I don't want to return to my college and soul searching, twenty-something years, though I keep flashing to the fact my own daughter is the age I was then. Weird! Our California road trip is about people, youthful memories and grown-up insights. Dan and I might as well have been kids when we met; and then poof: here we are full blown adults in our sixties. We met in Ojai, up in the hills about 45 minutes from Santa Barbara, a major stopping point on our journey. We are staying several days with friends, first, the former remarried husband, and then the former remarried wife. But back to those pelicans. I thought our trip was mainly going to be about people and not places. But I am wrong. Each place has brought me a visual gift of wild and natural beauty...like those hold-your-breath pelicans.
As we make our way through the narrow high mountain roads towards Ojai, it is as if I am seeing this landscape for the first time. Having worked part-time at one of its private schools, having met Dan at that school, I drove this path a hundred times. But this September summer beauty whizzing past the car window is indescribable. We have climbed inside an enclosed hilly canyon of paradise which keeps opening up to these scenes of three dimensional splendor: jagged cliffs, bowls of greenery, and serene, eternal skies. Ojai has been equated with a spiritual Shangra La, and it is still thick with theosophists. As a college student, I came here frequently to hear Krishnamurti speak in its parks.
At Dennis's house, I meet and immediately like his new wife Meredy. Before dinner we are taken on a dog-walk up along one of those hills I saw through my car window. As we walk and talk, I feel my feet touching this amazing land. It is hot and I am sweating. The town of Ojai is small; one long, yuppified street. There are remnants of the orange groves along which Dan and I used to run. Kathy and Allyn's rental is in a posh neighborhood and makes Dennis and Meredy's sprawling tract home look rather earthy. Kathy beams through the front door window as she sees our faces. Decades-old friends whom we haven't seen in over a decade. E-mail and the telephone can't replace pure physical contact. Kathy has a manicured, cascading waterfall in her back garden, but this doesn't seem to ease the feeling that I have lost contact with nature. It isn't until the next morning when Kathy takes us for a walk through a neighborhood access only, corral-like open meadow that the natural contact resumes. I find that talking outside, talking in wilder and more primitive places loosens people's inhibitions.
That Dan and I are in rugged Ojai after spending two feet-burning days walking and visiting with friends in bustling, downtown San Francisco and Oakland, shocks us. We are like birds making our way south for the winter, flying through one habitat after another.
Leaving Ojai, we skim along the coastal highway to Dan's mom's house which is a half block away from the Hermosa Beach Strand. Dan's mother and younger sixty year old brother live together and always have since their father's death, at age 45. They resemble a grouchy, long-married couple who know they need each other to survive. Dan's mom has a tremendous heart, beating inside a neglected eight-five year old body. The television is on every waking moment, and so to find solace we take walks along the strand or walks through this now more upscale beach town to our usual coffee place for breakfast.
Our daughter wants to see grandma, so we fly her down for the weekend. After she arrives I feel complete. It is hot, even at the beach...record highs in Los Angeles. Mid-morning, the daughter and I go for a bike ride, riding fast along the sandy, increasingly peopled shores. There are huge tankers far out on the glassy waters looking more like toy boats. There are rows and rows of volleyball nets with groups of players arriving at every one. There are boy scouts doing their duty on beach clean-up day. My daughter rides faster, and I try to keep up. The sky is unlimited if I look north, but a stack of smoke is rising to the east. We stop and walk our bikes onto a pier and see surfers paddling for waves. It's a normal day at the beach, but it's totally different from our Eugene, Oregon home environment.
At one place where bikes must be carried up the steps, with difficulty I begin lifting my bike. But then this incredibly nice gentleman says, “Let me help you.” I thank him profusely and he jokes that he'll be happy to carry my bike all the way to Starbucks! As I hop back on my bike, I wonder if this is what it means to be a senior citizen? I like the respect and care but hope I can be an agile aging specimen. The daughter keeps turning around and asking me if I'm OK. “Yes, yes,” I tell her as I'm catching my breath and wiping away the heat induced-sweat. When I say “I love this,” what I am really saying is “I love being with you.”
In the afternoon Dan's sister and her partner, Mary, arrive and we all head down to the beach with our beach chairs and umbrellas. All the water people, myself and Mary excluded, go body surfing. I sit and watch the expansive horizon and see what appears to be seal heads bobbing up and down in the waters. Later we are given this habitat's gift: a pod of playfully frolicking dolphins swim merrily by my beloved human swimmers and can be seen from the shore. I am once again elated...dolphins are rarely seen so close to this Pacific Coast civilization. I scan the waters for more surprises but all I can focus upon is my beautiful, lanky daughter and dripping wet husband, both of whom I love beyond measure. They are so alike in temperament, I think, and can feel myself edging towards an outsider frame of mind.
Is it a burden to be full of sensitivities and mental meanderings? Is it a burden to have to put all experiences, all musings into spoken and written words? I so admire the quiet nature of my family. My husband and daughter have no need to speak. Their inward contemplations are enough. My enthusiastic energy can't be contained.
Like a taunt yet subtle rubber band, our eleven days of travel have stretched us far and away from our home and back again. From wall-to-wall peopled big city to quiet as a pin-drop mountain oasis, from one upscale California beach town to another, we have opened our hearts to and rejuvenated our minds with old friends and family. On our last afternoon in Hermosa, we set up the gigantic umbrella, wipe off the lounge chairs and help Grandma and her walker make their way around the side of the house to this front yard respite. In the thirty or so years I have known Dan's mother, she has never sat outside with us. But here we all are: brother, sister, partner, Dan, wife and daughter, Dan's mother, my daughter's grandmother, sitting facing a view of the ocean rising above the sand. It is a miracle, this short span of living we do. It is a miracle to be able to encounter the surprises nature presents. It is a miracle, simply to be together, sitting side by side with those we love.
(c) 2012
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