We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—ANAÏS NIN, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1980
At first, I hardly noticed the arrival of summer. I can’t explain why; I guess I was too distracted by the ordinary details of my life to pay much attention. The weeks had a way of slipping by, even in the garden, where I thought the changing of the seasons would be abrupt and obvious. But there was no specific event in the garden that signaled the beginning of summer—my tomatoes didn’t all ripen at once, my flowers didn’t all start blooming. Up to that point, summer in the garden looked pretty much like spring in the garden, full of half-starts and new beginnings, except that the days were longer and the ground was a little warmer.
Then one day I was driving down Ocean Avenue toward home, on my way back from the nursery, when I found myself suddenly stopped in traffic. This was unusual—on most days, I zipped right down Ocean, past the dilapidated Victorians and the cheap motels, past the liquor store with bars on its window, past the abandoned cocktail lounge that the neighborhood association shut down, past Freddy’s Taqueria and the 7-Eleven. There was hardly ever any real traffic on this street, and I rarely gave any thought to the fact that this was the main road that tourists took to get to the Boardwalk. But this time a long line of cars, barely moving, stretched out in front of me, and without anything else to do but wait, I looked up to the end of the street where the Boardwalk sprawled along the shore. In the distance, I could see the Ferris wheel turning in its slow, grand fashion. The screams from the roller coaster were especially loud because there were two cars running on the tracks at once, and the screams from one car echoed the screams from the other, a half-terrified, half-exhilarated duet that I would be able to hear from my garden when I got home. I realized that the sun was shining, and the stretch of ocean just beyond the Boardwalk was blue instead of its usual gray.
And that’s when I realized: It’s summer. Winter was long over, and spring had faded quickly away, before I even had time to realize it was taking leave. The other cars stacked up behind me and in front of me were full of tourists: tourists with neon pink bikini strings tied around their necks, tourists rubbing tanning oil on each other’s backs before they even reached the parking lot, tourists with ice chests in the backseat full of beer and sandwiches. Summer vacation had come to Santa Cruz, and I fell into the role of the grumpy local, irritated by the invasion of loud, boisterous out-of-towners. They parked on my street, they partied on my beach, and they stood in long lines at my favorite restaurants.
Each weekend, they left dirty diapers, beer bottles, and candy wrappers in my garden, and I wandered around in the early Monday morning fog, picking up after them. It was the way they left their trash behind that really bothered me—if they’d dumped it in the street and it had somehow blown into my yard, that would have been one thing. But because our house sits about five feet above the sidewalk, people had to actually place their trash in my garden, among the flowers. They lined up their beer bottles in single-file rows next to my geraniums. They tucked fast-food cartons under my climbing rosemary. They were deliberate about it. I took it as a clear sign of aggression, as an act of hostility.
Really, though, I think that most of the tourists just never considered the fact that people live in my neighborhood, that we were not part of the tourist attractions, that our street was not an amusement park or even a parking lot. People seemed to feel that we locals were here for them, that we were a paid staff ready to accommodate them. Tourists came to my door and asked to use my phone, and they even tried to borrow gas money to get home. Once I came walking up the sidewalk and found a man pulling an ivy geranium out of Charlie’s yard, in broad daylight, in front of his own kids. I was so astounded that I just stopped short in front of him, too furious to speak, staring down at the flower in his hand.
After a minute, he smiled broadly at me. “You don’t think anybody’d mind if I just …” and he hoisted the plant as if he was raising a toast. “We’re from out of town—Modesto—and I thought I’d like to try one of these in my own yard.”
Was he trying to appeal to me as a gardener? Did he think I’d get excited about how good Charlie’s geranium would look in his yard back in Modesto? It took me a moment to find my voice, but finally I said, “Yes, I do think he would mind. He went out and bought that plant, and he put it there because he wanted it to grow there,” and I took the geranium from him and tucked it back into the soil, while the man’s children looked on, wide-eyed.
