Salt Creek Beach

The paved pedestrian path that leads down the slope toward Salt Creek Beach is interesting in its own right. It passes beneath a concrete bridge that supports Ritz Carlton Drive, where a mural of blue dolphins and other sea creatures swim on the walls. A long sloping grassy hill flanks the path, overlooking the vast ocean and Catalina Island in the distance. At the foot of the hill one can see the breaking waves that come systematically one after the other.

Our family walks down the path carrying our towels, sunglasses, cameras—encumbered also with a helium canister and six red roses. We probably look out of place.

Well-dressed people leash up their high-end dogs for a walk to the beach. Surfers in black wet suits walk barefoot, with tether cords wrapped around their boards. A lone player shoots hoops on a basketball half-court at the bottom of the hill.

At last we reach a final flight of stairs to the beach. Salt Creek Beach is very beautiful. The white sand is as fine as any that I've seen. Large cliffs hanging with vegetation surround the beach. One cliff is more prominent than the rest and on top is the Ritz Carlton Hotel.  From our angle we can see a few tiny people leaning over a railing.

(I have a friend who once worked at the Ritz Carlton while living in Laguna Niguel. He was a valet, parking expensive cars for a cast of celebrities. He told of parking Ozzy Osbourne's car, and how he used a cane and walked like a crippled old man—hardly the same person seen on stage.)

The ocean water coming in off the waves is crystal clear. I feel like I could drink it. The water is shallow here, scarcely rising above the shins for several dozen feet. Beyond the shallow area, a cast of surfers bob up and down on the waves, looking for a bite.

We find our own spot on the beach and Jenelle sits down on the sand and removes the canister from the box and two bags of balloons. One by one she inflates the balloons with helium, ties them off, lashes a ribbon, cuts the string at about three feet, then hands them to me. In about ten minutes I am holding fourteen purple and three white balloons.

Jenelle sets up the tripod and we pose for a family portrait while Jordan holds all seventeen balloons in his left hand, fist clinched tight to keep the balloons from drifting away.

Then Jenelle hands the balloons out: three purple to Jordan, three purple to Kaitlyn, three purple to Jenna, three purple to Savanah, two purple to me, and keeps the three whites for herself.

Today represents three years that Brittany has been gone.

My wife and I have lost a daughter, and our kids have lost a sister. Fourteen purple balloons represent the fourteens amazing years that we spent with her on earth; three white balloons represent the three years she has lived in heaven.

Jenna and Savanah release their balloons first, and shortly after, Jordan and Kaitlyn. Jenelle is the last to release, and we all watch as the cluster of colored bubbles drifts high and inland, above the Laguna Cliffs and in a northeastern direction. The white balloons become difficult to follow, being a less prominent color and smaller than the purple. As we crane our necks, I'm sure we have the attention of others on the beach who are craning their necks also, curious of our little ceremony.

Once the balloons are out of sight, Jenelle hands a rose to each of the girls. There is nothing formal about the roses. It is a little something to remember Brittany. Savanah walks over to the edge of the lapping waves and tosses the flower into the water and watches it sucked up in the backwash, tossed inside the waves, and washed back to shore. The rose looks very pretty when it sits upon the heavy sand, laying on its side, the red petals resting gently on the sandy pillow.

A sad truth with death is that we must move on.

Jenna finds a section of the beach where a vertical strata of long black rocks protrude from the surface like spines of lava. Adjacent are a series of tide pools. Up against the shore where the waves have washed at high-tide is a layer of smooth black pebbles and sea shells. Many of the pebbles are pierced with perfectly smooth holes. The shells come in crazy shapes, some with wild growths that look like organ pipes. She is excited to tell us of her find.

Salt Creek Beach is a great people-watching place. There are swimmers, surfers, children building sand castles, photographers, sun bathers, and women pushing strollers.

Before we leave, I notice that the roses have been arranged around a conical mound with a moat surrounding it, and decorated somewhat elegantly. I ask Jenelle about it and she says that some little girls “found” them laying on the beach and decided to make a sand castle with them. I'll bet this made Brittany happy as she watched from above. She was always the imaginative type who loved to play with children. ♠

Capistrano Beach

Early morning on a beach always has a different feel to it. The pink hues of dawn peek over the ocean and although the world has been asleep overnight, the constant crashing of the waves continue against the shore, persisting as they will evermore.

