We are on a ferry approaching Vancouver Island (at the westernmost point of Canada) for whale watching. I feel dizzy from a distance compared to home.
We reach a jade beach among algae and giant seals and enormous stones above jellyfish as large as shields. All around are birds of prey like gliders and endless trees that make your neck hurt just looking at them. Here everything is out of scale for us from the old continent. Women are as strong as men and young men in moults are faster than dolphins. In California you are a little in the sea of Verne and a little in Gulliver's land and you like it a lot.
We have been traveling for days among extraordinary creatures, in places where weight seems to act differently: in a few days I saw the largest fish and tree on Earth. The first moves its tail with such grace that, like a child, you have time to copy its curve behind glass; the other, as tall as a thirty-story skyscraper, has challenged wind and fire for millennia, transforming the wrinkles of the years into bark. Here you can still hear a bit of the echo of the dinosaur era where everything was enormous in size. I learned that you can be agile even as a giant if you have taken the time to learn the secrets of gravity.
The journey is coming to an end. The beautiful cities visited, and the friendly people met in Canada and the slightly hippie people met in California, were the backdrop to an imposing nature. I will remember more the rafting and swimming in the Indian rivers, the rapid fins on the surface of the killer whales, the climbing on the waterfall in Yosemite Park that never ends, the elephant seals grazed on the deserted beach at the end of Big Sur, the red steppe at sunset, the birds as big as hang gliders, the sequoias that don't die and the elk that don't run away. I will not forget the streams that fall into the sea, the jellyfish like umbrellas and the endless bays with pine trees on the water, the squirrels like ants and the university on the beach.
Yet the land refers to men and now I understand and respect the beach boys with their boards as fast as sharks in the cold Pacific after the sun. Strength is also in the muscles, courage not only in words!