The Cliffs of Del Mar

When I was growing up as an inner-city boy, our family would visit a very special spot, Valley Green, in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.  They had stables for the Park Guards’ horses and bridle trails that followed the Wissahickon Creek.  A mile or so along the way was a bridge across an actual babbling brook.  Walking over rocks and around smooth granite boulders took you up a wooded hill—what seemed like a mountain, to a youthful me—to come upon a ten-foot statue of a Delaware Indian named Teedyuscung.  The Lenni-Lenape chief crouched over the green valley, peering out beneath a hand raised to his brow, with his headdress cascading behind.  He was a leader of his people and is memorialized in marble.  His gaze became mine, over that valley and into the distance.  In my youth, this was my favorite place.

Seventeen years spent in Washington D.C., working foreign counterintelligence in the FBI brought cases and times that would put a strain on the strongest of men.  There I found a place of solace where I could sit and contemplate, be renourished and replenished.  It was on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, with the great man standing tall behind me.  I would gaze out over the Tidal Basin, rimmed with scores of Japanese cherry trees, which, in springtime, presented one of the loveliest sights of all.  After a while, I would return to the hustle and bustle of catching spies.  This scene, and its feeling of transcendence, replaced the green valley of my youth.

In 1990, my family moved to San Diego, truly one of the great cities, with terrain and climate unmatched almost anywhere in the world.  Down the road from our home in Solana Beach, we would visit Del Mar on weekend days, play frisbee and romp with our golden retrievers on the grassy knoll of Powerhouse Park.  Up the hill, in Seagrove Park, there were benches where time would slip by, and the calmness was something to behold.  But it was not until I followed the railroad tracks along the cliffs that my breath was truly taken away.

The beach below is a wide and gleaming expanse, with sets of waves from far out in the ocean that curl and crash, many at a time, before they finally succumb to gently touch the shore.

In the morning, teenagers dot among the waves, students from Torrey Pines High in their first-period class, Surf PE!  Late afternoon brings another set of surfers, older ones, many, professors emeritus from the University of California San Diego, who have participated in this rite for decades as the sky eases towards sunset.

The sheer wall at the back of the beach goes up more than a hundred feet of rough-hewn sand, much anchored with vegetation, but mostly outcroppings of ancient rock.  Erosion has carved chimneys where runoff from rare rain storms funnels its way to the sea. 

Atop the ridge, for perhaps fifty yards, is flat land.  At the rear of this plateau are the railroad tracks where, many times a day, a mighty engine carries commuters up and down the coast from San Diego to Los Angeles and beyond.  Then another sheer wall goes straight up to some of the priciest homes, with a vast overlook from this second tier of cliffs.  But it is out and away from the railroad tracks that a path ambles along the precipice, and you feel yourself in another world.

The trail meanders through plants and shrubs that sprout a pageantry of purple flowers, interspersed with little yellow ones that bob their heads and smile back at you.  There are more sprinkles of color, little red flowers, out of the corner of your eye.

The ocean coolness carries salty air to your senses, and your eyes track upward.  The homes are planted among bushy-topped, towering palms, like the ones Dr. Seuss drew in his children’s books, and windswept Monterey Cypress trees dance in a fanciful way.

There is never a time when passersby do not welcome fellow walkers with a grin and a greeting.  They, too, are breathing in and breathing out this wondrous place.  It is a locale of shared moments in a two-mile stretch that gradually inclines down to the sea.  Then the beach walk, back to the north, brings you close to the water that had glistened at you from above, and now sparkles at your feet.  Rapid shadows overhead gain your attention, and eight pelicans fly by in formation, just out of arm’s reach.

All through the day, the wet and flat beach is a walkway for tourists who relish in a rare pleasure, and locals, who quietly honor this sanctuary, so close to where they gratefully call home.

You look to the escarpment where you had been, seemingly, only a few moments before, and think, I was up there, on that ledge!  The kaleidoscope of colorful layers of rock, from gray to yellow, orange, and rusty-red, evokes the millennia that have passed for this panacea to become what we enjoy today.

Streaking clouds at sunset go ablaze, and you are primed to show appreciation with applause.  Then you actually hear it from others nearby who feel the same.  Even the overcast of “June gloom” gives another inflection to show a different emotion in this magnificent land-and-seascape.

For me, it is the jogging and the walking, the trail-way greetings and reveling in such an Eden.  The panorama is a solemn testimony to the extraordinary beauty of nature.

Now long retired and moved away, it calls me to return to this pacific place, which I feel compelled to visit at least once a year.  I yearn for it—even suffer withdrawal.

I took a last photo of the scene that fulfilled me, but it wasn’t enough.  I found an artist to recreate that image, to bring it to life on canvas, to invigorate me, just like when I stood upon the noble cliffs.

In a remarkable way, with that rectangular painting, I now have a window back to that scene.  I am grateful for each brushstroke, and can sense the sea, sand and sky, but I will never lose the lasting desire, and the passion, to return to the Cliffs of Del Mar.

February 2, 2017

Plantation, FL

The author pauses from his morning jog on the trail above the cliffs. 

Jon Smith, artist, and Wayne Barnes agree to memorialize The Cliffs of Del Mar.