Heaven, I'm in heaven (could have been different.)

July 4, Crescent City, California.

An apology. The folks that came to the circus today in Medford saw a truncated show, missing Fridman's two acts because he was out saving me and the baby.
Errands to run in the morning and he notices something off with the brakes, brake fluid shooting out, and the brakes going out, again. Defective part, clogged hose, the diagnosis varies but not this: had we not discovered that before the trip tonight the brakes would have given out at some point on the mountain road and Dylan and I might not have made it here in one piece, or at all.
The decision was Roy's; we hitched the trailer to the Chevy truck that hauls the quinta (as we call the circus common trailer) and Fridman followed me in our truck. Which means that he had to do no less than three 100-mile trips today, to Crescent City with me, back to Oregon and back again to Crescent City, but also that he couldn't work the shows.
For me making the trip by day was as if I'd died and gone to heaven (that special kind for agnostic French.) Not only the beauty of Route 199 in southern Oregon (enchanting Oregon,) the Smith River National Recreation Area in California, but suddenly, without warning, the Redwood National Park.
Nothing could have prepared me for them, my mind flooded with all the clichés in the world (that too a cliché,) my mouth dangling on the floor in amazement like the Big Bad Wolf eyeing the Little Red Riding Hood in those Tex Avery cartoons we used to see on French TV (my Dad's favorites.) The trees immense, terrifying, pillars of a giant cathedral, the architect gone mad, la foret improbable, the unlikely forest, strangely coming upon an expression by Virginia Woolf reading Mrs. Dalloway after hours last night, the exact words for this, a "feeling at once frightening and extremely exhilarating."
The finishing touch: a string of Mini Coopers flying down the road at Anderson Creek in all their stripes and colors (there even was a pink one.)


Fourth of July crowds on the beach near the marina.