Landscape


My hometown is a mix of Spanish ranches and track homes, surfers and suburbia, art shows and tans. To say that Southern California, that Carlsbad, California, is eclectic would be an understatement. We pride ourselves on our eccentricities, on our oddities.

On El Camino Real, one of the largest streets in Carlsbad, there is a small home with a dirt yard. In the yard, there is a man of metal. A stick figure of thick steel posed in a sprint. He has been in that yard, on the side of the road, as long as I have been able to recall. Metal Man dwells with other metallic sculptures and usually holds a Padres baseball hat or a Chargers lightening bolt. Carlsbad is proud of our Metal Man and that says more about us than anything else. Californians truly swell with pride for our craziness as much as for the surf town atmosphere alive farther down the road.

As we drive down El Camino, the street is lined with shacks and new split level complexes. The shacks are usually not much more than four walls and a roof, and usually are a mix of old clothing, sand, and skateboards. The ocean cools the warm days and brings in a layer of thick fog that tastes like salt on your tongue. The sidewalks are flat and new, yet still trail off into sand and dirt thick with clay. The clay used to put up the older Spanish homes, mixed with mud to form adobe. Californian homes grow from the ground, they are not on it.

My home is a track home, made to look like every other on the quiet cul-de-sac of Cima Court. Yet my parents took our small brown stucco house and built a two story gray and white home. The front yard has three large trees which lose their leaves every Fall as our one real reminder of the season. The back yard is large, yet filled by a pool and several patches of chili and tomato plants.

Inside the smell of hot tamales and fresh salsa fills the air. The mix of corn husks and peppers, stinging onions, and sweet smelling cherry tomatoes makes the mouth drool and pulls you from the slightly chlorinated smell of the pool into the beige tiled kitchen. The kitche, like the rest of my home, is a mix of beige, earthy browns, and orange hues which mix with the red rimmed sunsets and sky blue mornings.

Our carpets are soft and laced with reddish brown collie hair, from my dog, Princess. She lies on the cool tile of our entry way in the heated nights, from which our only escape is a small dusty fan on the dresser. Like most of the people of Carlsbad, we have no air conditioning and remedy heat with midnight plunges in acidic pools as coyotes howl in the background. The sound of the night on the corner of Cima Court is quiet, the humming of a fan, the song of a cricket, and an occasional late night car. Overall, there is nothing more quiet than a night in Carlsbad. I hear my dad snoring loudly, so loud he takes a sharp breath in and awakens, fulfilling his nightly ritual. I hear his feet pound the carpet with a rustle, then the tile with a suctioned squish along the floor. My mother, dead asleep, snores only quietly while I look at my stucco ceiling reading stories out of the indentations in the bumps. I fall asleep in a single sigh, after a long day contemplating waves and salsa and Metal Man.

I awaken again to the blue skies and warm sun of an inevitably beautiful day in my hometown, and I contemplate the sand in my sheets from a beach excursion and Princess licking my face to wake me up in her insistent manner. Carlsbad, California is lovely.