The Headlands
You walk past the aging store fronts that line one side of Main Street. There is no other side of Main Street. When you cross the road you are on the Mendocino Headlands. From the headlands you look back and see the estuary where The Big River flows into the Pacific between the wall of strata that you are standing on and the cliffs of a distant mountain that emerged from the ocean forming the arms of a huge cove.
You turn west and in ten-minute walk along the plateau’s paths through the high grass and past weathered pines, you are where the land ends. We stand on the promontory overlooking ocean and sky. There is only ocean and sky. We’ve made this pilgrimage so many times during our marriage. When we want to get away, this is where we get. The end of the land is clearly defined here; you feel you are at a border where you have no passport that grants you passage. Everything here is definite, definite and vast. To my reckoning we are 150 feet above the surf. But the bluff isn’t sheer. It is terraced, like an amphitheater carved and worn by millions of years of unruly breath and hands of wind, storm, surf, and the weight (wait) it takes to withstand time.
You can make your way down onto the sloping tiers between boulders and crags. The boulders are locked together by wedge and gravity. They are split and twisted by a fracturing of clavicle and vertebrae that we cannot see but still support the headlands (I’m referring to the tectonic plates). It is as if the bluffs were a stadium designed for spectacle. The arms of the ungeometric coves still embrace you. This is strange but not foreign, severe but not cruel. It actually answers something about where you feel at home.
This isn’t a panoramic landscape, this isn’t a game unless you call the rugged play of surf against rock a contest. What holds your attention is the unmitigated endlessness of the surf!
True, nothing is blacker than the cliffs we sit on here. Nothing is further from us than the ocean and sky meeting in contrasting shades of blue horizon. While many of the rocks remain jagged, you always find a place to sit that is favored by the sun. Tourists, usually couples or a family, will walk by you, every so often. One or two will sit and watch. Val found the perfect place which sequesters us as if we were monarchs. While it was never above 60 degrees today, the wind carries its burn and the bright sunlight to form the features of our faces. We are noble, not quite immortal like the rock, ocean, sky, sun. Nothing tempers, adulterates the air here. You breathe in what heals all wounds.
We are empowered. Even so, this domain… we have no control over it. The force that compels the surge against the rock of the shore, the force that ignites the wind, the force that sweeps daylight across the sky and sea, that founds the headlands—we have no significance to it. Even though I feel I am a participant in this place, I am the measure of nothing here.
These elements sense us, not at all. The unwavering tone of the ocean roar surrounds you like the voice of something immense that was only born to exhale. The sound of that breathing out does not cease. Regularly, the surf seems to clench, thrust and pound the base of the bluff with a thunderous percussion.
I, however, watch the sea. A thin line of indigo appears hundreds of yards pass the nodding bouy. From the ocean’s paler blue, the line seems to well up, becoming a long, rolling black cylinder; it gathers width and momentum, foaming as it crests. And the crest completes its charge, arches, and falls, shattering into a network of white lace foam bleaching the water teal as it spreads. Again, and again I am delighted to pick up one after another of the waves, follow them, without knowing I am making the same perceptive mistake. It is later that evening when I look at the iphone photo I took of the waves and enlarge them with my fingers that I see that the rolling cylinder was an illusion. The curl of the wave had, in fact, cut off the sunlight. I was watching a shadow.
There is a simplicity in observation even when it is imprecise. We have repeated this ritual of getting away to Mendocino so many times because of the affect this place, this movement, these elements have on us. We sat there, Val timed us, for an hour. For one hour, I was without anxiety, without worry about bills, without the fear of things malfunctioning, without a future or a past to tweak and prod me, without an awareness of my aging. That is what I meant by empowered. I feel that I am freed. That is the affect I meant.
In literature classes, they taught me to see that everything means something other than what it seems to be. Those waves, then, that I watched and misinterpreted were alive. Each appeared, had rising action, climax, descending action, was shadowed to its ending, and it dissolved—just like the living.
These words are a eulogy for the waves the day we were there. This is the awe of being at the end of the world. All that is left to do is to record our connections with what is of our world. And then….to leave word with you for your understanding, leave word so you will know we wanted you to be there. Isn’t that what Toastmasters is for?