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Big Surf in Santa Cruz

Elena told us the surf was up. My wife and I drove down to Cruz and went to a beach I call Magic Door beach, it’s about 6.3 miles north of the last traffic light in Cruz on, of course, Rt. 1. Parking area is on the left, high up, flat, long, like a waiter’s tray holding cars, rutted, muddy, you walk across the tracks and down some scree to an ampitheater beach.

Whoomp! I walked up behind the rock where the waves were booming. A peaceful tidepool there.

And in the pool, the aliens dreamed all unaware. Life is calm in La Hampa.

I got real close to the rock to shoot this veil of spray. There’s always a seagull or two just perched somewhere in the scene (not shown here) calmly diggin’ it, happy as a Big Sur cow.

And then we went to the Magic Door at the left end of the beach. And made it through.

There’s a whole ‘nother hidden beach on the other side, this is La Hampa as well. Gray and sandstone rock makes art heroine dreams.

It’s nice to have my dear wife here this time — instead of just my shadow.

I found the shrunken head of that third person you always see in your dreams.

We were reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to each other on Wednesday, wondering if it had something to do with the Grail Legend. And there’s this creepy passage about the third person you see in your dreams. I want to have this personage show up when, say, two of my characters are walking around in La Hampa.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

— But who is that on the other side of you?”

And then a little dog came up and ran away with this particular kelp-bulb head.

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