Late one afternoon last year, during a troubled time in my life, I took a long walk on the beach.

A day of rain was ending. Watery sunlight shone on glossy streets. It was a brief lull in California’s unrelenting winter. To the west, a layer of cirrus clouds announced another storm approaching. A high wind chased the departing rain, churning the sea into a tangle of waves.

I had been here—the Redondo Beach shoreline at the southern end of Santa Monica Bay—many times before. I spent most of my childhood in a small house about a mile away. Even after moving to Long Beach as a teenager, and eventually leaving California altogether to raise my family in New York City, I never stopped returning to Redondo Beach.

Why do some people return again and again to the places they grew up? Not everyone does. Some leave and never look back. Others never leave at all. Regardless, I think everyone has a place like this beach—a place where they go, even if only in their mind, when they are hurt, or lost, or lonely. A place where memories feel particularly vivid, and where the landscape is charged with an enduring goodness and rightness that is hard to put into words.

A need for such goodness and rightness had drawn me to the ocean on that winter afternoon. Earlier that day, my younger brother and I had moved my mom, who is 81, into a memory care facility.

It happened to be in Redondo Beach. We hadn’t set out to return to the place where our family started. It just worked out that way. This facility was one of the few memory care places we could find in Southern California that would accept my mother’s two beloved dogs. Now we were here at a time of endings.

My mom has dementia. She was diagnosed in 2018 and lived for several years in an assisted living place in Orange County, until her memory loss required a higher level of care. In her prime, she was a newspaper reporter with a generous heart, an observant mind, and a wised-up take on the world. My dad, until he suffered a massive stroke when I was 9, worked in newspapers too. He was more bookish and ruminative.

My mom supplied the energy, the fun, and a lot of the volatility in our household. After my dad’s stroke, she raised us singlehandedly, worked full time, and cared for my dad. She kept the house running, took us on vacations, and taught us to respect and be curious about other people, no matter who they were or where they came from.

To cope with caring for my dad, she also turned to drinking. Our childhood was a careening mix of love and chaos.

All caregiving is hard. Caregiving for a parent with whom you have a complicated relationship is harder. My mom’s dementia, doctors say, is caused in part by her drinking. She was like a storm that churned through our lives. Now we’re surveying the damage and doing our best to clean things up.

Given all those complicated feelings, you’d think I’d want little to do with the place I was raised. Yet that afternoon, after moving my mom into her room with just a few possessions so she didn’t hide or lose them, I knew exactly where I needed to go. I drove straight to the beach, parked the car, and started walking. I went in search of memories.

I am now the keeper of my family’s memories. All of my grandparents died when I was a child. My dad died in 2005. One of my cousins is delving into family genealogy, but I am the oldest one who remembers the days and years of that Redondo Beach childhood. It’s an unsettling responsibility. I tell stories to my own kids, but even as I tell them, I recognize how much the stories leave out.

The memories I sought walking along the beach were something other than stories. Memory, on its own, is not particularly reliable. It often takes the form of stories, which edit and package reality. Places are different. On their own, they tell no stories. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say they tell all the stories. At every moment, they are featuring in countless people’s experiences and memories.

If you return to the same place enough times, during every stage of your life, layers of memory accumulate. Viewed as a whole, those layers can begin to reveal truths deeper than any story. It can feel like stepping outside yourself and seeing the entirety of your life stacked like a pile of snapshots. There is no obvious connection between the snapshots, except that the same person and the same place are in each one. You could arrange them into a pattern and tell a story. You could just as easily mix them up and tell a different story. At a certain point, you give up editing and packaging.

The deeper truth that emerges from all of that has something to do with continuity and change existing simultaneously, not canceling each other out.

Redondo Beach has changed a lot in the decades since I was born. Its average home price is now close to $1.5 million. My parents bought their house in the early 1970s for $35,000. You could see a sliver of ocean from my bedroom but our street was not high class. Our neighbors were a biker gang, a family who worked in pest control, some retirees, and a guy who grew pot in his backyard. We duct-taped our shoes to make them last longer. The kids at my school were mostly stoners, metalheads, or, from the nicer part of town, children of Japanese aerospace engineers. There weren’t a lot of playgrounds, so we sought out construction sites, where we improvised BMX bike tracks and staged dirt-clod battles.

