SHELTER COVE

© Bruce G. Lee 1999

I’m sitting on rough nuggets of sedimentary rock, pushed vertical by the enormous pressure of the continental plates. Gulls and black cormorants spin in the air above me and the sea breaks with that muted murmuring crash just before me, racing white horses at the top, and the body of the wave that warm blue green you get only right before the wave crashes down.

Tide pools nest between these ochre rocks like calm implacable eyes, looking up into the cloudless blue and birds. Black seaweed clings to the rocks. Sun glitters from the deepening blue sea, and fishing boats bob in and out of the waves, an oceanic mirage that looks at one moment like a dingy filled with laughing children and beach toys, and the next like a trawler twice the size dragging a gill net into the cold gray waves. In the cove off to the left, brown pelicans gather to sun themselves. There is little wind in this south-facing cove, at the western most tip of California. There is an airstrip that dumps careless pilots into the deep; a golf course, with its greens spread out around the airstrip; a beach where you can drive your truck right down and launch your boat right from the sand.

When I asked about it just before I left, Patria said this place was cursed. “You’ll see,” she said, and I think I know what she means. When we first drove into Shelter Cove, we parked near the fish cleaning station, a trough with hoses and a long white pipe suspended on aircraft cable that curves twenty stories down to the ocean. I watched the galoshed fisherman hose down the surgical steel table, and at the end of the long long drain tube, surrounded by squawking gulls, the guts slopped out, distant and disconnected from the fisherman’s efficient mechanical actions at the top of the tube.

Later, I watched a three-generation family team, mother, grandfather and son, make short order of giant deep-sea fish; grand-dad eschewing the long white tube, tossing the heads and attached skeletons in a great backwards somersaulting arc over his head in onto the side of the cliff. The birds dove right in. Meanwhile the giant fish were reduced to a few ziplock bags of flayed meat.

Back on the rocks and the tidepools, I discovered some acrid salty pools, animal life given over to algal bloom and salt, the edges of these orange-green pools crystallizing in a white frost of salt. These pools looked hot and hostile, and made me kind of uncomfortable. These aren’t exactly little pools of death, but their harshness was a harsh contrast to the delicate ecosystems nearby. This whole place seems like a land of contradictions; the harsh and secretive surfers, the rough killing fishermen, the furtive locals, even the land itself seem to hold both good and bad in equal measure.

On the day we leave, we find “little black sand beach”. The road simply ends in a cliff, the asphalt falling away in jagged pieces. There is a small mesa to our left, hiding a tiny protected cove beach not twenty feet wide. But to get over to the top of the mesa is a dizzy footpath no more than six inches wide in places, and falling sheerly away on both sides fifty feet down. I trot across it without thinking, but Ed hesitates. He’s afraid, it turns out, not of losing his footing, but of passing out halfway over, and falling down the cliff. Given our history of falling down cliffs, I understand this. I instinctively hold out my hand for him, but for what? He has to navigate the path alone, in any case.

Once over the path and onto the mesa, we discover the weird wire flower sticking out of the ground is actually the remnant of electrical service that had been run out here.

“Someone was actually thinking of building here,” Ed says.

It seems unbelievable. For a moment, I’m thankful for the plane crash that killed all those investors in 1962. Otherwise, this place of contradictions might be just another fly-in party for the ultra-rich.
“That place is cursed.” Patria had said. “You’ll see what I mean.”

The settlers apparently killed the leader of the local tribe by burying him alive on the beach with his head exposed below the high tide line. This isn’t something mentioned in the book we find in the lovely Inn where we say, but there is a wonderfully naive section at the beginning of he book, a real revisionist history, describing how the Indians also used Shelter Cove as a sort of resort community, as if the natives vacationed here in the summer and returned to their “homes” in the winter. Apparently, the early white settlers left a bunch of cows to graze in the shoulder-high grass, and when they returned to a diminished herd, suspected and then killed as many of the Indians as they could find. They don’t mention “Sally” or whoever the powerful woman was who affected the curse at the end of this massacre.

“This land needs healing,” Ed bursts out that night with tears in his eyes, “and I’m going to help.” But somehow this land has been hurt too much. When I tell Del about the seventeen investors killed at the same time in the DC3 crash, she says “Don’t you dare buy property there. You’d have to cut yourself open and let your blood drain into the dirt, and then maybe it will be satisfied.”

“Maybe,” I say “but then you’ll be dead.”

But I really don’t know if the land will be satisfied or that it’s even cursed. After all, this is the western most point of California, the place where three geologic plates converge, and where a four-thousand foot mountain plunges into a five thousand foot underwater canyon, a beach of black pebbles, where every stone on this black sand beach is criss-crossed with white lines, a mineralogical trick-or-treat, each stone marked with a letter or a rune from some ancient alien language.

What of this place? Is it really cursed? Or is it just the land of Shiva, land of creation and destruction, where the paradox of life is exposed, throbbing and insistent, like a hangnail. Maybe the smug surfers know, trudging back from Sandy Point with their backpacks and their surfboards carried at their sides, as if “Everyone carries a surfboard when they backpack into the wilderness, don’t they? Maybe they know something, gliding in on god’s wave extracting energy from the turbulence of the world by saddling it up for a ride. Maybe they know, but they aren’t telling.

© Bruce G. Lee 1999. Publication of any part of this manuscript is forbidden in any form, electonic, paper or any other form without the express written permission of Bruce G. Lee.