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Up the coast and over the next rise was a vast expanse of ocean. She said, “nothing should be that color.” The color she was referring to was blue or green or aquamarine or something else, something fancier that, as far as things I’ve seen, has only been mimicked properly by eyes. I suppose it’s a long hand way of saying that the ocean was pretty. We’d been driving up the coast for what felt like days, though it had only been hours. The kids were crying in the backseat, or reading books, or complaining about the sun getting in their eyes, or doing whatever it is that kids do on long car trips that drive you bat shi- crazy.

Years ago, it’s hard to imagine that now. My but the years do slip by now don’t they, like wind through reeds of grass and yet, if one peers in a mirror they lie so heavy with me. Years ago I read about an expedition to Antarctica. I don’t remember what they were looking for, probably in search of the Northwest Passage. There was a period of time in the world when everyone wanted to discover the Northwest Passage. We don’t have the equivalent now, perhaps the far out reaches of science, Higgs Boson etc. The point is, they were looking for something and decided to sail north. The strange part about the journey is that the food they’d brought with them, smallish tin cans, contained  enough lead to eventually poison them. Apparently you can suffer from synesthesia and megalomaniac thoughts when in the grips of lead poisoning. It’s easy to picture these Englishmen, stark naked, skipping across the ice proclaiming themselves kings of this world and of that to come.

The water is beautiful. I’ll give her that. And the freeway is but a thin strip overlooking those waters, while the mountains loom to the right, no more than twenty feet away, red clay that it’s easy to personify as some sort of proud parent, watching the development of their only child, the sea. It was pretty in the way that all things can be pretty,  a smile, a shaft of light through the window, a piece of a stamp held up by a toddler and called a treasure. I don’t really mean it. To mean such a thing would be a sign of insanity, a sign that I was traveling north on board a ship sailing for the Northwest passage, locked in ice, waiting for a warm light that is never to come.