The Wise Latina Woman was Right

This morning Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, making her the first Latina and the third woman to sit on the Supreme Court.

During her confirmation hearings, Justice Sotomayor was excoriated over and over again over her comment in a speech about the specific wisdom of a “wise Latina woman.” Here is the exact quote:

Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Sotomayor was responding to an assertion, often attributed to Sandra Day O'Connor, that “a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.” Sotomayor argued against the presumption that gender, race, ethnicity, class, and life experience do not have an influence on how we make judgments even if we as individuals are consciously striving to be reasonable and impartial in our treatment of all parties in the case at hand.

And Sotomayor, is absolutely right. The weight of recent research in psychology and the emerging fields of cognitive and neuroscience show that our experiences and our emotions, our sense of who we are and what groups we feel an affiliation with, all of this affects, though it does not determine, how we make decisions.**

Take gender, for example. We need only look at the recent Supreme Court decision, Safford Unified School District v. Redding, which ruled that a school district illegally conducted a strip search of a thirteen-year-old girl, to recognize that the presence of a woman on the court was an important factor in the Court's decision-making process. In the oral arguments, Justice Breyer suggested that it was “no big deal when kids strip. After all, they do it for gym class all the time.” Outraged, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg responded angrily that “boys may like to preen in the locker room but girls, particularly teen-aged girls, do not” (See NPR transcript for April 21,2009.)

As a woman, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg understood , in ways that the other male justices could not, how traumatic it would be for a thirteen-year-old girl to undergo such a search. In a culture that simultaneously hypersexualizes the female body and yet assumes that pubescent girls are both sexually innocent and modest, it's inevitable that young women feel much more anxiety and embarrassment about the physical evidence of sexual maturity and do not want to strip in front of strangers. The girl who experienced the strip search developed stomach ulcers, a clear symptom that being forced to strip down to her underwear and then pull those garments away from her body was far different for her than changing her clothes for gym class.

This is not to say that I believe strip searches of students on such flimsy evidence as the school district had in this case is any more justified for boys than it is for girls. But Ginsburg recognized that gender made a difference in how much more negatively it could affect a young woman. Ultimately the majority of the court agreed with her and the decision ruled against the school district and in favor of the young woman.

What Judge Sotomayor was talking in about in her speech was precisely the kind of effect that Ginsburg's comment can have when judges are trying to reach a consensus about a particular case. In her “wise Latina” speech, Sotomayor stated: “I accept the thesis of a law school classmate, Professor Steven Carter of Yale Law School...that in any group of human beings there is a diversity of opinion because there is both a diversity of experiences and of thought.” She then went on to argue that “whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

This is not an argument in favor of a particular cultural, ethnic, racial, or gender bias. Rather it is an argument that since we all have these biases built into the very neural networks of our brain, our conscious awareness of them can bring new perspectives to the process of judging, just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg's tart comment on adolescent nudity, brought a new dimension to the case at hand and gave the male justices some insight into what thirteen-year-old Savana Redding might have felt the day she was strip-searched.

In fact, the more we are aware of our emotions and the processes we use to reach decisions, and most importantly, the more we are exposed to the life experiences of others who are not like us, the more we are able to expand the range of internal perspectives we use to make decisions that don't simply reinforce our inherent predilections.

In her “wise Latina” speech, Judge Sotomayor demonstrated that she is very much aware of the balance we must strike between drawing on our own experience and the need to try understand the experiences of others in striving to achieve our best semblance of impartiality. As she put it: “The aspiration to impartiality is just that -- it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.

For these reasons, Judge Sotomayor's presence on the Supreme Court represents not just a symbolic victory for diversity, but a real and practical one. As she has said, "Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage." In a society where women constitute about half the population, and as we rapidly move towards the day when there is no single majority race or ethnicity in the United States, that kind of self-awareness and openness to other experiences is precisely what we need more of on the highest court in the land

***In his seminal work, Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neurology at USC, argues that the ideal of pure reason championed by philosophers from Plato to Kant is wrong. Instead, he argues that “certain aspects of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality. At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use,” (“Introduction,” p. xiii). More recent work in neuroscience has confirmed and expanded Damasio's findings.

