During our January term, my best friend and I took a road trip through the Pacific Northwest and northern California. The trip was funded by Colby, and to secure this funding, Hayden and I proposed a “place-based writing project.” We would read stories about the places we were exploring and then write our own stories, in conversation with both the authors and landscapes. The project was approved.
It was a pretty good deal.
The story I wrote was inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Solnit writes about the Blue of Distance in a way I find intoxicating.
We stole colors, right from the edge of the world. Driving down Highway 1, from Puget Sound to Big Sur, the boy and I dipped our fingers in new landscapes and vibrant pallets. Each fold of coastline was different, each stretch of highway novel. At first, Hayden and I tried describing the colors to each other. We tried holding them in our mouths. But as the hues grew richer, our words turned stale. Neither of us minded the silence that elapsed between us. During those weeks on the road, silence was our third companion. She pushed our faces to the windows, imploring us to look, look. We looked.
And when the time was right, we each picked one color and pocketed it.
I don’t know when adventure became thievery, but it was probably after breathing inside became dangerous. The Covid-19 pandemic was entering its third year, and a new omicron variant was sweeping the country. News of rising cases and new lockdowns awaited us on the radio. We rarely turned it on. During our college years in Maine, Hayden and I had seen life grow bleak and brittle, we’d watched our futures tip over and pour out. Now, months away from graduation, he and I were stepping onto a bleached terrain. What else was there to do, but go search for the colors ourselves?
In January 2022, the colors we acquired felt like survival secrets, rations of hope. They didn’t exist in quarantines, hospitals, or collapsing economies. They existed only on the world’s edges, which are, by design, prepared for the unknown. Hayden took green with him, I’m sure of it. I saw him carry the color from the hills of Big Sur. I felt it sitting in the consul between us, still dripping with afternoon light, filling the cup holders.
Big Sur was the most southern point of our trip and driving that rugged stretch of coast felt like finishing a pilgrimage. Flanked on one side by the Santa Lucia Mountains and on the other by the Pacific, Highway 1 was reduced to a thin pen line, tracing rocky ledges like a calligrapher. Behind the wheel, Hayden took the bending curves at a careful pace. My breath was loud against the window. The landscape glowed from the inside out, as if it had swallowed the afternoon sun. Big Sur’s headlands were wrinkled velvet, cascading down towards the sea. They crumbled across the highway, forming a shoreline of yellow cliffs below, like a shelf of rough-cut gold. Far below, creamy waves washed up against the tendrils of land.
Reaching a particularly elevated stretch of road, near the Bixby Bridge, Hayden pulled over. Car doors slammed and our feet scrambled to the edge of highway, in a hurry. Wind whistled around my body as I walked through curtains of afternoon light, feeling a sense of limpidness in the sudden gravity of this place. It was time to pick our colors. We didn’t say this, but we both knew. Hayden pointed to the green: the color of coastal sage scrub. Sage covered the ridged hills in buttery strokes, catching light and shadow with each wrinkle of land. Branches filled the crevices of cliffs, vines marbled rock faces. The scrub looked like fur on a giant sleeping beast, tempting a hand to run along the creature’s back.
Draped over the terrain, Hayden’s green was the color which held everything together: of life clinging to the edges. It was the stuff of subsistence. While Hayden carried away the folds of green, I looked outwards, towards the thinnest breath of blue.
During our trip, I’d fallen in love with the horizon. Or rather, the layers on the horizon: the way remote mountain ranges lay flat together, as if cut from sheets of tissue paper. From the edge of Highway 1, I could see the bluffs turn silver and turquoise far away. They grew flatter and more translucent with distance, as if dissolving into sky. Finally, on the far edge of what I could see, the land was blue. The color was dreamy, almost forlorn. Hayden and I could drive and drive and never reach it. The color existed in the atmospheric distance, in the thick afternoon light and sheets of ocean mist. I carefully swirled that blue around my thumb and pulled it up into my sleeve.
I didn’t feel bad about taking a color so thin and delicate. Nor was I envious of the velvety green spilling from Hayden’s hands, full-bodied and sustaining. It was poetic, I thought, for us to carry both richness and fragility with us. But this poetry soon evaporated. Or rather, it was burned away.
Two days after Hayden and I departed from Big Sur, a fire burned through it. The blaze, known as the Colorado Fire, burned 700 acres in Monterey County, forcing evacuations and the closure of Highway 1. It scorched the hills surrounding Bixby Bridge, right where we had taken our colors.
Hayden and I learned of this while parked on a dark street in Seattle. The news scattered across the dashboard. And then silence elapsed between us. It was not the friendly kind of silence, pushing our faces to the windows. Instead, she bent our necks towards my phone, towards the burning images of Big Sur, imploring us to look, look. We looked. And I felt the blue turn in my pocket.
The National Weather Service reported that this was “surreal fire behavior” given California’s wet winter, and because the coastal area had no fire history. I tried to imagine what “surreal” meant. Not in levels of predictability, but in colors. I imagined the sky was soup, boiling and stirring. The sea reflected the sky, a devastating, home-cooked red. The hills were ablaze; the sleeping beast was being scorched. I imaged the creature writhing in agony, as the fire burned down its spine. The sage became a scribble. The horizon was beginning to charcoal.
Memory is a strange thing, as it allows us to paint worlds which no longer exist. For Hayden and me, the Big Sur we saw has become fiction, fading away just as life before the global pandemic did. These memories of “the before” grow fainter with time, and sometimes, we need to repaint them.
Fortunately, we still have colors with us: the green and the blue. They fill the distance between the burned landscape and the unburned one. Between the world that is sick and the world that is not. And colors will continue to fill the distance between Hayden and me. Love and loss and melancholy are all twisted up in friendship, for the desire to be close wrestles with the inevitable space between us. And after graduation, we will each enter the bleak terrain and paint something new. I hope to see his colors on the horizon. And I will have no choice, but to look across the distance without wanting it up close.
Quiet Histories 