black chevrolet

The onset of springtime and summer makes me antsy. I'm coming out of the hibernation mentality that descends on me around November, the air begins to warm up and smell like wildflowers and dust, and the sun is clearly climbing the ecliptic to its intense spotlight position for the summer.

I went for a ride on Sunday. I laughed inside to think I was going nowhere for fun, doing what people normally do with motorcycles. A strange and unusual concept indeed, after the gray wintry grind of nine-miles-one-way-nine-miles-back, dirty water splashed across the blue bodywork and scuffed windshield. Now the mud has dried to dust, and the same blue tank and same scuffed plastic windshield are out there pointed into a dappled-shadow fairyland straight from a Honda TV commercial. Highway 192 winds and stops and turns and winds again through some of the ritziest country residentia in the nation. Palm trees, boxwood hedges, yucca gardens line the highway. Low brickwork walls with ornate wrought iron gates shield great majestic hacienda dwellings from public eye. Mostly.

So this is where all the high powered film directors and movie actors and lawyers and computer programmers and retired Caltrans superintendents live. Who needs Beverly Hills, seriously. In fact, I've DRIVEN Rodeo Drive and they've got NOTHIN' on these folks. Nothing.

So the sunshine and shadow flits along, the motorcycle patters and putters along and I ask myself, as I always do, why I don't do this more often on weekends. People come from far and wide, go on vacation, spend lots of money just to be here, to do what I'm doing on a whim on a random weekend. As far as I'm concerned, it's free and a common fact of existence. I can come up to Montecito whenever I want and all it is going to cost me is ten dollars in gas. (Not even that.)

So in a way I'm not in the best position to appreciate the legend. But I don't really care about the legend as much as the sunshine and curves.....