Sunday In Santa Cruz

Next week I am eligible to apply for Medicare, thus as a public service Layne is holding a seminar for myself and her best friend who is in a similar predicament and we shall select among the many and various supplements and so forth.  We will be buying evacuation insurance for Central and South America with possibly some catastrophic coverage but from now until death day single payer will be my portion.  Therefore my public service for this splendid central coast Sunday morning is fewer words and more pictures from this delightful looking part of the world. So as you look at the pictures and get on with your day I shall be getting a headache.  I hate paperwork. 

Awaking from a nap. 

Rosemary, my former program director at KSCO, the funniest person in Santa Cruz. 

Lighthouse Field which used to be off leash once. 

Your Brussels sprouts at work: 

Cold and windy beaches on the coast north of town. 

Fire survivors near Davenport, a coastal village. 

Santa Cruz City Hall, leashed dogs welcome. 

They seem to hate smokers all the same: 

Suspicious homeless hanging out: 

Sleeping in the street is forbidden. Sort of. No cops to be seen despite sleepers everywhere.  

Foreign foods come with heating instructions: 

Santa Cruz: home of the Moore 24. 

Santa Cruz’s modest Cannery Row. 

Sempervirens: 

Layne’s former law office now a place to chat. 

Sailing Versus Vanning

I have seen the wistful look in the eyes of overlanders staring out to sea from a sandy campsite. It’s hopeless but I try to dissuade them from the idea that sailing might be a better lifestyle. Sailing has all the romance of piracy; vanning is just commuting extended.

My wife got on board with my idea to sail to Key West, seen here near the entrance to the Panama Canal a few weeks  before  the  end  of  the  US administration. 
Van Life twenty years ago was not what it is today with  modern technology offering, for good or ill, connectivity and many of the comforts of home. You can now cram a home into a van and still live a suburban life on the road. Twenty years ago a boat offered the independence travelers ashore only dreamed of enjoying. We took full advantage on a 34 foot catamaran which gave us and our two dogs four times the living space of our 2020 Promaster van. The Internet was found in cafes and we sent emails occasionally. GPS navigated uncertainly on expensive charts downloaded to a laptop with all the inaccuracies of two hundred years of  sun sight navigation to back up their pinpoint accuracy…We had a solar panel and a desalinator onboard and we watched where we went. 

Faced with a retirement plan we naturally thought of a boat first. But we rapidly realized Rusty hates the water and the thought of dealing with taking him ashore twice a day held very little appeal. Beyond those family considerations a boat would have offered us limited destinations which sounds like a paradox when water covers the vast majority of the Earth’s surface. You get to sail the edges of land if exploration is your choice and anything beyond Central America or the Caribbean Basin requires some serious pelagic sailing. I don’t see Rusty becoming an oceanic dog. 

I am not much given to over estimating my abilities and I knew that taking my wife and dog by boat on offbeat routes would increase my stress levels proportionately reducing my enjoyment. I am not Webb Chiles and lack his ability to face a watery grave with equanimity. Worse, I lack the desire to drown Layne by over estimating my desire to explore by water. On land I am ready to push my family to the limit. I myself am perhaps a paradox. Many people think driving Mexico is foolhardy and perilous. Perhaps sailing an ocean where people don’t reside would be safer. 

I fully accept that driving a van requires less skill and is obviously less romantic than being a 21st century  sailor on the high seas. However I love driving and at the rather ripe old age of 64 I have come to accept that I am more explorer and less sailor. I enjoy the ability to drive into a town, an archeological site, a park, a forest or a sandy beach and there park my home. My van takes me to the very doorstep of civilizations new to me. 

As a tool for exploration a boat is magnificent in the right hands (not mine) but for me leaving the boat on the coast to rent a car for an inland drive was always a source of expense and trepidation. I hated leaving my boat unattended. We did it several times with no harm but it was just one more concern for a worry wart like me. And I loved the driving! I remember the drives with fondness. I should pay attention to my feelings. 

