There are many spiders in my little bunker by the sea. They are very sensitive and painfully shy, but also very proud of the magical webs they weave, and of their own odd grace. I never kill them — except one that I thought might be a black widow — and I give them a lot of admiration. I believe that they appreciate it. (And I’m convinced that they are deeply humiliated, devastated really, by all the ill-will directed towards them on Halloween. I am especially nice to them at this time of year.)

When I first moved in they would sometimes crawl on the bed, and I would always remove them gently to some other place, and now they know that I don’t like them on the bed, and respect my wishes. They wait in their own little corners but always seem happy to see me. They are lonely creatures, and hopeful that they have set their webs in a good place, and they get rid of really bad insects, like mosquitoes and flies, who are rude and dangerous.

There are some beautiful long-legged spiders, airy and delicate, who live above my shower. Sometimes they forget and drop too far down, so when I take a shower I have to turn the water on slightly to remind them that it’s about to rain. They scurry back up to the ceiling on their invisible threads.

Learning to love spiders has been one of the best things about living here . . .

En Californie, le printemps n’existe pas.  Entre l’hiver et l’été,
l’année souffre une crise d’identité.  Les jours sont entrés dans une
folie d’oscillation entre une chaleur luxurieuse et une mélancholie
d’automne, brouillée par les nuages.

On a l’impression d’habiter un film assemblé par un monteur derangé,
sous la direction d’un metteur en scène dément.  Votre rôle dans la
drame est morcelé.  Quelquefois on parle Anglais, quelquefois on parle
Francais.  Quelquefois, la mer parle dans la voix d’une femme — et
alors l’ocean interromps le discours tendre dans la voix d’un homme.

On a l’envie des longeurs de la saison d’été, monotone et stupide, mais
fixée, lorsque elle vous dirai “Cowabunga, dude!” et on repondra avec
le sourire d’un idiot.

Now that Spring is here, the days of bright sunshine seem to unfold
with greater authority, no longer a promise but an actual downpayment
on the summer.

The vacation motels along Thompson Avenue, with names suggesting an
intimacy with the beach (an intimacy which is betrayed in fact by the
unseen barrier of the 101 Freeway) look brighter, too — the neon
“Vacancy” signs, merely pathetic in February, now have the quality of
confidant, if insincere, smiles.

Yesterday I decided to spend one of these bright days inside a movie
theater, watching The Mod Squad — a mistake I hope others will not
make. Depressed by the spectacle of such wonderful actors mouthing such
dull-witted dialogue I came out into the late afternoon on Main Street
and my spirits were instantly restored.

The ocean peeked back at me from the end of Chestnut Street, the
slanting light made the small-scale buildings of downtown Ventura look
like toys. As I walked to my car I passed the old Ventura Theater,
where the last evening of the Monster Swing Weekend was already in
progress. The Rumba Bums were on the bill, but I heard no music, just
squeals and cheers from a crowd inside, like the innocent echo of
lighthearted evenings long past.

I had the sensation of being on a movie set, but the feeling wasn’t
alienating, because it was my movie, set on the streets of my little
town, Ventura . . . an imaginary location somewhere on the coast of
California.

Ventura and Oxnard, the city it bleeds into towards the southeast, are
by volume mostly agricultural.  Along the 101 Freeway that bisects them
is a succession of malls and outlet centers, and using only this artery
one could supply all the needs of life without ever thinking of these
cities as anything other than highway sprawl.  You could miss entirely
the old downtown of Ventura, that runs along Main Street for a few
blocks near the restored mission, or the tiny beach community where I
live, “on the lanes”, as the older residents say — the little lanes
like mine that run off Pierpont Avenue and dead-end at the sea.


But if you take the surface roads that lead from my lane to the backs
of the shopping centers and malls, you drive through a landscape of
cultivated fields, some of which run down almost to the state beaches,
and grow strawberries and mushrooms and many other green things which I
do not recognize.


Downtown and the lanes, like these open fields, seem frozen in a
time-warp, images of the California coast towns long ago.  It can't
last.  Already one sees industrial parks and condo developments sitting
preposterously isolated on the edges of the farmland.  In our lifetimes,
probably, the fields will give way entirely to such things, as they
have over the course of the last century in Los Angeles and in the San
Fernando Valley.


