History
I have lived near the Pacific Ocean all my life. I am not a water person. As a child, living in the Sunset District in San Francisco meant wind and fog for much of the year. My bedroom faced west and was called a “sunroom” but it was hardly that. One of my mother’s favorite sayings was that “It’s called the Sunset District because the sun only appears at sunset.” I went to sleep most nights, listening to the fog horns warning fog-blind ships away from our rocky shores.
Mom was raised on 27th Avenue in San Francisco, about a mile from the ocean. When she was twelve years old (around 1925), the sand dunes were much more extensive than they are now, rolling about a mile inland, stopping only a few blocks from her home. So it was quite a hike to actually get to the water then. The one story I remember her telling about the beach was that she and her siblings would go into the dunes to roast potatoes. She also told me that someone had pushed her head under water when she was young and that she was afraid of bodies of water ever after. She communicated that fear to me.
As an only child, there were no brothers or sisters to take me to the beach. It was my father who introduced me to Ocean Beach; my mother almost never went along on these expeditions. The big draw near the water was Playland at the Beach, three blocks of rides (the Big Dipper, a Merry-go-round, bumper cars), games like Ski Ball and of course, the Fun House, featuring Laffing Sal in front. This was a lot more fun than walking along the beach.
Swimming in the ocean at Ocean Beach is and was a risky proposition. First of the water was cold and the weather was usually windy and foggy. There are super strong rip currents that can drag you far offshore. Lifeguards used to be stationed there when I was a kid but aren’t now. There are warnings posted at every stairway down to the beach about the rip tides. Every so often, someone is pulled into deep water and drowns.
For me, another deterrent from going to the beach was the sunburn issue. As a half-Irish, freckled kid, Mom constantly slathered me (like a rare steak going to the barbecue) with lotions that needed replenishing often. After getting a few sunburns, I assumed the responsibility of coating or covering myself. That was an inconvenient pain-in-the-neck at our shadeless beach.
Mom wanted me to learn to swim and so I began lessons at Larson Pool. I think I was about 9 or 10 years old. i absolutely hated it. My mother didn’t drive and so we walked three blocks to catch the bus to the Larson Pool, luckily an indoor pool. Summer days in the Sunset District were almost always foggy and chilly. So waiting for bus, particularly after the swimming lesson, was a miserable trial to soggy me. After a few of these outings, I begged her to stop the lessons. She agreed and so I am able to dog paddle a little and do a dead man’s float. Not optimal for swimming in the Pacific Ocean.
When I got older, one of my high school friends lived a couple of blocks from the ocean, so occasionally, we walked along the beach. One of those forays revealed another beach danger – undertows. Undertows are strong – they can drag you from the sand into the water. In this case, a sneaker wave caught three of us walking along the edge of the water. The water only came up to our knees but the pull into the ocean was really strong. Always something to consider when traversing the beach.
An old famous feature at Ocean Beach was Sutro Baths. Because the weather is so miserable and the ocean so dangerouse at the beach, Adolph Sutro built the indoor Sutro Baths in 1894. Glass-covered, it contained seven swimming pools filled with sea water at various temperatures. It lost popularity by the 1930’s and was defunct and decaying when I was a child.
Now Sutro Baths are even more dilapidated. This is what they looked like back in 2016 when Dave and I went out there on a blustery day.
After Playland closed, the main attraction at Ocean Beach was the Cliff House. It use to have a couple of restaurants with a great view of the ocean and lots of junk for tourists to buy. A couple of years ago, the National Park Service who owns the land on which the Cliff House stands, ended the lease of the restaurants there. Surprise! When the restauranteurs moved out, they took the “Cliff House” sign with them – they owned the rights to the name. So now the building is a shadow of it’s former self. But the views are still great at sunset.
