I sped west through the wine country of California, through the almond orchards and the fields of oil riggers that dip and rise like the cheap plastic drinking birds your father used to keep behind the bar. But all I could see in my minds eye was her.
Her delicate fingers caress sand in intricate musings. Her powerful hunger yearns for land and stone. She duplicates herself in tidal pools that live for brief, startling moments and then vanish into her totality. Likewise, each time I am at her shores, I consider walking into the surf and disappearing forever into her depths, giving myself entirely to her infinite embrace.
On Highway one, just south of Big Sur, I felt her touch. It flooded my flesh with a stinging shiver; her salt sweat lingered on my lips.
A hundred miles north, on the shores of Seal Rock in Monterey, I heard her song again in the twilight.
I sat at her feet upon a stone chair and watched the sun dissolve like sugar onto her skin. I saw the fire extinguish in an orange, stormy glow that called the fog from its slumber to breathe secrets on the wind. I listened to seals and sea lions howl and honk upon the knuckle in her hand. I watched the pelicans and cormorants battle for her bounty in wheeling, chaotic patterns of flight. I played with seagulls as the picked her bones clean and sandpipers as they danced the no-touch walk upon the finest hairs of her shoreline.
The loss, the loneliness washed over me in waves of emotion as the night of in-betweens crashed on my beach. The songs rose then within the ledge of reality, just as the wind, always the wind, rose to wrap me in the robes of station. I became something more again there nestled in the dark harbor of her shores. I felt healed and whole and hopeful.
I spent two days traveling Highway 1 from south of Monterrey to Leggett at the foot of Redwood country, following the course of the ocean and listening intently to what she has to say to me. At times, I perched atop looming cliffs and stared at her swelling below me, raging against her stone walls. At times, I wandered amongst the strands of her hair and let her spray touch my reddened forehead and run lightly down my cheeks. At times, I stood in her cold embrace and felt the sand beneath me slip towards the horizon of her infinite hold. But always, always, I have taken the time, a few times a day, to be with her.
She teaches me something new every visit, shows me a new side of her, a new facet of her being with every step danced along her shoreline. And with each lesson she teaches me, I teach myself something about my inner spirit.
The window is open tonight. Her whisper lulls me to sleep. I shall think of the incredible shoreline of the Pacific as it winds across Monterey while I dream. I shall drift atop the cliffs that drop off into staggering, rocky pools of tiny waves below my feet. I shall suck in the clouds as they kiss the tops of the doughy mountains. This is heaven on Earth, one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen in my life.
It was always my intention to drive along these roads until I ceased to feel that I was on vacation and would return to Columbus, my home. The minute I felt like I was on vacation and would return to Seattle, my home, I knew I would have tipped the scales. That happened sometime after I hit the coast. Now, it is only a matter of returning back home and starting again.
Route: West to North and then North all the way till morning