The last time I stared at the ocean with fear and awe from one of my favorite beaches was after the tsunami struck in the Indian Ocean in 2004. What if this pretty piece of the Pacific suddenly turned violent? What would happen to the beach-goers, the homes on the bluff, the town behind it and the campground on the bay? Why would Mother Nature show California any more mercy?

Now I go to the beach and worry not about a mean trick of Mother Nature but one caused by humans. And not just BP.

We take our dog to a beach in Marin County where she can run off leash. We get up early, swing by the bakery for coffee and a scone and head over the hills to Dillon Beach.

Rain or shine, we go. We’re not looking for a beach blanket day. We just want to make the dog happy and besides you never know what weather you’ll get at the beach.

One recent morning we found the beach eerily altered by a spectacular minus low tide. Hard white sand stretched out farther than we’ve ever seen. A group of people with British accents took off their shoes, rolled up their pants and waded right in, undaunted by the icy water.

Regardless of the weather, it’s worth the $7 they charge here for beach parking. They make their money on us because we rarely stay for more than a couple hours, by which time we’ve finished the coffee and the dog has had at least $7 worth of running her heart out after tennis balls.

Our beaches are pretty raw and open. They draw joggers and walkers, dreamers and shivering tourists. It is where the fog lives but also where the sun can make a final grand curtsy in a swirl of gold and pink.

So far there are no tar balls here. Our pelicans are safe. Nobody’s nervous about eating our oysters.

In 1989 the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground up in Alaska and dumped oil into the clear and beautiful Prince William Sound. Alaskans called it “the day the water died.”
There were awful pictures then, too, of dead otters and birds. The Press Democrat, my former newspaper, examined the Alaska tragedy to consider what would happen if a similar spill occurred in our waters. If a tanker ran aground at Point Arena up in Mendocino County, within five days the slick would spread south to the Sonoma beaches and into Point Reyes in Marin. Within a month, it would reach all the way to Santa Barbara.

The report concluded we were not prepared, and the results would be devastating. Now the ugly toxins rage through the Gulf, and clearly no one there was prepared.

You don’t have to live along the ocean to consider the beach part of your back yard. It’s everyone’s natural habitat, but how many more chances do we get to save the water from dying? You look at those giant boulders that hunker in the water off our beaches and wonder how you’d ever get them cleaned of gunk.

We’ve been saying for a long time that we have to get over our dependence on oil. But we’re all addicts and nobody believes that we have the will or courage to do it. We have two cars in front of our house. But we only need one to get us to the beach and back.

The couple from Massachusetts waiting outside the Orangerie in the warm, green Tuileries Garden agreed it was a relief to be away from disasters. You could walk around Paris, said the woman, and almost think the world was fine. The restaurants had lots of business and the tiny sidewalk tables were full of coffee drinkers in the morning and wine drinkers the rest of the day. There were lines at the artisan gelato shop until 11 p.m. People even smoked cigarettes and sat in the sun like nothing bad would ever get them.

Except for the cigarettes, we joined in. That’s what happens on a vacation. You get to leave reality behind for a while.

And yet, there really is no full escape, as the French reminded us. A squat guy in a black T-shirt came up to us at the metro and asked if we were Americans. When we said yes, he said, “I’m worried about your fish.”

We had some sense of what was going on back home, getting an occasional glimpse of the news when we checked our email. Obama was getting clobbered by both sides. Tipper and Al separated. The worst was seeing the photo of that noble but doomed oil-soaked pelican on the front page of the International Herald Tribune.

Taking a news break was kind of like going to a film noir, leaving your seat to go get some Milk Duds and coming back to more death and disaster.

We did avoid TV except for joining the crowd in front of a giant screen full of tennis, set up in the square at the Hotel de Ville.

Then it was back to “pass the pate” and one more carafe of the vin rouge.

From the top of one castle or another throughout France you can see fairy tale panoramas of perfect little villages, soft winding rivers and fields of red poppies. They look like make-believe scenes you might set up around a train set.

The rich and powerful built their castles up high, said my husband, so they could throw rocks on the people coming after what they had. Castlenaud, a medieval fortress hugging the cliffs in the Dordogne River valley, is now a museum dedicated to the art of war in the middle ages. This is how people used to kill each other, with crossbows and cannon balls that blew huge holes into the enemy’s castle across the river. It was mean stuff but what those boys played with seem like slingshots compared to our modern war arts where we can take out whole villages by an airborne robot.

If we’d wanted reports on the latest body count in the current bloody conflicts there was a TV in the kitchen at our inn in the Dordogne where Madame Chantel in fiery red hair and orange robe assembled breakfast. But we were content to simply listen to the river running past her gardens. It’s called the Ceou which means “sky in the water” in Occitan, the old language of southern France.

One night we sat beside it with our innkeepers, who speak as little English as we do French, and discussed our oil spill. Jean Luc got out a U.S. map so we could show him the Gulf of Mexico and where the poisonous ribbon of oil was fouling the waters from Texas to Florida and Lord knows where else. He traced around Florida and pointed up the Atlantic coastline and we all shrugged helplessly.

At Dallas we got through customs, found our gate to take us to San Francisco and were greeted by the urgent face of Wolf Blitzer on a TV screen. Not quite ready for prime time, we turned the other way and went looking for a banana smoothie.