Just Doubt It

Nietzsche at about 30

Nietzsche, as is perhaps inevitable for anyone attempting a radical critique of modernity, particularly someone who slays sacred cows so wantonly, is controversial and aimed to be.  A lonely man, he craved attention, and wanted to show off his talent, his daring, his outrageousness.  Startlingly original, he shared few of the common prejudices of his time.  His willingness to shatter taboos (“philosophizing with a hammer” as he called it) is a big part of his fascination.  His thought, like that of Socrates, whom he both admired and criticized, could be seen as a training in doubt, and he hoped to be remembered even longer than this mentor.  He so clearly yearned to transcend his time and place that I feel embarrassed for him whenever he shows himself too much a product of it (so German, so 19^th century). 

He was an amateur who made no more off his writing than Van Gogh did off his painting. Now, I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the work of professional writers now and then, but their motives are mixed, after all, their integrity is compromised.  To put it crudely, they’re whores.  Not to say you can’t have a wild and wonderful night with them on occasion, but it’s the amateurs, the ones who do it for love, that I return to again and again.  Nietzsche considered the corruption of culture by money to be far more pernicious than the like corruption of politics, because culture is more important than politics.  

After his breakdown

There’s a great deal of provocative material in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, he challenges your presuppositions, makes you think.  But the core of his interest is the Death of God, his melodramatic, even hysterical, metaphor for the spiritual impact of the Scientific Revolution on Western civilization, our migration from a metaphysical to an empirical worldview.  He believes this to be such a momentous event (“the great noon”) that it will inevitably result in the breakdown of society into chaos and anarchy, because the destruction of the foundation of all our values must inevitably lead to nihilism.  There’s no way to avoid this, according to him, because it’s an event that’s already occurred, even though many may not yet realize it.  He seems to fear that the knowledge of this event, our murder of God, will suddenly break over humanity like a massive wave and sweep everything before it.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that it could, instead, gradually percolate into human consciousness over a long period of time, and that those who recognize it do so because they are ready.  Some may succumb to nihilism, but their numbers may never be large enough to swamp society.  Others, lacking the acute metaphysical need he felt, may accommodate the news without such an extreme reaction.  After all, in terms of metaphysical beliefs, non-believers are already the third largest group, globally, after Christians and Muslims.  There are more secular humanists than Buddhists, Jews, and a number of other religious persuasions thrown together and, given the number of human societies that, over the millennia, have managed to survive without the Christian God (including some nominally Christian ones), the idea that we can’t seems, well, a bit parochial.  In fact, human societies have always determined their own values, invented them ex nihilo.   It was just a common delusion that a god had done it.  And anyway, few ponder the philosophical underpinnings of their lives with the same obsessive rigor and seriousness that Nietzsche did, most just believe whatever some authority tells them, so it’s a little difficult to credit his hysteria about this.   

Science derives from the Greeks.  Not just the line of Democritus and Epicurus, but also from Socrates: the Socratic Method is the forerunner of the Scientific Method.  While admiring the ascetic devotion of science to truth, Nietzsche, a classical philologist by training, criticizes its innate optimism, which is based on faith in the explicability of nature and belief in knowledge as a panacea, and these it derived, ultimately, from Socrates.  The innate optimism of science, Nietzsche believed, results in a delusion of limitless power.  In his own philosophical practice he eschews scientific method, preferring the poetic approach of aphorism.  (He refers to himself as a “Dionysian Pessimist.”)  Given his ambivalence toward science and his view that it has led to a crisis in human affairs, you might imagine he would have some sympathy with beleaguered Christianity, the main victim of science’s corrosive, anti-metaphysical effects, but in fact he attacks it mercilessly, holding it to be bankrupt and, in any case, dishonest and nihilistic in nuce.  (He is a champion of honesty, the “youngest virtue.”)