Because a zoning change in the 1970s lifted density limits throughout the city, there were many construction sites. Peeling bungalows gave way to glossy multistory complexes, school enrollment shrank and campuses closed. Redondo has never been as upscale as its South Bay neighbors, Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach, in part because the northern part of the city abuts a big oil refinery. Its pier, despite many attempted improvements, remains seemingly unalterably dilapidated. But Redondo Beach has grown more expensive, and more international. Today, a fifth of residents are foreign born. A bare majority are white. It’s like the rest of L.A., riding economic waves and growing ever more defined by a kaleidoscope of cultures.

So much change. And yet, at the same time, just as I remember. That winter afternoon last January, I parked at the southern end of the beach. Parts of the bike path were still submerged in pools of water. I walked to the sand, which was cold and wet. I took off my shoes and let the waves come up and around my legs.

There were sand pipers. Sea gulls. A few intrepid surfers rode the storm swell. The wind blew so hard, I could hear nothing but air and water. Walking along like that, I could have been five years old, or 50. The sea, the sand, the waves, and the wind were the same. Along the bluff top, I recognized most of the condo buildings. I had watched them go up as a child. There they were, unchanged.

People grow older, everything changes. And yet, inside, we peer out from the same place we peered from as a child. My father, near the end of his life, barely able to stand, shook his head and said, “You know, inside, I still feel like I’m in elementary school.”

I find such thoughts immensely comforting as I watch my mom decline. Her story, and maybe the story of our family, is not all that happy. It helps to see her life not as a story but as a totality, too complicated for stories. At the heart of all the change and loss, there remains a singular person, whom I love.

I return to Redondo Beach because it teaches me a great redeeming fact about life: That what is good and right about a person—maybe about the world itself—endures even as everything else changes and fades away. I need to be reminded of that, especially now. I hope you have a place that does the same for you.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, LeBlanc-Payne draws inspiration from natural artifacts found on the beaches of Connecticut; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Costa Brava, Spain; and the Côte d’Azur, France. Using traditional ink illustration, she composes her beachcombing into elegant arrangements that she finishes off with vibrant geometries of color that she adds digitally.

“I refer to the sketches as ‘exercise at the beach’ to flex my drawing muscles,” LeBlanc-Payne tells Zócalo. “My day-to-day is immersed in digital. It’s satisfying to switch off and switch over to a traditional medium to create these drawings.”

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Light disperses in the spray, and a seal
ducks under again. Home for them.

Swell and curl, the untrained wave
trains under lunar pull. Few things

outreach the power of touch.

Left out,
supreme in its trouble and possessiveness,

a human observes its shadow
lengthening across the surf. In this commotion, does it

too have a natural place — and the tide

pushes then drags a lumpy shampoo
over a collection of broken teeth.
 

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And we VW enthusiasts are especially bummed out.

Volkswagen—the “people’s car”—occupies a special niche in American popular culture, an unlikely outcome for a vehicular brainchild of Adolf Hitler. It’s a pretty uncanny coup, really, that VW and its original model, fondly known as the Bug or Beetle, could be conceived at the dawn of the Third Reich and still find their way into myriad American hearts and households, so soon after World War II, no less. In the 1960s, the loaf-shaped VW bus (dubbed the “Type 2” when it arrived in America in the early 1950s) turned into at least as much of an icon as the famed Beetle, but it was of course the Beetle that first paved the way for VW.

A famously unorthodox and offbeat 1960s advertising campaign helped get the unusual-looking Bug rolling—and more recently a VW commercial became one of the most shared Super Bowl ads of all time (remember “The Force,” with the little kid dressed as Darth Vader?). But an alchemy more powerful than advertising has somehow fueled the VW phenomenon, an organic fervor—a force?—of the kind that most brands, automotive or otherwise, can only dream about tapping into.

