Photo: @mathyaskurmann // unsplash
Although I was born in California and spent my early years in Australia, I was far too young to form any lasting memories of growing up near the ocean. By the time I was five, my family—Mom, Dad, older brother, younger sister—had moved to Colorado, dragging me along with them. We lived in Colorado for most of my formative years and it wasn’t until I attended college at the University of San Diego that I was finally allowed to spend as much time at the beach as my amateur surfer’s heart desired. Looking back now, I often wonder how I became such an ocean-loving adult after a mostly landlocked upbringing.
Contrary to what you might initially think and in spite of the fact that we moved around a lot in those early years, we were not a military family. My Dad was a successful college basketball coach taking different jobs in different places during his climb to the top of his profession. I attended three different high schools in three different states, and much to my chagrin, none of these states was California. However, my grandparents on my mother’s side lived in California during all those years we bounced around and best of all, they had a beach house.
So my most cherished childhood memories all take place at that beautiful, wood-shingled beach cottage, sandwiched between vast artichoke fields and fragile moss-covered sand dunes. Located just north of where John Steinbeck’s beloved Salinas River dumps into Monterey Bay, the ocean in front of my grandparents’ quaint two-story condo was mind-numbingly cold and dangerous rips were abundant. In fact, I can count the number of surfers I saw at Salinas River State Beach over the years on one hand. I used to sit up in my grandparents second-story bedroom and stare out the window through a pair of binoculars for hours scanning the ocean for dolphins, whales, pelicans—all of which were spotted much more often than surfers. But that was the intrigue of the place. I could walk the beach at sunrise or sunset and hardly come across another human being. I figured there certainly must have been other folks around though, as the beach was covered with makeshift driftwood shelters, which I would adorn with a log of my own or even a sand dollar (if I was in a giving mood). The Monterey Bay sand dollars were like nothing I’d ever seen before. They were huge and perfectly round and there were thousands of them. I used to hunt down the biggest ones—often the size of my adolescent hand—and fling them like a Frisbee back into the sea. “Go back to your home,” I would mutter into the biting onshore wind.
I hardly remember any adults accompanying me on my daily beach excursions, and if there were any, I mostly ignored them. I was too deeply immersed in my own wonder-filled world, digging for mole crabs, building sand castles, scavenging for shark teeth (which I never found). It didn’t even matter that the water was dark, frigid, foamy, and downright uninviting. It wasn’t until years later on a trip to Hawaii that I finally developed my love for riding waves.
I was perfectly happy just to be at the beach in all those years of growing up and visiting the ocean at Monterey Dunes Colony but I had no idea where that sense of wonder had come from. Was it the unique ocean ecosystem, the trillions of tiny grains of sand, the intrigue of unearthing some buried treasure? Or was there something else going on when I first laid eyes on the seemingly infinite Pacific—something more primal, spiritual, innate?
The ocean has always befuddled me with its ability to elicit calm; to bring me into a Zen-like state of complete moment-to-moment awareness. As an adult, prioritizing ocean time has done wonders for my mental and emotional wellbeing. “We didn’t come into this world. We came out of it, like a wave from the ocean,” said contemporary philosopher Alan Watts. I would have to agree—water is the medium in which our lives took form, after all. And back into it, we long to return.
