Traveling Alone

 Dazed after a night away from home, spent in comfort and surrounded by the ocean, its smell, its dunes, and its sound of waves, I can’t assimilate it yet. Drinking coffee that’s not instant from a paper cup and watching a ferry crawl across the lake that calls itself saltwater, feeling Mulrooney’s reproachful stare burning into my back, all of my routine has been jostled into a foreign cast. My addiction. Only money and Mulrooney keep me from indulging it every week.

This feels as if it was s the best trip I’ve ever made, even better than my stay at the Incheon beach. This time I had almost twenty-four hours and the sort of beach time that I used to have when I was little, staying with the Murto girls, where rocks and waves were our playground. 

Yesterday’s waves had washed up bundles of kelp and rockweed with its little balloon bubbles, all of it edible and all of it ignored. Its sharp, salty smell was familiar and nostalgic and it glistened in heaps on the sand, brown and shiny. Families worked on sea castles and one baby broke free, crawling rapidly toward the waves, again and again, like a little sea turtle. A girl wearing a bikini and a baseball glove played catch with her boyfriend while surfers slid down waves that were small but emphatic.

This beach is a democracy, in a community that has gone to the dogs in the best possible way. Humans coexist in a canine fashion here, unified by joy. On the other side of a jetty the sand belongs to dogs. People are there only as accessories, watching huskies play with corgis, puppies the size of tiny cats making friends with rottweilers. The dogs dance through waves in exuberant packs, silhouetted against the sky and as they leave, they’re still happy.

They always make me happy and when I remember them, I’m always smiling. They’re what make me come here instead of any other San Diego beach, a place where the eccentric time capsule of their human community is an appropriate counterpoint. “It takes a different sort of person to like Ocean Beach,” a staid-looking matron told me, “It’s not for everybody.”

Among the shops selling souvenirs and smoke-related accessories is a Mexican American diner with a dog who regularly shows up for breakfast and a Bank of America branch that first began as the Bank of Italy. It has hoboes who gather in parking lots and near the seawall, friendly, not feral, the way Bowery bums used to be.

The balcony of my room brought the ocean to me when I stopped walking and I watched the sun, half yellow and half orange, sink toward the horizon, touching it, disappearing in segments, and ending in a thin yellow line before it all vanished. Someday I’ll see the green flash, but for now I relish a sunset that’s not blocked by mountains.

Apprehensive about my sheets after the scratchy horror of the Aqua del Mar bed months ago, I was reassured by the smooth pillowcases and went to sleep happy. I woke up to fog that was as cozy as a pashmina and sat outside with a little bag of Cheezits from 7-Eleven and camp coffee cobbled together from Via and hot water. Downmarket all the way, with a hamburger and a beer for supper at the Northshore Tavern and more food than I could handle at the diner where Taco, dog in residence, and I became friends the next morning. I stopped at the tavern before I left, where the bartender remembered my Modelo order from the night before. 

I always come here in a convoluted, inefficient way, taking the airport bus to the fringes of downtown and then waiting for the one that will wind me through miles of hillside bungalows to Voltaire Street. It takes more time than is necessity but I love that view of the bay, the art deco building across from my bus stop, and then the ride through an old neighborhood with its streets named after classical authors, Macaulay, Bacon, Voltaire.

I fantasize about living in Ocean Beach even though I’ve yet to find a bookstore there. Then I remember advice that a friend received from his therapist, “Don’t make your oasis your daily life,” and I feel grateful that it’s only three hours away. I can live in this stodgy, self-congratulatory city just so long as I have Tucson and Ocean Beach, and the gift of flight.