Cloudy cliffs near monterrey
Like always, California was taking it on the chin for the whole country. Slipping and shearing fault lines imbue the Pacific coast with an energy and magic that nurtures a remarkable diversity of flora and fauna. Ancient redwoods, some more than 1600 years old, hide in luscious crevices from LA to Eureka. Californians’ laid back attitude contrasts, or perhaps is a reaction to, the intensity of life on the leading edge of the continent enduring earthquakes, fires, mud-slides and now – atmospheric rivers.
We felt vulnerable and anxious but also strangely exhilarated being just a block from the roiling ocean in Del Monte Beach, Monterey. Climate change was coming at us straight on. Would we be swept away in the storm?
John Loggia, Atmospheric River 2
Concerned friends and family called to check-in. We expected an evacuation order any minute, but failed to prepare the emergency bags you were supposed to leave by the door. We half-heartedly put some (not enough) water aside in whatever containers we could find in case the power went off, as it did in pockets around us. Reports of smaller coastal roads cutting off communities kept us home a lot, a familiar lock-down mode we’d honed during the long Covid slog.
Cloudy days and record rains came in with the year’s highest ‘king’ tides and a full moon on January 7. We walked the beach every day, the sky a wet blanket dragging toward land with holes where the sun would peak through for a while. The ‘tsunami warning’ signs jumped out at me as I rode my bike down to the lovely Pacific Grove Library where I’d often work. The ‘normal’ sunnier days returned at the end of the month, just before we had to leave.
Some nights the house shook with the crashing waves, awakening me from a deep, watery sleep. The first night they fell like that, I woke up thinking there was an earthquake.
One night I dreamed I was swept up in a great tidal wave rising higher and higher, speeding toward the inland mountains ahead. I roused before the wave crashed, then laid awake listening to the rain pound on the roof, watching grotesque shadows of swirling trees crawl across the ceiling .
Another night I imagined the ocean rushing into the low areas on either side of the high dunes where our house sat clinging to the sand. If we were an island cut off from the mainland, would the neighbors emerge from houses where the shades were always drawn and the TV glowed all night long? Would we share food and work together, or would we be at each others’ throats?
I saw me on my bed, floating out to the ocean and disappearing into a gray and uncertain horizon where water meets sky. I dwelled on how calamity sits perched on our shoulder ready to swallow our head at any given moment. I thought about aging and dying and how our individual life span is simply a microcosm of the life span of our entire species as we collectively contemplate a suicide nobody seems to have the will to avoid.
Del Monte beach