Skip to main content

I. Tripping West

Mari and I drove to Davis, California to be with Bill and Jane and their family and friends to celebrate the life and sudden death of their son.  Tim was to be celebrated, even while being mourned, so we left a day or two early, in order to make the trip itself special, too.

The first day, we drove most of the way to Santa Barbara, in order to have a full day driving up the coast of California, to Monterey Bay.  It is a long, winding road, not demanding access to the coastline, but conceding to it, going where a slower time thought to go.

I do not believe in gods and ghosts and ghoulies, (although I have heard things go bump in the night), but when the gods made California, they made something beautiful!  Sun, and sea, and golden grass carpeting the hills is very close to something we first saw when we crawled up out of the surf, eons ago.  We still sweat salt, and echo the heartbeat of the surf.  Still we turn to the sun from where our elements came, and watch the clouds carry water inland.


Not only is San Simeon a silly and glorious passion, it is a determination to watch something elemental.  That seaside sliver of California west of the San Andreas fault, sliding northwest, and the continental side, hanging fast, are creating still.

We stopped for a snack where elephant seals are down on the shore, and where the speed limit is 20 mph, and the price of gasoline in $7.50 a gallon, because the tanker trucks come seldom and slowly, and because it is a long ways to an alternative.
The erosion of the continent at the shore, with high ridges and deep arroyos, made us go carefully, and gladly, to appreciate what glory really is.

I do believe that almost everywhere has beautiful places, but California is not everywhere.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more