The first time I saw the ocean was at Golden Gate Park after two days hitchhiking from Denver. I was three or four years too late for the Summer of Love, but I felt it a duty to my generation and my chosen path as a poet to dip my toe in the sacred waters and kneel at the alter of the City Lights Bookstore. I still have the two volumes of Anna Akhmatova that I picked up that day
Back when the Summer of Love had just happened, I was in my Humanities class and our student teacher was handing out mimeographed copies of A Coney Island of the Mind
My world restarted at that moment. The words that before had only made sense, now made magic. And that magic led to me drinking beer with a bunch of guys pulling crabs out of the bay latched on to bait lashed to old dish drainers. Led me to sitting on a hillside in a park with a dense fog on one side of the bridge and a clear sunny day over the bay with every size and color of sailboat in a mystical dance orchestrated by fingers of fog reaching through the bridge to bridle their passage
It led me to using the last of my money to buy a bus ticket to Stockton, so I wouldn’t have to hitchhike out of the city. And it led me back across the mountains to my little apartment on Clarkson Street and my own search for the grace to just pull things out of the ocean with whatever’s at hand.