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symbol on the moon
Monday, October 5 1998
Most of the time here in San Diego the wind blows in from the west off the ocean. It's a cool, humid breeze, because the air is coming in over cool ocean currents. But every now and then the wind comes in from the east, off the high sun-baked deserts. As the air sinks into lower and lower elevations, it is compressed and further warmed by a process known as adiabatic heating. Sometimes these breezes from the east, known as the Santa Anna Winds, can get as hot as 100 degrees farenheit. Even in the middle of winter they can warm San Diego to 80 degrees. Today there was a mild Santa Anna and by mid-afternoon temperatures had risen to the mid-80s. It was as hot a day as I've yet experienced in San Diego; up until now the the days have consistently felt like late-fall "Indian Summer" back in Virginia.
To take advantage of the unusual warmth, Kim and I went to Ocean Beach and did a little boogie boarding. The tide was low, and the water was thick with other boogie boarders, some serious enough to wear rubber body suits. I waded far from shore and managed to get completely disoriented in a wave, tossed helplessly end over end on my board. So I sat on the beach for awhile trying to read Kuhn, being terribly distracted by humans and seagulls. I saw one seagull extract a piece of dead sea animal from a clump of seaweed. He flew down to the ocean to wash off the sand before eating it and in the process lost it to a thief, another seagull. But there were no seagull police to enforce the rights of the first seagull.
After awhile the lifegaurd got on the megaphone and ordered everyone out of the water because of 16,000 gallons of raw sewage coming down the San Diego River. After the announcement I went down to the shoreline to look for brown river cucumbers and white river weed, but I saw nothing but shells and sand.
We traveled south down Sunset Cliffs Blvd. to look at the rocky cliffs that define the shoreline just south of Ocean Beach. We got out and walked out to where the waves were coming in and slamming suicidally into the rocks in sprays of white. A rectangular vertical hole in the rock had been fenced off lest some stoned hippie on a vision quest stumble through into the wave-powered meat grinder below. I stood for a time watching the oversized Pacific waves meet their demise against the rock, seeing each as representing a human life. We roar across the oceans of experience, displacing things as we live through them, only to end it all on the rocky shores of death, our brief legacy just a spray of water above the high tide mark. The waves were coming in like lemmings, each crash suddenly having a tragic flavour.
The sun sank into the ocean, assuming an unexpectedly rectangular shape just before it winked out completely. It all happened so fast and beautiful, like a momentous occasion that comes much less frequently than once a day.
Soon thereafter the moon rose in the clear dry desert air to the east. It was big and yellow and the features could all be seen clearly. It seemed so blemished and imperfect; I wondered how western scientists could have ever believed it was a pure, perfect structure. Didn't they ever wonder what those mysterious, unchanging shapes on its surface meant? Couldn't they see the face? Or, perhaps, the lobster? I wondered why that pattern on the moon hadn't come to be an important symbol in our culture, stenciled on family crests and tattooed on foreheads.
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