Goethe Slept Here (Not)

In June of this year I traveled through the countryside of Germany to small towns that do not show up on most maps. I was searching for the places my forebearers used to live and feeling grateful to my brother-in-law for the loan of his GPS navigation system, since I would have been utterly lost without it.

As far as I know all of my ancestors for three or four generations back arrived in the United States from Germany. My father's father came from Steinbach-Hallenberg, a beautiful village in a narrow valley of the state of Thuringia in the forests of central Germany. My mother's family came from the province of Mecklenburg, a land of small lakes and rolling fields near the Baltic Sea. My maternal great-grandfather was from the tiny village of Viezen, and my great-great-grandfather from Dargun, a town that produces one of the best beers I've ever tasted.

All of these towns lie in the Eastern part of Germany, and for much of my parents' adult lives were inaccessible to them because of two world wars and then the heavily guarded border that separated East Germany from the West. To my great regret, both my parents died without ever having the chance to see the homeland of their ancestors.

To reach these places I traveled extensively in what had been Eastern Germany, and saw first-hand what twenty years of investment has accomplished: here you find brand new stretches of autobahn, gleaming colorful town squares and Aldtstadts, and ongoing construction everywhere. But while Leipzig and Dresden and Berlin, and even smaller cities like Jena, have reaped the economic benefits of all this investment, the smaller towns have found the reintegration of the two Germanies to be a double-edged sword. Everywhere you see the care these towns have taken to restore their buildings and homes, but their inhabitants are largely from an older generation. Their children have mainly left for jobs in the West or in the larger cities of the East. I spent a poignant late afternoon in the town square of Schmalkalden. Despite its central role as the place where Protestant princes drew up articles with Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon to defend their rights, this historic town's central square was practically deserted.

Yet what I also found in small towns like Schmalkalden, Steinbach-Hallenberg, and Dargun was a warmth and eagerness to share information with an American like myself who was seeking her roots. An American tourist is a rare bird here. Yet more and more of us are coming back to these towns in search of our ancestry just as their own townspeople are rediscovering and celebrating their own history.

And small-town Germans, it turns out, have a wonderful sense of humor. As I was walking the streets of Steinbach-Hallenberg, down the very street where my own ancestors once lived from the 1600s to the end of the 19th-century, one of my cousins pointed out a sign on a house nearby. From street distance it read: “Hier wohnte Goethe” echoing the hundreds of placards you find everywhere in towns like Frankfurt, Leipzig, Strasbourg, Weimar and Jena that can rightly claim to have housed Germany's most famous poet. And yet, as my cousin pointed out laughing, if you stepped a little closer and glimpsed behind the fence, you could see the word at the bottom of the sign that not only denied its claim but also played off the maddening tendency of German grammar to leave the most important words for the end of sentences. “Hier wohnte Goethe...nie” or literally “Here lived Goethe (never).”

Towns like Steinbach-Hallenberg and Dargun know full well that they are not on the main intineraries of foreign tourists. They are not listed in Frommer's or the Michelin Guides. But that is precisely part of their charm. To reach them you drive on winding highways through forests or fields where wildflowers bloom on the sides of the road. You find a strawberry field and eat the most delicious fruit you've ever tasted straight from the field. You climb up a steep path to a ruined castle that locals visit on their daily walk. When you're having dinner at one of the family-run restaurants in town, you might hear the owner playing guitar or wonder what the children in the back room really think of a dubbed episode of The Simpsons. You can ask the hotel clerk where to find the local pastor so you can ask about church records, and have another guest tell you, “Of course I know him, he's a great guy (ein toller Mann)."

And what you will find more and more often are great sources of local history. In Steinbach-Hallenberg, the Museum of Metalwork shows you just how much hard work went into making the corkscrews, metal instruments and nails that were the main industry for centuries. In Dargun, where dairy farming and brewing beer are the main sources of income, a new small museum has opened documenting the historical farming and dairy practices of the region (Uns lütt Museum). Just behind this museum lie the ruins of a beautiful Cistercian abbey dating back to the 12th century as well as palace grounds and buildings that date back to the 17th-century when the monastery became the residence of the Dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Destroyed in the final days of World War II, it is about to undergo a massive restoration. Every summer the monastery and palace grounds host a festival of light with fireworks that shine on the nearby Kloster Lake.

