The End of the World
California is the end of the world. At least it’s as far as white folk could go by horse and wagon. The end of the line. The end of greener pastures just around the bend. The end of new land to claim, though it already belonged to another.
When I think back on my trip, all I see is wet, windy darkness. My spreadsheet had a couple dozen sights and hikes my daughter and I could choose from to fill up our days there, but aside from an hour or two in Monterey as we made our way south, the sun never shone. We hunkered down in our warm cabin under towering trees, no wifi or cell service. Now and again, we’d venture out for a meal or, when we ran out of rom-coms to watch, to squeeze out a download from a barely-there signal we found in a restaurant parking lot.
Still, the whole time I was uneasy, a swirl of energy cranked in my solar plexus. The world shimmied around me, like it was dizzy. I’d wake in the morning with my fingers gripping the blanket, longing for the security of home.
Don’t get me wrong, Big Sur is a beautiful place, but the passageway through it is a thing built with hubris. A narrow two lane road, stuck to the side of mountains and ledges, overlooking the Pacific. It twists and turns, clutching onto whatever it can, then holding its breath across airy bridges. Some fools build homes on the ledges there, ledges that God built on the San Andreas fault.
Going south, you actually want to drive, because in the passenger seat there is about about a foot of road, and often nary a guard rail, between you and the space through which you would plummet — first to the rocks and then to the ocean — should the driver misjudge a turn.
On a clear day, the views must be breathtaking, but every time we left our hollow to attempt a hike, the rain and clouds thickened and stole the horizon. It was blackness at the edge of the cliff, and a deeper blackness beneath the redwoods. Wipers at full speed, the car, without warning, would heave and shudder when an ocean gust crashed into the land to which the road clung, to which our car clung, to which we clung.
Oh New England. I have never loved you more. Snuggly, cozy, safe New England, with your trees and hills, mountains and ocean, rain and sun, all in proportion, and none of you built upon with arrogance, save a skyscraper here or there on those few ant hills where humans crowd together.
Safe back home, a friend told me that Route 1 is a place from which people, entire families even, fling themselves at high speeds. They don’t wait for the wind to take them, for the tire to clip the edge of a bad turn, for the fault line to open beneath them; they just send themselves over its edge, to the rocks, to the water, to the end of the world.
I wonder if those that built this road couldn’t bear the fact that there was no where else to go. Who were they if they weren’t marching onward? They couldn’t help but stand at its edge, whip out their penises and piss into the ocean — marking it, too, their territory.
Last night, I woke to the roar of wind and rain in the dark, and though my body was nestled on this coast where all that exploring began, I felt myself teetering at that other far ledge, and suddenly I understood why the place haunts me so.
Just as the pioneers came to the end of their long-suffering exploration at the Pacific coast, it seems I have come to the end of my long-suffering seeking at my own western edge. There is, at last, no other place else to go, no greener grass, no gold-tinged stream.
This has happened to me before: the world outside shows up as a premonition for the world that will soon appear on the inside. I suppose I should be used to it by now, but I’m not.
As a young woman, a pregnancy that I was not ready to see through to life showed me how I perpetually aborted my own, and righted me on my path. Years later, twin children turned me inside out when I discovered my own heart — split in half, yet beating — in their tiny chests. Just last year, I stood before Utah canyons and, once home, found my own opening inside me as the tectonic plates of a crusted self split apart. And now, at this edge, at the far end of sixty years of desperate seeking, my startled heart has finally come to rest, and given up the ghost.