Behind the former Cliff House was and still is Camera Obscura. The San Francisco Camera Obscura projects an image onto a horizontal viewing table via a reflected image from a viewpoint at the top of the building. A metal hood in the cupola at the top of the building slowly rotates, making a full revolution in about six minutes, allowing for a 360° view around the building. So you get a great view of the ocean, nearby Seal Rock and environs.
So my favorite beach activities involved going near it (the Cliff House, Playland at the Beach, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco Zoo) but not too close and not in it. I also think that a lot of Ocean Beach in San Francisco is one of most featureless beaches on the West Coast. The northern end has the Cliff House, the southern end has some dunes but the central portion has only an old seawall and flat beach, flanked by parking lots.
Another view location that few people know about is Sutro Heights Park. The park once encircled the mansion of Adolph Sutro, a San Francisco millionaire. Now just the park remains but it shows off one of the best views of Ocean Beach.
Until I got into photography, the beach scene was not of interest to me. But forty-plus years of photography has taken me to many other West Coast shore locations and revealed some tremendously beautiful beaches and the huge variety of uses that people put them to. This limited series of posts with my images and commentary is meant to celebrate them.
Birds
Birds are found all along the West Coast. One of my favorites is the huge Brown Pelican. They fly in a stately formation along the coast, looking prehistoric. When one spots something edible in the water, it can take a spectacular dive to knock it out and catch it.
Closeup views can be had as they lurk under fishing piers like this one at El Granada, waiting for slippery fish to fall into the water or fish entrails, tossed by those gutting their fish up on the dock. The birds have a huge pouch that allows them to carry dinner home to the chicks. This pelican is waiting patiently, along with gulls and a wayward duck, for the fisherman to throw something to them.
These are elegant White Pelicans, hanging out at Oso Flaco Lake near Pismo Beach.
Another stately bird is the Great Blue Heron.
This grouchy looking bird is a Snowy Egret chick. They nest on Alcatraz Island. Their preference is to nest together, kind of like an avian condominium.
One of the most common birds found at the beach are seagulls. Many of them are California Gulls, mostly hatched on an island on Mono Lake in Eastern California. They are beautiful birds but their eating habits aren’t neat at all. They have a fascinating way to eat clams – they pick one up with their beaks and fly high in order to drop it on the sand. That often serves to break the shall and they can easily pick out the meat. Sometimes they go to all that trouble and another gull steals the broken clam before the first one can retrieve it.
They will eat just about anything and many a careless picknicker has lost food to marauding gulls. I once watched a gull balancing on the edge of a garbage bin, trying to decide if it wanted to jump inside to get a tasty treat. It teetered on its webbed feet for a while but eventually decided he might not get out once he got in.
Another tasty treat for gulls is the placenta and afterbirth of Elephant Seals. The gulls hang out, waiting for babies to be born, then chow down on the leftovers. Like I said, not fussy.
A bird species that has adapted way too well on the Pacific Coast and everywhere else is Canadian Geese. I can remember way back when seeing them was a special occasion. Now they are overpopulated and ruining parks and seashores with their large droppings. But their chicks are still cute.
The West Coast is full of small, rocky islands off the coast – a great place to raise a family. These Cormorants nest by the hundreds off Point Lobos. Safety in numbers, I guess. The breeding male develops a spectacular blue streak under their bills to attract a female. (Note the gull in the back, waiting to eat an unsupervised egg.)
Cormorants can be found closer to civilization. This bunch chose Alcatraz for breeding.
There are many species of smaller birds, making their meals at the ocean shore.
Plovers find safety in numbers, sometimes flying in groups of fifty or more. They dine on all the tiny crustaceans revealed by airholes in the sand as the current wave recedes. Plover nests are a little further up the beach, close to where dunes begin. Unfortunately, that leaves their eggs open to predation. California often closes those beaches with Plover nests during breeding season.
Often birds leave behind bits of themselves – delicate feathers.
There are many other West Coast ocean birds but I haven’t taken decent pictures of them. The next blog will cover some of the coastal animals and marine life that I’ve photographed over the years.
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