At most points in the descent, I was so busy trying to hold on and get around obstacles, that I seldom looked around. This portion of coast around La Jolla uplands is of the late Miocene Era, sedimentary rock on top of and cut through by striated metamorphic and plutonic rock, the whole business known as the San Onofre Breccia. I had lectured often about how these high cliffs were formed when the most recent part of this coast had risen, relatively late geologically speaking, long after the dinosaurs were fossils and the earth was undergoing repeated hard glaciations. And thus, all this was, for me, a source of great interest. All around I could make out a mass of indurated rock, gray wales, shales, bedded cherts, and an occasional limestone lens or two, and infrequently interbedded among it all, pillow basalt, indicating oceanic origin. It might have been a textbook diagram.
At one completely exposed turn-and-drop all-rock balcony about a quarter of the way down the cliff from the parking lot above we were suddenly facing north, along the beach, showing exactly how high up as well as how vulnerable we were. I found it thrilling, so I remained there while Craig went on, waiting for Mark to join me from behind so I could share the astonishing view with him.
He seemed upset: his normally cool demeanor jolted. I was about to say something about the rock, the stupendous view, when Mark reached a little shale shelf I was on and with a single glance realized where we were. His reaction was simply to turn away. “This the way?” he asked in a tight voice, gesturing down.
I went to where Mark was looking, where Craig had gone: a shallow sand slide between two outjuttings of rock, ending in a narrow sand pit. It looked like fun.
“Sure is! Follow me!” I started down, half-sliding, while grabbing at the worn smooth edges of rock on each side. When I landed with a thump in the little sand pit, Craig suddenly appeared from around the bend.
“What’s taking you so long? At this rate, it’ll take hours to climb down.”
“Just go! Will you!” I gave him a little push. Then I looked up. Mark was where I’d just been, some ten feet above, sitting on the edge of the little shelf, his feet and bag hanging off to one side. He wasn’t moving. “What’s wrong?” I shouted up. Craig remained where he was. “Mark!” I shouted again.
“There’s nothing to hold on to,” Mark shouted back.
“Just slide down.”
“I can’t!”
“Sure you can. We both did it.”
“I can’t!” Mark repeated, and this time there was something else to the tone of his voice.
“I’m here. I’ll catch you. You won’t go anywhere.”
“I can’t!” he repeated and dragged himself up to his feet, slipped, quickly grabbed at some grass that instantly gave way, so that he had to scrabble at nearby rock, where he held on as though for dear life. “I’m going back,” he shouted.
“What’s wrong?” Craig asked me, annoyed.
“Are you sure?” I called up at Mark.
“If we go back up,” Craig was saying, “we’ll have to go around to the other parking lot and walk to the beach. That’ll take a half hour.”
“You go down. We’ll take the long way and join you later.”
“I’ve got to show you where the other parking lot is. You’ll never find it on your own.”
“Do what you want, Craig. I’m going back up,” I said. “Mark! Wait for me,” I shouted and began scrambling up the sand slide.
Mark was hunkered down where he’d grabbed on, looking all-in, panting, his bag at his feet.
“Let me take that,” I said, grabbing his bigger bag, “I can cope easier with it,” I said, chatting away, trying to ignore the obvious, that Mark looked pale, out of it.
“I can’t do it!” he repeated. Then, “When I was a kid I used to have this nightmare of going off the edge of a cliff. I’d be holding on to tufts of grass, then sharp rock, then I’d slide off.”
In all our fifteen years together, I’d never heard of the dream before.
“It’s my fault we’re here in the first place.” I tried changing the subject. “If I weren’t so determined not to let Stupid have the last word. I mean this cliff is high, even to me, and it is scary and…”
I don’t know how much of it Mark even heard.
“And all of a sudden,” Mark went on, “there I was! In the nightmare! Right in it!”
“Nightmare’s over,” I said. “We’re going back up.”
“I don’t know if I can,” he said.
I couldn’t ever remember seeing Mark, or hearing him, like this.
