the night the clouds ran like water (2021) (Patreon)

This was a shot from the middle of my van trip. It is somewhere over Marin near the forest of pygmy Sargent's Cypress on Carson Ridge, taken on a night with a full moon, in a 25-second exposure. I still have never seen anything else like this night, where the clouds ran in a full sheet over the mountain ridge that protects Marin from the Pacific, and then flowed through the valley like a liquid. 

This was a few days after I'd spent time with a person who was... shall we say self-centered? it sounds nicer than abusive, so sure, we'll go with that; after spending some relatively unpleasant time with them, I came to Marin and spent time with a very very very good friend instead. My friend in Marin gave me the space to decompress and feel safe, which was relatively rare on that van trip. That alone meant the world to me, but the whole experience was capped with this night of unbelievable clouds after a perfect hike, and it genuinely no longer felt like I was on the same plane of existence. It felt like a very special switch flipped. I wrote differently afterward, I shot differently afterward, I feel like I may have left Marin a different woman. 

I think these few days leading up to this photo, and the moment I took this shot itself, may still be one of the most vibrant and important memories of my life. 

This is always when it's hard to tell if a photo is truly good or not. It's probably pretty good but I will never be able to disentangle my feelings for this night from the shot itself, and so I'll never be able to be objective about it. For once, I honestly don't mind that. Perhaps this is just a photo worth having as a memory; that's plenty for me.