Southern California Icons

When a large dog pokes his nose into your face at 6am, what do you do? You get up! We were on the road by 7;30 armed with coffee from a coffee shop we remembered from another visit.

We drove along the coast, long beaches curving away from the shore, people in bathing suits watching the waves, walking dogs and fishing. The mist rose from the water, blurring the line between sea and sky; the sun gleamed blindingly off the water. Oil platforms looked like tugs escorting the flotilla of the Channel Islands hovering 20 miles offshore.*

By the time we hit the coast above Santa Barbara, I began seeing palm trees like these, lining the highway, surrounding shopping centers, incongruously bristling with poorly disguised cell phone towers, and marching in lines across hilltop skylines.

They are ridiculous looking trees bare trunks, rising out of the line of vision into the sky, sporting an unruly topknot of fronds, but they somehow fit into the landscape here. Perhaps because they have always been here, and have come to remind me of my childhood in Pasadena.

*I highly recommend a novel called San Miguel by T.C. Boyle about several generations of women who lived on a homestead on San Miguel.