Celebrated solstice with Dona (who gets photo credits again). We sketch crawled up the coast, starting on Kelly’s patio in the thunderstorm - heavy grey clouds striated, rolling and ancient as the rock layers revealed in water carved canyon walls, lighting over the ocean and fat raindrops cooling the hot pavement. Motivated by a cool breeze we left our shady cafe table for the north coast.
Traffic stopped just short of Pie Ranch, a fatality we heard, so we turned around and sauntered onto Cove Beach at Ano Nuevo State Park, stopping to taste spring water leaking from the cliffs, balance rocks on rough wave tumbled logs, sketch New Year’s island with its crumbling lighthouse keeper houses, dipped toes in freezing sea foam, rest back on the rocks. Filled up with the four elements we returned to the road. The landscape rolled out long in the low light, far off cliffs and nearby canyon cuts. I can’t say quite why but the presence of everything right then, light, sweet road ahead dipping into the cliffs, the sky and sea, a friend and a silver car, all added up to some open sense of unlimited possibility, a lightness, a softening.
The late day allowed us to buzz up to Moss Beach Distillery to catch the sunset, sip drinks and nosh on fish and chips wrapped in wooly blankets by the fire pit, quiet, listening, leaning way bay to look up as the stars sang out and pelicans veed by in the last light of this the longest day.
