Away

February 21, 2009

(Elma, WA, by way of Hwy 101)

So up the coast I went, from dawn until midnight, hurtling along the coastal highway with my mouth hanging open. I stared so hard at everything around that I was in constant peril of smashing into the side of a cliff or plunging into the sea. The land itself looked to have some such inclination, always leaning like a wedge into the ocean, with a trail of small, rocky islands scattered before it as though it had flung itself at the horizon, broken, and fallen.

I hurtled through the little coastal towns of souvenir shops, gas stations, and rickety houses – by day like some curious flotsam that had washed up these fifty years past, by night like shoals of multicolored light in a sea of darkness.

In Oregon, the evergreen forest grows right down to the water, and the trees stand with their feet in the white sand. I think such sights are almost too beautiful, confluences of Paradise and Eden – nature decadent, nature unspoiled.



February 23, 2009

(Seattle)

While M was at work, I took a walk through Beacon Hill and along the bank of Lake Washington. Seattle in February feels autumnal, sedate. The trees are bare-armed and thick with moss, standing on lawns of sparse, dull grass and fallen leaves. They are trees of modest proportions and unostentatious postures. No towering cypress, no palm, no rigid desert trees standing sentinel. There were some pale, yellow crocuses gathered about the foot of a sapling on a boulevard. There was something of Minneapolis, something of Bennington, Vermont. Ambling by the water, I felt like a convalescent, my senses muted, my restlessness palliated. The naked trees cast a mottled shadow on the mind, threatening peace. The sky dims at the horizon, even at midday, and the edges of the mind dim.



April 4

(back in San Francisco)

A long walk to Pacifica reminded me again how different this city is from the one where I was born. There is such a difference in the way the genius of the place makes itself felt.

The beauty of Minneapolis is an old ghost with creaky joints. It walks slowly beside you, laying a hand on your shoulder as you cross the Hennepin Ave. Bridge, as you stand beneath the mill ruins. It rumbles in the throat with the engines of buses that struggle awake in the morning cold.

The beauty of San Francisco smacks you right in the face. It smacks you silly, and the April wind lashes your clothes about you, spins you around, and drives you downhill with your mouth agape.

One beauty is a titan with a crumbling face, with rust stains running from the mouth. The other, though as old, approaches you always as a young god at the height of its powers. It flexes its muscles; it beats its chest, with the wind rushing in from the ocean and waves smashing against the rocks. Strong and amorous, it bares its best treasures at once and demands you fall in love. I was of course swept off my feet. But I have been here some months now. I have woke of a morning and, looking out over the hills covered in dingy, pastel squares of houses, thought it an ugly city. Sometimes the sun shines too brightly for one raised further north, and inland, and beneath the shade of elms.

I begin to miss the green corridors of the avenues. Ivy-covered houses. Hastas. Grim skies promising snow. Promising thunderstorms. Yellow skies before hail. The faceless, handless statue of Longfellow standing alone in that forgotten field. Shade trees. Shade trees. That dappled, relenting light. It casts a shadow on the soul. It whispers in the throat of history, age, and a great river eating away the banks, carrying them away south toward an end, and leaving every year, proud and diminished, the remains – like some original place.