"And the end of all our journeys will be to arrive where we first began, and to know the place for the first time."- TS Eliot
We drove. And drove. And drove. Through the side roads toward santa barbara and over la cumbre pass and stared into the Los Padres wilderness, intact since the spanish land grant in the 16th century. And tried to imagine how this land was saved from the changes that altered most of the character of california almost beyond recognition. Here, as always rise the chalky white hills and deep green oaks, the horizon gentling mountains, silver sage, and wildflowers of the fierce little wills.
We descend to Santa Barbara, where I went to undergrad school, to the home of a college friend I hadn't seen for 14 years. Who recently lost her husband to cancer. Peeling out of the car in a neighborhood festooned with bougainvillea, we opened the door connecting our parallel lives again. We held each other for a long time.
Then trundled down to Henry's Beach, where we had gotten ourselves thrillingly into mild trouble all those years ago. The amber hour just before dusk and the seabird shadows lengthening. Barbara hops on the rocks like a sandpiper. then it's back to the house for sushi and cat fights (Rumi gets his mojo back and tries to bogart her two cats' food-- gets taught some manners.)
We look at yearbooks with impossibly smooth faces, picnics on a perpetual lawn, and bunches of long-haired boys. Would we have had the heart for all that life has brought if a window had cracked open back then? She says the ten years with her late husband were the best of her life. I ached to hear her say that with such finality. As though only bleakness stretched before her. But how could one imagine oneself into a life alone after that kind of closeness? She tells stories of his repartee, his preferences in wine, as though he were just in the other room, about to emerge after a nap or a smoke...
Barbara and Rumi and I left the next morning, to continue to Dana Point, the beachtown I grew up in, named for the B-list classics writer of "Two Years Before the Mast," Richard Henry Dana. (in place of the European grand tour his Harvard cohort took, he signed onto "the Pilgrim" to sail around the horn and wound up chronicling the mistreatment of sailors. Melville said his account of sailing around Cape Horn was so vivid it must have been 'written with an icicle.' Although with Dana's eyesight compromised by measles, it's a wonder he was able to write at all...he wrote about the natives, hustled into missions tanning works and how they carried hides to these cliffs to pitch them into his waiting trade ship)
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We arrive to the parental unit intact, smiling and relieved. A quick trip to Laguna Beach tidepools and emerald waters and then Barbara is off to Salt Lake City via John Wayne (International) Airport. It's hard not to smile at a town that takes so seriously a dead star astride his horse. Maybe he's an icon for the edge of the west we have arrived at, or a patron saint herding aircraft in the sky keeping them from stampeding... In a way it makes more sense than naming an airport for a politician.
Driving home alone, the ocean on the starboard, the greening hills on my port, I think my patron might be Saint Lucy, who carried her eyes before her. I see all the other times I've driven the coast highway, for 35plus years now stacking up on the shoulder. I cannot say why I was drawn back here now, except to see it all more rightly. the parents, the place, the threads through my history, and where they will weave next--san luis obispo, paso robles, petaluma--or maybe another state or country that has the same warmth and liminal coast and feeling of coming home.
They say when you circle back you are always one rung higher in a continuous spiral. I hold the moonsnail shell I scooped from the waves in Santa Barbara, and wonder if the shell is the house we've left behind, the spiral involute, ever tightening to a core that is me and you until all the sand settles and we leave the shell we don't need for the connecting sea.
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