“I’ll be right behind you,” I said. “You know me, I’m like a mountain goat. You almost have to be on this cliff. You’ll have to flatten me completely to fall, and that’s not going to be so easy. C’mon, now! Up!”
He stood up a little shakily, but with both hands free now of the bag, he had more to grip with and so a bit more confidence. He began climbing again, at first inch by inch, then picking up speed. I remained less than a foot behind him as he ascended, crowding him at times, touching him at all times, and so letting him know I was there. When we finally got over the fence, he went straight to the car, while I looked around.
Mark all but collapsed on the hood of the T-Bird. And so he wouldn’t look strange, I did the same.
Although he was clearly nonplussed by this turn of events, Craig must have been embarrassed by what happened, maybe by the fact that it was Mark who had been daunted by the cliff, and not me. Whatever the reason, Craig uncharacteristically didn’t take advantage of the occasion with some comment, but instead decided to be sort of sweet.
“I’m sorry, guys,” Mark said.
“The other way is a good path,” Craig changed the subject brightly. “It’s supposed to be one of the area’s better nature trails.”
A few minutes later, we all got into the T-Bird again. It wasn’t a long drive along Torrey Pines Road to the cut-off that led to the other parking lot, and we would have easily found it without Craig, despite what he’d said. It was naturally less high than the previous parking lot, and while the ocean was visible, it was significantly farther away. Craig said it would be about a half-hour walk from here to the water.
The trail turned out even better than Craig had said. I was already familiar with Eastern shorelines, from the high sand cliffs of Truro on Cape Cod, to the flat marshy deltas of Rhode Island and Connecticut, from the low, white dunes of Long Island and New Jersey, to the even wider, flatter, if darker colored dunes of the Carolinas and the hardscrabble Florida islands further south. But this beach was high, solid, nothing at all like those nearly underwater fens and brakes I had trudged through as a teenager searching duckweed for amphibian life and its secrets. The dunes here were younger, of a coarser granulation and less regular hue. They lay heavily atop the questionable coastal soil they would eventually break down into, a first brush of icing on a crudely baked cake. The trail itself was cleverly constructed, mostly slatted wooden path or lightly fenced gravel, sometimes laid out between half-buried boards or semi-defining beach-drift, sometimes almost indistinguishable from its surroundings except that it was harder underfoot. You would think you’d gotten completely away from the path, only to suddenly arrive at a set of perfectly carpentered stairs rising to another set of wild-looking dunes.
“It’s great!” I announced after a few minutes, and began pointing out the flora and fauna to Mark and Craig: the little habitats for tortoises and rabbits, the thin-leaved plants, thicker stemmed for better water collection, yet not quite succulents I’d never seen before, or the odd appearance of certain more familiar plants in disguise: a very slender sarsaparilla tree, a sort of wild raspberry bush. The bird life was smaller and faster than on comparable East Coast shores, more colorful, more flickering.
“That’s not…” something or other, Craig would declare suddenly, with irritating certainty. Then we’d reach an area with names tagged on the fences and they would prove to be exactly what I’d said they were. Which annoyed Craig, so he’d ask, “Well then, what’s that?” po
inting to some bush or reed, and before I could even suggest what it was, he’d declare, “Wrong!”
This game of egos-on-parade, which we’d gotten into since I’d arrived out here in San Diego, continued to draw us along the path, until we reached another set of stairs and a little deck that turned out to be the crest of the ridge as well as the halfway mark of the nature trail. Before us, the path swagged down widely, slalom-like, complete with angled side fences, apparently down to the water. It was beautifully done and I turned to point it out to Mark. But he wasn’t just a little behind us as I’d assumed, but out of sight altogether.