Even if you don't have any specific reason to go quite as far off the beaten track as I did in seeking my family roots, I found plenty of small German towns that warrant the attention of the more adventurous tourist including Bamberg, with its grand cathedral, or Schwerin, which has an impressive Chambord-like castle that also escaped the devastation of World War II, or the highly under-touristed Schmalkalden, which was one of the most historically fascinating towns I visited. For anyone traveling Europe by car (and with GPS) taking a detour off the autobahn, autopiste, or other highway is well worth the time and effort. You never know what might lie around the bend, and taking the time to explore the unknown is more than half the fun of travel.

A Family Reunion in Steinbach-Hallenberg

On Saturday, June 20th I finally met my German cousins in Steinbach-Hallenberg. Separated by two World Wars, and the division of Germany into East and West until 1990, it has taken three generations for our families to reconnect, but the sense of kinship was palpable when I cross the main street of my ancestral hometown and shook hands with Rolf, Helmut, Werner, and Lothar Wahl.

Steinbach-Hallenberg is a small town nestled in a valley inside the Thuringen forest in Central Germany. In winter, it is a ski area, but in summer, it is host to many German hikers (or Wanderers). Its red roofs stand out in colorful contrast to the green hills surrounding it and many of the houses are covered with beautiful slate siding in intricate designs. The valley seemed quite narrow and deep as we entered it, and despite the fact the river running through it, die Hasel, is hardly bigger than a small stream, you often catch the sound water flowing by as small stone canals (literally “steinbach”) carry mountain runoff through the town.

Driving into Steinbach-Hallenberg sent a chill down my spine because I'd felt as if I were fulfilling not only a dream of my own but also of my father who died in 1978, long before reunification was even dreamed of. I had anticipated this meeting with much excitement and not a little trepidation. Would my cousins be as eager to meet me as I was to meet them? What would I learn about my family history? What would they want to know about the American side of the family? And most of all, would my recently resurrected German suffice to make conversation possible?

I need not have worried about the warmth of my welcome, and it was clear that Rolf Wahl had planned our visit with great care. First we toured the Metalwerksaftmuseum (Museum of Metalcraft) with Veronika Jung, the Museum's Director. This is one of the many new museums that are springing up in small German towns, as their inhabitants express their pride in their heritage by creating a place to document a way of life that is fast disappearing in more urban centers.

Inside the museum, Veronika began by greeting us in English, but she gave most of the tour quite slowly in clear German so that I could understand just about everything she told us. The museum is located in two houses, one of which was moved from another site with everything intact – the nail-making apparatus, all the tools, and a number of patents. The family (die Recknagel) had no children, and they wanted to give the remains of their business to the museum to preserve. It was impressive to see how much thought and energy had gone into a preservation process that required raising one of the buildings off its foundation and then moving it through small village streets to its new site.

For me this discovery of the tool-making history of Steinbach-Hallenberg generated a good deal of emotion.. In the museum I found the first tangible piece of evidence about my paternal great-grandfather, Peter Wilhelm Wahl who died in 1893 at the relatively young age of 52. I knew that his death had precipated his family's departure from Germany when his widow, Marie Bauerschmidt, decided to take her children, including my grandfather, Adolph, aged 8 and travel to America.

Peter Wilhelm had been a master locksmith, and museum has in its possession a book that recorded sales of special tools. So here I was actually holding history in my hand and seeing the page where Peter's name was written and the number of corkscrews he sold. I was almost moved to tears thinking what it would have meant to my father to be able to hold this document as well because I knew he had always longed to return to his homeland.

At the end of the tour we watched a smith make a corkscrew and then a hand-mail nail. It sounds like such a simple thing but it was back-breaking work when people in the town had to make thousands of nails a week just to survive. My cousins who are about about twenty to thirty years old than I am remembered seeing men who literally bent over from the effects of such hard labor, and Rolf emphasized that the nail-makers were the poorest of the townspeople and lived in the smallest houses, often with eight or ten children, all of whom helped out with the family trade.

