The long way down Highway 1

This is sample writing for Pulse. The route is real; the picnic is a stand-in until we paste in the day as it actually happened.

We left later than we meant to, which is how every good drive on this coast begins. The Pacific was a sheet of hammered silver, then it disappeared into fog, then it came back looking like a different ocean. Someone in the back seat was in charge of the fruit. Someone else was in charge of saying we should stop here every nine minutes.

Highway 1 is not a shortcut. That is the point. The map wants you in Big Sur by lunch; the road wants you to pull over for a fence that has no plaque, only a view. We ate nectarines above a cove we never learned the name of. The juice went through the paper bag and onto the guidebook, which felt like the correct use of a guidebook.

There was a stretch where the radio gave up and we did not replace it with a podcast. The car filled with the sound of the engine working on the grades, and with the particular quiet of people who are related to each other and have decided, for one afternoon, not to fill the silence.

We will put the real photos here: the one where the cliff looks impossible, the one where somebody’s hair is horizontal, the one of the motel ice machine that became a joke. Until then, imagine a day that was mostly looking, and only a little getting anywhere.

When you edit this, keep the fog. Lose anything that sounds like a brochure.