Dana Point Christmas: 1834-1983
“Our cargo was an assorted one, that is it consisted of everything under the sun. We had spirits of all kinds,...raisins, molasses, hardware, crockeryware,...boots and shoes from Lynn, calicoes and cottons from Lowell....”
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Two Years Before the Mast (1841)
Everyone’s home on Seville near the garden center,
Where condo units cozy up like pleasure boats in their slips.
Kitchen screens are speakers full of the noise we make.
The pet tropical bird screeches.
Across the street, garage industry, two sewing machines stitching.
A chocolate parcel truck picks up custom-made bikinis.
Worn out, Dana quit Harvard College, set off to cure “a weakness of the eyes.”
His ship Pilgrim rounded the Cape—
Rain-wind, salt-snow, fried-air rushing sails toward California.
This Pacific strip, San Juan Capistrano’s beachhead, today hails the writer in bronze.
In Von’s Market on Ortega Drive, handling a blue plastic bowl
Molded in a plant upriver from the Lowell textile mills,
I recalled the ship’s cargo, the stuff we swap, like that tough New England cloth.
Christmas 1834. Just north of the equator. Dana wrote, “It brought us no holiday.”
Twenty days from the palm beaches, a hundred-plus from a Boston wharf,
The crew’s provisions had run out.
Jump to 1983. Pilgrim II rigged with colored lights.
Flashbulbs pop in Dana Marina at the Yuletide boat parade of lights—
All the kids and captains harmonize on “Little Saint Nick.”
Paul Marion, Dana Point, California, 1983