In the end Nietzsche’s perspective is, overall, too strident, stringent, stern, too strenuous and strepitous for my taste; and too male-adolescent: he wants to attack and destroy everything, and takes a little too much glee in wreaking havoc.  The various eras of our lives foster different perspectives, each with its own set of assets and liabilities, and each of these outlooks has an equal right to exist.  Nietzsche’s is a youthful perspective, rash and impulsive, full of itself.  I enjoyed it more when I was younger.  Like Mishima, his youth partisanship painted him into a corner from which he could not easily exit into middle-age.  His over-valuation of youth would have caused him, as it did Mishima, unbearable self-contempt at its loss.  So, like Mishima, he had to die (at least mentally) at 44, in the last glow of life’s summer. 

Nietzsche created a mythos that elevated him to super-shaman and psychopomp of this transition and tried to impress it on the world.  That was his ultimate will to power.  He claimed to be writing the history of the next 2 centuries, but 125 years since he penned his last jottings and lapsed into mental torpor, the calamity he prophesized has yet to arrive, so the jury is still out on him.  If he turns out to be right and the Death of God does bring on a massive crisis in human affairs, a major nervous breakdown, then he will be seen as a towering figure, the greatest Old-Testament-style prophet since Isaiah.  If, on the other hand, humanity manages to swallow the Death of God with little more than some mild indigestion, he will be seen more as an hysterical kook, a megalomaniacal Chicken Little with some crazy ideas, who, nevertheless, wrote some interesting commentary and philosophical poetry, embraced his inner lunacy, and will likely retain a modest measure of immortality as a master of the bon mot, the pithy epigram, and an inspiration and road map for readers longing to become who they are.  

Cadaqués

Carcassone

Mid-afternoon we arrived in the medieval fortress city of Carcasonne.  Our hotel, a fifteen-minute walk outside the old, double-walled cité, was a walkup with lumpy, rolling, funhouse floors, but it was clean, cheap, and well-located, and the owners were congenial, offering us one of their 2 free parking spaces.  Crossing L’Aude on the Pont Vieux we could see the massive crenellated walls stretching out to the right and left and imagine knights jousting before them.  It’s wonderful how, in Europe, you can travel in time as well as in space.  The vista mixed the romance of Sleeping Beauty castles with a reminder of how brutal life once was.  The rest of the day we wandered the streets and battlements, buying tee shirts for friends and a leather handbag for Frieda.  After dark, spooky torch-like lighting gave the place an eerie atmosphere, towering walls loomed out of black shadows.  We had a cassoulet for dinner, the local specialty, and then got lost trying to find our way out, stumbling into half-playful moments of trepidation as we imagined some knave or varlet lurking in the opaque shadows between the splashes of yellow light.    

 

It was a bright blue morning as we set off toward Perpignon, eventually exiting the toll highway at La Boubou and making our way on 2-lane roads through rolling vineyards toward Collioure, a resort on the coast once a hangout of the Fauve artists.  From there, we drove south.  The scenery was stunning but I had to keep my eyes on the narrow, twisty road.  Frieda was navigating and told me to stop in Banyuls Sur Mer, a seaside town about 10k. north of the Spanish border, where we had crepes at a place on the beach.  

A couple hours later we pulled into Cadaqués, a whitewashed town built into jagged black rocks and surrounded by mountains that, for me, carries a flavor of Greece.  I first visited it, briefly, in 1998 when Frieda, whose parents were born in Spain, was giving me the Grand Tour.   Her father was from Figueres, a town about 35k. inland that was also the birthplace of Dalí.  Her grandfather was Dalí’s drawing teacher, and her father and Dalí were childhood chums.  Much later, when she was a child, her family visited and Dalí, who was living in Cadaqués at the time, (or, more precisely, in Port Lligat, a kilometer away) sent a car to bring them to his house.  She still remembers how frightened she was by the huge (to an 8-year-old) stuffed bear looming just inside the front door, and her unease about the very odd man who was giving her a tour of his unusual home.  We returned in 2000 for a longer visit, exploring Dalí’s museum in Figueres (the definitive Dalí experience), as well as Gala’s Castle in Pubol.  We stayed in Cadaqués for 2 weeks on that trip, also exploring the little towns south to Tossa de Mar.  We even toyed with the idea of buying a pied-à-terre there.  Spain was still on the peseta then and everything was cheap.  But in the end we decided against it because we would’ve felt obligated to return every year and there were too many other places we wanted to go.  So instead we picked up a print of Dalí’s 1924 painting of a beach in Cadaqués, “Port Alguer,” and put it over our mantle. 

