Saturday morning at 3:51

Yesterday, for example:

At 8:00 in the morning, I pulled into a little town called Harmony: Population 18.  I spent an hour in a glass-blowing shop there, admiring the glass jewelry and bowls, talking to the glass blower and his little dog, Ruby.

Then I spent the rest of the morning among strange strangers, about 400 of them.

The village of Cambria was having a scarecrow festival.  (I will post pictures later.)  Every building had  a scarecrow out front: a line of nuns beside a church, Waldo and other literary characters at the library, a frizzy artist perched in the upstairs window of a framing shop, Dorothy and her companions on the Road to Oz.

Like all the other tourists, I was snapping pictures--even asked a hitchhiker to take a picture of me with Waldo and Raggedy Ann and Andy.

In front of a yarn shop was a colorfully attired woman, wearing hand-knit clothes and hat.  I talked for a long time to the owner of the shop who told me her full name and biography:

Woolimena P. Le Skeincreaux....is named after her Grandmere "Purl" from Nice, France--"which is very nice."

The whole village participated in this project--and there was a story such as Wooimena Skeincreaux' story--for every one of the 400-Plus life-size and larger scarecrows....

That was my society for the morning.

After leaving Cambria, driving along the rocky fringe of the continent, exploring Big Sur, looking at the elephant seals sunning on a rock, my day settled into quiet solitude again. Thick cattails bloomed from huge grey rocks, and the ocean lapped against the edges of land.  The switchbacks were tight, the sun was bright, the sky and ocean an endless canvas of October blue.

At Big Sur Vista Points, I sat on rocks and watched young couples come and go.  One couple was driving a blue Mini and had two bikes on the roof.  A man was carrying a young woman in his arms like a rag doll, and she was holding the iPhone camera to take pictures of them together.  Another couple stood close together with a baby snuggled between them.  One couple was letting their young boy take their picture--which the boy was taking his time doing.  "Hurry up, Son," the father said, "Let's get this while I'm still young."

I stopped at the Henry Miller library on Highway One, had a delicious burger at Nepenthe , then looked around in the gift shop, bought a few postcards.  (I'm sending myself a daily postcard from the road.)

To take pictures and write about a traveling day is to live the day twice.  I don't have to negotiate when to stop or for how long--as I did back in the day of being a passenger with Operation Haul-Ass driver.  I can sit beside a great stuffed straw owl for as long as I like, talking to the man from Alaska who picked up the hitchhiker who tells me that it's snowing in Montana and tells me that the fall in Oregon is going to be perfect by the time I get there--if I go that far.