The turnoff into the parking lot is barely noticeable. A quick turn off Highway One north of Cayucos built for an earlier time. A time of horse-drawn wagons, fewer and slower automobiles. The small parking lot with room for maybe ten vehicles is a concession to modern times, but not much of one. No parking lot during pre-State Park days. Just a turn, then a dirt road. I’m at Harmony Headlands State Park with my family for a two-mile hike to the ocean.
The path is a dirt road that has supported four-wheeled vehicles over many years. As we hike, I imagine a rickety wagon being pulled by a nag or a mule or two. The best transportation a Chinese immigrant could afford 100 years ago. They make the long journey from work camps or shanty towns all the way to the ocean during a rare day off from digging and pounding and hauling. It is something they learned from their fathers. The ocean contains abundance and sustenance. Much better than what the railroad company provides at the work site.
So they trudge, prodding the mules every now and then. Drinking the weak tea and rationing the thin flour cakes until hit with a slap of salt air. Thirst and hunger and weariness disappear when they smell the ocean. Their steps become more energetic. Over one small hill then another until…the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
The water near the rugged coast is not entirely blue. The men rush to clumps of brown and black. It’s low tide and much of the brown is now exposed to the air. One of the men shouts and points. The others pull out knives and begin to harvest the ocean’s bounty.
Seaweed that will be cooked for soups. Seaweed that will be dried for snacks. Seaweed that will be used as medicine, as fertilizer, as reminders of home. This is no weed. This is life. This is a connection to a homeland touching the same ocean.
I imagine many years later the mule-drawn cart is replaced by an old Ford truck. A truck used on leased farm land by recent Japanese immigrants to grow onions and artichokes and grapes and strawberries. Not the food of their parents’ land, but new world food that allows them to support themselves and their families. Sometime in the mid-1930s, the truck rumbles along the dirt road, the driver and his best friend in the cab. Two more friends in the bed of the truck. Kombu and nori are the subject of the hunt today. Old world food.
As I walk with my family, I also imagine other families, the native American foragers of the Chumash or Salinan tribes making the same walk. On narrow foot paths, over many, many generations. To fish, to forage for the seaweed that would also be food and medicine. Like us, I am sure that they kept a sharp eye out for birds and other wildlife. And thrilled at the beauty of flowers and plants.
Now it is my family and I climbing the last rise and looking down at the endless blue Pacific. And jigsaw puzzle pieces of brown and black and red and green. Kelp mostly, but also kombu and wakame and nori and sea lettuce. And I am further transported to my youth and my Japanese mother singeing nori over the stove’s open flame, tearing sheets of kombu for our rice and, only as an adult, learning to love the slightly gelatinous texture and umami flavor of the wakame in my miso soup.
Harmony in nature, harmony in food, harmony across cultures and time. It’s all here at Harmony Headlands State Park if you know where to look.