There is the matter of being at sea. I never felt at one with the business of sailing. Webb loves the isolation and the freedom of sailing an ocean.  I don’t. I discovered, and it was a good thing to discover, that I liked arriving. I enjoyed the process of discovery, going ashore and finding my way in a new town behind the harbor. I liked arriving and finding a superb anchorage which is no way to sail. 

When I was a youngster I lived in the Santa Cruz harbor and it was my world. I had friends and a hobby, and vacations involved nothing more than untying my little boat and taking off to explore the California coast. California is easy as winds and wind direction are predictable and the chance of running aground is nil on such a deep sharply defined coast. I got cold in the summer fog and I struggled to pilot the dark coastline as I poked here and there looking for a breakwater. It was fun but it wasn’t traveling. 

In the Caribbean and the US east coast I had to study weather patterns and look for windows and when we put to sea I lived with a knot inside that only slowly unraveled as the weather held and we completed our passage. The times I got it wrong we got beaten up and I never got used to the sensation of total loss of control in howling winds and huge seas. I don’t have those worries in my van.

I’d rather be in here wishing I were out there, than out there wishing I were in here is a sailor’s ditty I used to think of every time I planned a departure from a safe harbor. I enjoy sailing and I think I am reasonably proficient at it. I had the nerve to sail with Webb once and he pronounced me fit for purpose which was quite the ego boost. But living the nomad life in a van suits me best and I’m not bad at parallel parking either. 

I think sometimes I disappoint people when I say quite firmly I prefer the 21 foot van to the 34 foot catamaran but it’s the truth. I am already looking forward to driving the coast to Seattle even as I enjoy hanging out in Santa Cruz. The passage I am finding is the thing in my GANNET2. The harbors in my van life are secondary and that must mean I am doing something right, for me at least. 

Vive La Difference as Webb the sailor emphasizes.  So I am a van lifer first and a hobby sailor second. I hope that doesn’t disappoint.  

Santa Cruz

I have a habit of over thinking, and never more so than when I am in Santa Cruz, California. 

The beauty is undeniable, a town where the hills roll down to a spectacularly indented, foamy coastline. There is a university and with that there is a community of astonishingly diverse cultural influences. The farmers’ market yesterday offered us Ethiopian, Uzbek, South African, Mexican,Vegan and Jewish cuisines,

And fresh fruits grown locally,

And the usual musical accompaniment: 

All of which is normal summer activity across North America. People are doing this everywhere. 

Santa Cruz prides itself on not being normal, it is one of those stars in the constellation of “keeping things weird” which includes Portland, Austin, Boulder and Taos among many other western cities. It’s a city of contrasts and contradictions that was that way in 1982 when I came as a foreign student and it still is today. Perhaps more so. 

Layne settled here after graduating the University of California, Santa Cruz campus as so many students have done.        She was a lawyer defending homeless protestors and murderers and came to realize she wanted another trade. Teaching adults in Key West suited her much better. Plus she got a pension. 

I grew up here if you count being a 24 year old neophyte at life as being a human that needed to grow up. I learned to eat ethnic food here, I watched movies on the big screen, I learned the drug culture was not for me and I fell in love repeatedly with numerous unsuitable women. They were I am sure worthy but they were not right for me. It was a long and painful lesson. I walked the streets with much silly youthful despair. Night and my Minolta camera with black and white film were my consolation. 

I lived in a boat and rode a bicycle. Dogs aren’t allowed to live in the harbor to this day so my camera was my companion. I sailed my boat,

I drove my Volkswagen bus to the mountains or Mexico for vacation. My wheel has come full circle. 

Santa Cruz is a town that has stayed the same and has transformed radically depending on how you view it. I have done the same.

Once upon a time I read the news on KUSP a community radio staffed by eccentrics and geniuses and then I took up a better job in Key West telling the cops where to go on the radio, a sensible job that paid well and liberated me into dignified retirement. A job I held with skills painfully learned in my California apprenticeship. 

Santa Cruz lives it’s own struggle between common sense fighting geriatric idealism, multi million dollar homes versus filthy homeless encampments and the tedium of lost dreams and hopeless romanticism. 

And some of us, the smart ones, drift through enjoying the beauty and ignoring the chaos. But I’m not as smart as my dog.