"In a lot of ways we never did leave the ocean as a species, as shy naked mammals. You know exactly what I'm saying. You have stood there too, staring at it for reasons you can't explain. I believe that love is our greatest and hardest work."

Brian Doyle, The Sea

Calmation. There, I did it. I made up a word that describes the Heritage House Resort. It's full of calmation. I needed a new word to avoid resorting (pun intended) to hackneyed descriptions such as "on arrival, the cares of the modern world sloughed off like a well-used straight-jacket" or "a walk around the grounds caused my shoulders to drop liked wrinkly, old hanged men." Calmation.

We checked in with the front desk guy, and in the midst of his casually rapid-fire spiel, he told us we'd been upgraded. He just sailed right past that little detail like he was explaining towels in the bathroom. Never having been there before, we didn't know what to expect from either the original booked room or the upgrade. We followed his directions to the room: down the road, around the roundabout, to the end, and parked on the right side of the driveway, making sure to leave room for the other unit.

The first room is a small entryway, a mud room if you will, but really more of an anti-room to store your clothes and suitcases. Taking a left through the doorway reveals the first view. Through sliding glass doors, you look out across a narrow bay with deep, rich, blue-green water to a steep cliff decorated with moss and caves, and the whole framed by trees just past the deck. The bed is opposite the glass doors, so this is your view while lying in bed. To the right of the entryway is a desk with its own set of windows facing perpendicularly to the bed view, almost directly west. That way be monsters, or Japan. Japan for sure, anyway. You can't see it, though. It's too far.

So, my first thought was that the upgrade to the "Same Time" room (more on that deceptively dull name in a minute) meant an additional view. I can't oversell those views. I spent so much time over four days standing and staring out at the water. Sometimes just gazing with blank mind and hoping the Black Pearl would appear out of the mists, and at other times searching for critters with the binoculars. Sometimes pondering, to no avail, the question of why we have such a strong emotional reaction to views, specifically, in this case, rugged coastal views. The rugged shoreline is pure natural beauty and the ocean is somehow full of hope and expectation as if at any moment a ship bringing exotic goods from far-off lands would soon appear.

To the left of the bed is the nice and fancy bathroom. The kind of fancy that takes some figuring to get the multi-headed shower to work to your satisfaction.

If you like a rugged, romantic, California coastline, and who doesn't, Mendocino County is a great place for it, and the Heritage House Resort is a good home base for exploration. In fact, if it's the beautiful coast you're there for, you don't even have to leave the grounds. Heritage House has 20 acres on the squiggly cliff edge. On the north side of the property, you can wander up past flower beds to a gazebo perched right on the edge of a promontory. To the south, on the other side of the frog ponds, there's a path that leads you down a rickety wooden stepped path to Dark Gulch beach, a small waning moon of a secret beach enclosed by high cliff arms reaching out as if to hug the ocean. At the base of the cliffs are pockmarks and caves and recently fallen trees. The local wildlife always seemed to be performing for us in this little cove. We saw gaggles of geese land on the water, seals searching for supper, and squadrons of pelicans flying in tight circles and sequentially dive-bombing into the schools of fish. You could practically hear their communications: "This is Gulper 7, I'm going in!"

Back to the room: it's in a single, standalone building with two units. Ours was called 'Same Time', the one on the other side of the wall is called 'Next Year'. Put them together and you get 'Same Time, Next Year', the name of an Alan Alda movie from 1978, for which the building was originally built. After filming was finished, the building was updated to hotel standards, divided in half (including the name), and moved to its current location.

Layered on top of the admittedly inadequately described views are sounds and smells. There should be a room deodorizer (I'm sure there is) called "Forest on the Edge of the Sea." The tangy sea smells combine with rich, verdant pine and other foliage that varied with the wind; sometimes more salt, sometimes more floral. The sound is a continuous and soothing white noise of waves caressing the cliffs, wind massaging the trees, and punctuated by birds. Underneath is a subtle but consistent deep booming that feels like it's massaging your insides, the sub-woofer of the littoral symphony. It isn't clear where the rumble comes from until you have a more seaward vantage point and discover that there are big caves along the waterline, one under the cliff in front of the room. It can be somewhat disconcerting if you think too much about it but just don't. It is solid rock, after all.

At one point, as I was mindlessly gazing out the windows, looking towards Dark Gulch Beach, I saw what appeared to be a localized boiling of the water followed by some kind of grey creatures popping up. I got out the binoculars and saw it several more times. It appeared to me that there were a couple of seals terrorizing a school of fish. I decided I'd best go down to the beach. It's only about a five-minute walk to get across the grounds and down the rickety ramp. Unlike the first time we went, when I was just tromping around with no concern for stealth, I slunk quietly down the ramp, across the stream, and onto the apron of the beach, crouching down like I was up to no good. To be fair, I was probably fooling no-seal but I wanted to improve my chances of being undetected.

I found a partly concealed rock on which to sit and wait. There was still activity out in the bay, but it seemed less than when I was watching from the room, perhaps due to my presence. I sat there willing myself to be a non-threatening rock, practicing patience, and enjoying the surroundings. At some point, it occurred to me that the camera doesn't do any good in my pocket. Wildlife tends to happen all of a sudden. I had just unzipped the camera from its case when a little seal head popped up 10 feet offshore looking right at me--apparently, I'm not a very good rock--and he slowly swam past, staring me down as if to say "You aren't fooling anyone buddy".

Seals, they have calmation.