Many of these hand-made nails were beautiful objects with different decorative heads on them for use in fine furniture. My father's autobiography mentions that a nail factory had closed down in Steinbach-Hallenberg in the years before Peter Wilhelm's death, but Veronika Jung told me that there were actually many nail and corkscrew factories in the area, almost all of them small family firms.
By the turn of the century, it was getting harder and harder to make a living from nail-making. A cigar factory opened up which used imported tobacco from Florida and Cuba and employed many women in the town, including Rolf's grandmother. Metalworking expanded to include production of many different kinds of tongs and other specialized metal implements.

Today in Steinbach-Hallenberg you can still see these small family enterprises, like the metal workshop whose very modern equipment is located in a house once owned by Rolf's great uncle. But it delighted me to see that in a small town where records of my ancestors as date back to the 16th century, the spirit of the family entrpreneur continues to reinvent itself. Just down the street from the metal workshop, Rolf pointed out to me a sign hanging on the house of another probably Karen Wahl, advertising not metalworking but IT services!

From Blogger Pictures

Congress Gets a little Greener

On Friday, June 26th, the U.S. House of Representatives, in a narrow 219 to 212 vote, made environmental history by passing a landmark “cap and trade” bill: the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Like many Americans who have been waiting years for the United States to take a leadership role on climate change, this represents an important first step.

But as happy as I am that Congress is finally taking action, Americans still have a long way ago to lessen the output of carbon we all help to generate.

Not only does this “cap and trade” legislation now have to make it through the Senate, where there is considerable Republican opposition, and some anxiety among Democrats from coal or oil-producing states, but the energy debate in the United States is still too stacked towards a smorgasbord policy that gives carbon-generating options like bio-fuels and “clean” coal (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) too much weight in the mix.

In terms of what the United States could be doing to support the most environmentally friendly forms of energy production, like wind and solar, we are still paying mostly lip service to alternative energy sources, and even less attention is being paid to the most cost-effective but least glamorous solution: reducing our consumption.

Critics of alternative energy often overstate the inherent “instability” of solar and wind power – namely, that the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun only shines a portion out of every 24-hour period. But those objections have repeatedly been shown to exaggerate the effects of these periodic disruptions.

In fact, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests “that a land-based network of 2.5 megawatt turbines installed in non-urban, non-forested, non-ice covered areas could supply all of the world’s electricity needs.” In the study's findings about the United States alone, the potential for wind to supply American electricity needs is even greater, sixteen times current electrical needs.

Indeed, the main obstacle to harnessing the power of the wind, lies in the need to construct a better, smarter grid of transmission lines, and the political will to pay the upfront costs that can be compensated by clean energy production in just a few years.

In answer to the common critique that wind power either produces too little or too much, scientists now suggest that when excess electricity is generated it could be used to generate hydrogen, which is another clean energy source and one that can be stored.

I just returned from a trip to Germany, and I was struck by how advanced this country is in generating wind power. Driving anywhere in the countryside you see dozens of windmills. At the end of 2006, Germany had 18,685 wind turbines with a capacity of around 20,600 megawatts. Wind accounted for 5.7 per cent of Germany's energy consumption and was the largest source of clean energy. By contrast in 2007, the United States' total wind energy capacity reached a meager 16,818 megawatts (MW).

According to the Germany Wind Energy Institute (DEWI), by 2010 Germany's wind farms should have “a combined out put of A48,000 MW, including as much as 10,000 MW from offshore farms.” The U.S. Department of Energy, under the former Bush Administration, was not predicting a substantial increase in wind power until 2030.

There is much to celebrate in Congress's first steps towards reducing America's production of carbon, but looking at our neighbors across the Atlantic, it is clear that we need to move much more aggressively on the deployment of alternative energy production in our own backyard. Our technological capacity to harness the power of the wind and sun is improving every year; now we need to generate the political will to make the investment that will improve all our lives in a time of accelerating climate change.

