The entrance to the beach is still hidden and secretive. Nobody can find this beach unless they are one of the initiated. The stairs down smell slightly disgusting, just as always. I have never figured out if it is bad sanitation or the decay of eucalyptus leaves. Now that I am a chemist I can draw the shape of the molecule that gives the characteristic odor of eucalyptus. It looks something like a sting ray with a shark’s fin. Like the sting ray it is poisonous, so the tree is worthless as an eco-habitat except for the koala bears, which they forgot to import.

The stairs down are 94. Every year I would count the stairs. Every year I assumed that Grampa was the same age: 93 and never changing. They don’t seem so many on the way down, but I know that on the way up I will gasp for breath just as Grampa used to. The stairs are flanked by lush foliage from the homes on each side, and then suddenly dig into the side of the cliff to spill out onto Victoria Beach. It is not a large beach and it is not particularly friendly.

The California cousins always preferred driving down to San Clemente once they had graduated from skidboards to surfboards and body surfing. In San Clemente the waves are large and break a quarter mile out to give a gentle ride in. Those are the California glory beaches with miles of sand populated with lithe volleyball players and California Babes like the ones I aspired to be. But we weren’t real Californians, we were desert prickly Zonies and we stayed mostly faithful to Lady Victoria. She is haughty and jealous and pounds the beach angrily. The danger of the waves is real as Victoria suffers children only partially. Mom got a concussion on this beach when she was a child and has never since been at peace with water.

Victoria’s waves never harmed Dad. This was only right and proper because while he despises the military he would have made a great biblical general capable of parting the ocean. He was the drill master of the forced weekend marches who parceled out lunches only when we straggled to the top of a desert mountain peak. He is not, however, invincible. The desert, like the waves, takes its toll and he once was felled by heatstroke. Despite this he still lives within the desert. Mom and Dad have moved up into a scruffy little town in the high chaparral of the Sonoran Desert. When we go to their town we pass the Midwesterners in their exile communities safely moated behind sterile green golf courses. They fill me with a sense of impotence and they remind me of a Texan I once met who told me he loved everything about Mexico, except the Mexicans.

The desert is being loved to death by those who will not tolerate it. Mom and Dad do not have palm trees, lawns, rose bushes, or even swept dirt and gravel cactus gardens. They do however, cut back the oily, red, smooth-barked manzanita, the burning bush of the desert. And they have built a rock cairn within leaping distance of the roof and put in four special doors for Spot, the cat, to escape from coyotes and the rare roving bobcat. In this high desert place, the teeming shore line between ocean of desert and mountain island, Dad lives like the pirate bandit I imagine he always wanted to be.

On Victoria’s shore my brother and I were also pirates. At the end of the beach, where the stairs come out of the hill, is Sugarloaf point. The cliff used to have a little hollow which my brother and I would pretend was our pirates’ cave. It has collapsed now and there is a fence around the point with a sign announcing restoration of this historic scenery. More concrete, I suppose. It had always been a narrow walk around Sugarloaf point to the Rich Peoples’ Inlet and it was narrower now because of the fence.

The tide is high and I am still wearing my professorial leather pumps and have to jump quickly on the jagged edges of the rocks. Past the Rich People’s Inlet is the mad dash to the base of the Pirates’ Tower with its Jolly Roger flag where the tidal pools begin. The dash reminds me that I am a cruel person. When Sandi, one of the Illi-noise cousins, came as a teenager to live with us, my brother and I brought her down the night we arrived to show her the ocean. The tide was at its highest, a full moon tide, the waves frothing in the night light, and the sound filled you up pressed you till you gasped, making the dash truly terrifying. If you didn’t judge the waves right you could be hurled against the rocks at the base of the Pirates’ Tower. We could smell her fear but we wouldn’t let her back down. We insisted that the tidal pools were worth the effort, but mostly we were paying her back for making us pronounce Illi-noise as Illi-noy.

