Summer Voyage

I walked down the hill to look at the vegetable garden the other morning despite the howling winds. I just like to stand there sometimes watching things grow…rows of lavish lettuce in shades of green and purple, the slender grassy threads of onion, tomato plants adorned with yellow flowers, each a tiny promise. The garden is enclosed by chicken wire, which I had covered with a large plastic sheet that I thought would provide a bit of shelter from the wind and create a sort of greenhouse effect. It was a haphazard experiment. On this particular morning I found that the plastic had lifted and was flapping noisily in the wind like a huge erratic sail on a boat going nowhere.

It occurred to me then that I am on board that very boat. This is an observation, not a complaint. It has simply started out to be a strange summer, a stretch of pause and ponder, a rudderless sail on a blank sea. There are solitary days when I don't talk to anyone for hours on end, when even the dog finds me boring. Sometimes I savor the sense of isolation, the motion without destination, the small routines beneath a vast unflinching sky. I'm just circling and bobbing about, not going anywhere, and I suppose that seems dull and meaningless. But maybe in its own way it is also brave and pure...or so I try to tell myself.

Years ago I interviewed the late Jane Hollister Wheelwright, who grew up on this ranch. She was in her nineties when I talked to her, and she’d had enough time to notice patterns and gain perspective. “Everything becomes cyclical,” she said. “There's no stream that you can follow. It's just cycles, over and over." Lately I can see that very clearly. What she didn’t say is that the cycles accelerate. Even standing still I feel the whoosh of air around me, and I have the sense of everything slipping through my fingers before I can begin to understand what it was that I once held.

Fog is now gathering on the Gaviota coast while a little girl who used to climb right here on the rocks is in Morocco. One sliver of time contains both of these realities and infinite others. I try to fathom it but I cannot.

And I am happy for that daughter who is so faraway, afraid for her, and even, I confess, envious of her. The summer I was twenty I lived in a basement apartment in Chicago, the farthest from home I had ever traveled. I was a college dropout and prematurely married. I remember sitting in a bathtub watching the milky remnants of soap on the surface of the water, listening to the ping of the faucet drip, thinking how sad it was that my life had ended so soon.

So I suppose I have achieved some success if my daughter at twenty is in Morocco, filled with dream and possibility. But they tell me I cannot live through her, and she makes it very clear that they are right. I need to see Morocco for myself.

And a thousand places more. I want to wake up in a faraway city, walk its streets, hear its music. I want to see a bazaar and a rain forest, a midnight sun and a mountain temple. I want to cross borders and arrive at elsewheres and look through different lenses. I want to wander and wonder and love the world in new ways. I want to be, as Pico Iyer calls it, a global soul, even if it's probably too late.

But here I am. Yesterday my husband handed me a hummingbird feather, a tiny, perfect thing. You turn it to a certain angle and behold, a streak of iridescent color. The wind has been rippling through the sage and ceanothus and leaving a bounty of oranges to gather from the ground each morning. The cactus on the deck bloomed suddenly -- three astonishing scarlet flowers.

And the full moon…the Hay Moon? The Rose Moon? The Honey Moon?...rolled into my room the other night and I was washed in frog song and silvery light.

With no compass or coordinates I am sailing into this summer space. And I find it is not without solace.