My friend Carrie gave me two tarot readings on my trip and in both cases the Fool was the anchor card. Its appearance, accompanied by a rather cryptic declaration of “interesting” by Carrie, was at first a bit deflating, perhaps even more so than the dreaded Death card that inevitably appears in any depiction of tarot in film or television. Avid readers of the blog may be chuckling, perhaps even snortling, but I would remind them that while I may often act the fool, I certainly am nobody’s fool. In any case, my deflation was unwarranted, informed mostly by a complete lack of knowledge on tarot.
Despite what may come across in my writings, I am not a mystical or spiritual person. I have been doing yoga for years and years but I usually zone out during the philosophical and breathing parts of it. I am generally a rational and empirical person and therefore rather skeptical of practices like tarot and astrology and occultism. But I am so very fortunate that somehow I have bucked a trend and as I have gotten older I have become more open-minded and those two tarot readings evoked an intense curiosity in me.
And thus: the Fool. The Fool, it turns out, represents new beginnings and leaps of faith. In the Thoth tradition, which my reading drew from, it symbolizes pure potential, divine motion, and the spark of creation. The Fool, a youthful and vibrant figure, ignores fear and the subconscious ego, listening instead to his instincts and trusts the universe will catch up as he pursues life with creative ecstasy (as represented by the vine of Dionysus). Now that murmur of “interesting” makes sense, with the reading coming as it did at the beginning of my sabbatical. Was this mere coincidence, or truth in the cards? It is for each of us to decide that on our own but I will certainly be reading more about tarot in the future.
Back in the prosaic material world, I embarked on the final driving leg of my trip, choosing the more curious route of hitting the pacific coast highway for a bit instead of the straight shot down to San Francisco. The beginning of the drive went through more Redwood forests, where a brief stop at one last grove fortified the soul for the long drive, before I turned to the coast for a quick detour to Mendocino county. In my time, I have driven many roads of dubious provenance and endless twists and turns, from the wild peninsulas of Ireland to the mountainsides of Utah, and the closest I have come to experiencing dizziness was this stretch of Route 1 as it took me from the inland to the coast. There is nothing frightening about it as it goes through more forest with few sheer drops but it never stops twisting, for miles and miles, until finally it hits the coast.
Mendocino county’s coast is what I had hoped it would be: foggy, rugged, waves crashing, wild. At this point in my journey I was a bit tired so I didn’t linger for too long, except to have an excellent seafood meal in Fort Bragg (how this guy, a Confederate general, got a town named after him in this part of California I am uncertain). The PCH does not hug the coast as much here as it does in Big Sur but there were enough views of the Pacific to make it worthwhile and to see why this is a popular destination.
My return inland took me through Andersen Valley wine country, itself worthy of a stop for some tastings on a trip in the future, before connecting to the main highway for a boring, busy drive back to San Francisco to return my car. I did get a chance to drive the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, which was gloriously foggy, before joining some lovely bumper-to-bumper traffic for the rest of the drive. And so I arrived in San Francisco, my final destination after 2000 miles of driving over nine days, and with one final adventure to come.
