San Simeon—Through the Slit in the Cat's Eye

Abstract

Whenever down into I ache the basement for passage where home I from hung my up exile the photograph. in the Heartland Chipped, I go down into the basem nt where I hung up t photograph. Chipped, creased, and spindled by thirty years of restless navigation back and forth across the continent, the photograph, taken with a borrowed Leica on a tripod, freezes a wave that has just crashed onto a rock off the tip of San Simeon Point like Jell-O splattered on a transparent wall. The photograph takes me to another heartland along California's Central Coast where I lived thirty years ago and worked at Sebastian's General Store. I walked the point nearly every day after work with my best friend Terry Martin. Sometimes I hitched a ride with Doc, the Hearst Corporation caretaker, on his late afternoon patrols to run hikers off the point, beer bottles rolling around in the bed of his pickup. I visited the point to read the moods of the sea steel gray, emerald, azure. Ever since, driven by an insistent and mysterious spawn, I return to San Simeon Point year after year, part of an annual parade of Chinook salmon, gray whales, sooty shearwaters, and tourists bused in from Fresno and Oxnard. To know why I return is to know something about the geography of the heart, the theology of thin places, and the texture of a dog's ashes. For the precision navigator, San Simeon Point nestles in the cross hairs of latitude 35° 38' 27 north and longitude 121° 11' 54 west along the grid of parallels and meridians that holds the world together in a hatch of geographic rebar and keeps Chicago from becoming Shangri-La. For the geologist, the point, arching into the Pacific like a backward sixty-acre apostrophe, rides