Excerpt from In The Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey©
Cover image:
Mt. Adams from Mt. Rainer
by Tom Killion
from his forthcoming book
The Mountains of the West.
Cover design: Thomas Christensen
It has always been a shoreline with a double edge - western border of the North American continent, which some geologists say was once, in eons past, joined physically to Europe; eastern rim of this circular ocean that touches Asia, the south Pacific, Polynesia, Alaska and Mexico.
From my attic window here in Santa Cruz, I can look south across the bay toward the Santa Lucia range. One slope faces the Salinas Valley. The other slope meets the sea. And it is all right there, where blunt headlands and their drop-off cliffs mark the edge with such spectacular finality, all in the air at once, all the things we have asked this part of the world to be, and wanted it to be, and claimed it to be, and often feared it would become.
Land of Promise.
Continent's End, and shipwreck beach.
The last stop.
The first stop.
Shoreline on a wheel of shores.
