Kiss the buoys and make me cry

Clong! sang the buoy.

It's big as a washing machine, round and spiky and metal as Sputnik, a bobbing yellow enamel-coated and tattooed orb, glinting in the sun.

It's not supposed to sing or make noise, though. It's not that kind of buoy.

It was made to monitor time and tide, discreetly despite its sunny hue.

But it had never met my two front teeth before.

More on that later.

The buoy would get no attention at all if not for regular visits from the Kelp Krawlers. They're open-water swimmers who use the buoy to mark routes through the marine sanctuary off Pacific Grove in Monterey Bay.

My wish to swim with the Kelp Krawlers is almost as old as my wish to swim open water. While dreaming of an Alcatraz crossing four years ago, I began to dream of joining the Kelp Krawlers in the gorgeous and foreboding Monterey Bay, a place I have visited vicariously through writer John Steinbeck and biologist Ed Ricketts and painter Bruce Ariss.

But finding a way to be in Pacific Grove at 11:15 on a Sunday, when the main group meets, has proven harder than I thought.

It happened for the first time last weekend, and only then because Nancy and I had dropped her mom off to visit friends farther south, and were making our way home to Sacramento. Still, we weren't certain we could stick around. Daylight Saving made it possible, though, the time change robbing us of an hour but shoving us that much closer to the swim start time.

Heaven ain't Iowa. It's Pacific Grove. Though largely unattainable, like heaven, Pacific Grove at least has generous visiting privileges. Dozens of available parking spaces line the rocky storybook coastline on Ocean View Boulevard. Take your pick, especially at 9 a.m. on a Sunday.

Which we did. We were very early. I was eager.

Finding a space close by Lovers Point (fun fact: It was once called Lovers of Jesus Point as a church retreat venue), we passed the hours walking along the trail that overlooks the rocky coast, its massive adobe-colored boulders softened and lacerated by time and wave, and dotted here and there with resting harbor seals.

Pacific Grove is hyper-real, hyper-California, the Eyvind Earle postcard you'd send to your snowbound relatives to make them hate you. You half-expect a truck commercial to break out at any minute; to turn a street corner and suddenly find yourself in another section of Disneyland®™.

You can walk right along the shoreline through carpets of delicate ice plant, amid towering succulents with red and blue rockets of flowers, all the way north into Monterey or south around the point to the state Asilomar retreat if you want, right in front of grand sweeping houses, right before the great sweep of the dark blue bay.

I always thought that if we ever won the utterly remote chance to live in Pacific Grove, we'd never own a TV because we'd spend morning and evening down by the ocean, always finding something better to watch.

It's always a treat to visit, and next I was going to swim it.

The Kelp Krawlers are a big bunch, 30 or 40 of them gathering above Lovers Point Beach, and that isn't even the largest gathering, I'm told. It's lucky if two other people join me to swim my beloved Lake Natoma.

A guy named Chris was shepherding the Krawlers, gathering them up in the parking lot. All but four were wearing wetsuits. One who was not, besides me, is John Ratto, whom I've met through my favorite facebook®™ page, "Did You Swim Today?"

John lives in Pacific Grove. He said he owns a TV. His loss.

The beach at Lovers Point is a smaller replica of the cove far south in La Jolla, where I got to swim last April. Each features a terraced stone-and-concrete amphitheater that drops from a lovely park to the water and opens northwest to the curve of land in the distance. Lovers Point Beach faces the redwood-covered hills that rise more than 20 miles away, above Santa Cruz at the north end of the  bay.

In each place, the bright sand beach and topaz shallows form the amphitheater stage, inviting you in.

At an unseen signal, all the swimmers began making their way down to the stage, past beachcombers beginning to stake out their morning.

Most of the Krawlers were heading north to the round yellow buoy, about a mile round trip. I opted for the smaller group swimming a triangle of about a mile and a half around two buoys.

