Grasses on The Strand
Oh, heck! I thought we would have this beach to ourselves”
This has become a favorite family expression since my aunt Joan first said this on Ten Mile Beach many years ago. We were dragging long canvas sacks, formally U.S. postal bags, now filled with the driftwood we had collected. Far down the coast, obscured by spray from the long rollers off the Pacific,a solitary figure could be seen at the water’s edge. We laughed till our sides hurt at the absurdity of the situation. Even today all one of us has to say is” Oh, heck” to produce a smile. It was not that we were unfriendly, but we had come to love this long stretch of sand and grassy dune for its splendid isolation.
It was here that nature seemed at its most elemental. Rocky coves where pines met the sea gave way to the grand gesture: the expanse of water and sky in the brilliant light, rolling hillocks of sand, their southeasterly progression slowed by beach grass shimmering in the wind.
Not for me are the crowds of a summer’s beach. When November arrives the lonely, windswept coast north and south of San Francisco calls to me. There is a place between twin lighthouses where the shoals part to reveal a curve of sand and grassy dune not unlike the ten mile beach we had enjoyed all those years ago. Elephant seals congregate in the reserve adjacent to this spot. Once when we were hiking this stretch of coast I spied a long tree trunk on its side, probably washed ashore in the last storm. Ah ha! the perfect place to sit with one’s back to the dunes facing the sea. As I approached, one end of the” tree trunk” moved! It was a male elephant seal, a rogue, banished from the nearby colony. We quickly left him to his place in the dunes.
In the lee of the fore-dunes, lagoons fringed with green and gold rushes pool without access to the sea. Driftwood and the occasional saltwater deluge adds a brackish tang. Some winters, a storm coincides with an extreme tide sending waves through the hollows of the dunes to the lagoons resting beyond.
The hollows of the dunes are irresistible for me to lie down in. Sheltered and warm, the rythmic sound of the surf is hypnotic and somnolent. If one lies still long enough, birds and other wildlife will come quite close. I have opened my eyes to see a towhee regarding me next to my face as it scratched about the grass. Here my mind wanders to thoughts of life and of nature; thoughts about grasses surrounding me in the dune hollow and then to grasses in gardens.
In a corner of the Barbro Osher sculpture garden at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, landscape designer and University of California professor Walter Hood evokes the topography of grassy sand dunes which once covered this site.
Designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & d’ Mueron, the de Young museum incorporates a cantilevered canopy over the terrace of the sculpture garden. Clad in perforated and embossed copper panels, the monumentality of the structure required a landscape that speaks to primative essentials. Hood’s grassy dune alludes not only to the original landscape of the park, but to the reductive qualities of the dune landscape itself.
As night falls over the grassy dunes the soothing sound of the surf become a roar. What is seen and unseen in this landscape is like the lighthouse on the near point sending a whiplash of light over the waves and dunes. Without the companionable focus of a driftwood bonfire surrounded by friends, the dune landscape at night is grand and terrible in its immensity.
moonlight -
a sand dune
shifts
Virginia Brady Young, 2002
