encinitas

I TOOK MY YOUNGEST daughter cycling around California on my black Adriatica. We were up in the East Bay Area when we got lost looking for our Airbnb. We took a long road into a forest that was inhabited by large white birds with gastrointestinal problems, apparently. I thought it was raining, but the rain was white. Soon we were soaked in bird shit. I couldn’t believe how much of it came down. It didn’t smell like anything really, but it was collecting in puddles on the forest floor. This was the Bird Dung Forest, I later learned from a map, populated by storks with IBS. After we left the forest, we pulled up a driveway to the apartment we had rented.

THE APARTMENT was in a postwar split-level suburban house. The owner was nice enough, an older fellow with graying hair and a Dead Kennedys t-shirt. We talked about the Bird Dung Forest, and how to get to our next stop, Encinitas. He told me that we were currently in Oakland, but said it in an odd way, almost the way the New Zealanders say “Auckland.” Maybe that was some kind of local Oakland accent. “Encinitas? Yeah, I know Encinitas,” he said while getting us some drinks. “But that’s kind of far away. Why do you want to go all the way there?”

TO GET TO ENCINITAS we had to take the Pacific Coast Highway, he said. The next morning, we cycled out to pick up the route, and I rode up a hill, only to look down at a precipitous drop. It just didn’t seem that my bike could handle an incline like that and I cycled back down the hill and began to look for other options. A large wooden ferry had just arrived from San Francisco on the other side of the bay, and cars were disembarking. Then I noticed that there were a set of smaller ferries voyaging farther south. Some went as far as Encinitas, they said. My daughter was very tired by then, and clinging to a teddy bear. She yawned as we boarded the ferry. Later, I recalled that Encinitas was a familiar destination. I had passed through there once on the way out to the San Diego Botanical Gardens. But that was a very long time ago.