and then, a little more fear than beauty maybe. Here is an old photo I found online of Devil’s Slide, a notorious stretch of highway along the coast of California where falling rocks and cars plunging off the edge were par.
I had to travel this road many times as a child whenever we went to and from El Granada to San Francisco and back. Southbound, I would have been in the passenger seat looking out my window at the edge, though mostly I could barely bring myself to look. The picture does not quite get you there, but for a child looking out the window the edge seemed a gust of wind away. And that terrible drop to the ocean and rocks below.
During my life in El Granada, there was no shortage of reports of cars going off the edge and families plummeting to their death. Give me a Wordsworthian cataract any day.
2 comments:
I am reminded of course of Rilke here, beauty and terror. But also of Kundera's novel, Unberable Lightness of Being: "Vertigo is not the fear of falling, but the desire to, against which, terrified, we defned ourselves."
Edges are so key in literature, in art. Cleaving. Maybe that's why I like this "little" post so much--I enjoy thinking about edges.
I've driven along Devil's Slide many times, but never as a child. I didn't arrive in California until 1970, when I was 18. Still the Devil's Slide provoked some fear, but more demanded an attentiveness I was not accustomed to providing to a road.
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