This time the girl looked up and saw the German boys staring down, all big smiles and flirting. The girl returned a kind of ambiguous half-smile. She was a perfect freeway Mona Lisa.

We hit another scramble of traffic and the Volkswagen suffered from it and fell back, but a couple of minutes later it was up with us again. We were both moving about sixty miles an hour.

This time when she of the blonde hair, the gentle white neck looked up and saw the German boys flirting away, she gave them a great big smile and waved enthusiastically. They had shattered her cool.

The German boys were waving like a convention of flags with mile-a-minute flirting and smiling. They were very happy: Ah, America!

The girl had a lovely smile. Her friend waved, too, driving the Volkswagen with one hand. She was also a good-looking girl: another blonde, but with long hair.

The German boys were having a fine holiday in America. Too bad there was no way they could get out of that bus and into the Volkswagen to meet the girls, but things like that are impossible.

Soon the girls took an off ramp to Palo Alto and disappeared forever, unless of course, they take a holiday next year in Germany and are driving along the autobahn in a bus.

Sand Castles

Strange fences grow on Point Reyes Peninsula which is fastened like a haunted fingerprint to the California coast. Odd perspectives are constantly drifting out of sight or becoming too intimate in this place where white medieval Portuguese dairies suddenly appear cradled by cypress trees and then disappear as if they had never really been there at all.

Hawks circle in the sky like the lost springs of old railroad watches looking for correct protein wandering somewhere below to swoop down upon and devour chronologically.

It is not often that I journey to Point Reyes because, frankly, my mind is seldom in that place, but when I do go there I always enjoy myself. That is, if enjoy is the right word, driving down a road lined with fences that look like cemeteries lost in half-vague and half-mercuric spiritual density.

I usually end up going to a place called McClures Beach at the end of the peninsula. There’s a parking lot where you leave your car and then it’s a good hike down a gradual canyon to the beach, following a small creek.

Watercress grows luxuriously in the creek.

There are many peculiar flowers as step by step you disappear down into the turns of the canyon until at last you arrive at the Pacific Ocean and a dramatic beach like a photograph if they’d had cameras in the days when Christ lived, and now you are a part of the photograph, but sometimes you have to pinch yourself to make sure that you are really there.