The Lovely Carla and I spent nearly six days in California. It was a great, enlightening trip. Here are some highlights, in no particular order:
1. Flying in the air at 35,000 feet, looking down at a great mountain expanse. It's comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time. I mean, air travel is not magic, a mountain is just terrain, but then again, if you really start thinking about the billions of years it took to create that terrain, the vast chain of humans it took to conceive of flying, to invent a plane, building one and letting people buy a ticket and fly. All this just so I can get to California in a couple of hours? I know what a mountain is...remind me, what's a mountain again?
2. Sunset Boulevard. The human show in all it's mad, ridiculous glory.
3. Los Angeles, the city of angels, there are now so many angels, they can no longer fit on the head of a pin. They're all jammed up on the 405. A freeway is not free. You sit in the endless traffic jam and you think that this way of life is not sustainable.
4. Hiking in Griffith Park with our good friends Kris and Noel. Four hawks flying above us. We marvel at them hovering in the air, effortlessly, do they marvel at us marvelling at them? There's magic in the air. We look down from the trail to a see a thriving metropolis. We are overwhelmed by the sky, the sun, the purity of nature. Beauty. Absolute.
5. The Griffith Observatory. James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo; they were here.
6. Santa Anita, in the shadow of the mountains. I missed being the king of the world, by a nose. But the thrill baby...yes, the thrill!
7. Morning in Laguna Beach. Sipping a cappucino, watching a group of dolphins dancing in the water. A big, old pelican watches me, watching him. Later in the day, a grey whale comes into shore to rub the barnacles off on a rock. The beach scene comes to a complete hushed silence. "A whale!"
8. Sometimes man overwhelms nature; sometimes nature overwhlems man. In the California frame of mind, this dual overwhelming happens simultaneously, all of the time.
9. The vagaries of a life: yesterday, running on the beach, sun is shining, 70 degrees, ocean lapping at my running shoes. This morning running next to the frozen lake, kicking up snow as I go. Home again. And yes, well, why do some of us live here and not there? Yes, and well, tell me, what's a mountain again?