In the morning, when the sun first rises and warms the gentle waves of the Pacific, a great fog rises towards the mountains. It reaches forward through canyons and over ridges, fingers desperately clinging from one rock, tree, creek, to the next. The sun rises higher and brings along the day's heat. The condensation breaks and dissipates, and the mountains ride goldengreen on the sun's columns of light. Come nightfall, the sun disappears, now hugging the great Pacific, and the chill comes back, and the ocean fog rises again from its domain under and overtop the waves. Its crawl this time unhindered, for what celestial authority watches it now but the weary moon?
Six of us in a five-seater truck, the pressure of our bodies pressed against the others more than enough restraint to make up for the missing seat belt. The goal is in no mind. The goal is to see, to feel, to drive. The engine turns over and the lights come up. We take the king's road 101 to County Route N9, Kanan: Promised Land. The gateway to that land stands before us in its physical form as a stoplight, and inside of us as fear and hope, and a million lives we will never live. The fog obscures, but in that obscurity, forms become clearer because a new perspective arises. We are silent in front of the fog wall. The great red eye deems us ready; green. The engine hum now roars, and the night is ours.
The canyon run, up and down, winding, tapered road, widening; a tunnel, another. Thousands descend and climb these mountains every day, towards leisure or business. Us? Our business? Leisure. We are fast, we accelerate out of turns, and the wind comes turbulent through the windows, blowing into our eyes, making a maelstrom of our hair. And the fog… The fog is an apparition, a ghost, a thousand-thousand ghosts, standing side by side, staring through hollow eyes, reminding us; these mountains were here before us, and they will be here after us, and we too will be eyes in the fog, staring at our scion , making their own way through the fog.
Eventually, the winding ends, the geologies calm down and the final descent appears before us. The road bends gently downward, and a breath releases. We reach the end of the fog bank, and we are revealed to the coast. The wind seems less, though the mountains no longer rebuff the wind from the ocean. We turn down to a small lesser-known street, on a beach where there is some manner of seclusion even when faced with the expanse of the sea.
Here it sprawls. The great treasure of the state of medleyed paradise. The cliffs and beaches, which to us seem trite, but are true in their beauties of resplendence and age. Now for us, as that roaring engine shifts down to a hum again, we are greeted by the old rolling, the barrel-down crash of the waves, and the airy simmer of its foam and the retraction and the push again. It calms us down and kisses coldly our feet and threatens to chew and swallow if we get any closer. Quaint is the ocean upon the shore, but unconsidered are the terrors that lay miles out; the storms and shipwrecks, the abyssal depths and mountainous waves. We are content with our gentle rolling shore.
We make our way down, to coves each more secluded than the last. Each time we move the coastal bluffs grow taller over us and the incursions of the ocean grow deeper, and our beach narrows. We are one-by-one, weaving between coastal boulders, moving as a snake joined, not dead. The surf grows too close and the only direction forward is upward. Up we climb, a boulder risen from the beach, uneroded by the eternal surf, standing there, against the odds of a million years. This boulder, this rock, must be more than, must be willful and strong. Atop the rock, watching the ocean pool around us now, reaching the bluff, flooding our means of escape. We thank the rock for standing there despite everything, for providing our pant cuffs protection from the saltwater eddy.
The ocean swirls beneath and one of us lights the end of a cigarette, the moon and her ocean reveal a beauty that is hidden to us by our own smallness, our focus on finding privacy, shying ourselves away. That sky lays me bare and tears me open. The sky seems a reflection of the waves, both lit silver by the waning light of the moon, waning in influence, for the lights of the city keep getting brighter. It is the moonlight that sings to me, that almost calls me out off of my rock and into the waves. It is the moon, and her children the tides who make me cry private tears, and who, bows her head in mournful regret and clears the fog away. It is a clear drive home. There are no more ghosts in the mountains, only dim stars above, and streetlamps to light the way home.
That night, that moon, those waves, how many before me saw that same sky, that same fog and thought as I did, that they had never seen anything so beautiful? How many more nights like that will I have that transcend the conscious mind? I think not so many… nor so few.
