Finding Sunset Cliffs

The older boy had already found his move before we made it halfway across the sandstone reef.

He'd cup his hands around a tide pool, lean in close, then spin around with the kind of wide-eyed urgency only a big brother can manufacture on command. I found an octopus. His two younger brothers would come scrambling across the sandstone, careful enough but fast, and by the time they got there he'd be standing back with his hands in his pockets, barely holding the grin together. They fell for it twice. Maybe three times. I lost count because I was watching the parents, who were watching their kids, who had completely forgotten I was there.

That's usually when the session finds its real rhythm.

The Morel family had been in San Diego for a couple of years when we spent an afternoon together at Sunset Cliffs. Dad is in the Navy. They'd settled into the city, the boys had schools and friends and streets that were starting to feel familiar, but Sunset Cliffs, twenty minutes away, was new to all of them. It's something I hear more than you'd expect. Some of the best spots in San Diego have been here the whole time, quietly waiting.

We met at the top of the cliffs on a low tide afternoon. The stairs down to the water are known locally as the Thousand Stairs, it's closer to two hundred, but you feel every one of them on the way back up. The boys had energy to burn on the way down.

Before I let them loose on the reef, I slowed things down. Fifteen years of teaching middle school science leaves marks on you, and one of them is knowing how to bring a group into a new environment without losing anyone to an avoidable accident. I walked them through what to watch for, boulders that look solid but aren't, the algae that makes everything slippery. Both parents were listening. I could tell.

Then I started showing the boys what to look for. Codium first, a dark almost emerald green algae that goes by the name dead man's fingers because it looks like a bunch of fingers. A few feet away, a rubbery brown globe about the size of a tennis ball called brown brains. Their faces did what all young boys' faces do with information like that. We turned over a few rocks together. Then I stepped back and let them go.

For the next hour and a half, they explored. The octopus trick happened somewhere in there. The youngest eventually found a hidden pool tucked under a curtain of eel grass and got his feet wet, which seemed to please him more than it concerned anyone else. Mom and Dad drifted behind the boys, stopping when something caught their eye, occasionally genuinely absorbed by whatever a tide pool had going on that afternoon.

When the tide started coming in we moved toward the beach. One of the boys found a tennis ball that had washed up. Dad caught it. Then threw it. Then the whole thing became something else entirely, the three boys and their father working out the rules of a game only they understood, which dissolved into sand castles, buried legs, and the youngest lying flat on his back making sand angels while the sun dropped toward the water.

Mom sat with Dad. She had his jacket on over hers against the ocean breeze. They weren't doing anything in particular. Just watching their kids be kids, on a beach they'd never been to before, in a city that was starting to feel like home.

I didn't need to do anything. I just needed to be paying attention.

We made our way back up the stairs as the last of the golden hour faded. Said our goodbyes at the top. The boys were tired in the way that kids only get tired when they've actually used their whole bodies.

Sunset Cliffs has been here the whole time. Now it's part of their story too.