With their novel rear-mounted, air-cooled engines, the original Bugs and buses were built to be simple, practical, relatively cheap to buy, and easy to maintain. That’s one reason so many are still on the road—and why even today people get the joke when Woody Allen’s character in Sleeper stumbles upon a 200-year-old Bug and the dust-encrusted relic starts right up.

But a few years before its supporting role in Sleeper, the people’s car had already become a Hollywood star in The Love Bug, the first in a series of giddy flicks about Herbie, the Bug with a mind of its own. That Disney movie first struck a popular chord in 1969—a few months before a lot of Bugs and buses rolled into Woodstock.

Disney and Woodstock. That says something, and further examples of how the Bug made inroads across the culture are too numerous to count, from the much-mulled-over Beetle on the cover of the Beatles’ (!) Abbey Road album, to Herbie Fully Loaded (Disney’s 2005 Love Bug reboot), to the recurring role of the indigo-hued New Beetle in TV’s Breaking Bad.

The bus has been variously known as a microbus, minibus, van, transporter, camper, station wagon, and a few other monikers reflective of the vehicle’s multipurpose applications. But as with the Bug, the basic structure and silhouette of the bus scarcely changed for several decades. So it takes an aficionado of sorts to differentiate between a model made in the 1960s from, say, the 1979 VW bus that’s like a member of the Hoover family in Little Miss Sunshine.

The bright yellow and white bus in the movie (nowadays on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum) fairly evokes sunshine on wheels, despite the stormy interactions among the six passengers—and in what other car could they all sit, scattered on utilitarian bench seats, as if in pews? Drive through any Southern California beach city and you’ll find that such buses (and Vanagons, the microbus’s boxier 1980s successor) figure prominently in the streetscape.

When I think about it, I had my own bit part in building VW lore, back when I would load up my Sunshine-style bus with my buddies and their surfboards. It all felt pretty cool, but where did that elusive notion of coolness come from? The VW “Beach Bomb” in my Hot Wheels collection?

Perhaps the blue VW bus that figures prominently on the cover of Bob Dylan’s album The Freewheelin’ somehow seeped into my consciousness. The lyrics to The Who’s “Magic Bus,” a staple of classic rock, might have fortified the pop alchemy, too, even if the song wasn’t about a VW.

My youthful bus driving days were still a few years before Sean Penn, as stereotypical Southern California surfer dude Jeff Spicoli, tumbled out of a smoke-filled VW bus in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Yet I drove a similar bus, and with my sun-fried, shoulder-length hair, I looked a lot like Spicoli (but had fewer tardies, and probably better grades and health habits).

Many years later, I was watching Little Miss Sunshine with my wife and kids and we laughed harder than most in the theater when (spoiler alert!) the microbus’s horn stuck. Our family’s own VW Vanagon—bought used and by then 20 years old—had had the same quirk. And in our gleeful response, in 2006, I heard echoes of Disney, Woodstock, Woody Allen, and many more.

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Time passes: closets, mirrors,
laundry, arguments, secret
hiding places. Bottom line:
there’s not enough room here.

When I finally make it
to the ocean
I realize:
1) my toes have been too close
    to the edge of the pier, and
2) my aunt Marilyn isn’t really ignoring
    my growing list of accomplishments,
        she’s dead. About ten years now.

Dead and ignoring you are kind
of the same superhero power
whereas dragging that 50-foot hose
for miles like I’d been doing was
sheer stupidity. Sheer as
ice.

Who put, who put, who put—no
who hid ice cubes in my pocket?

No one living tried to stop me
from dragging that hose down the street
through the dirt to the ocean but
the dead waved their arms
and howled at me from atop the dotted
yellow line. Cars plowed
right through ‘em.

The ocean is nice. I should come
here more often. [Phone rings]
“Marilyn?” and her voice
is so, so, so—no
happy for me. Yes,

she’s dead. About ten years now.
And the ice cubes? Somehow
they’re still all t/here.

