S 16 – CA State Route 16
Between Greenfield, CA, driving west from Hwy 101 over Carmel Valley Road to Hwy 1 at Carmel. Spring 2016

Oh, how on earth to capture the day? Photographs of course. Words.
It is impossible to summon anything like a twentieth of it all.
Dear God, “All the praise of a lifetime is not enough.”

As the gray tongue of road endlessly curves ahead to be tasted and rolled over, and places glide into one another,
I cease to be a person and the car stops being an engine or vehicle.
In tandem, we are rolling, curving, moving, consuming turn after turn, vista after vista.

Tree field hill tree grass field sky
Vineyard oak rock face, foliage green gray blue yellow yellow-green leaf bark, fungus moss roots soil acorns dry leaves
Land as body- arm leg skeleton, breast hip shoulder torso
Land as arc- land as running expanse
Cows bull hock-deep in grass, a swarm of green purple lupine at the roadside poppies
Indian Paintbrush Scotch broom coreopsis barbed wire “posted no hunting” signs
horses grazing Spanish moss fungus on tree trunks, rocks
Trees meeting above the road green glades moss ferns
Roots clinging to shaved dirt hillside
Candelabra trees – oaks in excelsis shadows of oaks on green grass arcs of hillside
Shadow-maps of trees beneath them
Trees in green ranks – “like Druids of old, the murmuring pines and hemlocks bearded with
moss” a phrase from Longfellow that drifts back to me

The car and I as one
The trees and I as one
As though I branched with them, grew with them, stood with them
and blew through their trunks and branchings,
their leafings and shadows
My eyes, arms, thoughts,
Wheels, windows
Steering and motor
All as one being
A transformed being taking curve after curve, turn after turn
Through glove and glade
Clearing one after another

Vaya con dios, the saying goes
I am conveyed con dios all the way
Nothing but the place, the time, the being there, the being in

Four times, I stopped to take photographs. I could have stopped a hundred times. Really I could imagine the trip taking a whole day with almost countless stops. But had I stopped so often, I’d have lost the rolling transcendence. The moving magic. Immersed in trees, I was swimming in the spinning-out of a world, set out and defined by the road. Thought I was in contact through
the tires, I might as well have been a traveling wind current, channeled by the road, an endless spider-thread playing out.

My normal self and all its busyness, all the different affairs I keep track of – all were taken over.
Experiencing what God might have felt in the process of creating, reviewing, and renewing.