Carmel Highlands: another ocean view

 

This one is from the Tickle Pink Inn at Carmel Highlands, an exceptionaly nice place upon whose name I refrain from punning.

Carmel Highlands is a few miles south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where Clint Eastwood was once mayor, and just north of the spectacular Big Sur coast.  It was our plan to drive that coast but a wild fire now burning for a week is still only 17% controlled and a section of Highway 1 is closed.   The last time we were here Highway 1 was closed due to a landslide.  I have seen the Big Sur, but Carol has not and we are unlikely to be this way again.

Last evening around sunset.

Sitting last evening on our balcony, sipping Buffalo Trace and listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter, I was looking out at the horizon and wondering why I like the Pacific so much more than the Atlantic.  Perhaps it is because as a child in a suburb of St. Louis my mind moved west and my teenaged body did after my grandparents bought a little beach shack on San Diego’s Mission Beach in 1953.  And perhaps it is because there is no place in the Atlantic to which I really want to sail, as in the Pacific there is New Zealand.  

What is odd is that, while the publisher of GANNET 6 is pushing the age at which I made my sixth circumnavigation, which I never even considered, is that a decade older I am still driven to try to do more and don’t know what that should be.  So it goes.  Perhaps he will cause some of my words to be read by people who otherwise would not have.

I look out at this vast ocean that I have crossed many times, and at 84, though I acknowledge I am weakening, I am driven to do more, with the ocean, with words, and with Carol.  Originals can’t ever retire, until time and chance retires them.

So I move forward into an uncertain, though certainly limited future, and tomorrow Carol drives us south to San Simeon.