The Mendocino Coast

A coast that demands your awareness

A hoary veil of wetness creeps stealthily over rocks, slithering up the shore and over the cliffs, covering shrubs in a silvery wet fleece and shading the sun’s early heat with its nondescript silence.

Minute by early minute, the light is changing; haze becoming fog, and then haze again, mistily illuminating and running from the ubiquitous coastal trees, their branches blown like an old man’s hair.

High horizons and vertiginous viewpoints reveal the effort of the sun, it’s boldness subdued by silver. The Mendocino coast is not for the escapist, the moon-sick poet, or the sophisticated suburban weakling. It is the echo of dead cultures, it is a place for action and awareness, for mist and flowers, outworn forms, far from skyscrapers and city streets.

It is coastal redwoods, high canopies looming over persistent sea fogs, breezes that ruffle foliage, soft carpets of dead needles, wide, flat beaches holding huge lumps of timbers and trunks washed down rivers to the sea then rolled back up on the sand, having taken on a silvery whiteness, so that logs stand out from Mendocino’s gray sand.

By mid-morning, the sun has defeated the coastal mist and the shore suddenly comes to life as every twig and branch and trunk catches the reflective gleam of Mendocino light.