We finished a bottle of Mondavi and it was 12:30 a.m. on a Saturday night when we foolishly set forth from San Jose with the crazy notion of driving north up the coast. An hour on the road was all it took to realize that this was foolish. But there was to be no other time, so we had to fit something in to make that night bracketed in our memories forever. It didn’t matter that what we were doing was highly aberrant. No one would know about it and after I left Calfornia, our lives would continue. The work we had started before we met would continue as if Muir Woods had never happened.
We made it to Muir Beach at 5:30 a.m. It was pitch dark for all of 10 minutes when the first blush of day broke on the waters of the Pacific Ocean. In the dark, the waters had crashed loudly around us as we walked towards the beach. Once on the beach I lost all sense of space or time—there was nothing but darkness around me and the sound of waves pouring into me like I was nothing—just another vessel for the vastness of the world to pour itself into and out of. Black turned into iridescent blue, which soon forced up the pinkness of a new day as it nudged up from behind an outcropping of rock. It was a new day and here I was in a cove with the woods behind me and a crescent of water in front. I stepped from rock to rock. Maybe if I got further in, I’d be completely subsumed by the steadily breaking waves and the morning light. Shaan was fitting his camera to its tripod. We barely spoke. There was no need to waste the moment with words that could never capture its essence. The moat of water around my perch on a rock was getting larger and larger as the tide made its way in. Daylight had barely broken when we walked to the car. It was still pink outside when we started out north. It never occurred to us to stop and take stock of where we were going.
When we stopped next we were at Stinson Beach. The parking lot was huge but empty. It didn’t strike me as strange that it was either huge or empty. At this point the starkness of daylight made us strangely aware of how tired we were. We didn’t think about it too much. The beach was fringed by a row of cypress trees. It was a bedroom with no walls but we slept under the canopy of cypress tress. It was broad daylight when we fell asleep. The next thing I knew, the noon-time sun was overhead and there was a dog’s tail in my face. The dog leapt over us in hot pursuit of a ball. The beach was packed with sunbathing men and women wearing next to nothing with their children. We were still wrapped in our made-in-India wool blankets. I was still wearing my hat and shoes and with large water-filled plastic Pepsi bottles near us we surely must have looked like two homeless people. It was an entirely out of body experience particularly since the beach was completely deserted just a few hours earlier.
The saltiness of the ocean rolled into the pungent smell of cypress leaves. This was going to be a moment in time suspended above all the other moments that marched on. We had stolen these moments that were never meant to be. I was bursting with a sense of being alive as I ate my salmon and goat cheese omelet. When we got back into the car, we looked out at the shimmering water and decided to just kept going north.
The beach, water, salmon--it was all a hallucination. We both belonged to other people. But that sense of abandon we shared driving north is now bracketed for time eternal.