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My dad first introduced me to the morning charm of Perry’s one Sunday a few years back. Since then, he makes time once every weekend to drive over and say hi to the ocean. It runs in our blood: visiting the beach, even if just for a few moments, is a cleanse for our brains. After spending the past year land-locked and studying in Arizona, I found myself more anxious to visit the ocean this summer than ever before.

The Perry’s that my dad and I patronize is a few miles past the Santa Monica Pier heading toward Venice. Sometimes I look around and wonder how a place could be so charming. A few times a week, as I made my summer commute from the San Gabriel Valley to an office in Santa Monica, I left an hour earlier than I needed to—all so I could park my car in a $1 per hour lot, leave my shoes in the car, and go to Perry’s.

Each visit begins the same way: I walk up to the counter and am greeted with a big smile by perhaps the cheeriest guy in this city. He’s patient with me as I stare at the board for minutes, contemplating their extensive menu.

Is it weird to have mahimahi tacos for breakfast? I wonder.

Deciding against it, I end up choosing the King Richard’s veggie breakfast burrito with egg whites.

I settle into one of the red lawn chairs they’ve set up in the sand as I watch the ocean waves and wait for them to call my number. I’m often the first number of the day. They open at 9 a.m. on weekdays, and that’s exactly when I like to show up.

On a Tuesday morning, there are rarely many people at this walk-up, shoe-optional beach café, and that’s a big reason I’m there. Beachfront peacefulness is hard to come by in a crowded city. Santa Monica is full of people and traffic, but it still feels like a real beach community before the day begins. There aren’t even that many cyclists out at that time—just a few joggers and weary surfers. It’s well worth waking up early to catch a moment of small-town charm.

Nothing I’ve found in L.A. beats the combination of crisp morning air, toes in the sand, and a small black coffee as I wait for my breakfast. It’s always a good morning after that.

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I had gone to the beach with my college roommate Amanda, who flew in from Arizona on Thursday for the weekend. On Sunday, a few hours before her flight home, we finally found time to try the beach, as a brief stop on our way to drop her off at LAX. On the way, we picked up another friend, Sam, who lives on a houseboat in the Marina. Finding parking at the Venice Pier took 20 minutes; after a stop at Starbucks, we had 45 minutes to dip our toes in the sand before heading to the airport.

From the coffee shop, we made our way past packed cafés serving brunch to locals and tourists alike. Before approaching the sand, we slipped off our shoes and walked alongside the Venice Pier until the chilly water was up to our calves. The sky was overcast, and the ocean water was refreshing. I was relaxed and happy as I soaked in the idyllic combination of crisp air, toes in the sand and the company of my closest girlfriends, one from middle school and one from college. I missed this. I grew up taking weekend trips to Perry’s Beach Café with my dad on Sunday mornings, driving up PCH to The Reel Inn in Malibu to eat fish on paper plates, and celebrating birthdays with picnics in Zuma.

Walking in and out of the surf, we shared a beautiful 30 minutes, and stories of ex-boyfriends, college classes, and our mutual struggles to be vegetarian. We were standing in a triangular formation; I was up to my knees in water facing Sam and Amanda. I had been digging a hole in the sand with my feet, burying my ankles in it as water rhythmically filled and emptied it.

Without warning and without a second to look around, an explosion erupted above my head. My heart skipped about 10 beats. An enormous, white light broke the sky above me. A huge roar echoed across the beach, and my body refused to turn around, for fear of seeing that a bomb had gone off around me. I still had my Starbucks coffee and flip-flops in my hands, but those hands had gone numb.

Seconds later, the bright light disappeared, and the thunder was replaced with sounds of chaos on the beach. We ran, out of instinct, to shelter, which was out of the water and under the pier. As Sam and Amanda caught their breath, my attention was focused on my left kneecap, which was tingling. As I reached down to touch it, I became very aware of my hands. The joints in my fingers felt tender, and my hands were suddenly tingling as well.

