The .Plan

…for forgetful me.

El cantico de Moises y Miriam:

“Cantare al SENOR, que se ha coronado de triunfo
arrojando al mar caballos y jinetes.
El SENOR es mi fuerza y mi cantico;
el es mi salvacion.
El es mi Dios, y lo alabare;
es el Dios de mi padre, y lo enaltecere.
El SENOR es un guerrero;
su nombre es el SENOR.
El SENOR arrojo al mar
los carros y el ejercito del faraon.
Los mejores oficiales egipcios
se ahogaron en el Mar Rojo.
Las aguas profundas se los tragaron;
como piedras se hundieron en los abismos!”

…”Canten al SENOR, que se ha coronado de triunfo
arrojando al mar caballos y jinetes.”
–Exodo 15:1-5, 21

I’ve never been this excited about signing up for a library card before. But the Seattle Public Library is pretty damn cool.

Lots of places where you could just throw yourself off an edge. No real railings or nets and nary a warning sign. Scary.

I still haven’t driven through the state of Oregon, so I think that soon I will need to do the Seattle-San Francisco drive along the coast to get it all out of my system. And perhaps, then, in some cosmic way, that roadtrip will somehow cancel out that horrible, horrible San Francisco-Los Angeles PCH roadtrip debacle of 2003. But after that, Ring Road — the PCH of Iceland — awaits. I doubt it can beat R44 along the southern coast of South Africa — after all, there are no warm Indian Ocean waters up there — but this description is tantalizing:

After a long stretch through gray, barren desert, we regained the green hills on the approach to the western fiords. The road turned to dirt, and topped out over a pass into a stunning valley of tundra, yellow and purple wildflowers bursting from its flanks, waterfalls pouring off the rim and a stream at the floor draining toward the sea. At the coast, towering moss-covered cliffs crowded the sea, leaving room only for the narrow road and an occasional red-roofed farmhouse on a carpet of green grass where sheep grazed. Rain fell as a thick mist gathered over the Atlantic, and for many miles we snaked along between a wall of rock and a wall of ocean.

I imagined this was how it felt to drive California’s coast 75 years ago, downshifting on the sharp bends in the gravel road, idling before a one-lane bridge while an oncoming car made its crossing. Cold waves lapped over black beaches, lonely crags jutted up from the water, and with the sea fading from gray to green as the sun peeked through the clouds, the landscape was sublime and melancholy.
–Mark Sundeen, “Iceland’s Ring Road: The Ultimate Road Trip”, New York Times, June 18, 2006