By the Sea
I’ve never been all that mesmerized by the ocean the way some people are. I’ve always thought of people as either seashore or mountain people when it comes to where they position themselves in August. When I was a rookie in banking lo those forty-five years ago, one of the factoids I gathered up that first hot down summer in the city for me, was that when you reached the exalted position of Vice President in the bank, you had a long summer vacation to plan. Vice Presidents were given six weeks of vacation per year, or, more precisely, one month and two weeks. There was a New York State Banking regulation that required all officers to be absent from the premises for at least two consecutive calendar weeks each year. The concept was simply that if they weren’t there to keep their scams going, they would divulge themselves in that timeframe and you would get caught. How simple life and crime used to be, right? Now someone can hack their way into the T-Mobile database and get into your piggy bank via the autopay functionality back door, all while you are out of the office over a summer three day weekend. But in the 70’s it was still considered a more civilized time and a prominent man like a bank Vice President was someone of meaningful stature who was at least out of his youthful 20’s, if not into his early 40’s. He was expected to choose either the month of July or the month of August to go up to some place like Mt. Desert Island on the coast of Maine with his family and kick back from the rigors of his 10-3 job in Manhattan. Think about that, you were expected to be away not thinking about work for a full calendar month. That would have to last you until Christmas, though, since you then had a mere two weeks left of vacation time to reinvigorate yourself later in the year.
I think of movies set in the fifties and sixties when the father was out being miserable at the beach trying not to get too much sand in his shorts while his kids were using the time to sharpen up their adolescent sexual skills while Mom smoked Pall Malls on the sun porch while playing Canasta with the girls (it was a Uruguayan import that went nicely with Gazpacho soup). Those were halcyon days to be sure. So, here I am in Southern California these many years later and it is a quiet and gently breezy August afternoon on my deck with a distant shimmering view of the Pacific Ocean only 13-14 miles away. The Marine Layer keeps me from seeing the ocean every day (though the Marine cloud bank makes its presence vey obvious), but today it is out there shimmering in the setting sun. Once the sun starts its downward arc to the horizon, here in mid-August that’s at about 5pm, it creates a big shining and shimmering mass way out there in the middle of one particular Westward saddle which more or less corresponds to where Carlsbad is located. Being at an elevation of 1,620 feet, I can say with great certainty that that means I am 1,620 feet above sea level. My geometry tells me that the horizon is 54.2 miles away from me (I even had to use a square root to figure that and convert from nautical miles) and since Google Earth tells me that I am almost exactly 14.2 miles from the beach in Carlsbad, that means I am looking at a shimmering 40 miles of Pacific Ocean through this gap in the hills.
I have owned several home that were much closer to the sea than this. My house in Quiogue was 600 feet from Quantuck Bay and only 1 mile exactly to the Dunes of Westhampton Beach. At the South Street Seaport, the Accolade in Staten Island and 2 Water Street we were literally 100-500 feet from New York Harbor, with views from each place over that “ocean”. We were so close to New York Harbor that each one of those three locations got severely flooded in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy hit New York. In an era of Climate Change that kind of closeness to the water is way too close for comfort. Even the house in Quiogue was and still is at risk of flooding when a big hurricane hits the eastern end of Long Island, which you know it does with some regularity. But up here on this hillside, I get to look at the ocean and live comfortably in the security that even “the big one” isn’t going to bring the ocean to my doorstep since the San Andreas Fault runs way East of me (by Palm Springs) and even if we do separate from the continent, my hilltop will be high ground on the new Island of San Diego. That’s the kind of seaside home I quite like.
I get all the benefits of looking at the sparkling ocean, getting the sea breezes (there is a cool one blowing up here right now) and yet we do so without all that Marine layer that we see so many mornings and all that caustic sea air than rusts anything metallic attached to or around the house. By the time the breeze gets up here it isn’t quite as cooling as it is in Carlsbad, but it has had the humidity (and most of that salt) sucked out of it along the way. That means we are about 10 degrees warmer here than on the shore, but still 10 degrees cooler than in the valley to the East where that damn Fault lives. In many ways we seem to be straddling the classic California problems just fine. The state requires that new homeowners get a special (and very informative) report of their property with regard to seismic risk, earthquake risk (a slightly different thing), mudslide risk, tsunami risk and wildfire risk. Don’t make fun of tsunami risk until you drive up Rt. 1 on the northern coast and see all tsunami warning signs. The only real risk we seem to have around here is the ubiquitous wildfire risk, and from what’s been happening around the western states lately, we are doing just fine in this area with regard to that. I do watch the Cal Fire Map quite closely to see what may be coming close, but that is almost more to see whether out grid will get shut down by SDG&E.
I keep reading about the Colorado River levels and Lake Mead and I keep waiting to hear about the impending water rationing that might find its way to us, but so far, so good. The emergency that was just declared seems to impact Arizona and New Mexico the most and exempts California until the levels get much worse. I don’t really feel the sense that we are on the verge of a big drought, but I’m also sure I’m not well-trained in recognizing the signs. This summer actually feels a lot less dry than last summer, but that may just be that I’m top of my watering game this year. Speaking of which, it’s time to go water the back hillside and bring myself a bit closer by the sea.