I am walking along the southern shore at Doheny State Beach where a motor home is parked along the road next to a pair of palm trees, curtains drawn for privacy. Surely they are still asleep. The only other person I see is a man in a navy-blue jacket and holding a bag, collecting shells or stones from the sand. I am walking his direction, but we ignore each other, neither one wishing to talk with anyone else.

I watch a white pelican with her black-tipped wings and long pointed beak fly back and forth, parallel with shore, land on an undulating current, then fly away as soon as it breaks. By this time, the sun has risen just above the coast line, though still behind clouds and without symphony.

I continue walking along the shore, toward the rising sun, and past the man collecting items from the sand, and nearing Capistrano Beach Park. A homeless man rummages through a garbage can, gleaning what he can before the workers come to dump the trash. Beyond him on the pavement I see a cyclist with long black tights and a stocking cap over his ears.

Across the highway and perched upon high bluffs are large homes built right to the edge of the cliff. Lush vegetation grows on the bluff and it must be a beautiful place to live with an exceptional view of the ocean.

I arrive at the facilities at Capistrano Beach Park and see an elderly couple sitting on a bench watching the waves roll in. A white truck with two workers inside is parked adjacent to the sidewalk, door ajar, and cigarette smoke coming from the cab. They are probably deciding whether they want to begin cleaning, or just wait and watch the ocean.

I now come to a large wooden deck, and next to me is a basketball court. The fragrance of pine wafts up from the planks. I stop at a corner railing of the deck and spend a moment contemplating the situation. The waves wash up directly below the planks. A chilly morning breeze picks up.

Further up along the shore are a long line of multi-million dollar homes. How would it be to have a home just yards away from the Pacific Ocean? Do they know what they have, or do they take it for granted? For me, I'm lucky if I make it to the beach once a year. It is pure heaven every time I'm here.

Now it's time to walk back to the hotel and wake up my family. They don't know what they're missing.

So I ask, what would make a family travel 454 miles, just to visit the beach? We're not going to Disneyland or Sea World, and we're only here for the weekend.

From the balcony of our hotel you can look down and see the jacuzzi, and then look across the highway and see the tall waves coming in and breaking against the shore—a small tsunami of white rollers that create a crash so loud that the noise reverberates against the walls of the hotel.

The sun is now higher in the sky and with my family I make the walk over the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Pacific Coast Highway and a rail line for California Amtrak. Once on the other side we are on the beach and immediately there is a sign warning beach-goers of the steep beach face. “Strong shorebreak can knock you down and powerful backwash can pull you out into the deep water,” the sign warns.

We are back on the Doheny side of the coast. We take off our socks and shoes and roll up our pants, but the sand is rockier than most beaches, with medium-sized black pebbles that are smooth but still unpleasant to walk on. The places where the tide washes up over the sand is soft with few rocks and these are the places we seek out to wade in the water.

Jordan has brought his drone and is flying it over the shore. It is brand new and just last week he got it stuck in a tall tree, so I am sure he is hesitant to fly it too far over the ocean.

The kids have found a stick and are carving a cursive “Brittany” into the smooth part of the sand, just high enough where the waves won't touch it. It is interesting here that the waves seem to break closer to the shore, and appear larger and more violent than normal. This is probably due to the sudden depth of the water near the shore.

Jenelle and I decide to hold hands and take a walk along the beach away from the kids. I walk along the inside to take the brunt of any high washer that might strike us. Sometimes, when we are walking on a rocky patch, a wave comes in that covers our ankles and up to our shins in white foam, and I can feel a storm of pebbles pounding against my feet in a turbulent swirl like that of a washing machine, enduring painfully for about ten seconds, then subsiding as the wash reverts back to the ocean.

As we walk toward Dana Point, we pass a large berm that separates the water from a campground. Someone has propped a decorated Christmas tree into the sand on top of the berm and there are two empty lawn chairs next to it.

We arrive at the point of the beach where San Juan Creek runs into the ocean. Sometimes at high tide there is more water, but now it is low. We stop and sit on the berm and contemplate to ourselves, saying very little in conversation.

This must be where the waves become better for surfers, as several are congregated here, and others are in the water to catch a roller. On the other side of the creek is a more popular beach that is closer to the harbor. 

It is on that beach that we took the family many years ago after a trip to Disneyland. They were young and I don't remember much about the beach other than we got lots of sand in the van and Kaitlyn may have lost a bucket in the water. I remember lots of seagulls and trying to get pictures of them.