"I usually take off first because these guys will eventually pass me up," John said, and dove into water that looked too shallow. But I followed, and soon flew over undersea gardens that waved languidly in the blue sand. The gardens fell away and the water darkened to jade. Waves started to lift and drop me, a reminder I was far from my placid home lake, as I kept watch on John. He hugged the point a bit closer than he had recommended, but I kept a wider berth just in case.

Giant kelp snaked up from the bottom of the little cove here and there, and sometimes I had to climb over their heavy thick fronds. The kelp pushed back so hard that it seemed like a giant spring, holding up the water surface.

Another look up and I suddenly saw the flashing black arms. Sure enough, swimmers who started a few moments later have sped past. I began to follow them — when I could see them. The ocean constantly opened and shut the world from me.

I counted strokes, as usual, but I wasn't sure what for. I didn't really know where I was going or when I'd get there.

It's the wildest water I've ever swum, just a bit wilder than off Laguna Beach where I got to swim last year. I looked down into the deep green water and considered the wildness that might be swimming below in this sanctuary. But I never saw anything.

I was the last in the group to arrive at the first buoy, a tall yellow cylinder.

"Every new swimmer kisses the buoy," one swimmer explained. So I leaned in and deftly left a kiss. The buoy felt light, like plastic, and warm from the early sun.

I asked John how these conditions compare to most swims. About the usual, he said.

Next stop, said Chris, we'll sight on Cabrillo Point to the north, where the Hopkins Marine Station sits. The next buoy will be just to the left of the point. Somewhere. I followed the flashing arms.

Chris, I soon realized, was swimming behind the group, making sure all made it and were going in the right direction.

"You're keeping a good line," he said as I stopped with him one time. The waves seemed to get larger and jumbled. The world appeared and disappeared; I tried to practice sighting when I felt my body lift.

I counted strokes again, for no good reason, just out of habit.

In one rising wave I finally caught sight of the round yellow buoy, and a few dark heads bobbing around it.

"In answer to your question," said John, "this is not how the water usually is. The swells are getting bigger."

"OK, kiss the buoy," a swimmer said. This buoy was not light and warm and plastic. I grabbed onto the grass-covered steel frame around its girth and leaned in for the kiss. In the swells the buoy pitched forward.

Clong!

"Ooh, I think I chipped my tooth,"  I said, even before my tongue found the grit where the back of my tooth had been, the one the dentist had fixed already.

I'm a terrible buoy kisser. My swim friend Lisa Amorao has managed to leave perfect lipstick marks on this very same buoy. I've seen the pictures.

No pain, no blood, though. I judged it a worthwhile token of the journey I had waited so long to make. My tongue remained occupied as I sighted on the base of the amphitheater of Lovers Point Beach for home.

New swims always carry trepidation — How far to the next point? Will I tire out before I reach it? Should I keep calm or start flailing harder? Where is everybody? Will current take me where I shouldn't be? What's down below?

My worries eased and dissipated with each stroke toward the beach. John was just ahead of me so I followed him in.

Chris' worries eased too, I'm sure. After all, he was just taking my word for it that I knew how to swim open water.

Into the clear blue water of the beach I planted feet again in the sand, always the best part of a swim: The finish. Swimmers did what swimmers do, stand on the shore looking out onto the water, not so wild looking from this vantage, and share their adventure of having crossed it.

The water was 57 Fahrenheit, said John, warmer than usual for this time of year — warmer than Natoma — and not as clear as some days.

"It's Zen swimming," answered Chris, when I asked him how they find their way off around the cove. After a while, he said, you just know where the next buoy is, and you get a feel for distance and direction.

The only remedy, I decided, was to figure out how to join the Kelp Krawlers more often.

Same story, different viewpoint

Here is a rare moment to witness a story from a different perspective, a kind of "Rashomon" writ small.

My sister Tara delightedly — and delightfully — took up her side of The Story, the misadventure I wrote about last week in which Nancy and I began our relationship for certain, 29 years ago.

