to borrow a line from one of the songs that runs through my head whenever I am on the road.
Driving California takes a lot of time. I don't actually know how long the state is in miles; but in hours, from here north you can drive more than six hours without running out of state, and the same six hours won't get you to the Mexican border on the south. The state is more than fourteen hours long; in the time it would take to go from end to end, I could have driven from Boston to Chicago.
Which I realize doesn't mean that these two distances are the same. The size of a space measured in time has no direct relationship to the length that might be measured by a surveyor.
That was especially obvious as we rambled in a loose circuit from here to Santa Barbara and back. The Salinas valley stretches out forever, seeming an endless succession of fields nestling in the loops of the river. As we drive through here, the 70 mile an hour speed limit apparently the minimum for locals and truckers, we can see bands of rain and sunlight for miles ahead. Driving north through this slow terrain, we decided to leave our normal route through the Santa Cruz mountains and instead followed the Carmel valley northwest.
In truth, the time it took to reach Carmel along this route was far less than the Santa Cruz way would have taken, especially since we would doubtless have run into the ironically named rush-hour traffic, falling into lanes of cars inching forward painfully slowly. But as the miles rolled by on what at times was a one-lane road, deserted for tens of miles not just by other cars, but even any livestock, the fifty plus miles of this diagonal line taken at 30 miles per hour seemed to last for most of the afternoon. Around each new bend, live oaks covered in California's version of Spanish moss, fields of native chaparral and grassy pastures succeeded one after another. Where the road cut through the rocky hillside, thin beds of sandstone folded over themselves, or standing tipped almost vertical, gave way to cobbles and pebbles eroding out from loosely consolidated clay. More than any part of our journey, this new segment of road seemed vast and the possibility that it might simply go on and on hovered over us.
In contrast, driving across the hills from Half Moon Bay to San Mateo as the sun went down behind us over the Pacific Ocean seemed to take no time at all: charging back into the Bay Area traffic maelstrom erasing the sense of peace that the Pacific, grey and churning, nonetheless created. As the sun sank low each evening we spent on the ocean-- Half Moon Bay, Carmel, Cambria, Santa Barbara-- the most distant edge of the water turned glossy and silver. After the rain swept through, clearing the air of all dust, whitecaps were clear across the entire width of these bays, striking distant cliffs and rocks offshore.
One ocean, the same everywhere, yet constantly different. In the moonlight deep indigo blue crested in whitecaps as stylized as a Japanese print. In the honey light of the setting sun, where San Gregorio Creek stained the Pacific with a perfect semi-circle of brown sediment, rings of pure turquoise and aqua led out to the grey edge of the sky. With the full sun briefly shining from an almost artificial blue sky dotted with white puffs of clouds, ocean reflecting blue and white and grey and pink and yellow as the morning sun streamed down over the mountains to the east.
What remains: a line of whelks, most bone white, one showing flecks of brown. A banded stone, washed by the ocean. A piece of coral, tumbled so long in the surf that the facets made where branches broke off are glassy to the touch. The sound of the ocean, not trapped in the shells but in my memory. Rain in sheets joining sky and ocean. The spectrum of color briefly shimmering on the right. And everywhere green.
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