The sight, the sound, even the smell. What is it that pulls me back to the ocean time after time? Maybe it’s just to cool off. Maybe it’s simply to dine on fresh seafood. Or maybe there’s just something primeval about walking atop wet sand, waves crashing beyond me, sea gulls screeching above.
Whatever the reason, there I was once again a few weeks ago, savoring it all and reliving the memories.
I was a little girl traveling with my family the first time I saw the ocean – the one lapping against the city of Los Angeles. Again and again we would return, only this time heading south to the beaches that lie between Los Angeles and San Diego. There, we would pitch a tent atop a cliff that led down to the sea through a well-worn path.
Never mind the constant traffic on the highway behind us linking San Diego and Los Angeles. Nor the fact that our only amenities were an outhouse and an exposed outdoor shower. Not with sand crabs and seashells to discover, kites to fly, and campfires to gather ‘round as the growing dusk grew misty.
Best of all was the nighttime glow of the waves crashing against the shore, turning wet sand into a sparkling luminescence. We would stomp across the wet sand, leaving glimmering footprints behind, and fling the wet sand into the air, creating streaks of momentary glitter.
We had no idea what caused this phenomenon, joking that it was probably the result of atomic bomb testing in the South Pacific. Only much later did we learn that the glow, according to sources such as National Geographic, came from tiny marine microbes known as phytoplankton.
Though this is a glow that regularly occurs from time to time along the beaches of Southern California, I’ve never seen it since.
One year we camped near Oceanside, not far from Camp Pendleton, my husband and I sleeping inside our station wagon, our kids inside my parents small camper, while Marines jogged past on the beach.
After we got our own RV, we camped a few times at Silver Strand State Beach, in South San Diego. Asphalt parking lot, cheek-by-jowl with your neighbors, no campfires. Still, this was where we introduced our grandchildren to the ocean and all its inherent wonders.
Sometime in the early 1970s my mother had discovered a cluster of cottages for rent literally a stone’s throw from the sands of San Diego’s Pacific Beach. There, the family would also gather from time to time.
We ate dinner at World Famous before it became The Green Flash, stood in line for the breakfast burritos at Kono’s, walked the wooden planks of the Crystal Pier out to its end jutting over the surf.
Tourists and locals strolling, biking and rollerblading along the boardwalks of Pacific and Mission Beach provided unceasing entertainment. And more years than not, we’d recognize fellow Zonies, also escaping the heat.
In 1998, we had what would be our last seashore family reunion. Organized by my mother, it would be her last outing to her beloved Pacific Beach before her death in the spring of 2000.
A few years after my father died in 2006, I tossed the last of his ashes into the swirling foam off the coast of Pacific Beach, not far from where he built sandcastles with his grandchildren and watched the sun dip every evening into the ocean’s endless horizon.
He never, to my knowledge, saw that rarity known as the green flash, a green spot visible for a second or two just above the rim of the sun as it sinks into the sea. Neither have I. Maybe that’s why I keep returning year after year — to a sea that holds so many memories.