The climax of the story took place when I had to call home from Monterey and let my parents three hours south in Lompoc know I wasn't spending the night nearby at a friend's house on a mid-summer trip, as they might have been led to believe. 

Instead, I had been up to the northern end of the state, and floundered two long counties and a couple of winding roads away from home, out of gas and money, and needed rescue.

I called home to reveal where I'd been and beg for help.

"Monterey, California?!??" she blared, when I revealed where I was and what I'd been up to.


Tara and I predicted alike what would happen next — and we were both wrong: Here's her spin.

"Oh! I can remember this day! With steam coming from mom’s head and dagger eyes, mom came marching over to me as I stood in the neighbor’s yard. I thought, 'Oh, gawd … which lie has she caught me in? What did she find in my room? Which class assignment did I not turn in, and which teacher ratted me out? Oh, mother of gawd! What have I done?! I didn’t mean to spend my lunch money on candy!'

"As we stood face-to-face I had my rebuttals prepared and ready to be issued. Whatever was about to come out of mom’s mouth, I was prepared.

"And then … she barked the sweetest words that I have ever heard in my entire childhood: 'Your BROTHER … is in Monterey… and WE have to go get him!' All I could think was, I do not know where or what this Monterey is… but it will be known as my little slice of heaven. For TODAY is the day that I, Tara Turner will witness my parents verbally punishing my goody two-shoes brother! A day that I will revisit forever!

"As soon as mom told me this glorious news … I smiled from ear to ear and skipped if not danced a jig all the way to the back seat of our parent’s car. My smile remained way past Paso Robles.

"Why play the radio when I could enjoy the beautiful music of our parents' conversation in regard to the amount of disgust that they felt by being deceived by their son. 'What the hell was he thinking? Auburn? Why in the hell would he drive all the way to Auburn? And with no money!? Ya know, WE are not going to get home until 4 in the morning…I cannot BELIEVE this!!?'

"Ah, blast that music! Turn it all the way UP!

"As we approached your VW in the Hilton parking lot. I thought I should have brought some popcorn because cause this is going to be quite the scene. We all get out of the car and walked over to you.

"And then there was  … nothing? Nothing?! No harsh words? No tongue lashing? Come on!? You guys were all pumped up on the car ride up here, what happened?

"The fizzle had faded … the spark was gone, the passion lost. My moment of joy had been taken away. What in the Sam hell just happened? I had been tricked, fooled to believe that I would witness a great lashing. My smile had changed to the look of confusion. I had waited three hours… three hours … actually, my whole life!"

The same reputation I had … the goody two-shoes image that let me let out hundreds of miles of line until my whole plan tangled up in the works … should have ended my misadventure before it even began. Who would I have known somewhere in the county, where my parents thought I was going? Maybe they thought I had met a friend from college. It was completely out of character for me to go anywhere overnight.

What was I thinking?! What were they thinking?!

I'm thinking we would have missed out on a good story.

"Monterey, California?!?!!!" Our creation story

"Tell the story," someone will say, on rarer and rarer occasion, and we tell it.

Most people and families, I expect, have the story. The fundamental tale, the progenitor, the what-if-it-hadn't-happened? story.

On the 27th anniversary of Nancy being willing to marry me, this is the story of how we became one.

It took place two years before our wedding — we have been together as best friends now more than half our lives.

Our friendship began when we worked together as journalism majors on The Mustang Daily at Cal Poly. I met Nancy while she was busy on deadline (to write the only story, she will add here, for which she won an award for student journalism). Soon that year we had more leisure time, and spent every moment we could together at Poly Royal, the May weekend when the entire campus turned into an open house (which is what it's called now anyway, since alcohol-fueled riots in 1990 nearly killed the event; another story for another time).

The school year ended. "Maybe I'll see you over the summer," I said. As soon as I said it, I wanted to make it true.

