It’s darker than night, the dense purplish black blanket of coastal fog. The road is weaving through the mountains, up in the cloud layer. There is no one else on the highway. Blaring at 75mph with 25ft of visibility, particles of mist uneventfully obliviate into the windshield, condensing and amassing a blur that the wipers and defroster struggle to clear. Forest canopies occasionally darken the road even further, their unseen canopies only known by their shapeless shadow and a momentary gray trunk. If it were not for the occasional deer that crosses the road, this would not be terribly unsafe.

I know the road well enough, its wide swooping curves, where its cliffs are narrowest. In sections where it folds, I typically go as fast as I can without revving the engine below 30mpg or screeching the tires on turns. I like to save gas, I like to upkeep the car, and I like to stay alive. But I also like to go fast. Why dilly-dally when my commute to work is 66 miles along a twisted road, often stacked with slow, sightseeing, self-centered tourists? Besides, cars can’t drive at night like this without headlights, so the visibility is, in effect, greater. I can see the glow of a car coming from behind a blind corner, sometimes miles in advance. Excepting the risk of fallen rocks that the mountain offers on a nightly basis—the risk being the labor of replacing a tire, or of not being able to replace two—, and of the odd deer, there isn’t much danger in blowing past Ragged Point at 50, past the Southern Redwood Botanical Research Area at 60, Alder Creek at 75, downhill legs of Hwy 46 at 80. Of course, if there is a small animal, like a fox, possom, skunk, raccoon, I have to select mercilessness and kill the damned thing head-on, no swerving.

I killed a fox once like this just north of Pacific Valley. I was crossing paths with another car, and suddenly a little creature darted out across the first car, then crossed the lane into mine. I spun the car back to see to it. The fox was writhing in agony, its head on the ground, its body swirling about in the air in an electric frenzy. I remember the wide-awake tapetum lucidum, bluish greengold. I apologized to the fox, quickly turned on piano music, and asked it to die in peace. Seconds, and the writhing stopped. Blood had drooled out its ears. It was an incredibly beautiful animal, orange and gray and tan. Moved it to the berm of the turnout using some sticks to cradle its soft body, then laid sagebrush beside it, cried. Hopefully, the turkey vultures saw to it the next day.

I doubt a bobcat, coyote, or mountain lion are at much risk—they can leap high on a dime. The only mountain lion I’ve seen dead was atop Cuesta Ridge in the median of 101. Divine beauty. Obviously, a big rig got it from over the crest. Tragedy to the forest.

Highway 1 is dangerous under three primary factors: (1) the extent to which it is raining or has just rained, (2) the extent to which one is willing to drive distractedly for the given road conditions, and (3) the number of tourists present. Rain (2) is dangerous for the rocks it deposes. Distracted driving (2), including drunkenness and grogginess, will send you over a railing. Tourists (3) are erratic and their eyes do oft drift westward, laxing on the line of cars wishing for their pulling-over that they so vacatiously, so sabbatically decline, frustrating local drivers not wanting to soak in the long drive to Cambria, and thus become judgment-impairing.

Something I struggle with is getting to the starting of writing, and once started, to the finishing. Premeditation and divergent commitments slug me down. There’s surely something in speeding on the foggy coastal mountain road at night that has a word on this. There is proximity to the absolute unknown, at least a clear tendency toward it. Big Sur is a showering downward of continent into ocean fueled by a fountaining upward viewed from the south, a carving downward viewed from the north, a ram-stacking tilt north-northwest when viewed from all geographic angles. Anyway that it is going, there is surely a golden-angled seam where the scalloped hands of land slowly cobble and thread into the fast fingers of deep saltwater. It is a blasting into that threatens the cloud of all ordinal norms. It’s a sudden, breathtaking, mind-altering beauty that drains a really attentive mind. It’s a reckless slamming into, despite limitations and losses. Thrust-faulting into it. Eroticism primordial, yes: the face of the other held steady and staring. An attempt to interact with a fundamentally different one. Tantric wilderness. The mountain shoreline is but a handful of thousand years old, and there is not much ocean-carving done, except to shear off the boulders and make some cobble out of them. Non-alluvial sand is thanks to 1930s and after roadwork deposition. What we are seeing along the Big Sur coastline is a natural willingness to throw oneself into the other. And the whales sing their mystic mysticeti music. Will I write? And what would I write? How to will for the willing? Groaning birth pangs for freedom and glory to be revealed. Some days I sing that music too, some times. It is not all days and all times that I am able to sing, and I long that there were more. Motives swing low. Shall I drink the saltwater that is given to me? Then will my tongue be loosed as I have ever longed? Aspens, sagebrushes, great fir valleys, bravely running streams, wind!


Gorda, California
October 13, 2022