As I glanced around the beach, trying to make sense of the last 10 seconds, I heard Amanda telling Sam that it was lightning. Amanda told me that the bolt had hit the water directly behind me, just 30 or so feet away. I would later learn, via the Weather Channel, that the lightning strike electrified the water for about 50 yards around it. I had been standing knee-deep in what they called the “hot zone.” My left leg was closest to the deep water, so the shock may have entered through that extremity and exited through my hands.

From under the pier, I watched as dozens and dozens of people poured out of the ocean, sprinting, while others ran into the water to attend to surfers and swimmers who had been struck. The line separating the water from the dry sand was swarming with frazzled men and women. Sunbathers sat up straight. Families with picnics and umbrellas farther up the beach were quickly packing up to head home.

I began to regain sensation in my hands and ignored my tingling knee as we joined the mass exodus from the beach. We walked past the surf shops and restaurants again, this time overhearing conversations between strangers about the lightning. As we climbed into my car, I brushed the sand from my feet, which sent a small but sharp sensation through my ankle. The sand felt more grainy than usual on my fingertips. Perplexed, I gave up cleaning my feet and started the car.

I felt more scattered and anxious than usual, but I had to drive. I dropped Sam off at her boat and took Amanda to LAX. Then, while driving away from the airport, I made the uncharacteristic decision to try to get back to South Pasadena without using any smart navigation apps. I could hardly focus on where I was going and desperately didn’t want a voice coming out of my phone micromanaging my driving, so I got on the freeway and drove straight until I felt like changing lanes.

I read “Norwalk” on a freeway sign, and not knowing where that was, took the exit. I was preoccupied with my own thoughts, replaying the surreal scene of families, couples, and small children running out of the ocean. In that moment of aimless driving, I wanted to go to a bookstore and skim the shelves. No, I wanted to go shopping for workout pants. Shaking my head, I decided I wanted food. I was starving, my arms were suddenly sore, and I wanted to stop driving as soon as possible.

I gave in and turned on Waze for directions to Fresco Community Market, my favorite grocery store. I spent about 45 minutes walking around, forgetting why I was in that aisle, staring at the Greek yogurt choices, walking away and then coming back. I was dazed, but didn’t recognize it. Finally, I bought a loaf of bread, fig jam, and several types of cheeses and drove home. After making myself a grilled sandwich with my new ingredients, the chaotic day melted away as I watched Chopped, the Food Network show, and drank orange juice.

A few minutes after I finished my meal, my parents walked in the door, and I told them about my wild afternoon. I insisted I was fine, and I really thought I was. Once I finished my sandwich, I stood up.

This is when things took a turn. My mother watched me with a close eye as my legs grew weak, and my fingers began to tingle again. Within seconds of standing, I had hardly enough energy to bring my plate into the kitchen and left to lie down in my bedroom.

I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I have a long-standing sensitivity to fluorescent lights in the kitchen. But usually the dizzy feeling brought on by visits to the kitchen goes away within seconds. Not now. My eyes wanted to close, and suddenly my body felt cold. I reached up to itch my neck and froze. I looked down as I ran my finger across my neck. The tingly feeling I had felt in my knee and my fingers earlier that day was spreading. It felt as though there were eight layers of skin between my fingertips and the rest of my body.

The inside of my elbow became achy, and my muscles became sore with every second that my arm was elevated to reach my neck. The nerves throughout my body felt both electrified and numb. I lay very still as I called for my parents to come upstairs. When they arrived, my eyes were glassy, and my shallow breaths came and went quickly. It felt like an electric wave was moving up and down my left leg, across my torso. I squirmed on my bed to try and shift the sensation but it had no effect.

My parents started asking me specific questions, such as where my shoes are, if I remember the names of my medication, and what I ate today. I stared blankly at them and didn’t speak. A few minutes later, I watched as six or seven paramedics walked through my bedroom. A paramedic asked for my name and age; I answered quickly to focus on following the electric current through my body. They took my blood pressure and asked me other questions, to which I murmured answers.

