There is an emptiness about the sea, an emptiness, a desolation....

We drive by the sea. Hundreds of miles of sea and cliff and rock. Plants and roots and soil hang on, desperate for life along the cliffs, before the wind and waves and weather take everything away.

We drive along the sea, between Cambria and Monterey. The Santa Lucia Mountains hug the Pacific, and the cars are the trapeze artists strung on a narrow ribbon of road, between the two.

A fog beside me, rolled over us, a fog along the rocks and waves crashing. The waves are seabirds, the seabirds that fly from them.

I sit in the car, along a parkside in Monterey. Pacific Grove, actually. This park stretches along the ocean front for miles. All ocean front should be publicly-owned. When houses hug the water, there is a blot on the horizon that even the homeowners must live with. It is the unbroken landscape that renders peace for the eye. Only when the rocks ad waves and birds are free, will we also be free.

The sea, violent, taking its debris and spitting it feet high, catching the ripped kelp and scraps of rock, leaving it at the shore, the way a child would dump the totals of his pockets on the floor and run outside again to play.

The sandpipers that hunch one-legged atop the rocks aren't used to me. As I come, a few scatter, flying towards the onrushing sea, to gain the lift that hurries them to a farther shore.

31.10.98

© 1990 - 2003 Katharina Woodworth