La Jolla Cove

Author's Comments

The cove is small. Smaller than the photographs suggest, smaller than the hype prepares you for, and on most days more crowded than any cove this size should reasonably be. I have learned to come early. Six in the morning in late spring, before the parking fills and the tour groups arrive, when the water in the cove goes a color that genuinely surprises me every time - not the postcard turquoise but something deeper and stranger, almost mineral, where the kelp shadows move underneath. The sea lions are already awake. They are always already awake. They have claimed the lower rocks and they will let you know, through smell and sound, that this is their cove and you are visiting. I do not mind. They give the place a weight that pure scenery would not have on its own. Low tide is when the margins reveal themselves. The sandstone goes pocked and intricate, the pools fill with small bright lives, and the cliff faces show the layered orange and ochre that the midday sun flattens entirely. Morning side-light is what you want here. It rakes across the stone and gives the cove dimension that vanishes by ten. Park up on Girard and walk down. The walk is part of it anyway - the eucalyptus, the slow descent, the first sight of the Pacific between the houses. By the time you reach the cove you have arrived properly, which is different than just showing up.

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