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| atalantacreative |
| At Gaviota The ridge, ascending from seaward in a gradual coquetry of foot-hills…inland dropped off almost to sheer rockbed below. It left you breathless, wonder-stricken, awed. –Stewart Edward White, lumberman, miner, writer, adventurer, conservationist* At Gaviota Gorge, I pause always—the northbound tunnel, a stunning gracenote to the traverse music of the Santa Ynez. Strange mountains, running east to west, They rotated 110 degrees 12 million, 12 million years ago. Planets away, the moons trembled. White, looking the boyscout, the Teddy Roosevelt let’s go out and discover something gleam in his eye, understood the monumentality, the vast, as yet, unwritten miracle of it all. The dark crescent of hollowed rock, cool in the hot fist of August, belies the violence of subjugation, possession, man, nature, the desire to find a way over, past, through, to catalogue, record, evaluate. Two giants battle here, mountain, sea, sea, mountain, canyons of sorrow, veins of profit, histories of conquest and retreat—thirds and sevenths, all up and down this golden state. The blue Pacific, wide and wild, on any given day, repeats a sound a frequency in a ore bowl, crests and eddies, phrases and phases of moon and tide as pelicans fall like feathered bombs into the waves, and the displaced mourn, sustenuto. Neli Moody |