Port Alguer, 1924

We soon discovered that, aside from a favorite gelateria, everything we remembered was still there. In those days we had stayed at Playa Sol, and every morning after breakfast had gone for a swim from the little beach right in front of it. After drying in the sun, we’d walk down to the main town beach for beer and anchovy-stuffed olives and some chatting and people watching. When the olives couldn’t stave off hunger any longer, we’d walk back along the shore to our favorite restaurant, Ix!, for some paella, mussels in red sauce, or some other delectable comestible, before returning to the hotel for siesta. Toward evening we’d go for a stroll around town, maybe pausing for espressos, eventually stopping somewhere for tapas. All our favored haunts were still there. The only difference was more people; the town didn’t seem as laid back and sleepy as it once was. This impression was reinforced at a tapas place near the main beach where the road in front of the outdoor patio, unlike the old days, now swarmed with people. I tried the delicious navajas, a long, narrow clam, for the first time, and we also had some old favorites, like pimientos del patron, sardines, and bacala fritters.

Port Alguer, 2013

In the morning we picked up our old routine, heading for the beach nearest our hotel, which happened to be Port Alguer.  The beaches in Cadaqués are dark and pebbly, and the water is a dark, emerald green, but clear.  At first cold, it soon felt refreshing, and I was thrilled to swim in the Mediterranean again, a sea so full of history, the sea of Homer and Odysseus, the birthplace, cradle, and playpen of Western Civilization.  We dried in the sun before heading to the main beach for beer and olives, and on to Ix!.  The next day we varied the routine with a stroll over to Dali’s house after lunch.  It was closed so we couldn’t retour it, but the enchanted walk through the olive groves charmed us and reminded me again of Greece.  After siesta I bought Frieda a black leather vest.  

The following morning we took off for Barcelona via the main highway.  Frieda did an amazing job of navigating, better than a GPS, weaving through the city to our hotel at the top of La Rambla without a hitch.  I parked in a red zone while she registered and sent the bellhop out to take our luggage, and then she directed me to the Avis office near the Avenida Diagonal through a bewilderment of one-way streets.  We pulled into their garage at 12:59 and they slammed the door behind us for siesta.  From there we walked down Paseo de Gracia toward our hotel.  I marched past Casa Milá, but it jumped out of my peripheral vision.  That and Casa Batlló, a little farther along, are hard to miss, they’re both so startlingly unique.  We’d toured the first and seen the other Gaudí sights in 2000, when we were in Barcelona for nearly a week.  At the hotel we sampled the 24-hour buffet, taking the booty up to our room to eat on the balcony over La Rambla and watch the hordes of people swarming for Fiesta de la Merce.  

 

Cadaqués

 

We’d already noticed that people on La Rambla looked shabbier than they had on our last visit and on the way to dinner at Els Quatre Gats we noted homeless folk sleeping on door sills.  These were the first symptoms of the recession we’d seen; we hadn’t noticed it in Basque country.  Our waiter at the restaurant, who was Chilean, told us Spain hadn’t lived up to his hopes and he was thinking of going home.  Nevertheless, the restaurant, not cheap, was jammed, with no vacant tables. 

In the dim morning light we caught a bus at La Plaza de Catalunya and watched Barcelona slowly unpeel from its windows as it shuttled us out to Terminal 1.  It was hard to believe that in about 18 hours we would be 6,000 miles away and these buildings, these streets, indeed all that we had seen on this trip, would be just a dream.   

Basque Country

Maman

Getting to Europe from California has always been a trial, but lately the ordeal of the journey has begun to outweigh the pleasure of the arrival for me.  I’ve seen the sights I really wanted to see, sometimes more than once, so at this stage I either return to someplace I liked before or visit someplace new in which I have only a middling interest.  For the first trip to Europe since our wintery sojourn in Venice last year we decided to do both: return to Spain, a country we hadn’t visited since 2000, to go back to a little town on the Costa Brava called Cadaqués that’s particularly dear to us, and for something new add the Basque Country, a part of Spain that lies north of Madrid, on the Atlantic (the Bay of Biscay), which I had only a modest interest in seeing.  To get there we first had to endure a 10 hour flight to London, a 3 and a half hour flight to Madrid, plus another hour flight to Bilbao and all the airport residence making the connections.  By the time we arrived on a gloomy, drizzly Monday evening, we had been awake for 30 hours and were fried, but we still had to catch a bus to the Guggenheim museum and drag our luggage through the drizzle across the Nervion River to our hotel on the opposite side, near the Calatrava pedestrian bridge.  

