An earthquake as sudden as a brain aneurysm sent tsunami waves hurtling across the Pacific Ocean last week, demolishing the shores of Japan and knocking against the west-coat shore of North America, killing hundreds, displacing thousands. A friend’s step-dad found a dead body in his boat off the coast of Oregon. Someone died trying to photograph the wave’s arrival in California—that someone could’ve just as easily been me, knowing my curiosity—and sleepy little Santa Cruz had its harbor remorselessly ravaged as the far-reaching wave tossed around the locals’ yachts like toys in a bathtub.
Crazy fucking shit.
That said, this memory begins in Sacramento.
I go to work on Saturday morning like normal, brew drip coffee, bring out the signs, set up the outside seating, put on some music—I’m digging Matthew Dear and Badly Drawn Boy at the moment—and get ready to caffeinate the common-folk. Fast-forward about eight hours and then you see Jenny coming in from the sun-drenched alley, as pretty and summery as ever, and the first thing she asks is, “What are you doing after work?”
Plan A was to hang out with Sean and Lane for Second Saturday.
“I want to go to Santa Cruz and look at the damage in the harbor, take some pictures and maybe write about it,” she says.
Plan A changed with the swiftness of a text-message, and no more than an hour later Jenny and I are heading down L Street toward the freeway in my black Acura with the Forest Gump soundtrack playing on tape. Maybe it’s a bad idea to take my car—the transmission problems, Stella’s gettin’ old—but we’re trying to be efficient with our sunlight hours, so we cut out some of the prep-time and just go. And Jenny drove last time, anyway.
First it’s lunch in Davis.
En route with the sunroof open and the iPhone feeding us directions, Jenny and I invent fake identities and spend at least an hour pretending to get to know each other as Nathan, the wind-farm consultant and Anna, the knitter. It’s all fun and games until we’ve spent so much time in these roles that it’s difficult to pull out, and when Jenny—Anna—breaks out of character, I almost don’t believe her. Anyway, Anna had a boyfriend and Nathan—surprise—had commitment issues, so it was bound to be a disappointing outcome for our pseudo-selves, anyhow.
There’s a moment I remember noticing that the sun was casting the Acura’s shadow forward on the interstate, and yet I didn’t make the connection that I was driving east—if I’d been going the right way, I would’ve been shielding the sun from my eyes. Subconsciously I knew something was wrong, but I just kept driving, driving in the wrong direction. How we got lost, I have no idea, but we turn around before we reach Tracy and head back toward Oakland and we lose at least an hour of sunlight.
Cue frustration, and all of a sudden I really need to listen to the Bush tape, and loud. Jenny and I fall quiet as we decide not to let the interstate system defeat us and find our way onto the right path to the coastline. The energy is weird afterward, frustration mixed with sore ass-muscles, and Jenny starts writing in a journal as I start counting down the miles. We watch the sun set. We take 17 over the summit with my old Blake Miller tape—the opposite end of angst—softly strumming us into Santa Cruz around 7:00.
Once we get there, that whole drive doesn’t seem to matter anymore. We park on the edge of a cliff near a group of surfers loading up their gear into vans, putting Stella to rest after her long drive across California, and I realize that I forgot my jacket.
Whatever. We’re here. I wrap myself in an old beach towel I find in my trunk—next to an old computer monitor, long-forgotten Guitar Hero guitars, and a bowling ball. At least I’m warm-ish, and with a camera dangling around my neck and Jenny’s arm looped through mine, we head down to the beach.
The beach is lit by a half-moon and a splattering of stars, and we lay for a while listening to the sound of an upset ocean pounding against the cold sand, which reminds us—and the fifty people having bonfires behind us—that the ocean will be here, and has been here, for a long, long time. The ocean doesn’t come to the shore to people-watch the way we come to watch the waves. The ocean will unknowingly kill us and not skip a beat. Depressing, I guess, but you see the ocean differently when it becomes Mother Nature’s dust-broom sweeping people off the shoreline.
