driving

This month I am living with my Grandma and Granddad on California's central coast. I have been in love with this place as long as I can remember with its stretched-out highways and swaths of land. As a child it always meant vacation, family, and the briny smell of the ocean. Now that I've come back older it means rest, good conversation, and cold sand under my feet.

 

I've been here a week now and we've done a wonderful lot of driving either to spend time with old friends, escape the fog and chase the sunset, or simply to grab a gallon of milk. My neck has become sore from the looking but words tumble through my head as I watch it all go by and I cannot help but look harder.

 

 

Some of the great hills are disrupted by outcroppings of old volcanic rock, flinty in their old, wind-worn age, as if the hills oozed around them over time rather than the rock rising and piercing the hill's smooth descent. From above the land looks like bulky creatures smothered under thick earthen blankets, their arms still outstretched as they were when they gave up the fight.



 

 

 The contrasts of this place always surprise and delight me. One moment will show softly rolling wheat fields with airy oak trees dispersed through them and the next will reveal steep ocean cliffs with a single gnarled madrone holding on by the ends of its roots. The crisp curving lines of a grape orchard gives way to the scruffy burnt brown of heather and thorn bushes. Each curve enhances the next in the sheer unexpectedness of the coming views.