San Diego in February

What I forgot about California.

The only antidote to a crowded airplane and a bumpy ride into San Diego is a cemetery.

Today the wind is howling at Ft Rosecrans, and unlike a good journalist, I don’t know much about the military cemetery perched high above the Pacific Ocean near the Cabrillo National Monument.

What I do know is that there are comforting lines and patterns formed by the gravestones. The white marble headstones on the seaside hill aren’t the bleached white of the Colorado sun that subdues all color unless you look skyward. The stones here have a faint orange cast to them from the rusty spray from the churning waves below.

It’s quiet up here except for the wind that demoralizes the spirit and messes up hairstyles.

There are several new graves and renovation of some of the cemetery has peeled back the dirt from around the gravestones like peeling meat and skin off an animal bone. Exposed, dark-colored sandy earth look disrespectful, as if the dead matter no more.

Cars with white plates and red and blue writing drive through the patchwork cemetery. Pausing momentarily, they’re not looking for a long lost love, father, mother brother, they seem to seek the conversations between tombstones that are never heard but only seen.

Across the expanse of renovation for the dead, yellow caution tape stretches in the punishing wind, and the dead don’t care.

Time testaments line up and face the ashy-gray waters of the Pacific.

This resting place seems a cold and lonely place to leave a loved one.

I realized that the cemetery and the plane share something in common: the plane moves through the wind with dedicated zeal and the cemetery citizens don't care.