Holiday at the beach

When we went camping on a wild beach in Baja, I would go swimming first thing in the morning and then again before dinner. That was when I was a teenager and we were the only humans on the beach or anywhere else for miles around the arid region.

I have stuck with that basic routine in the decades since, as an essential contribution to health in the body and soul. So it was that I took two weeks to hang out with my nephew and his two young kids down in Carlsbad, a beach town in Southern California that is twixt the blue-collar, surfer village it was and ‘tween the beach-rental, nice-restaurant resort it is becoming.

And in the mornings, when the sea surface was still smooth and the morning sunlight was crisp and clear, I would walk down to the beach and take a long swim in the ocean. The only company was a few surfers who also liked the clean, blue surface yet unruffled by the wind, along with pelicans skimming the swells and sandpipers working in the wash of the waves.

It took a good part of the two weeks to get back in the shape required to pull through the ocean but on the last morning, I remember sitting on the beach after the swim, feeling the warmth of the sun combined with the light, cool breeze starting up, and thinking, there is no better feeling.

It is the closest thing to rejuvenation, sending you back toward the youthful strength of sensation that used to come new every day.

Back on the first day of the holiday, I wanted nothing more than to lay on the couch of the rental that had an oblique view of the ocean, read a detective mystery set on Catalina, eat an occasional olive and drink cold, white wine.

But by the next day the beach seemed like the more attractive place to lay around. So I would take a long swim and then have an orange, a piece of baguette and coffee from a small thermos, while sitting in the sand, watching the vast blue-green Pacific stretch to the horizon in front of me.

Then — this was also a ritual that started after snorkeling for lobster in a cold ocean in Baja — lay back on the sand under a straw hat, and, as the reedy, clean smell of the straw mixed with the ocean breeze, watch the sea for a bit, and fall asleep.

By the time I would come back in the afternoon, Tamarack State Beach was pretty crowded. On that last day, a small group of twenty-somethings stood in a circle talking and joking. A group of young men, Middle Eastern possibly, friendly as heck, were playing some kind of game tossing a ball to bounce off a plastic arch in the sand.

I looked down the beach northward with the sun getting low over the ocean, and through the haze that comes off the ocean that time of day, the gauzy figures of people walking, playing, or going into the ocean were telescoped into a narrow view of the end of a summer beach day in Southern California.

That is my other favorite part of the day at the beach — as it fades. The wind has often picked up a little, and the warmth of the sun is much reduced, the ocean surface is more broken up. There is a kind of melancholy feeling on the beach as families pack up to go home, a few couples still snooze, a radio plays tunes, but faintly in the wind.

While it shared the main constant of the Pacific Ocean, the wild beach we camped on at Santa Catarina, part way down the Baja peninsula had plenty of seaweed left on the sand by the waves, plus the sand flies that came with it, and a whole lot more fish in the sea, with small armies of seagulls in the wet sand and great long lines of pelicans cruising up or down the coast.

It was an entirely different place but a popular beach in SoCal also shares that end-of-day vibe, as the sun leaves to go down below the horizon, when it is soon time to get a cup of red wine and some dinner. After two weeks, I was rested and had gained swimming strength from hard strokes in a surging sea.

My nephew and his kids had boarded a plane that afternoon and headed back to North Carolina. It was time for the vacation to end, time to take the evening drive through the streaming river of lights that is the Five Freeway, through Anaheim and past Disneyland, with a half-moon floating above, past the exits for big boulevards, Baldwin, Rosemead, Atlantic that signify neighborhoods of folks from China, Mexico or Vietnam, all the way back to Pasadena.

The next morning, it felt strange to enter the elevator to head up to the Courthouse News offices. I didn’t really want to go inside.