I’ve been walking with the dogs down the long, straight path that heads out to the whale skeletons. Mobile home park on one side, half deserted, as the old folks die and the rent control debacle strangles the rest of them, marine lab buildings, towers and tanks, like way out to the west. Looks like a movie set out there, across the dried up pricker bushes, quiet cement and tin buildings with the towers, full of fish I guess, and fish experiments. The path lies between, just a long, straight shot that ends at a cliff drop, wedged between the cinderblock wall and 40 or so acres of dead grass.

The dusk happens earlier now. People go home. I can have the path by myself. Can’t walk it when there’s someone down there, that might speak. That path is only good in the silence. You walk down that path, like a straight plank going to drop you off to sea, and your gaze stays on the horizon that lies ahead. Sun is down, all smokey and cloudy, over the hills behind your shoulder. And just walk straight on, straight on, no one around. Tide is up, so way out from the west you can hear the echoy crash of waves slamming up to the cliff wall.

The dogs like this walk. Otterpop finds some stick part way in. Watch her watch it for a minute. Pick it up. Put it down. Pick it back up, weighs it in her mouth, and then she’s off. It was the right one. Gustavo just runs. Runs out to the pricker bushes, where the bunnies the color of dirt come from, comes back in. Just runs. And Ruby at my ankle, walking out to the horizon, where the path drops to the sea below. If it’s quiet enough out there, and the sea looks bad enough, it’s hard to go back in. We just stay out there, sometimes go all the way out to the skeletons, bleachy old bones, pounded into the dust with rusty stakes and bolts. Some giant whale that died somewhere and they boiled off the flesh with chemicals or something, maybe acid, of a whole giant whale the size of two semi’s. Brought those bones up and nailed them down, forever.

Finally when I walk back in, sometimes have to turn and go back to the cliff edge one more time. Watch a couple more waves hit hard. Then slowly walk back up for real this time. Sun long dropped down the mountain by now, but enough light from the afters to walk back to the road. Dogs still run. Otterpop never did let up on that stick. Gustavo runs out to the field and back, Ruby still at my ankle. If you squint and make the big industrial building at highway one blur to nothing, all you see is the meadows that rise up to the forest, and the redwood mountain above.

The dogs don’t watch that. They don’t watch how the light goes red from the smoke before it goes to black. They don’t care that the air is wrong now, and it’s autumn and autumn is a bad thing. Want to smack the next person waxing on about the indian summer and our beautiful weather. Autumn is when you gotta look over your shoulder. Hate what the light does, being suffocated out while it’s trying to turn into winter but can’t stop being summer part of the day. The shadows are long and in the wrong place and just wish the dusk would get it all done with and turn to the dark. Takes too long. Get it over with. Yank the cord and be done. Don’t like the way it marks a change in a direction towards the dark and the chill that no one can stop. It just changes and you can’t stop it.