This morning I woke up to find my 35 mm camera falling apart. I'm not entirely surprised by this occurrence, I just was not prepared to deal with such an occasion at my current location. I'm not going to say that I'm between a rock and a hard place, technology has provided me with an adequate back up, which is currently an hour drive away, nice and safe in my bedroom at my home-home (which I say because now that I live away from my home-home I find myself slightly confused as to how they differ from each other - one being home-home in San Francisco, where my family resides and one being school-home in f-ing cold Chicago - because I am oddly uncomfortable saying my parents home - because about 50 to 75% of my belonging are there - or even calling it my family home - because that just sounds to formal for me). I am currently at one of my favorite places on earth: Stinson Beach, California. When most people think of California's beaches, they think that it's all fun in the sun and warm and whatnot. I hate to shatter your imagination with the harsh truth, but you are wrong if you think that. Clearly, you've only seen California beaches in the movies. In reality, after those scenes were filmed, the actors/extras/whoever was involved in the scene probably got on a large down coat and went to sit under a heater. Yes, even in Southern California. But here, Stinson Beach, we bundle up in a nice flannel shirt and puffy vest - as I have on now - even on a beautifully sunny day today.
Stinson Beach is a small beach town about 45 minutes north of San Francisco (depending on your location in the city, but about 45 minutes from the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge given that there is always a little bit of traffic somewhere and that you'll most likely be scared out of your mind of the road on Mount Tamalpais. Wikipedia says it's 35 minutes away, but clearly it's never driven the road), which is home to 1 grocery store, 3 restaurants, a bookstore and a library, a few other odd shops, a small art gallery, and a 2 small parks. It's home to over 700 people according to the census in 2000, but is mainly made up of second homes for city dwellers, as is the house that I'm in right now.
This home is a family home. My grandmother bought it probably almost 30 years ago. It's on the beach - literally. The front windows look out onto an upper beach which then falls off onto the main beach, which leads you straight into the Pacific Ocean. If you didn't know, the west coast of the United States' is bordered by the Pacific Ocean and further more, the part of the Pacific Ocean that borders the West Coast is cold. Really, really, really cold. Kids play in it, parents reluctantly follow, and on one of the fourteen or so days a year that it is actually hot, people will flock to the ocean to cool down. And it sure as heck cools you down. Every so often - and in this case I'm talking every couple of years - the water is warm enough that the reluctant parents may actually enjoy playing in the water alongside their children instead of just making sure that they don't go to far into the water.
Summer mornings at Stinson are the best. The tide pulls out far enough to create "tide pools"(in quotes because nothing interesting is exposed, it's a sandy bottom so nothing should be exposed, but it does create shallow pools to splash in that as a child are the beez neez). Blocked by the fog, the horizon is not visible and the fog seemingly envelopes the beach in a blanket. It's never the depiction of a cliché beach morning, which makes it even better.
As in San Francisco, Stinson doesn't have sunny summers. As I said before, we generally get fourteen to twenty days of blistering heat from June through August. Fall is the best time in San Francisco and at Stinson Beach and generally is the sunniest. But today, in January, it's beautiful here. I woke up to the sun making it's way out from behind the fog. Now there is what we call a bubble around the beach, where the fog creates a "bubble" around the beach so that blue skies stretch to either end of the beach and to the top of Mt. Tam, but the fog bank is visible on the horizon and past the ends of the beaches and on the other side of Mt. Tam's peak. We are in the bubble of blue sky, which makes for a stunning day with a solid and chilling breeze.
I hope that you've enjoyed this interlude, I sure did. I leave you now to go and enjoy a lovely sunny day and will post some pictures later, this evening. I hope to write more this year and blog more this year. We'll see.
E
