Devotion

I've spent the past two weeks up and down the West Coast, from LA to Portland to Seattle.

I've driven 101 down the Coast Range: through the Salinas Valley, down into SLO, out to Pismo, holding the ocean's unpredictable curves to Santa Barbara, and up into Topanga Canyon where I'll be making myself a home. In Stegner's essay, "Inheritance," he reminds us of how little our country has changed in the 500 years since western contact; quoting Cabrilo, "[These Santa Lucia Mountains] reach to the sky and the sea beats upon them. When sailing near the land, it seems as if the mountains would fall on the ships."

Then back up 5: up and over the Tejon Pass, past the snaking pipes of the Edmondston Pumping Station consuming the energy of Rhode Island to push a river over a mountain, through the necklace of pitstop towns-Buttonwillow-Kettleman-Santa Nella, then the silent turbines and classified labs of Livermore, and finally spilling into the Bay.

A flight from summer fog which reached all the way to the western slope of the Diablo range which deposited us, rather abruptly given the slow climate progressions of a long drive, into the muggy evening air of Portland. A week of morning overcast and dazzling afternoon sun spent along trendy, eco-sensitive, bike-and-food-cart filled, boutique'n'gallery lined neighborhood thoroughfares, sandy beaches and decks with beers in hand.

Then the overcast ribbon through endless conifers of I-5's greener half, up into the startling upthrust of Seattle, threaded with highways, geologically layered, which tangle, plunge, soar and slide.

It is in these times when I see so much of our land at once, see it panning by as a grand survey course in the permanently and near incomprehensibly interwoven patterns of ecology, history and imagination, that I come to a feeling - though not a sense - of comprehension. This is when I feel I've got something. This is one of the ways that I have of getting the wheels moving and playing the preludes and overtures of having something worth saying.

This is where I want to be on the cusp of starting grad school.