Mary Panttaja

We flew home from Seattle today. A beautiful day at both ends: starting on the ferry from Bainbridge Island, ending with the drive up the lane through the wine country, the Russian River idling flowing by the side of the road. I napped and worked the first half of the flight, taking down some notes on Illumine feedback, adding things to my task list. But at one point I looked out the window and was startled.

The light was so bright and clear. Every little bit of the earth was illuminated and stark. More snow than I expected dusted the tops of the Siskiyous, ridges winding east to west across the edge of northern California. After a while, we came across a lake which, after study, I resolved to be Clear Lake in Lake County. Mount Konocti standing sentinel on the southern shore. Now I knew I was home. I could follow the highway and then the Russian River south to the Alexander Valley, tracing its radical meanders that carve up the neighborhoods where I live. But I couldn’t deplane here, and so we passed by my town, and continued south over Marin.

The mud of Tomales Bay was greasy in the reflecting sunlight, each drift and swirl in the sandy mud another smear of color. The San Francisco Bay was startling in its multiplicity of hues—mud in swirls, sandy bottoms, drifts of teal water, all lace-edged with the snow white bloom of the waves crashing on the shore. The sharp daylight etched each house and road and trail into a bold image of the earth.

After we cruised over San Francisco, we banked left to head back to the airport and circled the salt flats at the end of the bay. So many colors and patterns I couldn’t track them. Red, oranges, and pinks of the salt ponds, colors of algae and brine shrimp. Native mud flats in ochre and green, intense fractal patterns of water traces and creeping plant growth. Every plot was worth a photograph.

I don’t know why the colors and images where so brilliant today—was it the sunlight or the air? Or was it my willingness to see? Most likely, a little of both.