“Venice Beach in a
combination of the tacky, the mindless, the ironic, and the novel.”
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| Venice Beach day! |
One of the benefits of unexpectedly
making friends at CTY was having someone to go out on adventures with on our
free days.
One of the things
I didn’t even realize I wanted to do was to go down to Venice Beach.
It was my first Southern California
beach and even without any comparison to the other beaches nearby I knew Venice
was a beach with a distinct personality.
I took a bus with Elicia, Andi and Jennifer and then
walked about a mile until we came upon the stretch of sand while annoying
clouds rolled in across the early sunshine.
The boardwalk reminded me in some ways of the town where the
cruise ships dock in St. Maarten.
There wasn’t anything really new and shiny and Americanized about
it.
Instead, it was a stretch of
blacktop with vendors in permanent looking fronts on one side and temporary
tents along the other.
There was
an array of options—jewelry, clothing, scarves, coffee, funnel cakes, and every
five steps or so medical marijuana stores.
The Doctor is In
signs read or
The Green Doctor, Accepting
New Patients with a telling green leaf across the awning and on the
glass.
Along the side closer to the
beach were sand castle sculptors, tarot card readers, henna artists, and street
performers.
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| Henna tattoo! |
People of every kind
walked along on the chilly day and we spent hours perusing, and buying, the
different wares.
I got my first
ever henna tattoo at Jennifer’s encouragement and Elicia’s willingness to do it
too.
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| Manhattan Beach volleyball courts |
The
next weekend we biked on the beach down part of the bike path that ran almost
25 miles from Santa Monica to Torrence Beach. The trip confirmed what I already knew as we headed south
from the middle part near the Marina del Ray to Dockweiler Beach—where RVs and
campers seemed to flock-- and headed on to Manhattan Beach and its Pier. Pre-set-up beach volleyball courts were
everywhere and sports abounded on the beach. A week after that day Mom and I visited Santa Monica Beach
and Pier, north of Venice Beach, and saw the personality there—part carnival,
part upper crust which was totally different from Venice. At least until we half-snuck onto a
classy rooftop bar with vertical fire stations and great (expensive) drinks and
filled with dressed up people. We
looked like we had spent the day meandering on the windy breach. Because we had. But somehow they let us
onto the rooftop. We looked down the beach towards the lights and saw the
Ferris Wheel of Santa Monica’s pier in the not-so-distant stretch down the
beach.
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| Santa Monica Pier |
I
was on Santa Monica’s pier two weeks later when a car purposely plowed into people
crowding the Venice Beach Boardwalk, killing one and injuring dozens.
It’s not as though Venice is my
hometown beach.
But I had just
been there, and since we walked the entire boardwalk I had been in the exact
spot where the driver had gone into the crowd.
In the exact spot just two weeks earlier.
The pier I was standing on on Saturday,
August 3 was less than five miles away.
(In case you didn’t know anything about this, here’s the link about it:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/03/us/california-venice-beach-crash ).
I
loved that day walking along Venice and I wouldn’t trade it. But I knew its personality a bit, and
so it felt more like a classmate hurting instead of just some person you’ve
vaguely heard of but never met.
Maybe I’m personifying the beach too much, but it was my first Southern
California beach experience with newly forged friends, and one of my favorite
days of the CTY summertime. So it
hurt just a little bit to read about the death of a person I’ve never met
because it happened on a beach I had met.
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