State Route One
In Malibu they call it the Pacific Coast Highway along where the canyons cut their way to the bay, or beyond Point Dume to the ocean, and either way the fires rage down through the chaparral every few years, sometimes all the way to this wide road protecting expensive coastside homes from random razings. In Big Sur they call it the Coast Road and its cliffs invite scenic suicides as the wrecks rusting in the rocky surf attest. As Cabrillo Highway heading toward the City past Pigeon Point it has an agricultural air as the fields on both sides testify, strawberries and Brussels sprouts establishing delicious dialectics for the tourists who race past toward some tasty restaurant, and for the locals headed for the farmers markets. Across the Golden Gate it enters legend, not just of the jumpers in one last act of exhilaration, but of architecture itself, the gracefully engineered gateway to Point Reyes, through bohemian Bolinas and up through Bodega Bay to Shoreline Highway where raptors cruise in search of prey and you can glimpse them for a split second but no longer lest you plunge over the edge or slam into some log truck coming back from whacking the landscape. Late at night I’ve seen mountain lions, swerved around skunks that stepped in front of my headlights, thought about lots of things in the long dark drive home to a cold house and a heart in ruins. But on this road, home is the whole unrolled dark ribbon of it up and down the coast where your whole life has unfolded in so many cars with all those loves alongside, or solo as the day is long as you drove to or from some loss or other, some face you’ve all but forgotten in the sweet shade of a summer afternoon so beautifully in reach of the creamy breakers that rolled in foaming as you rolled by at the limit. And these passings are permanent even as the highway is, whatever slides or slipouts have closed it in winter storms, there’s a way around and you keep going.
Photo by Peter Heeling
About The Author Stephen Kessler is the author of Scratch Pegasus (poems), Poems of Consummation by Vicente Aleixandre (translation), The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters (essays), and other books of poetry, prose and translation. He is the editor of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges and of the quarterly literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review. Visit www.stephenkessler.com.
Photo by Dina Scoppettone
The Outdoor Poet is edited by Robert Sward, author of numerous books of poetry including, most recently, New and Selected Poems: 1957-2011 (Red Hen Press). He lives on the Westside with his wife, the artist Gloria Alford, and a poodle mix named Cosette. Participation in The Outdoor Poet is by invitation.
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