California is the crushed scent of bay laurel eddying through the dust trail you raise threading through the deep, brown, dry drainages, loop after loop in the coast ranges. White sun on those leaves punching through the veins of a redwood sky here, translucent green and a vast staring blue. Jarring dips in the shattered rock beds of streams young and indifferent to their task: they handle a rock here and there, sorting their materials, the dredged up sunked melange, etch an experimental whorl in a piece of sandstone and and then bam off to another valley. Not really their fault. Nothing’s settled in California.

Unearthly silence except for the wind setting the live oaks into an inferno of sunlight and an occasional twitter deep in the branches from a chickadee restless for more acrobatics, or down in the brown litter some leaflike brown bird rustles. All of the rivers theoretically run into the ocean, but they take their time about it, and when it’s still only a few miles off still lie deep in contemplation. No tell-tale sea breeze; it’s taking the most direct route into the hungry furnace of the Central Valley, high above you except for when your road or trail inexplicably decides to lift you up to the shoulder of a nameless peak and show you just how close to the edge you are of the vast implacable.

Night doesn’t like to wait here, though. It rides the lengthening shadows and steals into the air until the heat all comes up out of the ground and fog lays its infinite fingers over everything.

(cdm | CoastRanges )