I'm standing on a crag jutting out into the Pacific, waves crashing on the rocks below and laughter floating through the air and I can't stop smiling. This morning we left the city behind and drove through insane traffic and constant shifts in terrain, through pine forests and artichoke fields, sand dunes and wind-weathered rock, arriving in Big Sur in time for lunch and stone-skipping lessons followed by a hike up a steep hill to a scenic waterfall in Pfeiffer State Park, which would have been wonderful enough in itself, but then we pulled off the highway at a serendipitous spot and found a rough path down to the cliff edge where we stood like Walt Whitman facing west from California's shores, "Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound."
Like Whitman we are children reveling in the wonders of earth and feeling both very old and utterly new. Not so long ago I lay awake with a bad case of the jitters after a bout of chemotherapy and to calm myself I planned long road trips including one along this highway between Big Sur and Monterey (read it here), but at the time I wondered whether I would ever drive this road and walk these cliffs. Tomorrow we travel to Salinas and Monterey to commune with John Steinbeck and in a few days I'll be ready, like Whitman, to "face home again, very pleas'd and joyous." Today, though, I'm here and I'm happy and I wonder how anyone could live here and not be a poet.
1 comment:
Do visitors write poems, on the spot? It does look wonderful.
D.
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