One navigates this dreamscape with a sense of loss already.  One wants
to photograph it all, just to prove it really exists — to be able to
prove it once existed.  The bright hand-painted signs at the fruit stands
near where Telephone Road becomes a dirt lane, minutes from the great
outlet malls of Oxnard, brood in melancholy gaiety.

Ventura is a strange place, culturally arid, hard to love for any
obvious reasons — but the quiet doom that invests all of it makes it
very sweet . . . charms the spirit.

Yesterday at sunset two large Golden Retrievers ran down onto the beach
with their owner and proceeded instantly to two spots in the sand, as
though they were prearranged, and began digging furiously.  They didn’t
stop as long as I watched them.  The holes just got bigger and deeper.
Occasionally the dogs would pause, step back and bark into the holes.
There was nothing in the holes.

This was almost as strange as a couple in their thirties I saw a few
days ago, strolling along the shore.  The man had one arm around his
lady companion — in the other he carried a golf club, a metal driver.

Every now and then he would stop, disengage, address an imaginary golf
ball in the sand and “drive” it into the surf.  Then he would continue
on.

Some fantastic act of defiance — like Cuchulain attacking the breakers
with his broadsword?  A man who cares far too much about his golf swing?

When we know what the dogs were digging for we may know the answers to
these questions, and many others besides.  Mysteries of the beach
revealed . . .

We went swimming in the surf afterwards, and I felt a kind of preposterous cordiality with the waves.

The Ventura County Fair is over, the ferris wheel is gone. Yesterday a workman died from a fall in the course of dismantling it. The accident was attributed to the mist.

                                                                                                  [Image by W. L. Warner]

Yesterday evening a deep coastal cloudbank was driving in across the whole
horizon, eating up the headlands beyond the Ventura County Fairgrounds.
It was the last night of the fair and the lights of the Ferris wheel
glowed spookily in the mist, miles away. Wild rays of sunlight, like
banners, seemed to flutter over the headlands at the edge of the cloud
bank.

The sun, a bright red viscous disc, appeared through the mists just before it disappeared into the ocean.

These sorts of phenomena turn the blank landscapes of the sea and sky into
theatrical spaces, which seem both awesome and manageable — a place
one might act in, given the appropriate role, mythological and
ritualistic. Conditions also in which gods might step down into our
world.

[“Freedom Bulletin” No. 1 — no more posts until Congress solves the credit crisis!]]

For almost five years I rented a small studio apartment behind a garage in Ventura, California, half a block from the beach. My principle residence was still New York City, but I needed to spend part of the year in California, for professional reasons. I ended up in Ventura because I wanted to be near the ocean, I wanted to be within striking distance of Los Angeles, for business meetings and visits to friends and to my sister and her family there, and I wanted to be near Ojai, where a few other close friends lived. I triangulated those geographical objectives on a map and Ventura was the only logical choice.

 I sent out irregular reports to friends about Ventura — mostly meditations on place, a record of my exploration of the town and an attempt to create a myth about it for myself, as we always create myths about the places we live.

 Here’s the first of those reports, from 9 August 1998:

The beach at the end of my street isn’t wide. At high tide the waves lap up against the embankment of rocks designed to keep them from the houses lined up like books on a shelf, facing the ocean.

Sitting on one of these rocks at sunset I can look south and see the breakwater and the masts of Ventura Harbor, basically a man-made marina. North I can see the coastline for a few miles, curving inland in front of the city of Ventura then back out again to a headland of tall hills.

There is often a lot of coastal mist at sunset. Sometimes the tops of the hills at the headland are covered in it. Sometimes the whole beach is shrouded and it’s hard to make out a surf-fisher fifty yards away. All the permutations of the mist make for strange and shifting effects of the light when the sun goes down.

The water I look out at is the Santa Barbara Channel, running between the mainland and the Channel Islands, which so far have always been hidden by the mist.

The waves at the beach are not large or long but there are always surfers here. They wait out beyond the breakers, sitting still on their boards, sometimes for twenty minutes at a time, hoping for a good wave. They remind me of ducks then. Usually when a wave comes they are up and down in seconds. I think this must be an amateur or novice surfer’s beach.

Still, for those few seconds, riding upright on their boards, the surfers look bitchin’, tuned into something awesome.

The ocean.