The Matter of Time

In the morning we walked farther down, away from the museum, to the Casca Viejo, the old town, ducking into a café for some Spanish ham with coffee when the drizzle turned to rain.  When it let up, we headed back toward the museum, crossing over the soaring auto bridge and climbing down the catwalks.  Fog was rolling across the shallow pond at the rear of Frank Gehry’s fantastic building and under the high arches of the legs of “Maman,” Louis Bourgeois’ Spider sculpture, as we approached.  We lingered in the atrium, where Frieda wanted to savor the complex intersecting curves of the interior, before entering the gallery containing Richard Serra’s monumental steel plate constructions collectively referred to as “The Matter of Time,” though “The Matter of Space” felt more appropriate as, walking through them, I felt the physical space around me pulling and stretching and twisting like taffy.   Nothing else measured up to them, although Frieda was fond of Jeff Koons “Puppy” out front, which is certainly playful in the mode of Dali.  For convenience we had lunch in the cafeteria upstairs.  We couldn’t pick up our rental car until 4 o’clock as Avis was closed for siesta.  When we got there we discovered we would not get the Audi A3 we’d been promised, but instead a Fiat 500L 1.3 liter diesel.  I was rather disappointed, but half the cars on the road in Europe are diesels now.  Diesel fuel is cheaper than gas there and they get better mileage than gas cars.  Between the cost of fuel ($7/gal. for gas and $6/gal. for diesel) and the many toll roads, it’s expensive to drive in Europe.  I declined the GPS at $15/day extra yet we somehow made it back across town to pick up our luggage at the hotel and hit the road to San Sebastian.   

The front of the museum with Puppy

San Sebastian, Donostia in Basque, was a retreat for Spanish royalty in the 19^th century.  It boasts a spectacular crescent beach called La Concha fronted with mansions reminiscent of the palazzos lining the Grand Canal in Venice and Atlantic waves suitable for surfing (which Spanish royalty, alas, did not do).  The waves and the water temperature make it less suitable for swimming than the Mediterranean, not that we were tempted, given the continuing inclement weather that closely resembled that in Bilbao.  The Basque Country is the wettest, greenest part of Spain, otherwise a pretty dry land.  It’s also famous for its food, and the old town of San Sebastian is full of pintxos bars where the art of Spanish tapas is taken to the highest level.  Every inch of the bar surface is covered with plates of different snacks in colorful profusion.  You order short beers called cañas, or wine poured from a height so as to aerate it, called txakoli, and then grab what you want, wiping your mouth with a paper napkin that you drop on the floor.  It’s all run on an honor system where, before you leave, you tell the barkeep what you had and pay up.  You’re supposed to remember it all so it’s best to move on before having too many different items.    

San Sebastian from our hotel balcony

The morning dawned still drizzly, so we took the car north, into France, to see Biarritz, an elegant little town where French royalty used to summer back in the 19^th century, and then worked our way south through St Jean de Luz and Hondarribia, on and off drizzle all the way.  We had sandwiches from a street vendor in the former for lunch, and then strolled the sturdy seawall that protects the heart of the town from oceanic incursions.  In the latter we ascended to the upper town for some wine and cheese in Charles V’s castle, now an expensive parador.  From there we took a scenic road, a narrow country lane where we first encountered wild horses grazing alongside, then a herd of sheep meandering across it, before emerging onto a more substantial highway.  Back in San Sebastian we returned to Parte Vieja.  This time we had a list of bars recommended by Rick Steves, but discovered they were all filled with Americans and no better, in some cases not as good, as the bars we had chosen by whim the night before.  When we emerged from the last it was pouring rain so we took a taxi back to the hotel. 

