Carpinteria
The traveler arrives in Carpinteria at the end of the day, a long day, because on all routes the traveler must traverse a long wilderness to finally arrive.
Coming from the East, the road passes straight through the small town and ends at the sea which at dusk is also the air and tastes of cool orange and glowing violet, electric blue like quicksilver simmering in the troughs of the waves. The mountains hum and radiate the sea and for a while it is all atmosphere, all invisible mountain sound that erases any distance in between things; a magenta that allows the traveler to forget the road, maybe forever, and as the darkness fades it into a lingering velvet, constellations begin their slow reveal. This is where the road ends.
Riding from the North, after the traveler dips and weaves through parched hills dotted with live oaks and cows at pasture, flowing with them up and down until, joining the sea along the Gaviota coast, the fullest moon jumps from behind it’s hiding place, dead ahead, and falls back down again as the traveler sinks low, only to rise and reveal and fall and rise once more, for good this time, the light at the end of the tunnel. By now the traveler is shivering, coated with the dew that descends on the sundowners of the Santa Ynez range, cold but knowing home, feeling the closeness, feeling the last miles like a test of faith.
On the train from the South, the traveler passes through an interminable wilderness, one of the earth’s more formidable sprawls, the endless strip-mall tendrils and lifeless haze of Los Angeles city streets cutting for hours by the window like a record skipping, the traveler gliding smoothly amidst but apart from it all as if in a fever dream. Night descends during this dream and the traveler awakes in darkness. Through the window is a textured, matte, indiscernible ocean, a mirage of flaring headlights, the faintest glow of the moon now beneath the horizon. The train stops, deposits the traveler on an empty platform, slides away into night. A coolness is followed by a warmth. Carpinteria is sleeping. The traveler is alone, awake, and still at last.
Arriving with the dawn, the traveler sailing from the West enters the channel alongside San Miguel island into the rising sun, running dead downwind, wing on wing, fast and true. The swell is strong, steep, and slow. The breeze is stiff and constant. But the traveler feels none of this because he is moving with them, in them, as them, and the feeling is one of absolute stillness. Were it not for his churning wake, the traveler would swear that he was unmoving, perched there at the crest of a wave refusing to break, that rather the distant shore was instead coming to him, for him, alone there in the open sea. Squinting into the sun, the rising shore appears as a white cliff, improbably tall, trembling in anticipation. This shaky vision grows impossibly in the distance until the traveler realizes that from his singular vantage, Carpinteria and it’s sea are reflecting each other, erasing any distinction between themselves, land mirroring sea and sea mirroring sky and sky mirroring land. The traveler will eventually make landfall that evening, but in that still and solitary moment, he knows already everything he needs to know about Carpinteria.
Falling on Carpinteria from the heavens, the traveler understands perfectly that the macrocosmos is indeed the microcosmos, that the the folds in the mountains carved into canyons by rain branch endlessly like capillaries of a leaf into rivers, streams, creeks, brooks, rivulets– all tributaries, giving tribute, as he does, too, in that moment. In freefall, homeward bound, the traveler understands that there are many things Carpinteria is not, and multitudes it will never contain. But everything in this life is a balance, and, in the end, a choice. Home, like true love, is too.