Act of Mud

(CNN photo)

The 1-hr drive from San Simeon to Mud Creek now takes 3 hours

Two weeks ago Highway 1 was closed by a massive mudslide near Mud Creek, about 200 miles south of San Francisco. Highway 1 will be closed at least a year and will cost millions of dollars to fix, once engineers decide what the fix should be (build over, build around, excavate the old road, etc.).

Once a decade I drive along the scenic and slow Highway 1 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Alas, I don't know if I'll ever get to do so again.

Because we don't know when we will die,
we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.
Yet everything happens only
a certain number of times,
and a very small number really.
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood,
some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive
of your life without it.
Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?
Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

--Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

&copy 2017 Stephen Yuen