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.

Tags: Add new tag, Dillon_Beach, Exxon_Valdez, gulf_coast, Juicy_Tomatoes, oil_spill, Susan_Swartz

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.