Electric Blue, San Diego

The electric blue of San Diego sky was prominent all weekend on a recent trip.

Black's Beach in La Jolla, a few minutes away, a tucked-in small bay ringed with 200-hundred-foot-tall sandy cliffs. The exposed, sheer bleached-yellow faces, the sand dune-made cliffs, aged into sheer faces by time, sediment toward the bottom, still shifty and windswept, the layers at the top, harder-looking and rocky-ish. Every so often, as you curved down the narrow beach that spanned about 20 feet wide at high tide, the lapping ocean pulsing toward the sandy cliff, a convoluted canyonbreak wound up and curved and undulated (-ish) deep into the cliff face. Bulges, flutes, of sandy mangrove root-like cliffwall would twist and flow from the canyon's entrance-edge down to its beach intersection.

The beach, itself, especially the low-tide exposed smooth, glassy sand, had abstract blacksand patterns interspersed periodically; some clusters were uninteresting series of streaks, others were abstract art splotchings that extended, diluted over the beachspace.

The waves pounded the surf in a constant hush, hush, hush, and the small sand divots, created in the wave-wetted sand where running barefeet landed, echoed a consistent plodding, sucking sound as feet pulled out from each sticky, wet step. In the water, surfers broke on six-foot, hard-hitting curls, breaks, some flying over the peak of the waves, shooting like a ski-jumper or a diving dolphin, the board flying randomly in the air.

Surfing next day at winter twilight at a smaller-, smoother-waved beach a few miles south, the sun, an ocher globe in an ocher sky, slid off the horizon, a stringwrapped gumball that some Atlas-like giant god slowly pulled from a few feet below the ocean offing's table-edge through a viscous gel. Before the yellow-haze sinking sunsky, pelicans dove their deadweight dives in the near and far distance, nats buzzing the winter sunset, swarming the water. Once the sun hit the lower horizon, it dropped smooth and deceptive, Rolex-like, millimeter by millimeter on the horizon; its fluid, quick disappearance gave the heart, mind, eyes a mild vertigo. The waves kept coming in. About every 20th one was a decent surfing wave; every 50th one would break where you were, and catching one in, the darkening sky behind and the greying beach ahead, made the evening feel ten-degrees greyer, safe ... and forlorn.

A wetsuit keeps you surprisingly warm, no problems.

The electric blue sky.




To the beach

San Diego host, Kacey, on the right; I love that girl a lot for some intriguing, subliminal reasons.