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Dear Friends of Crystal Cove,
Visitors look at the sky this time of year and think: oh, bad luck.
Those of us who spend more time here look at the same sky and think in poems:
June Gloom. May Gray.
If it’s still early, the lesser-known Graypril.
If the marine layer hangs around a little longer, No Sky July and Fogust make appearances.
I love these names. I love the quiet wink and the musicality of it all — local inside jokes that sound a little like weather and a little like Lewis Carroll poems.
There is affection in them — like family lore about Aunt Margie.
A gray sky during the first week of summer break is a disappointment. June Gloom is a beloved recurring character. It becomes folklore.
In places like Colorado and Minnesota and New York, the seasons show up exactly as they were taught in first grade: cutout suns, construction paper leaves you can detach from their branch, snowflakes with scissor marks, cartoon raindrops. The seasons arrive legibly and with a certain confidence.
California, in a way I’ve come to love, is always more complicated than that.
Here, the seasons are quieter. There is more overlap. The gray of early summer. The heat of early fall. The first Santa Ana winds. The jacarandas. The grunion. The whales. The hills turning green and then gold with invasive mustard.
The marine layer settling over the coast in the morning like it brought checked luggage, but most days heading off by noon as if it had somewhere else to be.
The marine layer itself is not ours alone. It happens in a handful of places around the world where cool ocean and warm air meet—coastal Chile, parts of Peru, Namibia, and up this coast to Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. It makes me wonder about other coasts, other currents, and other people standing at the edge of other continents with their own folkloric names for the way fog gathers over cold water.
Here, the marine layer even has a supporting cast. The Catalina Eddy helps it hang around longer, but sounds less like a weather pattern and more like a minor character in a Raymond Chandler novel.
Which all feels very California to me.
We take something that might disappoint and give it a name and a rhyme and a supporting cast and a story.
One of the things I love about California is that it rarely reveals itself all at once. You stop waiting for it to be simple. You start noticing the rhythms that were there all along.
And then one morning you look up at a gray sky and, before disappointment has a chance to arrive, the rhyme gets there first.
June Gloom.
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