Gulls scatter before an incoming wave and return, beaks full of butterflied mussel shells, to wash their contents in the wrack of foam and water. High tide this morning. No real sunrise, just a gradual lightening behind a bank of fog, the sky like pearl under glass. I’ve come to walk the Marine Protected Area that curves around Dana Point’s great bluff. It’s a narrow strip of cobblestoned beach between the cliff and the sea. You mustn’t leave anything here, warns the sign at the staircase, nor take anything away.
But I’ve already spotted black marker scribbled on a stone, fresh since the last time I came: Sara was here. Carlos was here, too. If I walk a little farther, I’ll leave most of those kinds of markings behind. The beach is rocky and bouldered, uninviting to sandaled feet. Only the adventurous explore beyond the steep flight of cement stairs leading down to the water, seeking the sea-carved cave beneath the bluff.
I love the cave, which I first visited as a child, an Arizona-born soul visiting aunts and uncles in California. Inside, blue-and-silver light dances on curved walls and glints off the tide-tossed treasures of kelp and driftwood, a new collection every time I come. But I’m fond of the staircase, too, for it’s there I stood with the man I would later marry and, shyly, showed him the ocean. Chris grew up in North Dakota and had never seen the sea. Last night, from the hotel room, I called him to ask about his latest laboratory tests. Still too much lead and mercury in his bloodstream, he told me, the legacy of twenty years of fixing other people’s houses. Memory slips. He reaches for words that tumble from their sentences.
Maybe, I said, I should have come straight home after the conference.
No, he said. Go see the ocean.
So I am here, in a place as familiar as the lines of my own body. The sound of the surf loosens something inside, and I feel parts of myself that were tightly shut now opening, anemone-like, to what the waves might bring. The harbor has changed since my last visit. Earthmovers tear up the boat ramp, half-hidden by a banner that announces Coming Soon! The Mexican restaurant is closed, and several of the shops. They don’t want the mom-and-pop stores here anymore, the chocolatier told me, anger in her voice.
But the ocean is here, unchanged. I keep coming back, I tell myself, for the ocean.
I walk the narrow footpath at the base of the bluff, ignored by the gulls, wishing it were low tide so I could look for tidepools. I love the sea hares best, all eye stalks and spotted silk. The day I showed Chris the ocean, we hiked to the cave and stood in its mouth, transfixed by the sight of a pod of dolphins finning through all that sunlit blue. I fell in love with him that day, I think, not bit by bit, but all at once, like an avalanche. We honeymooned here and returned for anniversaries. This path only leads to the cave and a view of ocean and sky, but it also carries me, in memory, to a place that feels like home.
It requires careful attention to your feet, however, and when I next look up, the path is gone.
A fresh fall of earth stretches across the beach, torn from the cliffs above. The tide surges around the toe of the landslide as I halt in my tracks in dismay. I had read about the landslide in the news. Above me on the bluff, a rich man’s house is falling into the sea, his porch and wide windows now clearly visible from where I stand, dramatic fodder for the news cameras. But none of the reports spoke of the landslide burying this stretch of the Marine Protected Area below, destroying the path to the cave. If only it were low tide, I think—but even then, one would have to hurry, get the timing right, or risk being trapped on the far side. There is no other access, for the beach terminates at the sharp end of the bluff.
It’s like a blade inside me, a fillet knife lodged in the throat. No one told me it would be like this. My childhood landscape rearranged, the map I carry inside my head misaligned to my feet. Stalks of green corn grow from the fresh-turned earth, sprouted, perhaps, from the rich man’s rubbish. Bits of rebar stick up from the soil like spears. I don’t think it can be climbed, but now that I’m nearer, I see a narrow track trammeled up the landslide’s flank and a few fresh footprints, so someone must have tried. I follow, treading carefully. It’s steep enough I want to use my hands for balance, but don’t wish to risk toppling a boulder. Nothing here feels safe or stable. The track peters out near the top of the heap, and it’s clear there’s no going farther, unless some traveler finds in themselves more foolhardy courage than I possess.
From here, I can clearly see the rich man’s house falling into the sea. Multimillion dollar home at risk, the headlines said. Not worth a story: Access to popular cave closed by landslide. When the rich man’s house falls into the sea, I imagine he will build something grander, somewhere else along the wild cliffs, with insurance money and lawyers to make up for his loss. There is no insurance for a tidepool, no law firm for a sea hare. No one underwrites the value of the maps we carry in our minds. The planet’s surface is 70 percent saltwater; the human body only a little less. We learn these facts as children, then begin to forget them. Whatever we bury in the ocean or the earth, in time, surfaces again in our own bones and blood. It’s all the same, all connected. Or all torn apart.
I return along my own tracks to the staircase. The harbor is waking, though the fog is still thick. I must wait near the base of the stairs to make a dash between waves. A woman stands there, midway down the stairs, gazing at the horizon. “It’s amazing,” she says to me, “that something so powerful could be so soothing.” She gestures with both hands as she speaks, scooping them inward toward her heart.
“Yes,” I say, because I feel it, too.
“I used to scuba dive,” she goes on, looking out over the water. But her body can’t handle it anymore. Now she comes, like me, from an inland state to the California coast to watch the sea.
“It’s hard to lose the things you love,” I say, reaching for acceptance, equanimity, or at least composure. But I cannot find it. I hear anger in the waves now, a battering rage. It’s not the ocean’s anger: it’s mine. My own rage dragged out into the open. Lead and mercury swim in the bloodstream of someone I love, a man who spent most of his life repairing houses he couldn’t afford to live in. The coastline crumbles. The harbor vanishes under a developer’s dream of boutique shops and chain restaurants and hotels priced beyond my reach. All anyone sees on the news is a rich man’s house falling into the sea.
At the conference the day before, I heard someone say, Ninety percent of the excess heat pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Age has been absorbed by the ocean. My breath falls into the rhythm of the water, dragging across the cobblestones with every exhale, swelling again with the tide. Did I think the ocean was unchanged? Only on the surface. Down below, it’s warming. The ocean will take it and take it and take it until the ocean can’t take it anymore, and then, the ocean will rise.
