No rock left unturned.

This is how it began; with a flutter of my eyes, the ocean was made mine. The broken lines of the road and the mist sleeping on the edges of cliffs; mine. All that I could hold in a glance and feel in the space between blinks I made a possession of my memory on that day; I captured the waves of Santa Cruz as they broke and the lilting wind of Pebble Beach. I held each Redwood in a stare. Every sensation, I cupped in my hands and weighed as insurance; an unspoken promise that I would always be able to remember the raw beauty of it all; the first time I came to know Highway One.


When I think of it, I am there now. A place nobody knows except for the molting sea lions outside of San Francisco. They lie barking on the sand and shed their winter coats with such nonchalance they could almost convince you there is no magic to nature. I watch them for what feels like hours. The sun is so bright I can taste its orange and the few, perfectly white clouds that hang above the Pacific Ocean almost camouflage the largest gulls I have ever seen. I've abandoned the city and have no place to be; anonymous and tiny against a foreign backdrop, I feel free. I park the car by a small dirt track and wonder if I'm stepping where Kerouac or Steinbeck once stood. I am swallowed by the California between cities, the California that exists in bark and salt and silence and air.

Closing my eyes now, I can see the late afternoon on an unnamed beach outside of Monterey. I watch kite surfers skim the water and fly and jump over small jagged, white caps that crash together like cymbals. I feel the sand under my feet and hold it in my hands and notice how it is different to the grains of my homeland; somehow thicker; coagulated and golden. I feel it in myself too; that I am somehow different here. Golden.

I blink to see The Bixby Bridge as it arcs ahead; I am in awe of its elegance. I leave land and float above an ocean of labradorite; cracked purples and glowing greens. The shadows of redwoods grow longer with the drifting sun, reaching out like hands of safety to where the road meets land once more. I pull off by some cabins in Big Sur; a wild, yet incomprehensibly romantic place. I sit amongst foreign and ancient trees by a stream as the beauty of my surroundings fade to black.

This is how it ends; with a flutter of my eyes, falling asleep, years later and countries away. I am there once more; beneath the Santa Lucia Mountains off highway one; golden and free.