The Hum of Southern California

We’ve been in Southern California for a week and a half now. We wanted to love it down here, what with all the sunshine and palm trees and beaches. Trips down here in years past hold memories of wild times. Perhaps we are different people now, as we find ourselves only wishing to experience the wild again.

It’s a bustling coastline, bursting with people, cars, stores, buildings, houses, highways and every now and then a green park. Every time we find ourselves in port, as we are now in San Diego, we can’t help but write out a list of Things That Must Be Done/Bought/Fixed Before Leaving wherever we happen to be. Then we walk around as fast as we can and check them off, dragging our young charges with us, dangling the promise of an ice-cream cone in front of them.

It’s enough to make one dream of islands, of deserted beaches, of quiet protected harbors, of silence. We remember all our weeks up in the splendor of British Columbia and our heart hurts for the memory of beauty and stillness that seems impossible now. Maybe that is homesickness.

But there are islands ahead, and beaches and beauty and wildness. One more week of checking the items off our list, a night of trick-or-treating, then we’ll sail to Mexico. There is a hum of excitement aboard, that sometimes drowns out the exhaustion. We are surrounded by boats at the police dock here also in the last throes of preparations to head south, to a country that really feels foreign and doesn’t have fog. The energy is contagious. We’re almost there.