The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): The Once and Future Beach in Santa Cruz

March 20, 2012

The Once and Future Beach in Santa Cruz

The San Lorenzo River isn't notorious for its length. If you stretched it out on a ruler it wouldn't be fifty miles long. But when winter rains reach Santa Cruz County the San Lorenzo collects a prodigious amount of water from the steep hills on either side of the narrow valley it courses through. Characteristically enough, 17 inches of rain fell in Ben Lomond, about ten miles upriver from Santa Cruz, between Tuesday of last week and the weekend. All the other spots along the river, Felton and Brookdale and Boulder Creek, contributed their fair share as well, and the river, which carries hardly a creek's worth of water in the summertime, surged heartily out of the enclosing valley as is its annual habit and down onto the marine floodplain where Santa Cruz sits waiting to receive it year after year.

The river goes where it can, and has had its way with Santa Cruz many times. This year the river took an unexpected turn on its way across the last two hundred yards or so of beach to its meeting with Monterey Bay. Instead of barrelling directly through the sandbar that normally blocks its mouth in the summer, it swerved hard right, threatening the foundations of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Earthmoving equipment was brought in to build a levee of sorts to persuade the river back onto its normal course, but the river and the ocean tide are combining to make that a hard sell.

The San Lorenzo River passes under a railroad trestle on its way to the shore of Monterey Bay, March 20, 2012

A temporary levee attempts to contain the San Lorenzo River, March 20, 2012

Ocean waves lap the black bulkhead of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, March 20, 1012

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

©2007-2019

The ideas expressed here, and the words used to express them here, are the ideas and words of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), which is to say "peter ramus," which is to say, me. Naturally, given their ultimate source, the ideas are half-formed at times, provisional always, and subject on mature reflection to substantial revision and, often enough, to outright repudiation by the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), by "peter ramus," and by me.

The words themselves, however, in the precise carnival train order in which they appear, and such original images which may from time to time be displayed here, excepting of course for those attributed materials the provenance of which, as duly noted, originate elsewhere, are owned by and are the property of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," or me, and are subject to the terms of Creative Commons License 2.5 , by which license (in the unlikely event that such words and original images appearing here are taken up and displayed elsewhere) clear attribution must be attached to those words or images indicating their ownership, to wit: the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," but not me.