Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide


Belmar.

Leave your car at the parking lot by the public beach access.  Walk up Ocean Road.  Admire the starch of the early spring bulbs in the decaying planter boxes of the pale blue and pink beach cottages on your right.  Embroider on the daily habits, the histories of the cottage owners.  Are they residents at work?  Absentee landlords who come down only too rarely, rent their places out when they can't come?  Small-scale speculators turning older homes for a profit?  Here is a nondescript ranch style, painted an aggressively ordinary putty color.  Dark brown gutters.  Is there a thought in such a choice?  What is passing through the thinker's head?  Economy?  Some other T1-11-clad house?  A condo they pass every day on the way to work?  Or something totally unrelated?     A box score, a need for refined sugar, a pain behind the knee?  Here someone has carved their family name in a piece of driftwood and decorated the sign with statuettes of gulls.  Next to the gulls is inserted a pinwheel.  It is whirring so fast that you wonder if it will take off soon.  Cross a side street, Windsock.  On the other side a dignified if weathered Queen Anne with glassed-in porch.  You are closer to the core of the town.  On the north side of the Queen Anne houses give way to one-story commercial buildings, some brick, some plaster, all streaked with salt, algae.  Here is the fire department, signed with the name of the fire district, probably a vast, creaking universe of spruce and fir, silver snags, beaver marshes, estuaries, mountains of brown and red rock, headlands of boiling green, all served, as fire risk anyway, by twenty or thirty trucks and one or two red battalion chief Suburbans.  The fire department is an old auto service shop.  In places the yellow-green paint is peeling and you can see the old service shop sign peeking through.  

Follow Cove to its terminus and look down.  Where you expect to see more black/brown rock and rich foam there is a broad shelf, bordered on the north and west by a mustache of spiky silver and orange logs.   Someone has built a simple but solid stairway of treated lumber that takes you down by easy stages, past the layers of blue cobble and orange sand and cutting beach grass of the bluff at street level.

On the shelf is a shack, looking like a heap of driftwood that somehow detached itself from the mass.  Look closer, though, and you see a roof, a smokestack, a sash window.  Opposite the sash is a window of wine bottles on end with their bottoms facing out.  The diamonds between are glazed with mortar.  

Tonight

Tonight, while you pause at the end of Cove and look at the shack and the stairs and hesitate-- do I go down?-- You see a green glow in the wine bottles.  Someone is inside.  A beachcomber caught out late?  A photographer waiting for the perfect moment?  Kids playing spin-the-bottle behind bottles clearly already spun?  Lovers?  The smokestack, too, is breathing.  Lovers, you think.  They are lovers on a night like this.  There must be coffee in the downtown, you think, and you walk up Ocean Road.