Looking Down

The flight stops in San Jose and Los Angeles before wandering on to Tucson (and thence to Albuquerque and Kansas City; I took the 5:30 PM Tucson/Albuquerque leg dozens of times when I still lived in Santa Fe). It was mostly cloudy, intermittently holes in the clouds but not long enough to figure out where we were — until suddenly there was San Pablo Bay & the Richmond/San Rafael bridge. I looked around wildly. Oh yes. Ahead the Golden Gate and the City and the Bay Bridge, just beneath the plane oh yes Green Gulch Farm and Muir Beach, and Tennessee Cove and Rodeo Lagoon and Point Bonita and the road along the Marin Headlands and...

It all looked so familiar and contained, this piece of the planet that I used to know better than anywhere else. "Oh, home," I thought over the green Marin hills and rocky shore, and as we swept across the City to fly down the Bay towards San Jose. Home is the Olympic Peninsula where I am living now, and the part of California I was just then flying over; all one coast. The 23 years I spent in the desert slip away and off the map of my life.