Hilton Head Island: home and change

 

Our flights from San Diego to Atlanta and the following day from Atlanta to Hilton Head were uneventful, which is about as much as one can hope for flying these days.  We arrived home to find all as we had left it, including GANNET.  We also found that was hot.  Not as hot as in our absence, but still hot.  In Oregon and Northern California we often found ourselves wearing jackets.  That won’t happen on this island for months.

Naturally we were glad to be home among the familiar beauty and quiet of the marsh.  Having to deal with new surroundings and traffic every day is stressful, much more for me than making an ocean passage where I am always in my own space and, while the ocean changes, it does so in simple, uncluttered ways in the absence of people.  Of the trip both Carol and I most enjoyed those places where we stayed a few days.

Along the way we experienced changes.

We drove over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco where for the first time I found a self-driving car in the traffic beside us.  Carol, who had often travelled to San Francisco on business, had seen them before.  This one was large, white, with various spinning devices and sensors.  it was beside us for several blocks in heavy traffic and was very well behaved.  I was curious who manufactured it and when it pulled far enough ahead of us I found Jaguar on the back.

Later in Sherman Oaks we saw an automated food delivery device, something like a waist high rectangle on wheels which considerately stopped half-way across an intersection to let a bicyclist cross ahead of it.

We drove near what used to be the Vandenberg Air Force Base and saw signs to the Vandenberg Space Force Base.

And we found Southern California far more congested than I remembered.  Places like Santa Barbara and Oceanside, once pleasant, were traffic nightmares.

I had forgotten how noisy Quivira Basin is.  Located four miles from Lindbergh Field and under the takeoff flight path, when outdoors one quickly gets in the habit of pausing conversations every three or four minutes as a plane roars overhead, and even on the fifteen floor of the Hyatt, traffic noise from West Mission Bay Drive was loud.  So were the sea lions, but I don’t mind them.

Steve Earley, who grew up in San Diego, wrote asking if being beside Quivira Basin caused me to feel back home.  While important and pleasing parts of my life were spent there, it did not.

Carol drove us to Mission Beach one morning and we were fortunate to find a parking spot on Mission Blvd. not far from where my grandmother’s house was.  The couple who bought it from me in 1982 were then in their 50s and built a two story two unit building, lived in the upper and sold the lower.  The number of people who were sitting in the tiny front yard that morning cause me to think that at least the lower unit has become an Airbnb, and when we got back to the hotel I searched and found it has, going for about $500 a night and getting very favorable reviews.  Odd to find people paying to spend time in a place that was once home.  The building has flaking paint and a missing piece of wood in the back, so perhaps the upper unit is not owner occupied either.

We walked along the beach which is great.  The ocean is more beautiful and alive than off HIlton Head and though I have history there going back seventy years, I no longer belong.  I was just a tourist.  This is not surprising.

By chance this morning I saw this in the WALL STREET JOURNAL which I skim as part of Apple News+.  That housing prices have hugely increased in Southern California is well known, but the amount, and that San Diego has seen the greatest price growth, impresses me.  As does that St. Louis, where I was born, has shown essentially no increase in more than a century.  The numbers are adjusted for inflation.

Cities concentrate labor force and consumers and are in some ways convenient.  San Diego has the best climate of any city I know of in the world, and California is a beautiful as any place I know of in the world, but there are far too many people, and I am no longer urban.  I like the west coast better than the east.  I like the Pacific Ocean more than the Atlantic.  Hilton Head Island is not perfect, but there is beauty and serenity and most missed silence here, and it is home.