FRUIT HANGS HEAVY ON THE VINE

It’s interesting how we stumble through life, believing the hype, thinking we are the captains of our own destiny. I think we are like chicken in the pen who peck the ground wherever they please and lay an egg when they feel like it. I am on the road now, going on three weeks and I am roughly where I thought I”d be but the bumps and turns have lives of their own; they are what I live for. The other day we stopped at Lime Kiln Beach, on the Coast Hwy just a little south of Big Sur, California. It’s a special place for my daughter and me; we camped here in ’89. We walked again in the salt-&-pepper sand and took photographs but the tide was coming in; the only safe venue was to stand at the boundary between hot-dry and cool-wet sand, letting the runout from crashing surf spill over our toes. Rip tides and undertow would make short work of any careless wader. 

I was taking photos of ocean spray and pelicans when Sarah noticed birds circling about a quarter mile out. She saw the telltale blow, then the breach; humpbacks were feeding. People were stopped up and down the highway at all the turnouts, standing on the cliffs, watching them feed on schools of sardines. We watched from the beach. They swim in circles around the school, crowding the small fish into giant ‘meatballs’. Then two or three whales dive down and come up the funnel with mouths open, breaching the surface with hundreds of pounds of fish for their effort. We watched again and again, until our time grew short and we had to move on up the coast. We were on our way north, to San Francisco while the whales are headed south to Baja for the winter. I watched humpbacks feeding in ’09 & ’10 off the coast of Alaska; who knows, maybe the same pod. The more we learn about whales and their seagoing relatives the more we have to accept that we are not the only thinking, communicating, cooperating, rational creatures to share creation. 

At the same time, on the road, I’ve been listening to good music. Kate Wolf was a song writer from the 70’s & 80’s with a wonderful talent, who died too young.  But before she died she left us with ‘Here In California’, a song loaded with metaphor. Not just about taking your time falling in love but also about living in the moment and finding the joy, whenever and wherever it rises up to meet us; it spoke to me of loving whales from a distance, of awe for the power of the sea and surf and taking comfort in its cool, wet sand. 

‘. . . fruit hangs heavy on the vine,

There ain’t no gold, I thought I’d warn you,

and the hills turn brown in the summertime.’