suddenly, california

After thirteen motionless hours in my window seat, there it is.  A simple composition, really: tiers of gentle wavy lines flowing left to right, dark blue-grey edges with a soft whiter mist between them, utterly unlike the eroding orange slab that is eastern Australia.  I know without thinking that these lines are the tracks and scats of volcano and earthquake.  They are the same lines that welcome me to New Zealand, and they they mean I'm back home on the Ring of Fire. 

I'm spending all of August travelling in California, Oregon, Washington, and a bit of British Columbia.  More exactly, I'm touring what Ernest Callenbach long ago called Ecotopia, a seemingly coherent band of urbane culture that stretches from a little south of San Francisco to a little north of Vancouver -- a civilisation that worships its feminine landscape and depends  for its mental clarity on the reliable fogs and rains.  At the moment I'm in Portland for a heat wave -- almost 40 C, low 100s F -- and as always on such days the city is a little mad.  But it's a controlled and predictable seasonal madness, like a ritual revel, and the city wears it with confidence that feels almost premodern, tribal. 

Comments

[Peter]

100+ F -- wow. I didn't know that happened in Portland. Say hi to dale if you see him.

More travelogue, please!

[Pica]

Oof. We're able to cope, here with 100° but I can't imagine it in Portland.

Along with Peter, I say more please.

[Teresa]

Yes. More please. And come east for September. It's lovely here then! ;-D

[dale]

(o)

(Some of us cope by running away)

See you monday!

[Philip]

I enjoyed that post, but as someone living in eastern Australia I have to protest, that at least flying in from the east, Australia doesn't really appear as orange. I think you have to fly over the country as a whole, or look at an overview on a satellite image to see Australia as the orange slab that it mostly is, but flying into Sydney, which I'm happy to call home, the overwhelming impression is always one of near white sandstone cliffs enclosing a harbour of deepest azure.