California surf cats well know the most infamous spots for waves up and down the state. Road trips are a quintessential aspect of living the surfer’s life in California, seeing as how the state is so big. There’s countless places to catch world class waves in SoCal and NoCal. Swami’s, Beacon’s, and Oceanside in San Diego, Huntington Beach, Jalama Beach way out near Lompoc and Point Conception, Maverick’s in Santa Cruz.
And there’s Rincon Point, straddling the line between Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. It was at Rincon, on the beachfront adjunct of California’s famous Highway One, just parallel to the stretch of Highway 101 between Carpinteria and Ventura, where I came upon these descansos.
I became far better acquainted with the Rincon strip roadway over the course of the pandemic, as it was one of a few deserted places where we could safely take our pack of dogs with few crowds, as at that time, overnight camping had been prohibited because of Covid, and the parking lots were blocked off with cones and such. I’d had considerable experience cruising around there all the same, as while I’m not a surf cat myself, my associates in high school were, and I tagged along with them on many an outing, content to smoke weed on the beach while they paid their lip service to being consummate Cali boys (we don’t really call ourselves that, but it rolls off the tongue sweetly enough). Afterward we’d usually go grab Rincon burgers at the only convenience store around, in a little beach adjacent ‘burg called La Conchita, site of the infamous 2005 mudslide that came barreling down the hillsides after heavy rains, destroying 36 homes and killing 10 people.
The first descanso here was a harder one to photograph, as it was perched right alongside the busy lanes of the 101 South, and so I had to carefully navigate the parking of the truck and my exit accordingly. It was another of the frequent anonymous markers I happen upon across California. I would say the ratio of explicit epitaphs to unmarked ones, in my experience, probably goes 70:30, in favor of the former, and that’s not counting markers whose original epitaphs had faded to illegibility due to weathering.
The second one commemorates one Zack Gregson, an apparent outdoorsman and firefighter, clearly beloved as evidenced by all the totemic stickers added to his marker. I see many, many American flags affixed to descansos, especially those marking any members of our Armed Services, of course.
The last memorial in this segment honored a woman named Mary Jane. All three descansos were erected facing a wide ocean horizon. a lovely setting for the marker where majestic sunsets are enjoyed each and every day, myself having enjoyed countless moments of twilight there over the decades.
There are a number of totemic items placed in and about Mary Jane’s descanso, including a Catholic cross, a number of rocks stone-cut with inspirational slogans, statuary of birds and frogs (I’m not certain, but I think a few of them might stem from Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows), seashells and flowers. Most heartening was the picture of Mary Jane herself, where she is assembling a stacked cairn of rocks, that ritual we all like to do on occasion when visiting a place of peace and serenity.
Whether Mary, Zack, or Decedent X shed their mortal coils there, on that semi-hidden section of the Pacific Coast Highway, or if they’d done so on the far busier speedway above that less traveled road on the busier 101, I do not know. I find it likely they all ended their time on earth using the 101, because people barrel down those Rincon flats at very high speeds. It’s a flat track with little civilization lining the roadway, and there’s plenty of accidents there every month. The California Highway Patrol sets up speed traps there a few times a day, but there’s just too many people to track. It’s possible Zack and Mary’s families set up the memorial on the less busy road below because it was a more beautiful background and it was safer to visit the marker.
Since the photo of Mary was taken on a beach, there’s also the probability her family erected her marker there because that sector of the Rincon beach strip was her favorite place to visit, and that it’s quite possible she didn’t meet her earthly end on the 1 or the 101 at all, only that she had passed and her family picked one of her favorite spots to set up a honorarium. Perhaps they spread her ashes there on that beach, and set this marker up as a meta-signpost, incorporated into a literal signpost. It’s possible Zack’s marker, or Decedent X, was also erected for the same reason.
However Mary Jane, Zack, and ‘X’ went, or wherever it happened, their descansos are testaments to how oftentimes, loved ones don’t limit their honors to any one single place. I know of what I speak in that regard, as I regularly tend to a number of memorials all across this state, of varying kinds, in a variety of fashions, depending on the memories I created with those passed loved ones in that particular region. It can be a marker, a rock, a beach, a forest a mountaintop, or a street corner. It depends on whom I’m thinking about, or what I’m intending to invoke on that day, or both, and what me and that person might’ve experienced there. I get more into that in an upcoming segment (The Doggies, Parts 1 and 2).
Spirituality, and our connection to transitioned beings, aren’t limited to gravesides or church pews. But you knew that already, didn’t ya.
See you around, Mary Jane, Zack, and ‘X.’
Hope you’re faring well in your new spheres.