Craig climbed onto the deck railing and from there quickly located Mark. He’d stopped and was seated on a bench in a little dale a few hundred feet behind us, or rather sprawled out, the way he’d been on the T-Bird’s hood earlier, looking like an elderly pensioner stopping to catch his breath on one of those island benches in the middle of upper Broadway midway between Zabar’s and home.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Craig demanded in that accusing tone of voice I’d come to know only since I’d arrived out here. In New York, a few months ago, Craig had been mellow, delightful; here he seemed angry all the time.
“Tell you what? What are you talking about?”
“Why didn’t you tell me he…” Craig faltered. “You know! How bad he is!”
As Craig spoke, an electrical impulse raced up my spine and into my neck. Fear.
“What are you talking about? You heard Mark. He got upset coming down the cliff because it reminded him of a recurring nightmare he had as a kid.”
“There’s no cliff here.” Craig pointed out the obvious. “And this isn’t that long a walk. It isn’t!” he insisted.
That electrical thread of fear tingled again.
“He’s just worn out from what happened before!” I sounded defensive even to myself. “I’d be too!”
Craig wanted to say something else, but he didn’t or couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he shook his head and jumped down the stairs.
“If you…” I began and ended my threat, having to yell, as he was now out of range.
At the bench with Mark, Craig and I hunkered down, and I pulled out fresh fruit I had bought that morning. Naturally when I threw away a plum pit, Craig questioned the environmental impact of my deed. I thought the soil too dry and too poor for peach or plum pits to take root. But Craig thought they might just take and he had dire predictions for the destruction they would doubtless wreak on the delicate biotic balance around us. As usual, Mark watched the two of us argue without saying anything. Craig and I already had disputed at last night’s dinner and this morning at breakfast: it was clearly part of whatever we had together. Mark could see that and I could see amusement in his eyes. So at least we distracted him.
So much so, that when we started up again, he joined us in a chorus of “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” which the trail a little bit resembled at that point. By the time we’d gotten up to the little deck and slalom-like fence area, Craig was ahead. It was pretty much all downhill from here, easier going. Ten minutes later, we reached another stairway, which cut through cliffs to the beach.
“You must love this!” Mark often saw through my eyes.
As we descended, Craig was already rushing straight to the ocean, his shorts fluttering against muscled thighs, his red canvas backpack stretched over his shoulders glittering in the strong afternoon sun.
The lower cliffs that guarded the entire beach were low, only from twelve to fourteen feet high, and much older geologically than the high one, and they ran in a nearly unbroken line in either direction as far as I could see. As we walked along, more or less following Craig’s lead much farther ahead of us and out in the shallows, we would pass occasional undulations in the cliff face, forming little vertical caves where sand had collected in spots now just large enough for one person to lay down a beach towel. At other spots, sudden breaks occurred, forming arches where sediment had eroded, leaving the more durable ultramafic rock threaded through with serpentinite and gleaming black basalt. At other points, even those had broken off aeons before and fallen forward in the sand where they lay glittering, their surfaces softly, inexorably abraded with every turn of the tide, making them ideally smooth now for basking mermen.
“Nice as it all is,” I said, trying to tamp down my pleasure, “I still prefer that beach on Providenciales we found last time. And there wasn’t a cliff in sight. Remember?”
“We’ll go back,” Mark said. “Around Thanksgiving.”
“I hope so.”
“This is what you wanted to see?”
“Sure is.”
“Is it old enough?”
“Far older than the cliff we were on before. All this was laid down during the Middle Cretaceous. About a hundred and twenty million years ago. It was part of a primitive mountain range that didn’t run north to south, like the Rockies or the present day Coastal Ranges, but horizontally, directly under what’s now the Sonora Desert into Nevada and Arizona. A thousand miles away you can probably find this exact pattern of sedimentary striation in some spot in the Grand Canyon.”
Mark always followed what I was saying so easily, so eagerly, I never felt I was lecturing. Maybe that’s one of the things we’d discovered about each other first, that we could teach each other without fear of being bored, or worse, of unbalancing our equality. He made me blush once when he told friends that I was the most intelligent speaker he knew. But it was Mark’s own way with words, rather than his glamorous good looks, that had won me over when we’d first met.
