Dana Point 2

Posted on June 26, 2003 in Photos Strange The Orange

“Ah for the days of wooden ships and iron men!” Or so the saying goes.

Dana Point Harbor is home to at least two “tall ships”: the Pilgrim, which is based on plans for the ship which carried Richard Henry Dana around the Cape Horn in the voyage described in Two Years Before the Mast and a faux reproduction called The Spirit of Dana Point.

I figure that the Spirit must be a whaler because what Dana Point is mostly about is destruction of the natural habitat, beginning with the construction of a breakwater that destroyed the “Killer Dana” waves in the early 1970s and ignited a shoreline protection movement aimed to prevent such wanton habitat erasure.

Dana Point is the San Juan Capistrano Harbor described in Two Years, where vaqueros tossed dried hides off the cliffs to the Yankee seamen below. The unstable sandstone bluffs that the droughers stood upon in the 1830s are now overcrowded with luxury condominiums and palatial estates which will eventually bring the cliffs down to the same level as the sea from the sheer weight of paternal excess. But like the nuclear reactor down at San Onofre which lies within an earthquake fault zone, the developers of Dana Point plan to be dead when geology finally catches up with their creations.

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Next to the Pilgrim stands a shrine which ranks among my favorites. Made possible by the Swenson Family Foundation, it shows two sailors up in the rigging. A bronze plaque engraved with text from Two Years describes the unbearable queasiness that Dana felt the first time he climbed up among the sails. Lynn and I like to call it “the Sea Sickness Monument”.

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