Well sure, I’ve never hit the Powerball jackpot, and I might not be a millionaire. No, my great fortune is even luckier than that. I won the cosmic lottery when the dandelion seed of my life landed and sprouted from this soil by no design or effort of my own.
Of all the times and places it could’ve happened — 2012 Aleppo, Syria, when the bombs of Civil War and superpower proxy struggle started dropping; Mediterranean coastal Carthage (modern day Tunisia, Northern Africa) in 146 BC, when Roman legions conquered the city and sold tens of thousands of survivors into slavery. You name it. But me, I got to ride down Beryl Hill every day to go home. And that big blue view to infinity never ceased to wow the senses.
I got to know the smell in the air created by cliffside flora and soil mixed with kelpy saltwater while sitting way out deep at the Cove on a bombing swell, taking in the living psychedelic swirl painted atop the ocean from the greens and browns of land blending with the pinks, purples, oranges, and yellows of sunset, and the aquamarine of thick, wintry Pacific.
My gaze would drift toward the Hollywood sign and downtown Los Angeles, backed by a range of snowcapped mountains, and I’d think to myself: “Where on Earth am I?” It never fell on blind eyes, and never formed cataracts against the wonder of it all. The fortune. The deep gratitude.
But I’m also endowed with what I call “The Bear Went Over The Mountain Syndrome.” From riding in the back of the car with mom and dad during the joyful family pastime of house sightseeing trips — usually in wealthy Manhattan Beach nooks — to exploring the crannies by foot, bike, or skateboard back when we mobbed every street in town before driver’s licenses, I was always driven to see what was on the other side of every corner, down every alley, behind every fence, over every train track.
By the time I got my 1960 Chevy Brookwood station wagon, it became about what was around every bend.
Those childhood summer vacations bouncing around with my brother in the back of a small Toyota pickup truck — capped with a shell and lined only with a fire blanket — to destinations like Tahoe, Bass Lake, Yosemite, Sequoia & Kings Canyon, and Havasu, lit the pilot light that would eventually explode into a life of adventure.
My parents started with $65 between them when they were 19 and 20 years old, and couldn’t afford plane flights for four. There were also regular dips into Mexico when my grandparents briefly tried to open a beachside Baja restaurant. All of it shaped me.
By my mid-to-late teens I was renting cabins on my own adventures. By 19, a European study abroad cracked my cranium wide open, and the yolk that spilled out became a life of adventure spanning 36 countries, 60-something national parks, and road trips through 44 states.
Watching wild horses handle winter in Patagonia. Jackknifing into the Amazon River off a floating hostel in Brazil. Bike riding the Bolivian Death Road. Nighttime jungle hikes. Hang gliding sugarloaves. Inner tubing through glow worm caves in New Zealand while the ceiling looked like Space Mountain.
A couple weeks trekking the Himalayas in Nepal, where I saw more earth than I’d ever seen before while saying what’s up to Mt. Everest — or, as the Sherpa people call it, Sagarmatha.
Playing Indiana Jones in Angkor Wat. Dreaming of druids at Stonehenge. Climbing pre-Aztecan pyramids at Teotihuacan. Catching mummy’s curses in the shadows of the Great Pyramids of Giza. Synchronous fireflies at dusk. Beards of Spanish moss blowing in the wind. Canoes, suspension bridges, lazy gators. Poolside piña coladas just aren’t for me.
Making snowmen with my darling daughter Savoy on the hips of a 20,000-foot volcano. Diving with sharks to recover a sinking cell phone in the Galapagos. Paying $600 to stay out of jail while rifle-equipped guards screamed at my driver and waved a baton in his face, all for stepping on the wrong dirt across from the Taj Mahal.
Dragons and castles. Citadels and palaces. Temples and cathedrals. Hoodoos and voodoo. Australs and boreals. Penguins and pink dolphins. And always a waterfall just a quick motorbike hop away. Yet I’ve never not lived in Redondo Beach. And you might not believe that I actually work seven days a week.
Sure, there were once sugarplum visions of living abroad — a young man’s immature dream lacking any real plan. But I quickly came to recognize that the coloring book of life is filled in by the people most important to you. With a front cover of birth and a back cover of death, it’s those people holding the crayons for the pages in between.
Home is relationships. The well-tended garden of relationships buffering your kingdom. So yes, some clichés are worth repeating: home really is where the heart is. And if there’s ever been a place that feels hard to leave, tugging at the heart upon your return, that big blue view atop Beryl refuses to grow old — and home has never been far away
Jeff Vincent
Associate Editor