I had just gotten a shark-nosed Volkswagen squareback with my parents' help, so now I had motive and means. The opportunity came around my birthday. My loving family often and inexplicably felt need to mark my birthday by going to the Santa Barbara County Fair, which was held not in Santa Barbara (too picayune for that crowd) but in Santa Maria, in the north county. The fairgrounds was a glorified parking lot behind a JC Penney store.

Even if it was the fairest fair of all — which it wasn't; maybe 40th out of 58 counties — it was not the appropriate birthday destination more than once, not for anyone older than nine, anyway. For this birthday, I needed to escape.

Time to do something different, I told my parents. Just take a daylong drive, maybe. Being a lifelong Goody Two-shoes paid off: My parents said OK.

Get out of Lompoc by, oh, 8 a.m., make it to Auburn by lunch, say thanks and 'bye and drive back by around dinnertime. That was my plan — my deluded, naive, star-dusted plan.

The drive, we have learned over the many years, really takes more than seven hours, one way.

Lunchtime came and went on that first trip north, and I wasn't even halfway, having just dipped out of the Kettleman Hills into the San Joaquin Valley. Though not a stranger to this strange land — we'd gone through on many family trips to the Sierra — this was the first time I had a front row seat and had to pay attention to it all.

I might as well have been walking in space.

The miles droned on. The gray-white hills never seemed to move, nor did Auburn ever seem to get closer … until many, many hours after lunch, somehow I navigated my way through the macramé of freeway cloverleafs that was Sacramento, and ascended the foothills in the softening summer night.

Finally, Auburn! Now, how in the world to find Nancy?! In the dusk! I had packed neither telephone number nor address, just a map and memory of the city name. Of course, the only solution was to drive around in search of a miracle.

It came soon enough in the last of daylight, in the form of a green Volkswagen beetle, which crossed in front of me at an intersection. Who was at the wheel? None other than Nancy … well, maybe Nancy … unless it was her identical twin, Carol (sounds like a bad soap opera by now, doesn't it?). In the absence of any other sign or clue, I followed the VW to St. Joseph's Catholic Church, parked near her and followed her inside, taking a pew behind her and waiting until she finished her prayers to say:

"Excuse me, you look so much like Carol Lewis, it's scary." Clever me: If it was Nancy, she'd laugh and we'd hug. If it was Carol, she'd say something like, "I am Carol Lewis," and I'd explain everything. See!

(Later, Carol would say she thought I was a stalker intent on taking her tires; such innocents we were …)

Nancy was at work, Carol said, and Carol was on her way to work after Mass herself, but she would lead me back to her house and introduce me to their family.

All but two of the Nancy's 10 brothers and sisters were living at home then; older brothers Tim and Phil were out on their own. Without Nancy to guide and interpret, I was immersed in the chaos of a regular evening in the household — two small brothers, Stephen, just two or three years old, and Greg; a sister, Sharon, and brother, Joel, in the middle grades (I was like an insect in a jar, a thing of intense curiosity, to them); three more sisters, Kathleen, Joan and Susan, in high school (maybe Joan was home from college then?) futzing mostly unseen in the downstairs part of the house; and their mom and dad, all of whom welcomed me with warmth and expectation, and not a hint of trepidation that this guy who knows Nancy from college just drove nearly the length of the state unannounced to see her.


They would not let me leave after I saw Nancy. Stay the night, ridiculous child, they insisted.

I called my mom to say I'd be home the next day. "All right, I figure everything's OK," she said, not too put out that I deflected her pointed questions.

Carol returned from work and drove me to the pizza parlor where Nancy worked. I hid behind my cowboy hat as I walked in, but Nancy somehow suspected it would be me.

"How funny!" is what she said mostly, over and over. Back at her home, she reintroduced me to her family.

Next morning was my induction to the sophisticated choreography of getting a baker's dozen of people ready for early Mass. It was a process I'd join for many years.

