Surf rising

The little waves that ruffled to shore in my beach haiku are gone, replaced by good-sized waves that curl in with spray steaming back off their tops.

As the winter waves get bigger, the coastside buzzes with speculation about the big-surf contest held in our front yard.

"Have they called Mavericks?" asked a woman at the gym.

"I bet they'll call Mavericks on Wednesday" said the greengrocer at the farm stand.

"Surf's comin' up, swell's right," commented a laconic cop at the taqueria, "can't call Mavericks 'til the wind's right, though."

Mavericks, the big-wave spot off Pillar Point, was named for a white-haired German shepherd dog with an adventurous spirit. The spot didn't gain fame until the early '90s, and gained notoriety in 1994 when Mark Foo, a Hawai'ian big-surf legend, wiped out and disappeared on an 18-foot wave. The first surf competition was held out there in 1999. In the early days when Mavericks was called, hand-lettered cardboard signs saying Mavericks today! were tacked up on telephone poles, letting us know that we needed to skip work and stick around.

I grew up during the surfing craze of the '60s, woodies and Surfin' Safari and all, and I never got over it. I body-surfed Santa Cruz waters but never graduated to the longboard elite. Wasn't ever a gidget-type surfer girl either, good grief. Meanwhile, three hundred miles to the south, Wm was one of the longboard elite, surfing Zuma and Trestles and Malibu. We have salt water in our veins, we dream of breathing underwater, and the waves call.

You can learn all about Mavericks, check the contest status, and watch the competition live when it's on at http://www.maverickssurf.com/.

The silver lining for 2010

On the last day of 2009, Wm and I walked on the beach at sunset and we saw the silver lining for 2010! A flash of silver beneath the clouds, where the sky met the sea...


"...the little silver flash...follows the setting of the sun, making a brief crescent of light no thicker than the crescent of a fingernail along the horizon line" says the story of Umai, a girl of the Yurok tribe who yearned to know what the crescent of light was.

Umai took her canoe to the edge of the world:

"She sat at the world's edge, watching quietly. She saw that the sky does not rest solidly on the ocean, but that it lifts and dips and lifts and dips in an even rhythm...and she saw that it is this dipping sky that causes the waves...

 "The sun went down behind the edge of the world and was followed by the familiar silver flash. But from so much closer up, Umai saw that it was not at all a narrow crescent, but a waving, moving something with a center of living brightness..."*

May 2010 be filled with good health, and a center of living brightness for us all.

* This story is told in The Inland Whale: Nine Stories Retold from California Indian Legends by Theodora Kroeber, published in 1959.

Beach haiku

Today we walked on the beach on a very low tide and watched the sanderlings and willets scurry along as the small waves met the shore at Miramar. Out beyond Pillar Point is where the huge waves of the renowned Mavericks surf spot build, but the waves on this day were small and peaceful. I waxed poetic in the sand.

little waves ruffling to shore
on a low low tide
small shorebirds jitterbugging

Here is a small bird jitterbugging near the ruffling waves:

Rebecca goes camping

Today I borrow from Wm's web site, where he says:

We just got back from a camping trip, and we are pleased to report that Rebecca is back to being Rebecca. I have to admit that I never thought we would all be hiking and camping together after last month's prognosis; we were thinking in terms of days.

Rebecca has gained all of her weight back and was chasing the raccoons and critters away from our campsite like she always has. We still take it one day at a time but this last camping trip was really special with her; Ellen and I have had dogs all of our lives but we have never seen a dog with so much spirit and true grit. She made us totally forget about the situation and it was a well-needed emotional rest and a slip back into normalcy.

Somehow, it reminds me of getting a second chance like in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life...even if the outcome suddenly changes we will always remember this little miracle and be grateful for the extra quality time we are getting with Rebecca.

 A few photos, of course:


Our campsite over looking Sunset Beach between Santa Cruz and Monterey

Rebecca guarding the food


Yo!...let's go hiking!


Check out the surfer dudes (Rebecca always finds the action)




Rebecca loves the sunset...means dinner, critter chasing, and a campfire.


After the campfire wears down, it is time for the warm innards of Goldie, our home away from home. You can see the snow clouds forming behind...it snowed the following day in the Santa Cruz Mountains.


Goldie is our all-original 1971 Dodge factory-conversion van which sleeps two adults and two small children (or two adults and one large dog), dining area, wet bar, kitchen sink, fridge, and stove, along with lots of drawers and closet space. We just hit 70K original miles on this last trip.



"Hey Dad...stop your yapping...my burger is ready..."

Ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties...

...and things that go bump in the night! It's that time of year. Pumpkins everywhere, our neighbors' black cats on the prowl, skeletons dangling from porches... and the Christmas displays going up in the big-box stores. I, along with apparently everyone else, detest the earlier and earlier start to the annual force-feeding of consumerism that has become Christmas. Somebody's got to be buying the stuff, though, nurturing the greed that perpetuates the earlier and earlier force-feeding... 

But enough of that. Happily, we're relatively immune to it in our little community. We're immersed in things autumnal -- Hallowe'en, Dia de los Muertos, sunny beaches after the summer fog...

.. and of course the Brussels sprout harvest. The sprouts grow along the plant's stem, the bulging little balls poking out all the way down almost to the ground.

The sprout fields are a sea of fluffy leaves, stretching across our fertile bench of land between mountain and ocean.

 To harvest the sprouts, the farmers strip the leaves away, then cut the stems and strip the sprouts off.

A new trend is to sell the whole sprout stalk. That can be a lot of sprouts.

You know how sprouts smell when they're cooking, kind of... pungent? Well, they smell a little that way when they're growing, too. When we were kids passing a sprout field, the cool joke in the car was "who farted?!"



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A few days ago I looked through my collection of New Yorker covers (yes, this proud native Californian has taken the New Yorker since the '70s) and found a couple of classic Hallowe'en covers by the inimitable Charles Addams.

This one appeared on the October 31, 1988 cover... a month after Charles Addams' passing on September 29, 1988. I think he must have loved that.