At the end of the earth

The Palos Verdes peninsula is a solid chunk of land that juts out into the mighty Pacific Ocean like a rudder to the city of Los Angeles. I parked the car on top of a bluff there and Susan and I took a trail down to Abalone Cove. The hike is short but steep and there are places along the trail where the chaparral is quite tall and forms a cool archway beneath the noon-time sun. At high tide the beach is covered with cantaloupe sized rocks that make the hike slow and deliberate but we walked south towards Portugese Point . There the sandy beach opens up a bit and we put down a blanket and had a picnic lunch.

There was one family already there, a father and two young teen-aged boys were scrambling about the base of the Point with fishing poles. The mother and young daughter were looking at things along the surf line. Seagulls had found a sandwich bag with cookies in it at the edge of the beach and were taking turns trying to get the contents out. Offshore, small fishing boats were plying the waters around the peninsula and a biplane appeared briefly, making a low pass over the water.

While Susan sunned herself I took my camera over to the base of the Point. Just beneath the surface of the water, large flat sheets of gold-colored rock with mosaic like features seemed magnified by the churning water. A solitary tree affixed to a shelf on the Point seemed like a trophy, a verdant award to survival in this rocky place. Indeed, here at this particular edge of the Pacific Ocean it feels as if this is where the Earth itself ends and the unimaginably immense ocean begins. Here, the surf on the rocks creates an incredible sound as the waves pull down on the piles of rocks. A small child walking by with her parents said "It sounds like popcorn!" It sounds like a creek flowing over stones, but deeper and more resonant, and intermittent as the waves ebb and flow. It is the sound of the world breathing.

Later, we pack up our things and leisurely do our walk/balancing act along the stony shore, back to the bluff trail and back to our car. In ten minutes we are back among our own kind on the crowded streets of San Pedro. A few minutes more and we are on the bridges crossing the port flying over oceans of ocean-going containers. In 30 minutes we are on our own street but a whole world away from the end of the Earth.

The work shown here is called the Girl at Abalone Cove.

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