gap, exposing the ocean behind it. Birds circled and landed on this rock and I just stared. The rock unbothered by the birds and their crap and the wavy ocean. I wondered if it waited for the sun, but knew it didn’t because it is a rock and I am a girl who is capable of wondering about too many things.
Eventually, the time for departure away from Land’s End arrived. I did the key in ignition, gear shifting, and green lights thing. I thought about how my friend Joe told me it is such a Californian thing to drive to a place to walk around. I thought about how it is such a Californian thing to go to the sea when it is nice out and you have things on your mind. It feels cinematic, but it really is symptomatic. Cinematic by basking in the vastness of this land’s edge. Symptomatic because it is compulsory, a knee jerk reaction of any mood to see the sea, to see an attraction, to see so much of something you cannot see yourself. Something so incomprehensible (there is more ocean beyond the horizon) there are applied meanings and mysticism. Whatever it is, it is pretty and it is always there and the sun also rises (only to set eventually).
