Today I revisited our flight with friends out to Santa Cruz Island, and was fascinated by this building I snapped as part of a scene near the southeast end. It’s an old church with cemetery, all but untouched by time.
Each of those grave markers represents a life story that ended here, so near the bustle and constant change of SoCA yet so very far. A time capsule from the previous millennium in some ways, of a very different lifestyle from our Hollywood freeway culture. Moving minutes backward in our own time to the climb West for the crossing, this long look to distant Point Conception carries my mind back even beyond the abandoned buildings by that lighthouse to the Chumash people who inhabited both places.
Though only a couple of minutes before that, our takeoff looking past UCSB to the island seems a lifetime ago.
The drought-ravaged wetland next to the airport hints at the marsh once there when a Chumash band lived on a hillock that was once an island.
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