The Coast

Fortunately there are roads, some of them lead west, and a few make it across the coastal hills and down the canyons of rain-fed creeks and even out to the Pacific Ocean, ever laughing at its misnomer, bashing itself against rocks stupid enough to confront its waves.  And there it is, eternal and rolling, seagulls mounting impressive formations, understudying for the brown pelicans, currently recuperating offstage.  The newspapers speculate that a parasite, or turbid coastal waters, has messed things up for pelicans.  I try not to dwell on this, for that is my wont.  Obsessing on what is missing or imperfect or in need of remedy.  Today, I half believe that the pacific brown pelicans will make it, cheer them on, and let it go.  The wind won't let go and conveys the sense of too much happening to get lost on birds.

To the north, artichokes are bursting from the black earth along Half Moon Bay.  I want to stop and ask a farmer what he does about snails or slugs, the latter being both large and indigenous, giving them an advantage in mowing down the agriculture.  The bluish spiky leaves, the stalk lifting the artichoke fruit to the eye level of passing drivers, the whole scene is screaming with spring.  The latter being a vague concept in these parts, daffodils first appearing in early January, fruit trees bloomed out and shedding their petals by the end of February, artichokes roaring by March.  The mustard.  I wonder if you can actually spread it on sandwiches.  It is growing everywhere along the coastal highway, and way up a hill the mustard has filled in someone's fenced acreage.  The distant plot drapes across the slopes like a square from a quilt, a twisted fluid parallelogram of brilliant yellow.  California does not get much better than this.

In my own garden, I confront the brussels sprouts much as I did the Pakistani woman who drew blood from my veins this very morning.  The annual physical.  Bloodwork.  For some reason, I had delayed it this year.  Fearing there was something bad in my blood.  But there I was, giving of myself for the greater cause of health, the phlebotomist taking a good gallon or two.  And God only knows where it goes, this blood.  But there was nothing to do but let the clinic have its way with my veins, and so it is with the brussels sprouts.  Having had free botanical rein for more than a day, they are taking full advantage.  One of them seems to be on the verge of flowering.  I'm going to have to endure this, brussels sprouts blooming, pollinating, seeding.  Honestly, if the right consultant would simply get in touch, I would have motivational sessions.  Starting with the mission statement, that we brussels sprouts are determined to be the finest available in Menlo Park, making ourselves fructify early and often, rivaling the sweetness of those growing beneath the snows of Gloucestershire.  Barring which the only thing to do is give up.  The suckers will flower, there will be a summer, and maybe a productive autumn.  It's like the blood.  Wait and find out.

One may not have to wait for the garlic, currently blasting along way ahead of schedule.  Wise to remember that last year I lost track of the stuff.  At some point in the course of boating to Britain, the garlic's green tops faded, even decomposed, and by the time it occurred to me that the stuff was ready to eat, it was no longer locatable.  Lots of digging ensued.  Much fork insertion, earth levering and desperate searching.  They appeared, one by one, the garlic globes.  And the ones that got away reappeared in January.  Which explains why the garlic I planted this year, vying with the garlic from last, now constitute a garlic jungle, so thick with foliage that the normally assertive spinach has retreated.  In any case, the stuff is out there early, as far as I'm concerned.  The next crop in.  Tomatoes, of course.  Grown indoors from seed.  What they are, well, that is a different matter.  I just don't have any patience these days.  And it takes a modicum of patience to, say, label the small plastic cells in which the seeds have sprouted.  So that one knows that this will be a yellow cherry, that a Roma, that a beefsteak.  As it is, I haven't a clue.  They are tomatoes.  And my answer is to plant all of them, crowded tight as the Amazon rainforest.  Then, for once, just to see what happens.  That being a lesson, if there is one, in a human death.  It happens.  So try to enjoy what happens before it happens and even what happens afterward.