Last week, the Art Ranger missed her assignment as she was truly "at large". She's tried to prepare those freeze dried blogs that post themselves while you are a way, or she even thought she might be hip enough to document the amazing adventure with her phone and post the findings from her hotel room. But the fact is, what we experienced was unphotographable. Lenses and apparatuses just couldn't have captured what we saw, so instead we will endeavor to share a color memory chart.
We got to ride our bicycles along the Big Sur coast, a narrow Hwy 1 mostly along the edge of a cliff for 96 miles (that is under construction due to rock slides every day of its life). Nearly every glimpse and moving frame of the pedaling grinding churning day was jammed with various kinds of beauty and wonder. From lavish bunches of poppies of varying yellow-oranges glinting in the breeze, to groves so vertical of Redwood gravitas with air sharing pockets of 500 year old oxygen.
From a bicycle, you could gaze just below the guard rail where cliffs with flowers jutting out of them them and patches of white beach with tourmaline waters sparkled far far below. Frothy turquoise, deep bluegreen or greenblue. Taking breath and breathtaking. Rocky ocean painting and repainting itself in a constant edgey swirl.
At times, you were relishing gravity and sticking your knee out like a motorcycle racer flinging down hills faster than cars. Your hubs sang with joy. You smiled like dogs out car windows. We thought of our dad, Bob, who would have been there with us, except stopping to do a couple watercolor sketches, and taking his sweet old time.
Meanwhile, her hind end was getting to have a sitting-on-nails feeling. She moved on to add inner leg aching to outer leg aching to knees hurting to hanging on for dear life with salty neck and salty face. But there were awesome sparks of more than blue sky and we decided that our journey was epic and therefore it was endurable. And thanks to some air fluidity physics, friends in front of her were able to clear away friction causing molecules and help her unprepared body to finish the job.
Oh, and here was the color of the patch of grass that she lay upon (and could not get up off of) after the whole fabulous ordeal was over.
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epic, and breathtaking and taking breath...good for you Melissa...and thank goodness for friends who can help you finish the job! cheerio
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