From Charles de Gaulle to Zurich, whose airport gleams with sleek wealth and requires of you two passport controls and extra documentation, we take off up and over Europe. Stark snow covers Iceland, her black veins of land and confections of breaking glaciers hovering above smoky water. Then Greenland's black peaks, so solid and elemental, blanked by white. Then Northern Canada of frozen waters, unimaginably rugged and snowy land and ice.
We fly down over the flat brown patchwork of America which gives way to Idaho, to rounds and swirls and bulging creatures of earth, green dragons imprinted by the forking waterways of the fecund land, mountain ranges like millions year old reptiles basking in the extra heat of global warming, their veined horn skin stretched over bony ridges. After the beast comes the beauty, mountains push high and higher out of the whorled land, ranges in high remote kingdoms that proliferate in advancing tribes. The river valleys of green and the brown river snake of Idaho, and snowy rock mountains march across the most beautiful land, the Northwest. Still more pure is Oregon, breathlessly serene mountaintops.
And then Nevada, which leads to the green Cascade mountains, the land's rippling muscle that finally, in the Cental Valley of California, reveals man's ugly imprint, clothed in banal highways and cities, brutally demarcated industrial agriculture. Then, exhausted eyes (after reading several New Yorkers, Economists and a Donna Leon novel during the 11 hour flight) sight the San Francisco Bay. We circle over promontories of swirling browns and reds, like a huge art installation on the California Coast which stretches out along the white flecked Pacific, which nibbles at the crests of green ridges of land. Then the little city of San Francisco, its wooden houses climbing up and down hills, its core of skyscrapers like the heart of Manhattan, Coit Tower, the bubbling land.
We fly down over the flat brown patchwork of America which gives way to Idaho, to rounds and swirls and bulging creatures of earth, green dragons imprinted by the forking waterways of the fecund land, mountain ranges like millions year old reptiles basking in the extra heat of global warming, their veined horn skin stretched over bony ridges. After the beast comes the beauty, mountains push high and higher out of the whorled land, ranges in high remote kingdoms that proliferate in advancing tribes. The river valleys of green and the brown river snake of Idaho, and snowy rock mountains march across the most beautiful land, the Northwest. Still more pure is Oregon, breathlessly serene mountaintops.
And then Nevada, which leads to the green Cascade mountains, the land's rippling muscle that finally, in the Cental Valley of California, reveals man's ugly imprint, clothed in banal highways and cities, brutally demarcated industrial agriculture. Then, exhausted eyes (after reading several New Yorkers, Economists and a Donna Leon novel during the 11 hour flight) sight the San Francisco Bay. We circle over promontories of swirling browns and reds, like a huge art installation on the California Coast which stretches out along the white flecked Pacific, which nibbles at the crests of green ridges of land. Then the little city of San Francisco, its wooden houses climbing up and down hills, its core of skyscrapers like the heart of Manhattan, Coit Tower, the bubbling land.
A pungent Alaskan air whips through San Francisco and breaks open the foul daze of the airplane air, as I stand under the mocking brilliance of the California sun, waiting for the Super Shuttle. And now we are driving through rush hour traffic in America! But this America still has its original hills, where Monopoly houses stand obediently, and flat industrial neighborhoods sprawl like the old Cannery Row, a familiar little city on an intimate scale. We drive up to the top, where tourists always stand atop the crookedest street, Lombard, and I am soon in my temporary home of solicitous concierges and overflowing palms and azaleas and wisterias. And then a friend and I go out for a walk into the blustering San Francisco wind that chills into darkness. We walk and walk and walk past the somewhat dour natives of this overgrown urban village of striking mansions and unpretentious wooden houses and modern architectural atrocities, on and on till I got home frozen and dazed.
First stage of the journey, completed.
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