Past the Pirates’ Tower was the cleft. You skirt the end of the cleft and stop to wait for the spout hole to steam. I remember Grampa bringing me here the first time. I had waited and waited and waited forever. The tidal pools were off limits to the really young, and since I was the youngest of all the cousins I was the only one forbidden the tidal pools. But one day Grampa took my hand and led me off. He showed me the spout and he showed me where the abalone liked to hide in the crevices and to watch out for the purple sea urchins with their poisonous spines and how to poke your fingers into the soft insides of the sea anemones and feel them curl up around your fingers. He picked up a star fish, all orange, and showed me the fingers underneath.

I was hooked and from that summer on I spent most of my time at the tidal pools. I collected the abandoned homes of baby abalones and sea urchins. By the time I was seven or eight I had a collection large enough to require a cigar box. Grampa gave the cigar box and took a picture of my collection. I no longer have the cigar box but do have the sea shells and the picture. I rarely look at the picture because if makes me sad. I had spent an hour arranging the shells and then he went and took the picture from the side when I wasn’t even looking at him. You see few of the shells I collected in the picture. Only the painted ones I bought for a quarter at the tourist store are visible. And all you see of me is the back of my head and my orange swim suit encased body with its large childhood tummy; just like the one my daughter has today.

No one else is out on the tidal pool flat to see me jumping to avoid the salt water on my leather shoes and trying not to scuff them. I would take them off and go barefoot but I would cut my tender middle-aged mid-western feet. I stand for a moment to orient myself and to ask a prayer that I will be given a gift today. I feel in need of it. I feel, well, disoriented. It’s that California feeling, all that missing coastal desert, and all those shifting identities. I allow myself one hour to find my gift. It is futile because of the hose and the leather pumps and high tide, but I look anyway. The sound is deafening. There is a large wave for about every 6 or 7 small waves. It is predictable enough that you can plan your jump to the side of the lower tidal pools and avoid being drenched. Because of the waves, the moments of transparency to the bottom of the tidal pools are tantalizingly short. I am wishing my children were here. I am wishing my Grampa was here. But mostly I want that ½ inch long shell of an abalone that didn’t grow up. In the one second when the water in the tidal pool turns glossy, the mother of pearl will glint. Although the color of it will be the same as the boring, overly abundant, mussel shells, I will know it when I see it because of the ridge of holes that curl around it and in that moment I will plunge my arm down and grab it and pull it up through the froth of the next wave.

The sun is beginning to set and as I face warily west to keep an eye on the waves I feel the skin begin to peel off my burning forehead. Soon I will have to abandon the chase. I still need to drive up to Los Angeles and check in. I finally leave. I do have a gift in my pocket but it wasn’t what I was expecting and I don’t know quite how to interpret it. When I get to Los Angeles and tell my electrochemistry friends about this trip and the gift none seem surprised. One tells me I am lucky that I didn’t get the abalone shell because it is now illegal to take empty shells from tidal pools. But Al, my husband, on the phone back in Illinois, recognizes immediately that the gift I did receive is an example of true California weirdness.

I have brought it back home. My gift sits on my desk now as I write this. It sits next to a welcome home drawing my six year old son, who pronounces Illi-noise as Illi-noy, made of the most important geographic landmark in his life, the Sears Tower. The drawing is carefully and colorfully covered with rows of windows that trail at drunken angles up the side of the building. A charitable chemist describes this as a good example of a shift in the crystal phase of the building with the change in colors indicting, perhaps, a transmutation in elemental composition.

I will leave my, in retrospect, inevitable gift, a 2 inch long 4 oz. lead fishing weight, on my desk as an experiment to see if it will transmutate into a gold abalone shell, or, perhaps, spontaneously combust. It is, after all, from California. I expect these events to occur long before I expect Al to bless my attempts to convert our lawn into prairie. He will travel soon and I will move the border of Illinois wild flowers to what I hope is an un-noticeable inch further into the lawn. This is guerrilla warfare for where I see man’s enforced sterilization of Mother Nature Al sees only God’s lush abundance. Al insists that the turf grass (imported more than 100 years ago from cool, moist, temperate, England) is native here, which I suppose to him, born and raised in Buffalo, it is, just as the ferns and eucalyptus and banana trees are native to the twenty-somethings in California.