A Surprising Mother's Day Gift

From Recently Updated

I've received my share of memorable Mother's Day gifts over the years, despite occasional snarky comments about the “Hallmark Card” nature of the holiday. Casts of my children's handprints, hand-made pillows and vases, and the “Mom's Day Off” button that wasn't as effective as it promised, have all brought a smile to my face.

But this year I received an unusual gift, and it came, rather surprisingly, from my husband.

“How would you like to go for a bike ride?” he asked me as I drank my morning coffee. I thought about it and looked outside to see one of those perfect Northern California spring days --sunny but mild.

“Okay,” I agreed. Where shall we go?” He coaxed me to try some hills, telling me that after months of working out at the gym's “virtual reality” bikes, I was in better shape than I imagined.

Feeling both challenged and a bit nervous, I set out with him towards the Santa Cruz Mountains. As we hit the first slopes on the bike path, my husband told me to downshift. Breathing fast I did so and we made it to the end of the path at the underpass of I-280.

Here we turned left and started up the real hills following a series of side streets that eventually would take us to Page Mill Road, the route serious bikers take up to Skyline Ridge or even over the mountains to the Pacific. Now I was on my lowest gear and just focusing on my mantra: “One more foot of asphalt, Just one more foot. Keep pedaling. Keep breathing.”

To give you a sense of why I was so much on my mettle during this ride I have to explain about my long-running love/hate relationship with the bicycle. To me the bicycle represents a perfect balance of yin and yang: the thrill of speed and the peril of losing life and limb.

There are home movies of my Dad returning from his daily bike ride to pick up a newspaper with me tucked on one arm, while he used his other arm to steer.

When I was a little bigger I used to ride on the back of the bike on a seat my father made out of an arm rest. I often rode without shoes until the day I caught my heel in the spokes of the back wheel and gained a scar I carry to this day, and after that, Dad threatened me with a switch if he caught me out biking barefoot.

From My Pictures

At three I rode my tricycle so fast around curves that I frequently tipped over, scraping knees and elbows. At five, free of training wheels, I rode my bike around a bend in the sidewalk, hit a piece of concrete that had been lifted by tree roots and chipped my brand-new front permanent tooth on the handlebars.

By the time I was in my teens, I was riding far afield, still seeking the thrill of speed. There weren't many hills around my house, but I did find one with a decent incline. Unfortunately, the city buses used to run along the road at the bottom, and my brakes were not reliable so there inevitably came that “Oh my God” moment when I sailed in front of a bus driver with inches to spare.

But my real fear on this particular Mother's Day came from the memory of having attempted this same ride years ago on a ten-speed. Then I had downshifted to the lowest gear only to find that I was basically pedaling in place. I finally had to get off and push the bike up the steepest part as other bikers flew past, and the humiliation was too much. I was twenty-something and already too old for biking.

Now, sweating and making my painstaking way up another steep slope I thought that while nearly twenty more years had passed, I was actually making it this time.

We finally reached our intersection with Page Mill Road, and my husband was still urging me onwards. “It's only another half mile to Foothill Park,” he told me. “We're almost to Foothill Park?” I thought to myself incredulously. Now I had to keep going and I did, feeling a huge and surprising sense of accomplishment. I'd not only conquered a hill; I'd conquered about four miles of hill.

The best part, however, was yet to come. “Do you want to go back down Page Mill?” my husband asked me. I readily agreed and shifted to third so I could stay in better control of my speed. I turned my bike around and set off, transported back to my childhood self, the speed demon, heedless of possible scrapes and bruises, with the wind rushing past me and the cars barely passing me, and many glorious miles of descent unimpeded by red lights, stop signs, or city buses.

It's not often you find yourself physically upstaging your twenty-something former self, and I can attest, it feels like you've had a taste of immortality when it happens. So here's to more bike rides and a Mother's Day gift that didn't make me feel like a mom at all but just like being a kid again.

Has the Marriage Debate Reached a Tipping Point?

Photo courtesy of Sarah Parker. All rights reserved.

For the past few years Americans have been consumed with discussions about the legalization of same-sex marriage, first as a political wedge issue, but more recently as a legal phenomenon that seems to be gaining momentum.

