The Lowest Ebb and Highest Tide
by Matt Hale
I forgot how much I used to hate the City as a girl. I’m not sure whether I grew to like it or I just got used to it. That’s probably something I should know about myself, isn’t it?
There’s a spot out near Bodega, on Coleman Valley Road, where you’d swear you were going to drive straight into the ocean. After a long, gradual incline surrounded by woods, the road flattens out (I really had no idea how steep it had been until I was at the top), you reach a clearing, and suddenly the Pacific Ocean is a massive wall thousands of miles high and about two feet from your nose. There is no sky. You can’t see the road in front of you. My foot hit the break out of pure instinct! I got out of the car and sat on the hood for…I have no idea. Hours. It was exactly where I needed to be. You know I don’t believe in any of that bullshit about the universe “guiding” us or “providing” for us (tell that shit to all the people dying in ditches—tell that shit to my mom). But sometimes, you do randomly get lucky. And I am thankful.
It was the noise that got to me when my dad first moved us from our little house in Sebastopol to that stale, converted industrial SOMA apartment (the building had probably been arty and cool in the eighties, but any vestiges of its La Bohème heritage had been thoroughly decimated by the time we got there—it was the downtown SF equivalent of Malvina Reynolds’s ticky-tackys). In my room, trying to sleep or read or think, the constant sound of traffic, even eight floors up, made me feel like I was sitting in the middle of the freeway twenty-four hours a day. By the time you met me, I guess I had become quite the hardened city kid, but I spent Junior High pretty much perpetually terrified.
Joe, we live in a remarkably beautiful part of the world. It’s so easy to forget. Just drive randomly for a while, though, avoiding highways as much as possible, and you’ll find yourself catching your breath. It’s unfair, really—so much of the world is so ugly. Fleeing Rohnert Park, I had no plan at all—no intention other than an unarticulated urge to seek solitude—and after less than two hours of heading vaguely North-West and turning onto the narrowest, least-occupied roads I could find, I ended up at (as Michael Stipe once put it) “the end of the continent.”
Joe, I want you to promise me that you’ll come out here and see this place. I know you’re terrified of driving, but, I don’t know, hike if you have to (it’s really not that far away). Maybe I’ll take you one day, but I feel like you should see it for the first time alone.
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