Biarritz

Our last day in San Sebastian we explored the Gros district, meandered down to Zurriola Beach, the prime surfer hangout, and ate churros from a street vendor.  In the evening we made our way back to Parte Vieja and bar hopped to the tune of our own whims again, leaning toward the places full of locals.  This time we ordered the hot pintxos from the chalkboard menus posted.  As everything was listed in Basque, we had no idea what we were eating.  Frieda suspected one dish featured bull testicles, but they all tasted great.  To finish we returned to a place we’d discovered the first night called La Viña and had some amazing cheesecake, their specialty. 

   

By morning the rumor that the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain had been dispelled: it falls mainly along the Atlantic coast, where we were. So we headed north, into France, and east, toward the Mediterranean. Although it was still drizzling slightly when we set off, we gradually drove out of it. As patches of blue began to break through the cloud cover while we blew across southern France at 140 kph on a wonderfully open toll road, the Black Keys’ “El Camino” blasting on the stereo, a sense of exhilaration and freedom overtook me, the kind of feeling that started to make the trip seem worth it.

 

Unamuno

As a young man

Frieda had an assignment in a class she’s taking to translate a poem of Miguel de Unamuno, so we got into a conversation about him.  Perusing the bookcase I spotted a copy of his magnum opus: The Tragic Sense of Life.  It was one of those books that I didn’t recall where I’d picked up but kept around thinking well, maybe I’ll read that some day.  Inside the cover was the name “Tanya,” the sister of a girlfriend I had back in the early 80s. 

Unamuno was a Spanish writer who lived from 1864 to 1936.  In addition to poetry, he wrote plays and fiction, but The Tragic Sense of Life is his philosophical testament.  He was raised a devout Catholic, but in college discovered science, and this set up a lifelong conflict for him, because the knowledge of science lacked the promise of personal immortality that had so comforted him as a boy.  Unamuno really, really did not want to die, a sentiment with which I have some empathy.  He considered the longing for immortality to be the essence of human striving, as illustrated by our positing, across cultures, immortality as the core of divinity, the basic quality of godhood.  He felt it was the primary secret that our thirst for knowledge ultimately seeks.  But, although he was dissatisfied with science due to its failure to unearth this secret, he also knew he couldn’t go back to the simple faith of his childhood, and this was the root of the tragic sense referred to in the title.  

Middle-aged

His thoughts document an early-20^th century Spanish variation on a long phase of Western intellectual development through which we are still passing, albeit in a later stage, the struggle between reason and faith brought on by the Scientific Revolution.  Ever since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution Western thought has concerned itself with the collision of the new perspective with the old religious one.  The new perspective, I would argue, really goes back to the Greeks, their idea of the individual thinking for himself.  Toward the end of the Roman Empire an alien, Levantine mysticism bled into Europe, an intoxicating ideological drug known as Christianity that called, in exchange for the promise of immortality, for submission to authority (all monotheistic religions are, by nature, authoritarian and thus hostile to democracy), and the West fell into a narcotic trance for a thousand years.  In the Renaissance Greek thinking, the individual, reawakened, and science grew out of this uniquely European perspective.  Consequently this is really a struggle between our native inclinations as Westerners, as the heirs of Greek civilization, and a foreign ideology that has overlain them.  But Unamuno didn’t look that far back.  For him, Catholicism felt like his Spanish nature. 

Part of Unamuno realizes that there is no going back to childish beliefs, to superstition and fairy tales; that religion is part of the childhood of our species, a childhood we have outgrown.  Yet his emotional longing for immortality will not allow him to completely let go of it.  At times his desperation is so great he seems to imagine that immortality is something he can just conjure out of thin air, as if wishing for it would make it so, rather than something that must be clawed from nature bit by bit. 

 

Old

While longing for immortality, he nevertheless recognized that the Christian vision of it is absurd.  What would we do in Heaven: would there be TV and sports teams, film and music, food and relationships—sexual relationships?  Would there be anything at all of what we know and love about life?  Or would we just sit on a cloud strumming a harp for eternity?  There is nothing plausible about the Christian promise of immortality.  Doctrinally, virtually everything about Christianity is, by turns, outlandish, preposterous, or ridiculous.  It’s a relic of an earlier age; ultimately, a con.  Nevertheless, like many today, he couldn’t shake it off.  He was caught between reason and faith, unable to commit to either.  The book is a self-contradictory, rambling record, rife with rhetorical questions, of his attempt to wrestle these incompatible perspectives into some sort of reconciliation. 

