By the Sea in Laguna Beach, California
There are precious few things in one’s life that are never disappointing. For me, first and foremost, that is walking along the sea. I have walked along the sea in many far flung corners of the world, but the one I have walked most often is a magnificent stretch of coast in Laguna Beach. It draws me like a magnet, particularly and preferably after the summer season when the four million tourists have left.
People-watching is interesting even off-season. Fat, skinny, male, female, human and canine, young, old, and everything in between, all come to the beaches and picturesque coves. Children gambol and build sand castles. The agile and young play frisbee, volleyball, and basketball. Scuba divers suit up and lithe young teens run and jump on boards that skim along the sand into the waves. Even the disabled who are bound to wheel chairs use contraptions that they can wheel along the sand.
You can hear just about any language being spoken. And it’s a multicultural gathering spot. The smell of lighter fluid and charcoal mingles with the sounds of the crashing waves and Arabic and Farsi in an area popular for barbecuing.
Laguna Beach being a true art colony, plein air artists set up their easels along the paths and don’t care who watches them paint. Complimenting the blue of the sea and the sky are the varied colors of cliffs carefully landscaped with trees, plants, shrubs, and mulitcolored flowers. Sculptures adorn the paths here and there. Even an unusual live tree is an abstract sculpture as it stretches its contorted trunk horizontally rather than vertically.
A charming gazebo looks out upon the sea. Sometimes I have seen it decorated for weddings, but the best wedding I saw was on the beach where the formally-dressed bride, groom, bridesmaids, and ushers were standing barefoot in the sand.
Near the bench being supported by two sculpted figures, a man in a motorized scooter told me to look at a lizard motionless near another sculpture. He opened a pill bottle, took out a worm, and threw it to the lizard. Instantly, the lizard turned around and grabbed the worm. I wondered if that’s a daily ritual for both of them.
One well-dressed man with his face shaded by a jaunty hat, stretched out across the full length of a bench with his suitcases and bags carefully distributed around him. Hanging from a hanger in front of one bag was a sports jacket — as if to tell us that he was sleeping there by choice and not necessity.
Once, during my years of wandering the world, my parents brought me to Laguna Beach on a visit. As I sat on a bench and looked out upon the vastness of the sea, I felt a feeling I had never had before. “I could be happy here forever.” This was indeed a strange thought for a nomad.
Years later, happenstance brought me to live six miles away from Laguna Beach. The joy I feel when I go there has never diminished. I learned about a small neighborhood park above one of the beaches because I became a volunteer for the Pacific Marine Mammal Center. The park is on a cliff looking out upon a rock jutting out of the sea where wild sea lions gather and where we release our sea lions when they are healthy enough to resume a wild life.
After my weekly regular shift as a docent at the center, I drive to the sea. I love the anticipation of my first sight of the ocean, etched in shades of gray or blue as it meets the sky. When I get to the park overlooking the rock with the sea lions on it, I watch the sea lions through my binoculars and feel a sense of small accomplishment in having been a part of helping wild sea lions.
It is a small, beautifully manicured park with quiet nooks where people play the guitar and sing to themselves, or sit on the lawn eating and sipping wine. Of course there’s a lot of picture taking there, and every now and then, a wedding on the cliff.
Sometimes small planes and helicopters fly above the cliff along with the pelicans, cormorants, and sea gulls. Recently, I even saw a blimp slowly, silently gliding by with a big picture of Snoopy on it and the large words “for the if in life.” Philosophy in the sky.
In the green park, I often see tiny, busy hummingbirds drinking deeply from the flowers, reminding me of my own years of flitting back and forth, drinking deeply of the cultures I lived in. Occasionally a pod of dolphins gracefully go by. Only once I saw a large raft of sea lions joined by their flippers floating by.
When I look at the sea from this vantage point, I can almost forget that we humans have made the sea so sick and polluted, killing to extinction so much formerly abundant sea life.
Close to sunset, with my binoculars, I distort the gleam of the sun on the ocean into thousands of moving cell-like creatures rejoicing in a dance over the water. The shining, shimmering path the sun makes across the water and all the way to the cliff where I’m standing connects me to the sea and the sun. Soon, the sun throws out flames of red and yellow across the sky. If I’m very, very lucky, there will be soft clouds that catch and reflect the color throughout the remaining blue sky after the sun sinks reluctantly behind Catalina Island. It is then that I’m reminded of the true meaning of that much-overused word - AWESOME!
Tags: California; sea lions, people on the beach, Travel, Travel; Laguna Beach