Americans were simultaneously incredulous, elated, transfixed and horrified when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome began his impromptu issuing of marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in February 2004, a mere three months before Massachusetts became the first state in the union to legalize same-sex marriage. Before that only Vermont allowed couples of the same sex to gain any kind of legal recognition and then only under the rubric of “civil unions,” a term purposely created to avoid the religious and cultural sensitivities that surround the word “marriage.”

It's ironic in a way that marriage has become such a social and political bone of contention when the general movement of heterosexual couples over the past thirty to forty years has been away from marriage as both a legal and religious symbol. Beginning with rising rates of divorce in the 1960's and 70's, the number of couples dissolving their marriages reached a peak in 1981 (5.3 for every 1,000 people) before beginning a modest decline.

At the same time, increasing numbers of couples, particularly among the young, began to choose to co-habit or “live together” rather than marry, so much so that the 2000 census had to replace its quaint acronym, POSSLQ (Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters) with the more accurate “unmarried partner,” which could cover both same-sex and different-sex couples. In 2005, the United States Census Bureau reported 4.85 million cohabiting couples, up more than 1,000 percent from 1960, when there were only 439,000 such couples.

So it seems a bit strange that heterosexual couples, who seem less inclined to marry or to stay married themselves, should get so exorcised over the desire of same-sex couples to participate in a type of legal union heterosexual couples increasingly reject. Indeed, there is a certain “dog in the manger” quality to heterosexual arguments against same-sex marriage.

At best, these arguments offer same-sex couples the alternative of “civil union” as a kind of “separate but equal” institution for marriage, even though these same legally married couples bridle at the thought of making all “marriages” into “civil unions” for legal and governmental purposes. They want to stay “married” not “CUed” (civilly-unioned).

At worst, these arguments use a kind of “marriage in wonderland” logic to allege that same-sex marriages will somehow harm the marriages of heterosexual couples.

And that's the Achilles' heel of the argument against same-sex marriage.

We've been living with same-sex marriage in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden as well as a host of other countries who offer civil unions that carry the full rights and responsibilities as those provided by marriage. Yet Western civilization as we know it has not come to an end, there has been no mass expression of moral outrage, no uptick in the number of children declaring themselves “gay” because their parents are “gay,” no discernible effects on families whatsoever, except for gay couples and their children, who finally can exercise the legal rights other families take for granted.

You know that the hysteria over gay marriage has reached its last gasps when the “threatening” scenario of an advertisement like “The Gathering Storm” provokes more laughter and parody than nods of agreement. Opposition to gay marriage has long seemed like a powerful political stance for conservatives; now politicians who express strong disapproval of gay marriage risk seeming merely silly and out of touch.

In demographic terms, I represent a divide between members of an older generation that finds it hard to accept the idea of same-sex marriage and younger people who increasingly take it for granted that some of their peers will want to marry someone of the same sex. According to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll: “Support for gay marriage has grown somewhat among voters over age 65, from 15 percent to 28 percent, but six in ten remain strongly opposed. Among those under 35, though, two-thirds support it, up from 53 percent in 2006, and nearly half support it strongly."

For those who fear the rising tide of public support for same-sex marriage as well as the expanding enfranchisement of same-sex couples to marry in more states, time is not on their side. Same-sex marriage will gain more acceptance, and although I'm not often given to prediction, I believe that by the time more than half of states legalize such marriages, the response of the public will be a collective yawn.

Now it's spring, the wedding season is upon us, and I myself will soon be attending the nuptials of my niece who is marrying a man. Frankly, it would make no difference to me if she were marrying another woman. Having attended at least one same-sex marriage, commitment ceremony, what you will, I can safely say that the beauty of a marriage celebration comes from sharing in the happiness of the couple who are pledging their faith in front of friends and families and not whether that couple is gay or straight. Some day I hope it won't even be an issue.

