The peace of Ventura eases a troubled soul

It was a fine, gray morning along the Ventura coastline. A damp mist dropped like a bridal veil over the Cliff House Inn, and sea gulls soared and screeched for attention in the complex currents of air that surrounded us.

The breakfast crowd had not yet gathered on the lawn just a few feet from the pounding surf, leaving the sounds of ocean and sea gulls to my wife and me as we attempted to sort out our lives in the shifting surprises of recent events.

Whenever a crisis alters the course of our well-being, I have a tendency to want to get away. A motel on the ocean, with sea and sky blending into one, was the perfect place for contemplation.

I have never regarded Ventura as a tourist destination. Santa Barbara was generally our choice for a short trip away from the madding crowd, where Cinelli and I could consider our options without the drumming of a big city in our ears.

I considered Ventura an innocuous settlement on the way to someplace else. We visited friends there occasionally, but did not take seriously the idea of actually spending time in a town tucked away into a mountainside. That has all changed.

It was after a shake-up at the L.A. by God Times left me temporarily columnless that we decided on the brief sabbatical. I am only truly at peace when I am away with the one person in the world who can be next to me in silence and understand what I’m feeling.

We had stopped for dinner once at the Cliff House’s restaurant, Shoals, marveling at its proximity to the ocean, in view of the spray that laced the near horizon and in earshot of the muffled hum of the surf. It stayed with us.

There are faraway places in the heart of every dreamer that call to him across an expanse of possibilities, and Ventura is now among mine. Although the room at the Cliff House was smaller than we expected, the inn’s location made up for it. One could leave the window open at night and sleep to the lullaby of the Pacific, floating off to different places on different oceans.

Father Junipero Serra founded Mission San Buenaventura more than 200 years ago on the site of what would become a city of the same name. Now populated by about 106,000 fortunate residents and its name shortened to Ventura, it sits like a village on the Mediterranean, just about 60 miles north of reality, at peace with itself.

Sunset magazine calls it “the new Ventura” and raves about its renovated downtown, its growing art scene and its “cutting edge restaurants.” We favored rows of thrift shops and antique stores loaded with stuff we didn’t need, and added much of it to the stuff we have no room for. We bought this and that from a shop called Times Remembered and sweetened ourselves with chocolates from Trufflehounds.

My indulgence was a crystal cocktail shaker, which added to a collection in my already crowded writing room that features 16 different martini glasses on a window shelf. In the late afternoon, as the descending sun ignites the many colors of the glasses, a rainbow is cast across my desk in a harmony of tones that would seem almost spiritual, if your religion features a chalice with an olive in it.

Speaking of God’s favorite drink, a treasure of 36 different martinis can be found at Café Fiore, which, while not a discovery equal to old Junipero’s founding of Ventura, is a welcomed haven for weary travelers. Entering the restaurant after a hard day of shopping, we were greeted by a bar whose configuration was that of a woman’s open arms with liquor-bottle eyes that sparkle in the properly directed bar light. I don’t usually wax poetic over booze, but, knowing the drinking habits of a few priests over the years, I’m sure Father Serra might have felt the same way.

We had lunch at a place called Café Bariloche, gazing out at the avenue over a Peruvian entree and a Brazilian beer. I quit drinking beer a long time ago, but a bottle of Palma Louca is heaven’s gift to sweat when the mist melts away and a hot sun pounds down on the coast.

I’m never sure that a place that seems so right at a certain time will feel the same when I return. Paris never changes, and New York is always pretty much the same. I’m afraid that if I go back to an inn built in the 1940s it will seem quaint but a little tawdry, and Ventura will be just another small town in a pattern of municipalities with big ideas.

But for a few days at least, wrapped in the remembered comfort of sea and sound, of tranquillity restored to a briefly troubled soul, I can thank them for the pleasures of their ambience, and for the nights of deep and peaceful sleep.

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Almtz13@aol.com