Walking along the streets of Provincetown and the beaches of Cape Cod in 1975, that first summer we knew each other, Mark would ignore all the other Speedo-clad beauties vying for his attention, and instead sing to me the complete score to some barely known Thirties or Forties musical, Porter’s Nymph Errant or Gershwin’s Let ’Em Eat Cake. The first few times it happened, I expressed amazement: how did he know all that? Mark laid a hand on my shoulder casually, looking like one of those Waspy studs in a Ralph Lauren ad, and said, “I know my musicals inside out.” It was one of the few times he’d ever boasted, and I was thrilled. Of course someone coming upon us at that moment on Commercial Street in front of Spiritus Pizza might have easily assumed we were in love talk. And I guess in a way it was, since little else could have made me adore him as much as hearing what he loved.
“I found it! The spot!” Craig ran up to us. “There!” pointing down the beach.
“Where?” I asked.
“Just below those cliffs,” Craig said, sparring at me so suddenly I almost dropped the bigger beach bag, before he rushed off again, his big feet splat splatting the wet sand.
“I hope it’s not too much farther,” Mark said, only half-joking.
*
“Sto-op! Cra-ig! Don’t!”
He’d just dumped a baseball capful of cold Pacific water over my bare midriff. I leapt up and chased him into the ocean. At the water’s edge, he stopped and doubled back on me, using his superior stance and greater height and weight to throw me off balance into the swirling surf and there to grab handfuls of wet sand and thrust them deep into my Speedo. This proved to be incredibly annoying, and in addition, provided Craig with—if not the exact erotic stimulation he was looking for—then at least a substitute he could find gratifying.
“Cra-ig! Sto-op!”
I managed to pull away from his grip. But he wasn’t to be stopped so easily. For the next ten minutes he was at me constantly, after me, up and down the beach until I heard myself squealing like a teenaged girl, and then I figured out a way to trip him up and we were both rolling around in the surf, him unexpectedly so, soaking his walking shorts.
Chastened, he only made faint stabs at harassing me while I edged back to our towels. Mark was ostentatiously ignoring us, reading an oversized Somerset Maugham biography and listening to his portable CD player.
“Now I’m going to have to take these off and dry them!” Craig
complained.
I would be washing sand out of my genitals all night because of his shenanigans. “Too bad! You should have known better than to come after me,” I said, searching through the beach bag for my own book.
“Well, I’m not going to sit around naked here in front of everyone,” he declared. He pointed behind us where the lower cliffs dropped into a half-natural, half-manmade stairway up, and where we had seen men dressed in only shorts and bathing suits standing about, striking poses: obviously the famous cruising area of Black’s Beach. “I’ll find a spot where I can be alone.”
“Who’s stopping you?” I let my disdain drip.
“Rat!” he said, without much heat.
“Dimwit!” I answered back, equally cool.
“I’d say more, except there’s a third person here,” Craig declared.
“He can’t hear with those headphones on. And he doesn’t care,” I added. That, I knew would really irritate Craig: the fact that Mark was so completely ignoring him despite all of Craig’s efforts to get his attention.
Craig grunted something under his breath, grabbed his backpack off the sand, and went muttering off.
I settled on the beach towel, covering myself with sunblock #30, then located my own paperback.
A few minutes later, Mark’s CD ended. He dropped the book and looked around.
“Put some of this on my shoulder blades, will you?” I asked.
“Where did he go?”
“Up there.” I gestured with my head.
“To cruise?”
“To dry off. And sulk.”
“Why sulk?”
“Because you’re ignoring him,” I said.
“He’s cute,” Mark said, meaning that he thought Craig had a good body. Which was undeniably true.
“He’s cute,” I admitted.
“But that mouth!” Mark laughed. “Sue really hated it! When I went to pick him up to come meet you at the airport, he wouldn’t stop saying terrible things about straights. I thought I’d have to throw him out of the car.”
“That’s Craig’s way of trying to impress you.”
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