It was a hopeless endeavor, of course.  Despite mighty efforts, he could not definitively shake off Catholicism because it was such a deep part of his personal and national identity as a Spaniard, and he was unable to rise above the latter to become a fully fledged European thinker.  Ironically, had he been able to manage this he would have secured a greater degree of literary immortality, because he would have been seen by later generations as having been ahead of his time, rather than of a piece with it.  In the end he fell back on one of the great resources of Spanish culture, the figure of Don Quixote, as a symbol of his own impractical pursuit of an unreachable goal. 

What makes life tragic for Unamuno as well as the rest of us is, of course, that we all must die, and cannot go on learning and growing.  No one is going to be saved no matter who they submit to.  Unamuno went through enormous mental contortions to try to circumvent that conclusion, but they were to no avail.  A blood clot in his overworked brain laid him low at the age of 72.  Alas, all we can do about this is to grant him a posthumous shadow of life by reading him.

So, anyone want a copy of The Tragic Sense of Life?  Tanya?

Cayucos

Dino exploring the beach in Cayucos

Hwy 1 from Carmel to Cambria may be the most scenic drive in the world.  In my experience only the Amalfi coast in Italy comes close, and there you have to put up with those oversized buses the Italians insist on putting on a road half the width of Hwy 1.  Plus, Route 1 has the added advantage of being a whole lot closer.  The ideal instrument for traversing this somewhat twisty road would have been the Porsche, but Frieda wanted to take Dino Ferrari, our white collie, along for the ride, and he’s just too big to fit comfortably in the back of a 911, so we had to employ the Volvo.  It turned out that, for a leisurely drive, it was perfectly adequate.  I let Frieda steer and spent my time gawking at the scenery rather than carving apexes.  As we cruised through Big Sur I spotted a young man sitting in the shade by the side of the road, leaning against a redwood, with his nose in a book, and was reminded of my first visit to this spectacular area many years ago, when it was the haunt of well-heeled hippies.  I couldn’t see, as we sped past, whether it was Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, or Jack Kerouac he was perusing, but I still caught a whiff of the old magic that had charmed all of them and me as well.  At the southern end of the drive there’s a tight, twisty stretch of road.  The first time I drove it I was headed north from Ojai in a Corvair Corsa and worried that if the entire road was that serpentine I wouldn’t reach Santa Cruz until after dark.  But it turned out I had nothing to fret about.  That stretch only lasts a few miles.  In no time at all we had passed Cambria and reached our destination, the quaint little beach town of Cayucos, just north of Morro Bay.  

From our terrace in Cayucos

Going south the beaches darken from pearl in Carmel to cocoa in Cayucos, where the sand is punctuated with black, agglomerative rock formations ranging in size from a steamer trunk to a small cabin.  When we arrived it was sunny, but a strong, cool wind was coming in from the sea and I wished I’d worn my hoodie as we lunched out on the Sea Shanty’s deck with Dino.  The Shoreline Inn, right on the beach, was also dog friendly.  Dog compatibility seemed to be trending in the area, catering to empty nesters or DINKS like us, families filled out with canine kids.  The 3 of us went for a walk on the beach there and we found that, just as in our own neighborhood, Dino was the star of the show, fawned upon by everyone we met, while he, as usual, reveled in the attention, smiling and prancing for all like a movie star on the red carpet.  For dinner we got take-out fish tacos from the Smoke House and enjoyed them with a bottle of wine on our terrace, from which we could see, adrift in the haze, Morro Rock, a few miles to the south.  

