It’s happened before (more or less) so I wasn’t completely surprised
when it happened again over the weekend.
I was walking along the San Clemente Pedestrian Beach Trail, about 60
miles south of Los Angeles. I would have
preferred to walk on the beach, but the tide was in, and there wasn’t much
beach to walk along, and in certain places there was none at all.
San Clemente Pedestrian Beach Trail is quite narrow, pressed in against
the railroad track, and I encountered a certain number of other pedestrians
along the way. And one of them stopped
and looked at me searchingly and said, “You’re a famous Hollywood actor, right?”
“No,” I said, “but I get
that a lot,” which I understand is what actual famous Hollywood actors say when
they want to deflect attention. However,
I was, and still am, left wondering which particular famous Hollywood actor this
man thought I looked like.
There was an occasion some years back when I was
walking down the main street of Beacon, in upstate New York, (I don't remember it being quite ruined as it looks in the picture above but it was certainly the same era) and a man stopped
me and said, “Has anybody ever told you, you look just like Dave Stewart of Eurythmics?” Of course, in this case he evidently didn’t think I
actually was Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, but I said no, nobody ever
had told me that, and the simple truth is that I don’t think I look anything like
Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, nor would I wish to. I mean, I have a beard, but that’s about
it. Still, the man in Beacon didn’t
intend it as an insult.
I was in San Clemente because I’d just come down from
visiting the Mission San Juan Capistrano, founded by the Spanish in 1776 (a
year when things were getting a bit lively over on the other coast), and the mission
is the place the swallows return to every year.
I had gone there to walk among the ruins and the cacti, two of my current
obsessions.
These days the mission, though certainly ruined in
places, is also thoroughly preserved, perhaps too much so. There were long periods when it looked more
like this:
I think I’d
have been more impressed back then, though of course the cactus gardens
wouldn’t have been in place.
The railroad line cuts right through San Juan
Capistrano and I suppose there’s a right and a wrong side of the tracks, though
San Juan Capistrano is such a wealthy little enclave, that even on the wrong
side there’s a tea house and a petting zoo. But if you’re looking for cacti,
there’s this utterly amazing specimen which I’ve now visited a couple of times.
(Actually, now that I agonize about it,
I wonder if it’s actually a euphorbia).
It’s inside the boundaries of the Ito
Nursery, which doesn’t seem to do a lot of business in cacti, which I think is
a shame. I’d happily pay good money
for a cutting from this monster. Was the
cactus a ruin? No, far from it, despite
being in a neglected and unwatered section of the nursery: I guess that’s why I
like cacti, and indeed euphorbia.
In the motel that night I found myself reading The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux, a
quirky and excellent book, partly an anthology of extracts by other authors, partly
a collection of “amazing facts” and mini-essays by Theroux himself. Inevitably there’s a section about traveling
pedestrians, titled “It is Solved By Walking.”
The usual subjects are present – Rousseau and Wordsworth, Muir and
Thoreau, Chatwin and Herzog. But there
was one name that I wasn’t familiar with: Xuanzang (my ignorance knows few
bounds).
Xuanzang (I now know) was the 7th century Chinese monk and
scholar, who thought that the Buddhist texts available to him in China were badly
translated, so he traveled to India and beyond to get closer to the source, and
to bring back some texts in the original
language for more accurate translation. He
traveled 10,000 miles in seventeen years, much, though not all, of it on foot.
He visited the ruins of Gandhara (now in Pakistan), “there were more
than a thousand monasteries but they are now dilapidated and deserted and in delicate
condition.” And he visited Taxila, which
currently looks like this:
He also visited, and was awed by, the giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan, now
in Afghanistan, one of which once looked like this:
They were dynamited and destroyed in March 2001 after the Taliban declared that they
were idols. As Theroux puts it “to the
cries of ‘Allah is great.’” The current
Afghanistan government has pledged to restore the statues, but I can’t help
thinking they may find themselves with other, more pressing priorities.
Inevitably I didn’t see any Taliban equivalents
in Southern California, however, while walked along the San Clemente
Pedestrian Beach Trail I did see some
signs of ruin, or at least a house that may be just a couple of winters away
from becoming one. Some of the houses in
San Clemente are built on the cliff top, and the cliff is eroding, with this
result:
I like those big, serious industrial supporting columns and they’re obviously
doing their job, but you see the area to the left, where a giant slab of rock
has fallen away like a collapsing sandcastle.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and move inland.
