As you drive north up the 101, the sun and openness of the grassy hillsides of Marin County give way to the dampness and density of forests of redwoods and douglas-firs. The air gets fat with fog. The sun thins out until it’s mostly just a suggestion, a soft glow treating everything below it equally. Golden slats of light on the golden hills fall away, and so do the shadows slung across them. A few weeks ago I made this drive in to camp under the old-growth redwoods on the patch of the earth where they have grown taller than any other trees in the world.
On the way, it began to rain and I had to stop at a Napa Autoparts in Garberville to replace my wiper blades, which I had neglected doing for years because we’ve been in a drought in the West for as long as I can remember and also because I do not know much about cars or maintaining them. Rain streaked down my glasses as I hunched over the cold white metal of my hood to replace the blades.
I used to think of San Francisco as wet, dark, and foggy. Coming from Arizona via Southern California, it certainly is. But in comparison to truly northern Northern California, I’ve begun to think of San Francisco as Mediterranean, all yellow sunshine on white plaster and cool breezes on blue water. Before my camping trip north I could only situate San Francisco in relation to its southern context; I had been completely missing the northern context.
Perhaps this is what travel and new experiences do. We put our bodies in new places and they feel new things, and our known experiences reach beyond where we thought the spectrum of available feelings ended. Then we reintegrate, recalibrate. Our perception grows a bit more fine-grained; our senses widen and certain things first become perceptible and then eventually comprehensible. It’s like being given a new instrument that inches your sense of vision beyond the spectrum of visible light until you start to pick up certain wavelengths of emotional infrared, certain wavelengths of ultraviolet.
Our bodies, fundamentally, are instruments built for sensing. We just ignore most of the data they present to us. The body overwhelms with a million sensations, perceptions, feelings. It’s usually too much. Mostly I’d like to avoid poring over its printouts and feeling the spikes of its emotional seismograms. Mostly, I’d like a Mezcal negroni, a scroll through Insta, and numbness instead.
But lately just feeling what my body has to feel is beginning to seem meaningful in itself. I spent a weekend camping under the darkness of an old-growth redwood canopy, where the fog condenses on redwood needles and falls like raindrops so frequent that it took me a lot longer than it should have to realize it wasn’t actually raining. I was damp for three days. It was a new way for my body to be. I spent the weekend cold and wide-eyed, full of wonder, staring up at an obscured sky, trying to catch the mist as it threaded itself through the green of a million needles.