People like him made it easy to be a grouchy local. The invasion of privacy, the intrusions upon my home and my life, were not only annoying, they were a little frightening. In a suburban neighborhood, property lines are very clearly defined. There are lawns and driveways and gates, and people know not to cross them. But here, none of us have driveways or lawns or even marked parking spaces. There are none of the traditional barriers to keep the public out. People sit on my front steps to brush the sand off their feet before they get into the car, and usually I don’t mind. Sometimes they wander aimlessly up the steps into my garden before they realize that they’ve gone into somebody’s yard. But I really lost it one day when I came home and found a couple of teenagers sunbathing on my front porch—not on the steps, but actually on my porch, right in front of my front door. The man had spread out a beach towel and was sprawled on his stomach, and the woman was lying on her back with her shirt rolled up and her shorts rolled down to expose as much skin as possible without actually getting undressed.
As usual, I was too astonished to speak. They both had on sunglasses, so I wasn’t even sure if I was making eye contact with them.
“Hello,” I said, thinking I would try the polite approach.
They both looked up at me, said hello in response, and lay back down.
This was too much. I knelt down next to the man and said, “This is my house. It’s not a public area. This is like you lying on my front lawn.”
The man looked around for a minute, surprised. He looked up at me, and at my front door behind me. He turned and glanced at his girlfriend. “Whoa,” he said at last, rolling off his beach towel. They both jumped up as if they had just noticed for the first time that the beach was actually another block away, and they ambled off without another word.
IN SPITE OF THEIR BLUNDERING WAYS, I have to admit that I was a little fascinated by the tourists. They put on their own show, arriving with their beach umbrellas and their acoustic guitars, ready to live the idealized summer fantasy, the beach vacation. While the rest of us went on with our daily routines, scuttling to work and back home again, folding laundry, and paying bills, they turned our usually cold, foggy little town into a beach party that lasted from June to September. They got sunburnt, they drank margaritas, they bought silly souvenirs. In short, they reminded me of myself when I went on vacation. Because of that, I found it hard to stay mad at them.
I could walk along the beach and see replays of every summer vacation I’d ever taken. Toddlers raced up to the shore, shrieking with delight, running back to clutch at the legs of their parents. Young girls rolled in the sand, pretending to be mermaids. Teenage girls propped themselves up on lounge chairs, listening to the radio, and boys showed off on their surfboards.
Occasionally I’d catch a glimpse of some ideal summer romance unfolding at the beach, the kind that everybody wishes for, the kind that only happens in the movies or, apparently, in Santa Cruz. One day in late June, I went down to the beach. The day was unusually warm, with clear skies, none of the typical afternoon fog, and a perfect surf that erupted into gorgeous, foamy, breaking waves up and down the shore. The sun, which was just about to set, cast a deep golden light over the beach. As I walked from one end of the beach to the other, the light caught the spray coming off the waves, framing everyone near the water in a sort of misty halo. A young couple, silhouetted against the sunset, played Ping-Pong in the sand. When the ball went into the water, the woman dove in after it, and the man chased her, until they were both running in the waist-high surf. He caught up with her and grabbed her around the waist, swinging her around and kissing her until the waves receded and they both dropped into the sand, like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity.
These people think that such moments are only possible in a place like Santa Cruz. But as a local, I have figured out that it just isn’t so. The tourists bring their own magic with them. It isn’t about this place. It isn’t really the ocean or the sand that makes them happier or funnier or more romantic. I walk along this seashore every day, often with Scott, and we have never dropped into those waves for a passionate kiss in the surf. It is the act of being on vacation itself that makes them happy and relaxed and fulfilled for one short week a year. It would happen to me and Scott, too, if we went to a different beach, in a different town. But the tourists don’t know that. They give all the credit to Santa Cruz, and I let them.
