Saturday Morning Beach Report: Many Musings

It was all shimmer and shine this morning, the clouds in the distance as thick as marshmallows. Next to the water the sand was scooped low and a companion mountain of sand hid the houses. I'm on a deserted island, I told myself. No one lives here.

Farther along the sand was etch-a-sketched with giant drawings, silty black debris tracing out mountain ranges.

The debris line was full of shell and stones and charred-looking pieces of wood. This couldn't be from the fires, I thought to myself. There's been no rain to wash it into the ocean.

But the water itself was, in places, inky black with it--whatever it is. I have seen the beach like this at times in the past, but maybe even then it was airborne fire debris from somewhere.

2017 changed the landscape of this beach I walk on. The giant wall of rock that forms harbor mouth is no longer a wall from the beach side. The lower 90% of the wall is now covered by sand, and the sign (if it's not buried too) that proclaims Danger! No Climbing! would seem ridiculous since you can now just walk onto the top of the wall. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, (sandstorm of fake news, erosion of decency, buried alive by stupidity and cruelty) but I'm too busy thinking that I'd like to have a job some day naming things. If there's a new pink lipstick for 2018, I'd like to call it Godwit Pink.

It's a pity I'm not a real photographer, but if you look closely, maybe you can see the pink of this bird's beak. It's just so darn pretty.

Solstice

It's time to memorize (again)  this poem by Yeats.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

       THE SECOND COMING
    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Monday Morning Beach Report

Everyday the news is sad and terrible.
Look at the ocean, I tell myself, not at the headlines on your phone.
We love who we love. We breathe the air we have to breathe.
So drink it in, and hope the toxins and the sorrow will alter just a cell or two.
Look at the curlew going about his business.
Look at the new plume on the horizon and nod.

The Fire/Day Nine. Really? Yep.

Mountains, I thought. I can see the mountains! Sure there's some smoke, but it looks good out there.
And, yes the situation is improving if you're not someone whose house has burned down or is still evacuated, BUT the fire is still burning.

The night the fire started a friend in Ojai got the emergency knock on her door at 1:00 a.m. Earlier she'd offered shelter to a friend who was evacuating from Santa Paula. A few days ago other friends who were evacuated from Ojai decided to go to Santa Barbara for a few days to escape the smoke. Then the fire spread and  now that's where the worst pollution is. Or maybe not today. Maybe it all blew down here.

I went to run some errands under this morning's rosy assumption. When I got out of the car at the shoe repair about 5 miles north, I choked. Ash blew into the car. The second errand was a half mile to the east from my house and the air was clear. But my neighborhood looked like this. Smoke goes wherever it wants to.

I'm inside now and I think I'll stay in. There's a big wide world beyond my front door, but I'm not going there.

Yesterday and this morning I pulled 44 pounds of paper out of my filing cabinet and had it shredded. I've dusted all the places I never dust. I've refurbished my emergency backpack, ordered some emergency water with a long shelf life, re-organized my writer's space,  Earlier evenings of the fire, I made dinners for friends, and tonight seems like a good time to do that again. Ratatouiile would be perfect.