Like The Drake Passage On a Rough Day

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But frozen in time, covered with boulders and chaparral and other low lying green stuff, and scaled up a bit. There are trees here and there, rarely more than fifteen or twenty feet in height. That is pretty much what the landscape is like in my neck of the woods. Like the seas down there by Cape Horn, when the going gets tough, there is not much rhyme or reason, just ups and downs in all directions.

Imagine how it is in a boat rounding the Horn where the oceans meet violently on a day when warm and cold currents collide. Waves appear not in rows so much as in random chaos. As you plunge to the trough of one, you look up to see crests on all sides, not just in the direction you are heading.

Here the peaks and valleys are sometimes faced with ragged stone, often peppered with bus sized boulders, and often not. And from where I sit I can see the largest swells maybe 20 miles to the north, and the ones at my level closing off the view on the horizon five or ten miles away.

Always, it seems, the horizon is a pale, misty gray green. It is when it finds itself more than just a few miles in the distance.

I can picture this as a huge ocean to a race of giants. It could change color and resume its motion, and there you'd be. What would be the equivalent of 40 foot waves would be 400 or 4000 feet. I'm not being very precise with the scaling of this picture. The giants would be larger than anyone I know. That is safe to say.

The shape holds pretty much true. So, that is how it is. Someone was on my case because I could offer no acceptable verbal description. There it is. Throw in rabbits everywhere, some squirrels, rattle snakes, coyotes, couple of mountain lions, plenty of California rednecks, horsies, of course, random assorted oddities, and here we are.

Don't forget a bright blue sky most of the time. Way up there, not low like Miami. But then when it gets cloudy, the clouds are right down here with me, usually. The wet clouds. Once in awhile the puffy, decorative ones float around a few thousand feet up. Mostly, all that is not land is a clear confident blue, not unlike the blue seen on many computer screens.