The Sea

Recuerdos de Santa Catalina, 2007, acrylic on canvas, electronically amplified.

You say you have been told our coastal waters are not a sea; yet from between the Point Firman Light and Wayfarers Chapel at Portuguese Bend my eyes detect great romance and mystery looking at the Channel Islands, something Cabrillo might have felt, if not Homer…something from the inside of the ocean …Balboa’s Pacific, something that says sea, our sea, where the lovely Chumash chaparral and the shell bank of clams and abalone live in a dolphin’s pool a short swim away.

Then again, Cabrillo may have felt little romance dieing on Santa Catalina, or San Miguel, or Santa Rosa Island in January of 1543. And the clams and abalone have gone on to the past tense as well.

It is a cold January up and down the coast this year. Look beyond the undrawn oilrigs. Blanket your flowery plants.

Here’s how Richard Henry Dana saw it during a warmer winter in 1833…

We had a fine breeze to take us through the Canal, as they call this bay of forty miles long by ten wide. The breeze died away at night, and we were becalmed all day on Sunday, about halfway between Santa Barbara and Point Conception. Sunday night we had a light, fair wind, which set us up again; and having a fine sea-breeze on the first part of Monday we had the prospect of passing, without any trouble, Point Conception, --the Cape Horn of California, where, the sailors say, it begins to blow the first of January, and blows until the last of December.

(...)
We had been below but a short time, before we had the usual premonitions of a coming gale, --seas washing over the whole forward part of the vessel, and her bows beating against them with a force and sound like the driving of piles. The watch, too, seemed very busy trampling about decks, and singing out at the ropes. A sailor can tell, by the sound, what sail is coming in; and, in a short time, we heard the top-gallant-sails come in, one after another, and then the flying jib. This seemed to ease her a good deal, and we were fast going off to the land of Nod, when--bang, bang, bang--on the scuttle, and “All hands, reef topsails, ahoy!” started us out of our berths; and, it not being very cold weather, we had nothing extra to put on, and were soon on deck.
I shall never forget the fineness of the sight. It was a clear, and rather a chilly night; the stars were twinkling with an intense brightness, and as far as the eye could reach there was not a cloud to be seen. The horizon met the sea in a defined line. A painter could not have painted so clear a sky. There was not a speck upon it.

(...)

I read Dana with a glass of wine and hear this in my head.

(I cannot be held responsible for Elliot Lurie's unbuttoned tail-tied shirt or 1970's fashions generally, nor can I determine if he is channeling Joan Baez or Tiny Tim, but the song is a favorite. Here are the Chili Peppers doing their version.)

Brandy, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 36x36 inches, from the collection of the artist.