Santa Cruz

We are staying in a quiet, leafy street pretty close to what counts as “downtown” in Santa Cruz — Pacific Avenue plus a couple of parallel roads. We’ve developed the habit of walking downtown in the morning to grab a first-thing coffee, and it’s about 20 mins each way. Although there’s a bit of a hill on the way in, the walk is hardly taxing, and apart from when we cross Mission, there’s very little road traffic. But here’s the thing: there is very little pedestrian traffic either. Actually, that’s understating it — most mornings, we see literally no people on the sidewalks. It’s a bit like being in a zombie apocalypse movie. Usually there’s more walking action along Pacific Avenue during the day, and it can get pretty busy at weekends, but before 8:00 am it was pretty quiet too. All in all, a big contrast with Edinburgh.

We expressed our puzzlement about the lack of pedestrians to our friend Line (a Dane who studied in Edinburgh and is now firmly rooted in Berkeley). She summed up the situation neatly: for Californians, walking is not a mode of transportation. The other side of the coin? Driving and parking is super-easy across the whole of Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz! Home of our year-long sabbatical in 1995, when we hung out on beaches and playgrounds with two-year-old Maaike and lived next door to the most beautiful campus we know. That moment of excitement when the urban sprawl south of San Francisco turns into Highway 17, and everything becomes greener and clearer. We reminisce about how we did this in a Limo when we first arrived in January 1995 and Maaike threw up at every curve of the highway.

We went to New Leaf grocery store first, off 41st, for a sunrise smoothie, the illusion of virtuous consumerism, and memories. Then off to see our old friends the Lax-Garcia family. Lena was five last time we saw her, and Rose a day old; now Lena is about to turn 13, and Rose seven and-a-half. It almost makes me cry, they are both so beautiful. Lena and Maaike, best friends at age one-and-a-half, embrace awkwardly but are soon off to look at something on the computer and essentially don’t stop talking for the rest of the day. And here is June, who used to be Maaike’s child-minder and adopted granny, still looking just the same age 86.

We laugh, we talk, we walk to the place where Maaike fell into the blackberries in ’95 and had to be disentangled, along the beach (where Maaike was scooped up by a wave and lost her first left shoe) to 26th Avenue (where we lived for a few months and Maaike fell down the porch and got that scar in her eyebrow). We are almost in a bit of a time warp: everything is the same, and different too. We eat at La Palomar on the harbour at 3:30 and finally stroll downtown, on Pacific Avenue, which in 1995 still bore traces of the 1989 earthquake but has now been fully rebuilt, pretty glam actually, and end up in Bookshop Santa Cruz, where else, discovering that Natalie Goldberg has a new book, on failure. Where does the day go? It passes on a high of happiness, and when we finally take Highway 17 north again, Maaike cries most of the way home.

Tag: Santa Cruz

Walking: Not a Mode of Transportation