The Cave at La Jolla Cove
Thursday, May 6th, 2010
The cave is a 30-minute swim from a small enclosed beach in the La Jolla Cove. The salt water is thick with big leaves that come undone from long seaweed strings and they bob up ended all the way out to the cave – the stems protruding as though they were snorkelers who needed and were breathing air. In the open water, orange-golden fish swim just beyond the oar strokes from kayakers and the other swimmers’ kicking feet, the fishes’ colors so brilliant in the cloudiness, their features blur.
“Oh … are you not going to look at the fish?” Mary asked me, the disappointment showing in her face but even more evident in her voice.
We were 50 feet out from the beach, just beyond the arching line formed by the recreational swimmers with their back to the sea. I was using all my concentration on staying afloat and familiarizing myself with the water. I hadn’t yet begun to focus on the leisurely aspects to the swim, and I doubted I’d need the goggles she handed me.
I am from Kansas, a place with no natural water to call its own. I disqualify the lakes because they are all manmade. There is a river, but it’s too polluted for swimming and everyone knows that river water isn’t permanent. Rivers come from second hand sources upstream, from higher ground. The ocean has always been there, lapping at the beach, depositing sand and shells, and taking them away again. I came here to California to see Mary, to escape a marriage that failed during a bitter Midwestern winter, and to learn how to surf. Mary spent her childhood days on wave boards in much clearer waters, letting the foamy swells and what they brought to shore teach her about what she believes and what she doesn’t about herself.
But our first and only surf lesson came the day before in much shallower waters on Pacific Beach. There, I had time to watch the waves wash off everything about her but her smile, and then bead on her shoulders. She was the main reason I swam out so far, and because I believed in her notion to keep my first viewing of the cave pure. I needed to do this swim for her (I had to say with her another few days), but mostly for me.
“No, no … let me get my goggles on, then I’ll follow you,” I said.
She walked us down to the beach from her little apartment where we’d made love off and on the first two days I’d stayed with her. We had to be quiet because construction crews were re-plastering the second story of her building. The workers would go up and down ladders and rearrange drop sheets right outside her window while we in the throes of making love.
We found the beach on a path that avoided the easy peer down into the cave from the sidewalk. High cliff walls make the cave unreachable by foot. She said tourists – and I imagine the natives out walking in couples or as families – came down the hill from the T-shirt shacks, the salmon stucco hotels and the grill-out restaurants to peer down at the steep cut in the hillside. This was “too easy”, she said, but I think she meant it wasn’t fair to skip the swim. The view isn’t earned that way and it wouldn’t feel the same as pushing through the current in the cave that’s been weathered into an arch by thousands of years of licking sea waves, and, with tired arms, pulling yourself up into the horseshoe-shaped clearing to look up at the smooth walls. The reward is the miniature world between the steepness and the private ocean that rolls in to you, still wild but secret, too. After you absorb that feeling, it’s back in again, back through the cave, back into the open sea with the blurry fish, and the planes flying overhead dragging signs for beer and strip bars.
The entire town has seemingly come up around the cove. In some ways, it’s a celebrity – at least, a local personality that tourists and natives gather around to see and occasionally visit. Sidewalks follow the beaches past the houses and apartment complexes, but all the cement seems to lead to here. Businesses display black and white photos of the cove for sale that show all the old buildings from that era, many still there. The cove is the community’s treasure, and it’s crown jewel is only reachable with that long one way swim with currents and salt, and impossible visions.
Along the rocks, a seal family slapped onto damp stones turned the same shade as their skin. The seals, despite unwanted attention, barked out to sea. Around them yellow boats and swinging oars of the kayakers stopped them for a closer look, then floated and bob in the water, just watching the miracle animals secluded from the swimmers at the public beach but still under watch.
This was all odder to me than the normal tourist. Back home, a seal sighting is restricted to the zoo. It was as though I’d swam out into a exhibit and the tourists on the higher ground would start throwing me raw, whole fish.
I followed Mary. She was ahead 20 yards most of the way, pacing me. I’d see her looking over her shoulder and smiling, then her feet was disappear as she dove deep and cut through the water making S-shapes with her wrists. This was the secret, she told me later, to not wasting energy.
Seagulls were on the hunt overhead and it was them I came to see the most. Compared to me, they were traveling at lightning speed, and it was tiring just wanting to move as fast as them. The water was pushing toward the cove, but not in complete waves, so the surface kept leveling, and the view of the sky or the cliffs never registered without brown water filling out the bottom. With my view cut down so tightly, I imagined the birds were prehistoric and the million dollar housing plots are overgrown with shrubs – the sand bar.
So far out from the beach, my breath mixed with salty seawater swallows that dry the tongue and burn in the chest. This is what it is, though, to be alive. I was another of the humans temporarily turned into a wild sea animal, perfectly accepted by the marine life and the more native swimmers. The sea took me in without regards or questions. We belong to the water, really. Our bodies are 70 percent water. We have to drink it to stay living. The sea and I made amends midway to the cove and it was decided that I would swim as well as I could, and as long as I did, it would agree not to drown me. I trusted it and kept swimming behind Mary.
The current carried me through the cave and up onto the rocks inside the cove. We sat together and watched the water spill over the rocks’ smooth tops and soak through the gaps. The only sound was the ocean. The only smell was the ocean. All I could feel was some light sunshine and the water turning to foam in the rocks.
After a few minutes, I slipped back into the water which had its way with me again, and she led me out again, back into something treacherous and lovely all the same. I was more relaxed after letting water carry me on the way out. I listened to Mary offer reports over her shoulder about the colorful fish that I was missing. I watched her feet disappear and I wondered if they might turn to a fin as she dove deeper. How could anyone be so natural in the water? The cave teaches that something has to be surrendered before you can reach your nirvana. And even then, your small, private paradise can only be found in certain places, and through certain people.
