From Mendocino where Big River meets the sea… then over to Clear Lake where the shoreline is lined with spectacular California Golden Poppies… then by way of Dixon down to Button Willow, a place I like because it always reminds me of hallowed billow… then on down to the bottom California and home in San Diego… Life is good.

After I posted the note yesterday, I learned about the tragic bus/truck accident on Interstate 5 north of Sacramento that happened about three hours after Margaret and I turned from Highway 20 onto that freeway a few miles south of the accident site. Ten people were killed and others were injured. The bus load of students and their chaperones would have turned onto Highway 20 on their way to Humboldt State University and would have driven by the lake where I took three of the lake and poppy pictures. Thinking it might sound flip, I thought about erasing the part of my post that said life is good, but I decided to leave it. Having been reminded that ten people yesterday, five of them high school seniors, had their lives cut short, I feel even more acutely how good life is and how much everyone who still has it should cherish it and should try not to muck it up for other people. Life is good.

Driving toward home this morning over Tejon Pass about an hour north of Los Angeles, I didn't stop the car to get the picture of clouds and the vast expanse of mountain to the north of the highway; I held my little point-and-shoot Sony against the window and pressed the shutter release a dozen times... not really looking and framing the way I usually do.  I liked what I got. I like the suggestion in the photograph that life is definitely passing... but not yet past. 

When I got back home to San Diego, I went down to the river... still thinking about those young kids whose lives were snuffed out on Interstate yesterday... and I got another cloud picture to go with the one I chose from the Tejon Pass group. The red "stuff" on the river is algae that will be washed out to sea if we ever get all the rain we need in this part of the county.