Nothing Says Summer Like a Day at the Beach, Any Time of Year

We had a brief heat wave a couple of weekends ago when Bay Area cities broke records, and then we descended back into wintry weather with cloudy skies, wind gusts, and temperatures that barely broke into the 60's and 70's. Even I agreed to turn on the heat the other day when the rest of the family got out of bed and started putting on parkas and two layers of sweatshirts over their pajamas.

We're in the middle of spring, and in Palo Alto, that means we should at least be getting a taste of summer. True the roses are in bloom, and the pollen count is up, but it's often been too cold to be outside without a jacket and we've had more clouds and rain than I can remember for this time of year. For a region that's been plagued by drought, this is good news, but there's a part of me that's still insists stubbornly that this is not exactly the merry month of May.

So I'm looking back with nostalgia at photos from a weekend we spent at the beach in the middle of April when we had a brief respite from rain and clouds. We had one perfect day on the coast in Carmel: the sun was out, the sky was a brilliant blue, and the kids felt warm enough to risk getting splashed by cold Pacific waves.

We started out by climbing along the rocks and tidal pools at the Point Lobos State Park Reserve. My youngest soon left me behind as he scrambled up sharp inclines like a mountain goat, reminding me of my own father's penchant for climbing rocks, and getting himself into perches overlooking waterfalls or ravines that were clearly out of bounds. “Dad, the ranger's coming,” I found myself yelling at him once when were in Yosemite, hoping it would scare him back down into safer territory.

There was no hope of that today. I hadn't seen a single park official anywhere, but one of the mothers who was with us, filled in that role, telling her kids not to follow mine out onto the rocks where a rogue wave could sweep them off. She was perfectly right to be concerned since her two boys were much younger than mine. My fifteen-year-old was keeping an eye on his adventuresome younger brother, and my husband was also looking out for them, when he wasn't concentrating on getting a perfect shot of the waves and the pelicans that kept sweeping across just above them in swift-moving arcs. I had sighted a playful sea otter with my binoculars and had no intention of going anywhere as long as it stayed in view.

Now that I'm on my third son and resigned to the fact that he's an intrepid climber, my attitude towards child safety has shifted considerably towards: “Don't ask, don't look.” I know the odds are that they will make it out of childhood with no more than scrapes and bruises (and so far one broken arm), and following them around telling them to be careful is just going to drive them towards steeper cliffs and more dangerous surf. As it turned out, my boys did move off the furthest rock about one minute before a wave swept over it, but my husband reassured me that they would just have been soaked (most likely).

From Springs to Mind

In search of safer beaches, we climbed up the trail towards China Beach, a protected cove with white sand that shines under turquoise waters as if you had suddenly found yourself in Jamaica, only with much, much colder water. There was no chance of playing in these waters, however, because the beach had been taken over by mother harbor seals who were still nursing their pups. We watched one pair emerge onto the beach and lumber up onto the sand, and then with the binoculars we began to discern at least four or five more pairs, and one pup who was old enough to be on her own. The young ones flopped and wriggled while their mothers occasionally batted them with a flipper as if to say, “Enough already. Can't you see I'm trying to take a nap?”

Tomas, my fifteen-year-old, was still determined to make it to beach where there were waves he could play in so we all piled back into our respective mini-vans and headed about a quarter mile north on Highway 1 to Monastery Beach, officially known as the Carmel River State Beach, and referred to by local divers as “Mortuary” Beach because just about every year there are fatalities due to rip tides, rogue waves, or divers who lose track of their depth.

The geology of beach is fascinating because as you look at the cliffs behind where the Carmelite monastery is located, you don't realize that you're on the edge of an enormous canyon, big enough to hold several Grand Canyons. The steep slope of the beach means that waves often crash directly onto the sand, particularly in the middle where the slope is steepest.

That didn't stop Tomas from playing in the freezing surf, keeping a watchful eye on the younger ones who ran up to the waves and then away from them cackling with glee. All of them got soaked eventually, but the cold and wet couldn't dampen the joy on their faces. With Tomas guarding them from behind and the rest of the adults watching them from above, we whiled away a perfect warm sunny afternoon as the tide came in and children ran shrieking from advancing waves, stopping only to refuel on cookies and grapes before they ran back for more and more.

From Springs to Mind