But it was the fact that Brittany was with us on that beach that makes it special to me. I don't remember anything that she did that day, but I know that she was with us, a little girl about three or four years old at the time.

So, why would a family travel 454 miles just to go to the beach? This is why. To reconnect and remember Brittany.

Brittany loved the beach. Living so far away, we rarely went, but when we did she reveled in the moment, taking in the salty sea weed breeze, and walking barefoot along the sand, and letting the waves come in and immerse her feet. The last beach we ever went with her was Santa Monica Beach, and she played in the water until well after dusk.

After returning home to Utah she would always ask when we were going back to California. She really wanted to go to Disneyland, but the thing she wanted most was to go to the beach. “If the beach was the only place we went, Dad, I would be happy.”

Unfortunately, we never made it back. But about a year and a half before she died, Jenelle and I decided to go on vacation, and Brittany spent two weeks at our neighbor's house. It just happened that during that time they had a wedding in San Diego, so they took Brittany along. They spent a day at the beach in Oceanside and Brittany couldn't get enough.

Looking back, that was one of those tender mercies from God, giving one more opportunity to visit the beach before she passed on to the other side.

This trip is to honor her. Sometimes I feel bad that we have traveled to California and the beach far more times without her than we ever did when she was alive. But Jenelle reminds me that she is probably here with us and enjoying the beach in her own spiritual realm.

We make the long walk back to the kids and find them safe. I can see where Jenna attempted to write Brittany's name by placing pebbles into the contour of letters, but getting them washed away by the waves. Kaitlyn and Savanah built a sand turtle with a moat around it. Now all three play a game where they guess how far the waves will roll in by standing at that point. Sometimes they get drenched, sometimes they stay dry, and sometimes the water just barely touches their toes, and if that happens, they win.

Now it is near dusk, and after a day spent inland, we are back on the southern shores of Doheny Beach. I take half an hour to enjoy the sunset, this time leaving on my shoes.

I will admit that we smuggled firewood into California. Someone had told us that firewood is confiscated at the agricultural checkpoint, but we decided to chance it and no one ever stopped us.

I open the hatch of our Trailblazer and pull out three slabs of heavy juniper, with the furry bark still attached. Dotted along the beach are concrete fire-basins. I stack the wood like a tee pee and below insert three fire-starting logs that I bought at Wal-Mart. Within ten minutes the blaze has flared up, sending flames that can be seen over the rim of the basin.

Our meal isn't too elaborate. Just hot dogs, with a potato salad from Ralph's, and chips. We brought roasting sticks to cook the hot dogs over the flames. For desert I place a kettle of water over coals and we warm it up for hot chocolate. Then we drink the cocoa with Tim Tams, biting the tip off of each end of the cookie, using it as a straw to suck up the drink, then devouring the cookie with our mouth before it dissolves into nothing.

The night is getting cooler and it feels good to stand next to the flames, hold out hands, and feel the heat against the skin. The juniper burns strong and heavy. On the other side of the fence we can faintly hear the traffic from the Coast Highway, but it is overwhelmed by the breaking of the waves and the snapping of the fire. Every fifteen minutes an Amtrak train whizzes by.

Now that the meal is over, and the fire is still keeping us warm, Jenelle gets her laptop computer from the Trailblazer and sets it on a picnic table that we have dragged next to the fire pit. We all gather around, and for the next ten minutes we watch our Brittany video.

This is the same video that my brother-in-law, Jay, made for Brittany's funeral. It begins with her birth and pictures of Grandma and Grandpa holding her, then through her childhood and holding a fish that she caught with Uncle Brent, and as a teenager when she wore lipstick and mascara in the Middle School play, up to the whole family surrounding her bed at the hospital, only minutes from taking her final breath.

Of course, we can't help but to cry. I really miss my little Britt.

After wiping my eyes dry, I decide to take one last venture to the water. The lights have come on up the coastline at Dana Point, but looking seaward all is dark, except one lone flash on the horizon.

I am with Kaitlyn—the rest of the family staying by the fire which is about fifty yards away. The waves seem taller now, and more violent when they crash. Although the ocean is a very dark black, the whitewater on the waves shows up well. Sometimes a wave will come in and break like a fuse being lit, crashing right to left, like a giant zipper pulling closed—then a resounding boom!

We stand at the shore and watch the white foam wash toward our feet, but never quite reaching. ♠