[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Do you get why I’d paddle out into the cold Pacific just south of Davenport on the exact day when the light tips into something else, when summer finally admits defeat and the whole goddamn world exhales?
That Stegner quote: “another fall, another turned page”, that’s the whole thing right there. This September feeling. Doesn’t matter if I’m not in school anymore, doesn’t matter if I haven’t cracked open a textbook in thirty years. My body remembers. Something in my DNA says: summer’s over, time to get serious, time to reckon with what I’ve been avoiding while I was drunk on sunshine and denial.
And so I go to ********. I go at dawn when the water’s slate-grey and unforgiving. Not because I’m punishing myself, but because there’s something honest about it. Something true. The equinox doesn’t give a shit about my problems, my deadlines, my existential dread about getting older. It just is. The waves just come. And for a few hours, that’s enough.
This is California’s dirty secret, not the tech billions or the wine country or the farm-to-table horseshit. It’s this: cold water, empty beaches, the ritual of suiting up when any sane person would stay in bed. That’s where the real locals live. That’s where you find something like grace.