I decided to go for a walk today on the coastal cliffs of Pacifica, CA because I decided to go for a walk today on the coastal cliffs of Pacifica, CA. I didn’t have any motivation or plan. I just decided to do some exploring.
I parked my car on this quiet, winding road overlooking the shore and started down what some might call a trail but was really just a strip of sand cutting through the carpet of ice plant. Up ahead there was a single Cypress tree teetering on the edge of the cliffs, doubled over from years of fighting the winds of the Pacific. I squinted my eyes and saw two straight lines coming down from one of its branches, and I thought I knew what it might be but I didn’t want to get my hopes up too fast.
I kept walking and, sure enough, someone had cobbled together a swing with some Home Depot rope and a driftwood seat, peering out over the waves of the Pacific a hundred feet below. It would’ve been a total influencer magnet had it been any closer to the road or to San Francisco, but there wasn’t a single person in sight. It didn’t really seem like whoever built the swing really intended for it to be seen. They just sort of intended for it to be found. It was their love letter to the Pacifica coastline. I played Joni Mitchell out of my iPhone speakers and swung back and forth for maybe 20 minutes, smiling ear to ear with each to and fro.
I think that’s the part of living in California that I’m unexpectedly enjoying the most. The jobs are great and the weather is fantastic and the 49ers are killing it, but walking up and down the trails of the Pacific Coast you can just sort of feel the ghosts of all the people who loved that place before you. Their love is carved into the handmade benches they perched on the sand dunes and tied to the creaking rope swings they hung from the Cypresses. Every trail I’m on, I feel I’m walking in the footsteps of someone who did that same route every morning for decades, and it wasn’t Kim Kardashian or Drew Barrymore or Mark Zuckerberg or Adam Levine. It was some random woman and her graying golden retriever who just couldn’t resist seeing that stretch of coastline every day.
California is an ever-changing place just as often defined now by the people who left it than the people who stayed. But I still feel the people who stayed.
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