Dana Point 1

Posted on December 31, 2002 in Photos

Last night, out in the parking front in front of the Santa Margarita Staples, I observed a man acting very strangely. He kept taking only a step or two out towards the back of the lot and staring over us as we parked. When I got out and made every indication of suspicion, he explained himself: The faltering light, which was only going to last a few minutes, gave an unforgettable color to the smoke blue clouds clustering around Mounts Santiago and Modjeska like kittens around their mother’s teats. I agreed that they were worth the look and joined him for a second or two. Then I resolved to download the last images of the year from my camera and post them here.

Click on image

I actually took these photos on the Thanksgiving Weekend. Dana Point used to be one of the wildest sections of the California Coast until tax hungry county bureaucrats and money hungry realtors built a yacht harbor. The resulting breakwater destroyed the appearance of an area that deserved to be preserved as both a natural area and a national historic landscape due to its mention as the harbor of San Juan Capistrano in Two Years Before the Mast. (This was the spot where the rancheros threw the cow hides over the cliff.) The construction of the breakwater destroyed what was known as the “Doheny Dip”, a legendary wave formation that some surfers attempt to ride off these rocks. The loss of Dana Point was the spark that ignited the voter revolution known as the California Coastal Initiative and for several years, similar stretches were protected from developers’ schemes until dismantled by Republican maneuvers in the 1990s.

These pictures are from the last, slender neck of wild land at Dana Point. The rest is concrete, steel, and patches of lawn planted to make dry California look more like bog-saturated Scotland.

On Thursday, January 2, watch for my “Best Photos of 2002”.