Once More to the Ocean

Four days a week, provided there’s no typhoon, I take a morning walk to the ocean.  Complications have robbed me of the benefits of running, so I have increased the walking distance instead, and am starting to include core work and swimming to regain and maintain upper body strength.  For now, my strength all lies from the waist down, like a built-in, self-reenforcing set of steel-banded stilts that I have regained for free.  The end goal is still to be caught on the flying trapeze--I’ve flown on my own up there, but I wasn’t strong enough at the time (physically and mentally) to be caught.  To work on both physical and mental aspects, I walk to the ocean.

The author, ready for the ocean on steel-banded stilts...

Living in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to walk through Golden Gate Park the three and a half miles to the ocean.  I would take 9th Avenue north to the Park and follow it around as it turned into Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and guided me to Ocean Beach.  The path was all sidewalk right up to the sand, and rollingly flat.

The to the ocean in Carlsbad, from the Cove, is a slightly shorter walk to the sand--about two and a half miles--and offers no N Judah light rail to ride back on, hence making the trip longer.  There is also little sidewalk time until one gets to the most boring leg of the trip (see my previous post on this point) and markedly more extreme hills that the San Francisco trip.  The trail looks somewhat like what is to follow...

Taking Park from the Cove, walking north, I walk until Adams is reached and turn left.  I walk up Adams on the wrong side of the road; Adams is a sidewalk-free thoroughfare with blind turns, so unless I want a Stephen King experience, I stay to the most visible side.  

Entrance to Adams, not on the blind side...

Adams climbs a hill with vistas on the Agua Hedionda Lagoon, the road curving to the south and then correcting back to the north to take me to the summit.  There the view has enough height  to include the lagoon and the ocean beyond I5 (or, if you prefer the southern California terminology, “The 5”) before the road takes me back downhill to the nestle of houses behind the freeway entrance.

Agua Hedionda Lagoon, from Adams...

Agua Hedionda in the foreground, "The 5," and the Pacific Ocean behind in a thin blue line...

At Chinquapin I take another left and cross the street, making my way west.  I cross the interstate via an overpass, a case of grounded flight, until I reach Jefferson.  There I am thick in residential plots three times the size of those in San Francisco, and houses half again as large.  I cross Jefferson and turn right on it, flatly walking north again until I get to Tamarack, where I correct my path west again for the last time before the destination.

Carlsbad Cove Mansion, and surrounding gardens...

That last leg on Tamarack is bland, visually uneventful until the beach is sighted again.  I use that expanse of dull to digest and determine what I will write about and how to measure my breath in meditation.  I try not to let my mind rest on resentments, and sometimes, with concentration, I succeed.  If I don’t succeed I don’t resent that failure--I give myself space to see what I’m doing without the exterior feedback, self-defeating, that shrugs and says, “You always go there; we expected that from you, Jo.”  I’m starting not to expect it from myself, starting to believe that there will be a day when it doesn’t happen, and the solidity and blandness of that length of Tamarack gives me that solitude, that forgivingly blank canvas.  Every day, in that space, I’m starting out forgiven.

The long road of Tamarack.

At the end of Tamarack like the Pacific Ocean, guarded by surfers and joggers on point along the sand and in the fringed, frothy lace of the breakers.  Rarely I’m approached.  Most beachcombers like me are looking for some answer along the horizon or north and/or south along the sand.  Those that do strike up a conversation seem to have either found all of their answers or have given up searching for them westward and try instead to search for them in strangers.

One older man and his wife joined me at the fence and began speaking to me despite my iPod earbuds in place.  I paused the playlist--the selection Beyonce, I think--and turned to him to inquire what he’d said.  “Do you ever get tired of it?” he asked again.

“No,” I answered.  “Never.”

It’s truth.  How can that stretch of Tamarack be so dull and meditative and this never-ending supply of water be so entertaining?  Yet, there it lies, the shifting blue picture, and I could stay there all day.  And stay there I would if I didn’t set myself the boundary of breakfast waiting and a limit of three songs on the iPod beachside.  If I didn’t set these constraints I would start overloading a backpack to camp down there, spread out my papers, and...daydream for hours with no writing.  If I deprive myself of nourishment and blank pages, then I have a reason to go back, and I need that reason.  This great body of water is a medicinal distraction, but too long at it and I get drunk on it and the healthful purpose vaporizes.

"Ocean in sight, o joy!"

Reluctantly, I turn from the safety net and climb back home, back up the ladder, back to the trapeze that is my writing and my life in the Cove.