And so, over time, I began to want to perpetuate the myth, to be a part of the bright, flowering backdrop to their beach vacations. I thought back to the vacations I’d taken to resort towns and tropical islands, where I looked on with envy as the locals laughed from their front porches, gathered hibiscus and bird of paradise from their gardens, and walked the streets of their thatched-roof villages in the evenings with a familiarity that made me ache with envy. This is part of the vacation experience, watching the locals from a sidewalk café or a sandy beach bar, sipping some tall, sweet drink that would seem entirely frivolous back home, and having a long, rambling conversation with the person sitting next to you that goes something like, “If only I lived here“” and drifts to, “See that little white house on the hill? I was meant to live in that house “” and ends, in a slurred speech, with, “Tell the neighbors they can keep my furniture. Call the office and tell them I quit. All I need is a beach chair and a barbecue grill.”
I have had that conversation myself more times than I can remember. But I never thought I would hear a woman say this as she walked past my house: “Look at that sweet house with the red geraniums, honey. Did you know I’ve always wanted to live in a little cottage by the sea with red geraniums in the front?” And, as they got in their car to head back to San Jose or Fresno or Barstow, I heard him reply, “I know you do. And as soon as we win the lottery, this is where we’re coming.”
People would trade in their lottery winnings for my house? Could that be true? People felt about my house the way I felt about houses in Carmel or Mendocino or Hawaii? I found it hard to believe, but I was pleased nonetheless. In fact, it was that remark that spurred me on to live up to the tourists’ romanticized notions of Santa Cruz. I started growing all the classic California beach plants in my garden. I planted bougainvillea and Mexican sage, the same planting scheme I’d chosen for the house in the Beach Flats. I put in ice plant, the succulent sand dune flower that blooms iridescent pink and purple flowers for one month in the summer. I let trumpet vine ramble around the corner of the house, its red flowers so large that a hummingbird could disappear completely inside one open blossom, and I smiled indulgently when young women reached up and plucked the flowers for their hair.
I did all this because of the tourists, in spite of the noise and the traffic and the garbage that they brought along with them. I was willing to let them believe that this place held the key to their happiness, this town by the sea where the flowers bloom all year long. They reminded me to enjoy my life as a local. I felt their approving glances as I tended my bright seaside garden, and I waved to them from my patio, where I often sat in the evening with a glass of wine. And on Monday mornings, after they’d gone, I walked up and down the street and collected their empty bottles of suntan lotion.
I’ll buy anything on vacation. Silly souvenirs, amateurish watercolors, and even those themed cookbooks like the Spicy Caribbean cookbook I brought back from the Virgin Islands, all in the hopes of re-creating the vacation experience at home. But when I get them out of the suitcase, these trinkets seem foolish and out of place.
The Santa Cruz tourists are smarter. They are always stopping and asking me the names of plants that grow in my yard, in hopes of re-creating the seaside experience back at home. A surprising number of beach plants grow all over the south and the west, and with a few seashells scattered around the garden, you might just be able to hear the ocean from your own backyard.
The numbers next to these plants represent the Sunset climate zones where the plants can be grown. In general, most of these plants can tolerate light frost, but would have to be covered or brought inside for a heavy freeze.
Tropical hibiscus, a flowering shrub that attracts hummingbirds and grows well in containers or in the ground (9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19-24)
Bougainvillea, the climbing vine with papery flowers in purple and red (22-24, can survive light frost in 5, 6, 12, 13, 15-17, 19-21)
Passion vine, a rambling vine that can cling to netting or a trellis, with red or purple/white flowers (5-24, depending on species)
Trumpet vine, a vine that hummingbirds love, in red or purple (all zones, depending on species)
Echium Pride of Madeira, a shrub with outlandish spikes of purple flowers that grow over six feet tall, bringing to mind a cross between a tropical paradise and a Dr. Seuss drawing (14-24)
Mexican Sage, a salvia with long blue and white spikes of flowers that attract hummingbirds and make great additions to bouquets (10-24, cut to the ground in winter)
Fuchsia, a shrub that grows well in hanging baskets, with purple, pink, or red flowers that have an otherworldly beauty (2-9, 14-24 depending on species)
Red-hot poker, a shrub that is often mistaken for aloe, with tall, fiery red and yellow spikes (1-9, 14-24)
Aloe, often seen growing at the beach, puts out orangishred spikes of flowers (8, 9, 12-24)