The paramedics said that I seemed fine, medically speaking. But the fatigue was overwhelming, and a loud beep from a paramedic’s walkie-talkie gave me a sudden and raging headache. I tried to explain how I was feeling, but the paramedic interrupted to say that they couldn’t answer specific questions because of liability concerns. The paramedic offered me a ride to a hospital, but I shook my head quickly. If I was in any real danger, I figured I wouldn’t have been able to operate the car as I did after leaving the beach. Within minutes, the paramedics were gone.

The electric wave moving across my body had slowed down since I began dealing with the paramedics. When I awoke and joined my family later that evening, I felt tired, but the tingly sensation had stopped. I contacted Sam and Amanda, who reported no ill effects.

I feel fine today as I recount this. The rare lightning bolt was a surprise to Angelenos, as were the heavy rainstorms earlier in the day. We’re not used to such things. I hadn’t known, on Sunday morning before my trip to the beach, that thunder follows lightning, or that untimely rainstorms are something to worry about. I know now.

The post I Was Struck by Venice Lightning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why? Because whenever I had a little time off from my job with National Public Radio, the last thing I wanted was more insanity. Pie de la Cuesta offered calm. It was tranquil and pristine, with about a dozen affordable mom-and-pop beach hostels that all offered the same thing: a clean bungalow, hammocks on the beach, cold beer, and fresh fish.

But Pie de la Cuesta was hardly boring. Sometimes it was dangerous. The currents along that stretch of Pacific killed people frequently. In the 15 times I made it down there I saw three or four people nearly die. None had taken any risks; they were just swimming a few yards offshore when the currents suddenly decided to take them. The lucky few I witnessed all got rescued by other swimmers, dragged back to the beach where they collapsed, drawing huge crowds around them. Sometimes it was in the evening, sometimes in the morning. You never knew when it would happen.

The beach didn’t just represent salvation for swimmers. Crossing to its inland side you saw that the sandbar sheltered a deep brackish estuary, cut with hundreds of mellow waterways studded with palm trees. It was where they filmed the Vietnam scenes for the first Rambo film.

Pie de la Cuesta was where our little West Highland Terrier, Cinque, got his first and only shot at summer love. Happening upon a giant Doberman bitch lying in the shade of a tree, he tried to hump her every which way except the right way. His date ended when the Doberman lifted her head and snarled, enough is enough.

Pie de la Cuesta had two vacant beachfront lots where I was sorely tempted to invest and open my own bungalow retreat. But I was warned against it. Real estate dealings in Mexico are a good road to trouble. And Guerrero state is the Wild West, where corruption is the norm. Where a gringo with cash is like a bleeding surfer in a bay full of hammerheads. One foreign bungalow owner was shot dead by one of his own security guys on New Year’s Eve, 2003.

Pie de la Cuesta is where I took my biological mother for her 70th birthday. After, I was driving us home, back towards Mexico City, at two in the morning, doing 100 miles an hour through the darkness. Somewhere south of Chilpancingo, the hardscrabble state capital of Guerrero, I thought it was funny that there was a bull in the road. Then it wasn’t funny. But I was too tired to react. Luckily for us the black beast moved on its own into the left of the two lanes, which was bad luck for the Cherokee four-by-four that tried to pass me at that very moment. As it pulled alongside me it collided with the bull square on. Right outside my driver’s side window. It sounded like someone had dropped an 800-pound hamburger on to a gym floor.

Pie de la Cuesta has a boring name. But it was the perfect spot to unwind, to watch the sun set over the Pacific while drinking a cold Corona with salt and lemon; to read an entire book without leaving your hammock. To do nothing at all.

But things do happen there, amidst the tranquility. Whether I ever make it back, Pie de la Cuesta will be with me forever. It’s where I met my partner, Anne, the love of my life, a decade ago.

Gerry Hadden is the Europe correspondent for PRI’s The World and author of Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti.

Buy the book: Skylight, Amazon, Powell’s

*Photo by Gerry Hadden.

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