After breakfast, we spent a final few hours down at the American River. Nancy accidentally threw her shoes into the water while throwing pebbles and had to wade in, in her Sunday dress, to retrieve them.

"Do you need some money?" she asked, saying goodbye. Nope! I said. I had my checkbook (This is a plot point; pay attention).

Off I went for home, only the roof of the car keeping me from leaving earth's orbit, a happy, happy guy. Since this was my first time driving the great continent by myself, I veered toward San Francisco, eager to go home by another way. With the last of my cash, I paid for gas in Pinole and turned west.

It turns out The City is blocked by toll bridges, each requiring toll. A strange and inconvenient concept. No cash in the ashtrays. Not a penny in sight. When you can't pay toll at a toll bridge, you don't get a just-this-once pass: The bridge keepers shut down all lanes so you can drive sidelong across lanes that aren't meant for driving sidelong. So the westbound mass of humanity, backed up near Oakland, watched me rattle along to the bridge headquarters building, where I wrote a check for 75 cents.

Beautiful city, though, San Francisco. Undeterred — reinvigorated, in fact! — I thought, Why not head to the coast and keep driving home along Highway 1? Yeah, why not? I'm king of the world!

The gas needle dropped. I was unafraid. I let it go to a quarter of a tank and pulled in to buy gas — where I learned that just that summer, the entire world decided it would no longer accept checks for gasoline purchases. This was not a matter that anyone would have thought I'd find newsworthy, apparently.

Vast quantities just waiting in my checking account to pay for fuel. OK, not vast, but enough. A fair exchange, check for gas. Can't you just take one lousy check? Just this once?! I'm good for it!

No! Also, no, no, no, no, no, no and no.

The needle dropped to empty as the miles passed, the inviting coastline turning lonely and cold and menacing, the hard sun shooting longer and longer glares, refusing to abate.

The needle dropped below empty when I coaxed the ter-pocketing car into the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel in Monterey at sundown. Clothes askew, sweat dripping from my body, my face red from screaming at humanity's blindness to my needs mile after mile, I looked like I ran all the way.

In those days:

(1) Pay phones existed,

(2) You could make a collect call for a dime, and

(3) The desk clerk at the Hilton wanted the dime back after I completed the call home. Hilton, above all, must balance its books.

"Where are you??" My mom asked.

"Monterey."

Pause. "Monterey, California?!?!!!"

Appreciate, if you will, my nanosecond of restraint as I consider the wisdom of lightening the mood with the snappy, "No, Monterrey, Mexico (Duh!)" I settled on, "Yes," letting my mom have the funniest moment of the whole misadventure. I finally had to let them in on what I had done.

Since I was due in early the next morning to my summer newspaper job, my parents and sister had to make the three-hour trip from Lompoc to Monterey to retrieve me. Well, they didn't have to, but they did, bless them. Three hours and many miles served to soften my parents' mood (though my sister came along with the expectation of witnessing my evisceration), so that by the time they found me at 1 a.m., they were contemplative and maybe grateful that my absence was just a lot of fuss over a girl.

I rode with my dad for part of the way home, then switched cars with my mom at about Soledad, and attempted to deflect any lingering anger by asking them about their childhoods, filling in gaps about things I've always wondered. It worked: They were in a mood to talk, and I never had such uninterrupted time before or after.

After a couple of hours' sleep, I went to work and called Nancy later that day to tell her the whole story. I know that's hard to believe, but that's what the world was like without smart phones and facebook. News and trivia sometimes actually had to wait an entire day.

We married two years later in the church where I had met Carol on that first trip, 27 years ago this weekend. I proposed along the coast in Monterey, not far from where I borrowed 10 cents in hopes my parents would rescue me.

If you see us, pull up a chair and we'll tell you the story, complete with gestures and interruptions, maybe even song — a whole show.

Happy anniversary, Nancy!