Three times I didn’t have a camera
1) Mark and I drove and camped down the 101 and 1 in northern California one spring. We marked places we liked in our trucker’s atlas of America that we inherited from my father, but we didn’t bring a camera. Photographing gigantic redwoods with their feet covered in carpets of perfect little green shamrocks, and grey zen monasteries, and elk grazing on high, grassy cliffs over black rock- and pearly, abalone-pocked beaches, and baby mule deer and large black-tailed jackrabbits bounding together through yellow, post-winter grasses so tall that the two species were almost indistinguishable, and blue-green-clear papery-gelatinous sheaves and reams and ropes of dead and dying by-the-wind sailors along the sand would probably have been difficult with a little camera, anyways. I drew pictures in my journal. Very funny-looking ones.
2) Vestmannaeyjar.
3) Out for a walk the other night along Spanish Bank, the tide was out. I walked out on sand settled and rippled into unending edges by the ocean, and watched the sunset turn the waterlogged sand orange and pink and gold and blue–no: mandarin and peony and lemon and indigo; no: long-wavelength hues and non-spectral purples. Blue herons and gulls fished in fingers of water. The mountains in the cleft beyond the end of the Strait were high-lofted by the atmosphere and white and orange with snow and light. The freighters in the Inlet–and there are always so many of them–were Tonka-bright, monolithic stripes of red and black and blue on smooth, dark water. Standing in rippling, tide-soaked sand and looking up at the rippling sky proved such a good illusory sense of elevation that two other strangers came out to join me even though our shoes slowly soaked through with brine.