Dockside and Morro Rock

Next day we drove down to Morro Bay for lunch at Dockside, where a combo was playing Dave Brubeck as fresh fish were being unloaded nearby.  It was quite enjoyable, with excellent clam chowder, fish tacos, and cold Stella Artois to wash it down.  The place even had leashes attached to the perimeter bench to hook Dino up and prevent him from wandering and becoming a nuisance.  Surprisingly cool breezes interrupted the warmth now and then and made us shiver.  Nevertheless we stayed until the combo quit, then wandered south along the docks checking out the restaurants and shops, the Rock looming over us, before circling back to the car.  The Rock, which was once quarried for granite, is connected to land by a sandy spit with a road, so we drove out to it. On the bay side was a nice, quiet beach, while on the ocean side it was choppy, tempestuous.  From there we headed down to Los Osos and Montaña de Oro State Park.  We had thought of taking the Bluff Trail with Dino but found it was closed to dogs, so had to content ourselves with the pebbly beach at Spooner’s Cove where Dino could romp on leash.  Back in Cayucos for supper we picked up shrimp cocktail, clam chowder, and salad at Duckie’s Chowder House, all quite tasty. 

Spooner's Cove

In the morning we cruised farther south to Avila Beach, noted for being a southern-facing beach shielded by highlands that wrap around the northern side of the town and protect it from the north wind and northwesterly swells. It’s the first beach, as you head south, that feels like southern California, and that makes it a strong candidate for an easy winter getaway. Not only was it notably warmer than Cayucos, with calmer waves, but the town also had a more chichi air. The beach was a dazzling eggshell, devoid of the rocks and clumps of kelp that litter the beach in Cayucos. We explored the waterfront for an hour or so, had some ice cream, and then hit the road back north, up through the Salinas Valley, a less scenic but quicker route home. Dino, who in the past has been a nervous car passenger, finally learned to relax, sleeping in the rear much of the way. He was tired from being on the go all morning with his people, time he normally would be snoozing

Avila Beach

When we got home I read in the news that the atmosphere had passed another milestone, 400 ppm. of CO2.  The last time the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was so high was 3 million years ago, long before the advent of homo sapiens, a time when sea levels were 50 to 75 feet higher than they are today.  In other words, our profligate dumping of CO2 has dialed in the programming for this level to return, dooming the world’s coastal cities, not to mention the lovely little towns I had just visited, and yet still we continue, business-as-usual, to dial in ever higher levels.  Stubbornness, a reluctance to change our ways, may prove an evolutionarily fatal quality for our species.

Indian Wells 2013



Practice Court



It’s relaxing to have a familiar vacation, a place you go every year.  For us that’s the tennis tournament at Indian Wells, in the Coachella Valley of California.  It’s a beautiful, landscaped venue with spectacular views of the rugged mountains nearby.  But our excursion got off to a somewhat inclement start this year.  As we were cruising east on I-10 raindrops began to appear on the windshield of our Ford Focus rental and soon the semis were kicking up a thick swirl of opaque mist.  Since it was lunchtime anyway, I pulled off at Carl’s Jr. in Banning for one of our 2 or 3 fast food meals of the year (there are simply no other options out there).  By the time we got back on the highway the flash shower was over and we pushed on over mostly dry pavement.  It was still colder than usual, however, so after unpacking at the motel we headed for Tsingtao, our favorite Chinese place, on the corner of Highway 111 and Portola.  To our shock and dismay, it was gone, vanished, nothing remaining of it but a dark sign and a ‘for rent’ poster in the window.  We were forced to resort to an internet search to unearth a substitute a few miles away, which turned out to be barely tolerable. 

Outside the Main Stadium

Indian Wells is the biggest tennis tournament on the west coast and every year (this was our 10^th consecutive visit) it gets bigger.  The goal this year was 400,000.  Court 6, for example, which used to have merely 3 tiers of white folding chairs, now has 3 of permanent, bolted-down chairs plus four tiers of bleachers.  There are currently 8 match courts and 16 practice courts but by next year there will be 9 match courts and 24 practice courts.  Stadium 2, currently a towering scaffold, will be rebuilt as a concrete arena seating 8,000 (the main stadium seats 16,000).  We’ll hardly recognize the place.  The large, polyglot crowds that show up now make it hard to do the kind of court-hopping we used to do in the early days.  If you try that now, you’ll be unlikely to get a decent seat for anything.  Now you pretty much have to pick a court, get there early to seize the best seats you can find, and plan on holding them all day, while taking turns on snack and restroom runs. 

