Stepping Out

  Considering we’re travelling quite a distance, the part of the world that we actually end up seeing is really rather small.

For the most part, once we’ve set our anchor in a harbour we only see the places we can reach by foot.

We rely on our legs to carry us for both errands and for entertainment.

 During our extended stay in Half Moon Bay we’ve been walking everyday. When Maia has done her schoolwork, I’ve finished writing and we’ve all completed our chores, we dingy into the dock and set off. Sometimes we’ll have a destination in mind: a rugged bluff above the ocean, the surf break or a long curving beach. Most of the time though we just choose a direction and see what we find.

 The funny thing, to me, is how many of our walks simply show us the ocean from different angles. You’d think that as people who live on and travel across the sea we would be eager to go inland and get away from the water. But we don’t. We tend to meander down beaches or along coastal trails watching the light shift over waves that are always changing.

 Yesterday we found these houses, four doors apart from each other, on a road that was once a coastal highway:

 We talked to one of the owners and learned his home was built in 1919 and that his yard once stretched all the way to the surf break. Then he told us about Michael Powers, an aging hippy/artist/adventure traveller – who built this house by hand over many decades:

 It sits in between lacklustre modern houses on a coastal road that is falling into the sea at a rate of a foot or more a year. The harbour, where our boat sits protected by the stone breakwater, has changed the currents so much that the shore further along is eroding.

 We all turned to the sea as he told us how it was changing his patch of land. And he told us he wouldn’t live anywhere else, that being in a place where he could see, hear, smell and feel the ocean is fundamental to his happiness.

We understood.