A cool mist rises up from between pines on HWy 101.
Well… It took two days. But we’re here for nearly a week in Crescent City, California. Home to…um…well… a lot of rain. It’s been raining since we’ve arrived and for a few hours before that – up till now it’s been roughly 9 to 10 hours. Setting up in an RV isn’t fun in the rain. Matter of fact, I’ll wait until tomorrow, or until the pond under the RV settles to place the leveling jacks for greater stability inside the RV. Without those jacks people confuse our RV with the ones that have that bumper sticker that reads If this RV is a-rockin’ don’t come a-knockin’. Really, as if. We have a nearly 16 week old baby. Do you honestly think anything like that happens here?
We’re parked about 30 minutes from the Redwood National Forest. The drive here was mostly scenic route. I say mostly because I mostly couldn’t see any of it. I was too busy keeping the RV between the yellow median line and the white line of the shoulder. If any of you have ever driven California 299 from Redding to Arcata then you know the hell of which I speak. I’ve never seen a river that color before. That and the evergreen that lined the river’s banks was purely breathtaking…at least, what I saw of it.
From Humbolt Lagoons State Park, looking north up the California shoreline.
Being a self-proclaimed amateur photographer my eye was more busy watching the curves than it was framing potential captures even though I spied more than a few, especially along the Trinity River – a rushing aqua-marine river that ran along the meat of the drive. It’s not that I couldn’t stop and take a few shots, but the little camper we had in the car seat had only just fallen asleep. Too risky to stop and wake the baby.
I did squeeze off a few rounds of shots, but it was only back on the Pacific coast of northern California, where the ocean sounded like it was raging mad. We managed a stop and I walked to the shoreline in a cold-damp, blustery wind. The sound of the waves crashing a hundred yards from shore and the wash between them and the beach was a low, rumbling that shook the sand beneath my feet.
There was a desire to stop the drive about every 100 feet or so to snap a photo. If I had done that we’d still be halfway on the 299 with another 120 miles to go.
Waves of mercy, wave of grace… The power of water is not to be underestimated. The sound of the madness going on beneath the crashing waves is enough to let anyone know not to enter in.
For every rise of two to three-thousand feet of elevation there was an equal decline out of the low hanging clouds we had driven into. Mist rose between rows of pines in seemingly spontaneous places. An image of the Smokey Mountains came to mind. Up and down, right then left, wipers on then off. I kept the RV between the lines a whopping majority of the time, but my butt is still vibrating from the rumble strips I ran over that were carved into the asphalt on the side and center lines.
Life pushes onward occasionally forcing us to keep focused on the necessary but mundane rather than the beauty of life that passes by us as we move. There was plenty of time on this trip to stop. I should have. Even if it woke the baby, I should have fired off a few more shots for the digital album. Alas, there’s always tomorrow. I’ll have to do some back-tracking.
Our GPS display at the Humbolt Lagoons. Freshwater Lagoon on the right, the mighty Pacific on the left. (RV in the middle.)
This is the view from the shoreline of the Pacific, looking back to the RV. Right behind the RV is Freshwater Lagoon, part of the Humbolt Lagoons.
The Journey. Rev. Greg Larsen 