My Favorite Place, by Laurie Gough
_ The Globe and Mail asked me to write for their My Favorite Place column:
My current favorite place in the world is a secret. If too many people discover this place—okay, it’s a beach near San Luis Obispo, California—it might start going to hell. The truly majestic sites of the planet need us to keep their secrets.
First let me explain that I’ve traveled to many exotic tropical islands with white sand beaches that look like a movie set, beaches that give way to lush volcanic mountains ripe with mangoes, where the pace of life is slow, the air is soft, and swirling stars blanket you to sleep. But I can’t choose any of those places as my favorite because they’re not real. I can’t pack up to move there permanently. I tried that once on a Fijian island. I stayed there a long time, taught school, almost married a Fijian man, but in the end it just wasn’t realistic for a strong-willed western woman to break into a traditional, chauvinistic culture where a main source of entertainment was watching men become comatose on kava. I couldn’t wake up in the morning and plunge into the long established steady current of Fijian society. To them, I was a freak. Besides, without a library, movie theater or outdoor café for a thousand miles, I wouldn’t have lasted.
The beach I’m talking about you can visit whenever you feel like if you live in the town twenty minutes away—a town with a library, a rep cinema and enough outdoor cafes to drown in a vat of iced organic de-fatted soy mochas. I’m talking about a beach on this continent, in Montana De Oro State Park, California, and my favorite town near this beach is San Luis Obispo. This college town of 40,000 is a utopian wonder— big box stores are banned and instead of urban sprawl there’s a green belt of mountains that can’t be developed. There’s a farmer’s market downtown every Thursday night, and it’s far enough from San Francisco and LA (each about three hours away) that it has the feel of friendly Midwestern community. It’s always spring there and best of all, it’s close to Montana De Oro.
Montana De Oro has 8000 acres of ocean bluffs, sand dunes, streams, river valleys, mountains and a bright Irish green, rich and breathtaking. When you leave San Luis Obispo and head towards the coast, you pass beneath a canopy of eucalyptus trees and their cool menthol scent permeates the air along a winding road for miles. When you exit the canopy you find yourself facing the intimacy of the ocean, aquamarine, eternal, thunderous, and you think you’ve arrived at the edge of your senses because here, after all the magnificent sites of the west, is finally the place where nature’s combination of land, sky, water, weather, vegetation, birds and space is perfect. Egrets, hawks, pelicans, monarchs, coyotes, deer and bobcats grace the land and sky while far off somewhere is always the sound of a lone seabird echoing through the night.
My secret beach is where I saw the Green Flash, and I can tell you, the Green Flash is real. It’s that rare flash of green light that flashes just as the sun is setting, a rare atmospheric condition where the air and temperature have to be just so.
After staying in place like this, it’s a little harder to venture out into the rest of your life. You’ve already arrived where you want to end up. All you can do is close your eyes, face the ocean and breath in a promise that you’ll return to live there some day.
My current favorite place in the world is a secret. If too many people discover this place—okay, it’s a beach near San Luis Obispo, California—it might start going to hell. The truly majestic sites of the planet need us to keep their secrets.
First let me explain that I’ve traveled to many exotic tropical islands with white sand beaches that look like a movie set, beaches that give way to lush volcanic mountains ripe with mangoes, where the pace of life is slow, the air is soft, and swirling stars blanket you to sleep. But I can’t choose any of those places as my favorite because they’re not real. I can’t pack up to move there permanently. I tried that once on a Fijian island. I stayed there a long time, taught school, almost married a Fijian man, but in the end it just wasn’t realistic for a strong-willed western woman to break into a traditional, chauvinistic culture where a main source of entertainment was watching men become comatose on kava. I couldn’t wake up in the morning and plunge into the long established steady current of Fijian society. To them, I was a freak. Besides, without a library, movie theater or outdoor café for a thousand miles, I wouldn’t have lasted.
The beach I’m talking about you can visit whenever you feel like if you live in the town twenty minutes away—a town with a library, a rep cinema and enough outdoor cafes to drown in a vat of iced organic de-fatted soy mochas. I’m talking about a beach on this continent, in Montana De Oro State Park, California, and my favorite town near this beach is San Luis Obispo. This college town of 40,000 is a utopian wonder— big box stores are banned and instead of urban sprawl there’s a green belt of mountains that can’t be developed. There’s a farmer’s market downtown every Thursday night, and it’s far enough from San Francisco and LA (each about three hours away) that it has the feel of friendly Midwestern community. It’s always spring there and best of all, it’s close to Montana De Oro.
Montana De Oro has 8000 acres of ocean bluffs, sand dunes, streams, river valleys, mountains and a bright Irish green, rich and breathtaking. When you leave San Luis Obispo and head towards the coast, you pass beneath a canopy of eucalyptus trees and their cool menthol scent permeates the air along a winding road for miles. When you exit the canopy you find yourself facing the intimacy of the ocean, aquamarine, eternal, thunderous, and you think you’ve arrived at the edge of your senses because here, after all the magnificent sites of the west, is finally the place where nature’s combination of land, sky, water, weather, vegetation, birds and space is perfect. Egrets, hawks, pelicans, monarchs, coyotes, deer and bobcats grace the land and sky while far off somewhere is always the sound of a lone seabird echoing through the night.
My secret beach is where I saw the Green Flash, and I can tell you, the Green Flash is real. It’s that rare flash of green light that flashes just as the sun is setting, a rare atmospheric condition where the air and temperature have to be just so.
After staying in place like this, it’s a little harder to venture out into the rest of your life. You’ve already arrived where you want to end up. All you can do is close your eyes, face the ocean and breath in a promise that you’ll return to live there some day.