Tomorrow we trip 600 miles south, through mountains and forests and high basin and range, down into valleys, back up steep ridges, and finally down into a monstrous river valley that broadens and widens until the hills fall away in the distance. The sky gets bigger and all the trees get smaller and fewer, the wind and sun get harder, the houses get closer together, and still we roll south.
The colors and the light change with the topography. Instead of a million shades of green and umber I will notice all the yellows and rusty reds. Gold and topaz instead of silver and emerald. The rivers change, too. Instead of bright water raging in torrents through mountain canyons and millions of little creeks and streams and rills, the big valley's wide slow dark rivers are banked and leveed and constrained, dredged from farmland silt.
We'll stay one night beside the wide San Juaquin, under the shadow of Diablo, and listen to the wind whistle to the east, the smell of salt marshes. The next nights will find us in the Salinas Valley farther south, the coastal fog blanket rolling over us at night and scraping against the hawk mountains. Fields of artichokes and strawberries, the smell of fertilizer and earth.
We travel to visit family; there's a new baby, siblings, cousins, parents, and grandparents to see and hug. After three days in farmland we'll head east, across the wide valley, into the gold rush hills, where my grandparents live on a steep hillside five miles from town. I love that land of red clay and sheer granite cliffs, manzanita, buck brush, big pines and oaks. The smell of iron and pine duff. Last year when we were visiting we saw what looked like a shimmering silver cloud across the tops of the trees, and upon investigation discovered it was thousands of dragonflies hatched and rising from the wild river in the canyon down below.
We have many miles to travel, and many more before we return to the place I love best, where cherry trees grow wild and the light is jade green and the air smells like rain.
I'll return in twelve days.
The colors and the light change with the topography. Instead of a million shades of green and umber I will notice all the yellows and rusty reds. Gold and topaz instead of silver and emerald. The rivers change, too. Instead of bright water raging in torrents through mountain canyons and millions of little creeks and streams and rills, the big valley's wide slow dark rivers are banked and leveed and constrained, dredged from farmland silt.
We'll stay one night beside the wide San Juaquin, under the shadow of Diablo, and listen to the wind whistle to the east, the smell of salt marshes. The next nights will find us in the Salinas Valley farther south, the coastal fog blanket rolling over us at night and scraping against the hawk mountains. Fields of artichokes and strawberries, the smell of fertilizer and earth.
We travel to visit family; there's a new baby, siblings, cousins, parents, and grandparents to see and hug. After three days in farmland we'll head east, across the wide valley, into the gold rush hills, where my grandparents live on a steep hillside five miles from town. I love that land of red clay and sheer granite cliffs, manzanita, buck brush, big pines and oaks. The smell of iron and pine duff. Last year when we were visiting we saw what looked like a shimmering silver cloud across the tops of the trees, and upon investigation discovered it was thousands of dragonflies hatched and rising from the wild river in the canyon down below.
We have many miles to travel, and many more before we return to the place I love best, where cherry trees grow wild and the light is jade green and the air smells like rain.
I'll return in twelve days.
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