Santa Barbara – e.alia.salim

Yosemite

This annual trip has trended larger and younger lately; there’s a lot of spontaneous group singing. The moment a girl unzips her puffy to reveal a sweatshirt announcing “FEMALE FRIENDSHIP” in white script is the moment I accept that I can’t hang.

I bow out to instead walk 16 miles alone to Glacier Point, watch a super-moon rise over Half Dome. The year flares out in dreamy traces of pink on the twilight, and my sharp lunar shadow follows me all the way back to camp.

Santa Barbara

There’s a quality to Southern California sunshine that makes it distinctly more difficult to take things seriously.* Massive mudslides in Montecito are washing dead animals onto the beach; regardless, there is a beach. Donations of clothing are accepted only new with tags. I’m just a visitor and so it’s all difficult to reconcile: there is the sprawling emergency-response staging area and the old burn zones across the water; there are the red-tile roofs and crying seagulls over the pier.

In any case, we eat and we ride. Having my friends on knobby tires with slow flats hardly puts a dent in my problem of keeping up, and they’re in sight only when we’re descending. In fact, I watch one of them come with in inches of being hit by an (at-fault) car on Gibraltar. As with his last near miss, I have a clearer view of his actual proximity to disaster in that moment than he could ever have himself—but in this sunshine, at least, there is warmth enough to convert the horror of that split second to an afterglow of fierce relief.

* A must-read, if you’re interested in this particular superstition: Carey McWilliams, An Island on the Land

Angel Island

It’s ridiculous that I’ve never been here before. Angel Island is every bit of professional park propaganda I’ve ever written balled up in a beautiful rock: transit-accessible, urban-adjacent, family-friendly, and best of all, Historically Problematic. It has ruins, vultures, flowers—all my favorite things—and it puts the city on the skyline, where I like it.

It is also, as a consequence, insanely difficult to book. So here I am with the Golden Gate Bridge framed in my tent door, all because I have a friend who is six to eight months better than me at planning ahead. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

mtpinos

Karl has nothing on the fog over the Grapevine: I can see only the first set of brake lights in front of me, barely, and those only when they’re on. The radio’s in and out. It’s fraught and eerie on the inside, but later on I’ll look down on the same sea of white from a deserted campground on Mt. Pinos and feel like I’m on an island in the sky.

I’m in Pasadena to visit my oldest friend, whose toddler and I have in common a skeptical countenance and a wild enthusiasm for dogs. She dozes through most of our hike up Echo Mountain: after setting out on the wrong side of a culvert there is only the briefest consideration given to backtracking before instead we hoist her, still sleeping, over the fence. I believe this is called raising them right.

My friend’s parents have also moved south. Their new home is a topsy-turvy world in which the fort-making furniture of our own childhood has been rearranged in space and time: where the rooms overlook an ocean instead of a swimming pool; when she’s a mother and not a child. We find a camcorder and screen our ’90s-era home movies, Python-esque productions that shake with the director’s laughter. We watch our younger selves play games of Hot Lava and Lost Kids.

The overall effect—and can you blame me? On a warm beach in a soft blue morning? Watching a school of actual dolphins?—is one of vertiginous gratitude and loss, of my heart in my mouth.

23735028_196217377607404_5306601474833252352_n — “And thank you, every day.”

Tag: Santa Barbara

Winter miscellany, December–March

Points south, 11/17–11/20