Photo of the Day – Rare Pines in the City

This piece of beauty lies within the city limits of a sprawling mecca. San Diego to be exact, the last big American city before Mexico (there are a few smaller places before California ends and Mexico begins….unexpected, smaller places that you only find out when you think you’ve made it to Mexico by bicycle once you’ve hit San Diego only to realize you have four more cities, a least, to pedal through before your victory dance commences). Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve only is what it is because a few nature enthusiasts saw the importance of maintaining the rugged, natural landscape that existed before it was dipped in concrete, sprinkled with bits of steel and sold to aimless suits and ties and skirts, who meant to make it by building skyscrapers with windows facing other viewless windows on even bigger skyscrapers.

Don’t read into the description wrong, I love those big skyscrapers and their histories. I love hearing of the odd personalities that once sat behind the old oak desks and spewed out decisions to their underlings or the shoe shop owner who lost it all by investing in two million pairs of the shoes that didn’t make the fall fashion. The millions of continuous stories and people watching, make these buildings as vitally interesting to me as the “landmarks”, the religious centres, the “must see before you die”s. History is not too much different from gossip, with our interests lying in the unabashed, the more display filled and unbelievable epics, but also in the minutia of day to day life.  I find the functional and dysfunctional, the awe of the past and how the present came to be, the rust and the sheen, as equally as enticing and question riddled.

Anyways, I’ll get into that when I am not as zonked out as I am right now. Nature was something I had little to no desire seeking out before traveling. I liked history and nature to me was just untapped land that would look way better with, I dunno, a temple to Zeus to engage your imagination or an aqueduct running through it’s tundra or mountain scape. That’s before I travelled a realized that the shapes that I had associated with nature were as varied as the building styles of all cultures and that they too had their stories. In fact, much of what I respected in the man made monoliths, the variance, the impossibilities of balance,  were stolen from their larger, and more natural predecessors.

Torrey Pine Sate Natural Reserve was one of those places where it was as if nature took offense to my attitude toward it and and flung open it’s insides to reveal the dramatic curves of it’s jutting rock edges, where these rare pines cling desperately perched over thousand foot drops into the banging percussion of the emotionally churned blue sea’s clambering waves. Such a fool I was to doubt the thousands and thousands of whispering words that nature’s picture drenched my soul in. And yet with all the words merry go rounding in my innards, I stood silent, letting the my surroundings piously brag to me.

The edge and bottom of California - Torrey Pines Nature Reservation

Not the Way of Seattle – Original Post March 19, 2010

The Main Drag of Port Townsend

 

I am stealing Internet from Quimper Sound. I am a rebel in a red scarf serenaded by a guitar that wales out from a door. Across the street a reputed film house, The Rose Theatre, apparently makes the best popcorn in town. I may have to sample it, since in Coupeville, yesterday, I had the best Cornbeef Coprocon Potatoes, Soda Bread…..and ONIONS in town.

The clock tower welcomed me into the city

I sit on the sidewalk of Port Townsend, the dubbed “New York of the West” in the earlier part of the century. Due to Seattle’s coal, drunken sailors and a lack of railroad tracks, the town is a ghost of what could have been, what should have been. Nestled across from Keystone Point, the town is beautiful, the facades are multicolored sunwashed, the temperature is matched in brightness, the people smile and say hello. Some clickity clack heels of some odd women breaks my thought. I stare at my reflection in the computer screen. Handsome devil on a bike. Love it. I am going all the way…San Diego here I come. I can do it now….not before…but now I have the ball rolling and the inertia will take me there.

Couch surfing host extrodinaire, Andrew

The days are to get longer, harder, faster ridden. Today I will sit and chill with Andrew on his dog farm. We talked about his career as an actor late last night, about the film he had made in Romania called Hideous, about the money he had to smuggle, 20,000, that he was laundering for them into Romania, about the toxic fluid scene he shot with real mercury, about the lover he met, staying 4 extra days in the Ladlmum Hotel in Bucharest to be with. We ate break, drank wine and soup, and laughed. We went back to his farm on discovery road and he showed me into the guest room, a bed covered in flies he wiped clean. His place was a single wide, which is a wheeled in home, which he retorted after I asked, “You really are a city boy, all hicks live in these.” I fell asleep to the sound of his 5 or 6 Turkish pups outside, llamas…..and frogs. Today…biked into town, visited townhall, talked to the curator for 97 hours about town history….now its time to end abruptly to go explore as the bus leaves back to discovery bay at 5:55 and I cannot miss it,

Stay Groovy

Ira