Water & Sky
Point Arena January
The sky, for three days empty, began to gather clouds from around the world ― a remarkable collection, and expertly lit. The sun, itself accentuated and concentrated by the contrast, shot spectacular light on the world, wrapping around the gleaming white cylinder of the light house, blooming again and again against dark ocean in the blown spray off cresting waves, and warming the shining chins of seals as their round faces emerged from waves. Just south of the point, whales turned near the surface, waving dark arms. We watched them for a long time, while behind us more and more visitors climbed the sunlit lighthouse to pretend that they were Frensel lenses, turning green beauties, hailing sailors 21 miles out, past the corrugated edge of sea.
Silver Lake September
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Three hundred eighty-five acres of deep grey water pattern with white, millions of drops accelerating from somewhere in a murky atmosphere, itself grey with ash and water. Layers of lake, pale granite, pines, ospreys, and the last fishing boat, driver huddled in a life jacket, roll gently into that greyness, while behind me two aspens, not yet yellowing, sing like rushing water in the wind. Electrons make the sky white by turns, the air rumbling almost incessantly with small thunder, and occasionally it all snaps together in an instant of sharp purity, sky split by a thick fork of electricity that sears the eyes and ushers decibel piles to crack and mushroom over that perfect breathing stage.
Mendocino August
The fog folds over the bluff, drifting in pieces over the hills, houses, a patch of blue shows above the bridge. But the sea melds quickly into the sky, a sudden horizon. A young man in black on the end of the bluff plays the fiddle to the yellow grass, to the carved wooden faces, to the dark stone, to the short sky, to the slow-moving sea, which leans, bends, and falls its massive salty weight into deep whirlpools against rock, into piled slowly-crashing crests, into white fingers of foam that run through cracks in the geology. Even when it runs, it runs slowly, this pre-dusk sea.
The sound of the fiddle disappears. Prayers fold out on patches of bluffed sand. In an unseen cavern, the ocean roars from time to time, deeper than thunder.