The ocean doesn’t give a shit about shorelines.
As we leave, Jenny and I find absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t find a Safeway nearby and get our own firewood, make our own bonfire, because it’s only 8:20 PM and the night is young and so long as we leave by 2:00 AM, I can make it to work in Sacramento at 5:40.
Then Stella has a fit, unhappy with her unexpectedly long commute, unhappy with the cold, and shudders as she drives us to the Golden Palace, where Jenny and I want to get dinner before the bonfire. Chinese food. Lots of gold, orange, ornate decorations and dragons. Neat lamps. Classical music. A seat reserved for “The Emperor” next to a shrine near the entrance. Locals dining with forks, not chopsticks, but I’m not complaining when there’s fried rice involved. My fortune cookie told me that my family would be a big part of my life this year. We pay the bill and bounce.
Poor Stella… Still grumbling, the poor car has to deal with our bad directions and on the way to find a Safeway we find the Boardwalk instead, then pass the old motel where Jenny and I stayed last time, wind our way through neighborhoods and experience four or five moments of déjà vu before parking behind a Mexican restaurant amidst the bustle of Downtown Santa Cruz. The car falls silent, gladly, and now it’s time for me to find a sweatshirt because it’s only getting colder outside.
We never do see any of the tsunami damage at the harbor.
Nonetheless, we peruse the store-fronts and weave among the drunks and hurriedly try to find a store that sells sweatshirts that didn’t close at 9:00 (it’s almost ten, by now) and every door we try is locked (except at bars and coffee-shops). Luckily we pass through Santa Cruz Roasting Company and, thinking they’d sell clothes to tourists like us, we find out that they don’t have any sweatshirts in-store, but maybe the CVS across the street has what I’m looking for. Good news: they do. They also have firewood, but as the night got later, Jenny and I have given up on that idea.
Warm, far from home and drunk off irresponsibility, we head over to 515 and fight for seats downstairs where tattooed, lip-pierced girls pass out drinks in the crowded, dimly-lit restaurant with hip-hop pumping through the speakers. We doodle on the paper table-cloth and order drinks and play a few rounds of Hangman. Jenny gets two-for-one cocktails and teaches me the proper way to taste wine.
We get four minutes to run through a music store and I almost talk her into buying the Mumford and Sons album. I’m obsessed.
So comes time to go. It’s about midnight and by the time we’re back on the freeway, it’s already tomorrow. I’m driving. “You can sleep, if you want,” I tell her. “No way, man. We’re in this together,” she says, and that’s the end of that. It’s Pink Floyd on the way over the summit, and maybe some Oingo Boingo, and this time we do our best not to get lost but get turned around near Concord when we pull off for gas and accidentally find ourselves westbound once again. Woops.
Back in Sacramento, I stay over at Jenny’s with the intention of getting two hours of sleep before opening at Old Soul—but thanks to the time change I only get one. Somehow I float mindlessly from Jenny’s bed to my irritable Acura to my house to Old Soul, and somehow I make it through a whole eight-hour shift without crashing. Somehow. Or did I?
I go home afterward and Kirsten’s there, my occasional roommate, and she tells me about her unfortunate turn of events with Collin, who dumped her yesterday. I can’t think of the last time I was someone’s crying shoulder, so I do my best to stay positive and remind her that there is still a lot of good to come out of this experience. She had three great weeks and actually stepped back into the dating world—which is hard to do, I’d imagine, after a failed marriage. She seems content with the whole thing. Plus, she’s pretty sure that she’ll look into moving to the Bay sometime soon and take yoga-teaching classes, and that could happen as soon as May. Kirsten heads off to work and I pass out for four hours.
Dinner at Jenny’s. Soup, grilled-cheese sandwiches, Radiohead on the record player.
And all this because of an earthquake near Japan, maybe not the part where Kirsten got dumped by Collin, but you figure an event like that has the power to change a lot more than the coastline.
These are great shots!
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