Clear skies or fog, predictions by the weather app, often wrong “in the middle of fucking nowhere”. At one time this landscape of home was inconceivable as a ‘nowhere’; that was until the fateful meeting of an itinerant crust punk looking for a ride south, irritated by the lack of resources in this apparent wasteland.
He was possibly right on a human level, and I thanks to those choice words was more enlightened. After all, the forecast in this place is often better determined by surmounting a nearby mountain for its view, a particular lookout where one can catch a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, a minute shimmering sliver between two distant hills, if you see it, no fog.
Southbound is the direction on this day, riding the high bluffs above the flat dark ocean and empty beaches cloaked in their world of fog. There was still a chance of sun beyond a geographic boundary line where the fog stops like a gray curtain that rolls over the land out to the ocean. This atmospheric feature is a sort of sign written by the contours of land and sea that states – ‘this is a common starting point of northern fog’. In winter this place is boggy on account of its flatness, often shaded by clouds and blown by a desolate wind. Sometimes a lone male elephant seal can be found wallowing in the cool sand below the bluffs, a sad boy to be sure. In late summer and fall, it is mostly dry, expansive, and sometimes balmy on windless days.
It took several trips to carry the materials out beyond the sound of cars. Standing in the grass, it was apparent the essential clamps had been forgotten back at the cabin, much needed for the framework of the contraption to hold the idea in form. One silent car pulled into the gravel parking lot just off the highway. Would I look strange to them, curious, crazy? I made an effort to smile and wave at the lone couple who didn’t respond. Their cold indifference felt thick in the air, their face a shield for hidden curiosity, wrapped in the scratchy who cares woolly blanket of our societies making. They passed by on the trail and the wind carried a noise to the ear, unmistakable, “it looks like trash…”. The words were almost lost to the sound of grass, so maybe it was only the wind collaborating with my preconceptions. Their truth is they were right. It could’ve been trash, it was trash, but you know the saying.
They had not seen everything though, only a pile of synthetic foam cloth collected from a can, a gigantic plastic foam mass undulating in the prairie, momentarily diverted from its trash existence. They continued on, their fantasy of a trash free world shattered even here in this remote place far from civilization. The something else was laying low, now it stood proud within the view, an object they hadn’t seen, a sort of mirror.
I sat before it looking out over the sea of grass, out to the surface of the dark ocean, and beyond to the wall of fog, looking to somewhere between the sky and the horizon, out to nothing and something, and to both at once.
