Never turn your back on the ocean

With the glaciers melting, the oceans rising, the king tides surging, the big storms lashing, the big swells crashing, the cliffs crumbling and shoreline civilization not yet retreating but recurrently flooding more frequently than ever, it's a great time to live on the coast. My go-to seaside walk is West Cliff Drive, where on high-tide, high-surf days when the road's not completely closed I'm one of hundreds of pedestrians, runners, bicyclists, scooters, skaters, skateboarders and automotive gawkers out for a good long look at nature doing its thing spectacularly.

For now, a lot of the West Cliff cliffs are far enough above sea level that you might get splashed with some stray spray but if you stay away from the edge you probably won't get knocked over and soaked by a sneaker wave or dragged out to sea by a rip current, yet you can feel the power and see the awe-inspiring beauty of the constantly moving and changing silvery mercury-like surfaces, the cormorants skimming, the pelicans gliding, maybe even a surfer or two braving the wild cold for a possibly deadly thrill.

For me there is a thrill in simply watching the natural show, the cosmic equivalent of being stopped in your tracks in a museum by a painting that overwhelms — Gericault's “Raft of the Medusa,” Pollock's “Autumn Rhythm” — only the power on display is not esthetic or metaphorical or even emotional but viscerally frightening because you know it can actually kill you, destroy your home or waste your business, trash your beachside picnic space, batter your public restrooms or bury your beach in debris swept down from the mountains or flung out of the depths by rogue waves. Like a burning landscape but quasicontained by land, the wild ocean, even seen from shore, can be terrifying.

I've lived by the ocean a lot and love being able to see it from my windows. On Point Dume in Malibu more than 50 years ago I lived for a year in a tiny cottage wedged into a bluff about 50 feet above Little Dume, a locals' surfing break, where every night I fell asleep to the percussion of the surf, so close below it shook the mattress platform, and when the wind blew hard and the rain flew, I felt for the first time the true magnitude of weather. And when the sky cleared, at night you could see not just the stars but the electric lights ringing Santa Monica Bay all the way around to Palos Verdes.

Those of us who've lived on them both recognize the rhyming geography of Monterey Bay and Santa Monica — Point Dume is to Palos Verdes as Lighthouse Point is to Monterey across bodies of water about the same size and shape. But since Santa Cruz, like Malibu, is snuggled up against the mountains, we have a more intimate bond with the ocean than does the rest of the vast West Side of L.A. So it's easy to get close to the elements here and to feel the brute force of their embrace.

Living on Gualala Ridge above the Mendocino Coast for 10 years I got smacked in the face a lot by swirling systems barreling down from the north but blowing around counterclockwise from the south to whack my southfacing house. But to look at that blue-water view, even wind-whipped with a million whitecaps, cleared the mind, and at night, even from a mile away, you could hear the surf rumbling and the chorus of seals barking in Anchor Bay.

With so much grandeur on display off our coast, I'm often astonished in a different way by people out there staring at their phones, or trying to take a photo, as if their pitiful little device could contain the ocean and bring it home in a little magical rectangle, which actually got in the way of seeing what they thought they were looking at. Such are the absurdities of technocentric civilization.

The smashing waves off West Cliff are a preview of coming destructions and a sobering reminder to make the most of our time in paradise before it's lost.