The Mind's Blank Canvas

The trees are sticking up through the fog on the coast range like charcoal sketches on off-white cotton, barely illuminated in the pre-dawn glimmer. My car’s vibrating on the asphalt pocked by wind-driven ocean spray and cracked from the shifting sand it overlays. It sounds like my board bags are going to tear as they slap and smack the roof in the buffeting wind. The lizard green thermos my great-grandfather used to carry to work rolls across the passenger-side floor sloshing coffee around its innards like a miniature impact zone every time I take another corner. There’s not much traffic on the road.
 
It’s just me and Highway 101.
 
Everything’s monochrome out my window, Oregon in an old photograph. It’s not warm enough yet for vibrant colors. Slowly the sun peaks above the ridges and the coast begins to develop like a Polaroid. The black ocean takes on a liquid-tinged evergreen hue. The fog gets overexposed, and the sandstone starts to glow with ripe oranges and medium-roast-coffee browns. The headlands of inky volcanic leftovers stab out into the swell lines rippling in from the horizon, crushing each wave into a billion tiny pearls.
 
My mind’s a blank canvas and nature’s painting the picture. I’m not even in the water yet and the day is already perfect.
 
--Jens