Relaxing on the Lawn

Friday, our first morning there, was sunny but chill.  When we got to the venue at 11, I was comfortable in a long-sleeved shirt over a tee.  The match of the day we were really interested in was the rising young American Jack Sock against the Croatian giant Ivo Karlovic.  It was the 2^nd match up on Stadium 2 so we headed over there to try to get good seats on the south end, where the sun is behind you.  We got some decent ones but had to sit through Petra Kvitova’s (she of the famous chicken squawk) defeat of Olga Govortsova in 3 sets, in order to hold them.  When Jack showed up he seemed in control, winning the 1^st set 6-3, and taking the 2^nd to a tiebreak.  Meanwhile, however, dense clouds were blowing in from the north and the temperature was dropping like a stone.  We kept adding layers and had put on our full complement by the time Jack lost the tiebreak.  Then he fell apart as the thermometer continued to plunge.  By the time he was beaten, we’d had enough of shivering, and high-tailed it for the car.  At least it didn’t rain, which had seemed possible.    



Ernests Gulbis



Saturday was warmer, and we went back to Stadium 2 to see David Ferrer, the #4 seed, get clobbered by Kevin Anderson in the first major upset of the tournament.  Then we watched 2 more matches that didn’t much interest us in order to keep our choice seats for the match between the young Australian hopeful Bernard Tomic and Richard Gasquet of France.  Once again, Tomic failed to live up to the hype and Gasquet beat him quickly in straight sets, enabling us to dodge over to Stadium 3 to catch the Gulbis/Tipsarevic match.  It was dark by that time, and getting cold again, so there weren’t a lot of people and we got fine seats on the north end.  I’ve always thought Ernests Gulbis an underachiever, but this night, for once, he played up to his potential, completely blowing Tipsarevic, the #9 seed, off the court 6-2, 6-0.  Gulbis was playing so fast, slamming serves right at Janko and blasting forehands past him with such power, that Tipsarevic was reeling, like a punch drunk boxer bouncing off the ropes.  He looked like he’d been hit by a hurricane.  I’m glad I finally got to see Gulbis play as well as I believed he could.  (He won another round before going out in a very tight 3 set contest with Rafael Nadal, who went on the win the tournament.)



Grigor Dimitrov



Sunday was a gorgeous day, abundant sunshine, in the low 70s, with a light breeze, the air dry and crystal clear: perfect for tennis.  We got to the venue just as it opened and secured front row seats at the south end of Court 7 where Frieda’s current favorite player, Alexandr Dolgopolov, was scheduled to play the second match.  We prefer to sit at the end because you can see everything without having to swing your head back and forth, you’re closer to the players, and you have their view, with the ball coming at you just as if you’re playing.  But we had to sit through a boring women’s match before the Dog came on.  Frieda, of course, was impatient for the women to finish and get the hell off the court.  Then, when The Dog finally showed up, his play was lackluster and he lost the 1^st set to Carlos Berlocq, a 30-year-old Argentine clay courter with a career high ranking of 37 (the Dog is 24 and has been ranked as high as 13).  In the 2^nd set his play improved and he squeaked it out in a tense tiebreak.  He was up a break in the 3^rd set and seemed to have Berlocq on the ropes when he pulled something in his left leg.  The Dog called the trainer but he had nothing to offer and afterward Dolgopolov rapidly fell apart, failing to win another game.  Frieda was bitterly disappointed.  We stayed around for Tommy Haas/Andujar and the French/Polish doubles match that followed, and then the beginning of a match between 2 youngsters, Matthew Ebden of Australia and Grigor Dimitrov from Bulgaria.  Dimitrov has been talked up for a couple of years now as ‘Baby Fed’ (as in Federer), and I was impressed by the smooth power of his game.  I would have liked to stay for the entire match but it was dark by now, getting colder by the minute, as it tends to do in the desert, and we had to get on the road for the hypnotic drive back to Ontario.  Later I read that he disposed of Ebden in straight sets, but went out to Djokovic in the following round.  However, he’s on my radar now as someone to watch.