| western watershed romance |
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What a terrifying premonition of a year, and it's
still relatively newborn. Feels stillborn, though, a birth born from
and borne by fear. Fear of the future. Fear of what I'm to do if I lose
my job - don't think I can work for the government, which supplies most
fisheries positions, and feel right about it. Government is the lapdog
of politicians, politicians are commanded by politics, and none really
gives a fuck about Nature, only adherence and the government's own
survival - so I'd be working far more for the benefit of the selfish,
corrupted colossus than Nature. Fear of how I'm to expand my
decades-long musical library from the little confines of my mind and my
tiny kitchen and into the greater world. Fear of keeping my current
life together - and even more, the effort required to raise that life a
good 3,000 feet in elevation. How I'm to surpass last year, which found
me bursting like a phoenix from the ashes and fallen timbers of
society, fallen timbers that've crushed so many others. Change and
novelty, and my mind abhors few things more than change, the risk of
novelty, though bundled in that risk is real growth and feeling and
love and expression and the total actualization of self. So my mind
dumbs me and numbs me to ironically keep me from losing what little I
have.
But somehow, the little fire, the
little everlasting fire I have burning in the pit of my damaged soul
that always stops my hand from stabbing in the knife to hilt - it
bubbles up, forth, through the numbness, the dissociation, indicating,
suggesting, screaming that I gotta fuckin' find it and face it and
battle and conquer or lose, but whatever - I gotta face it. The little
fire's been waking me in the middle of the cold, cold night, the early
AM, and it won't let me escape back into sleep's netherworld for at
least an hour, while I toss and turn and try to play fantasy reels of
bullshit, try to live the life I'm supposed to spill out in the world,
in my head. And that only angers that little fire.
Spurred me awake in volcanic rage yesterday at 2 AM, that's for sure,
despite my desperate desire for a night's sound sleep since I planned
to rise just before dawn and jet off for a little wilderness to put the
boot to work. Fuckin' bright-eyed in the icy night, and I just laid
there, angry at myself for not allowing me to sleep. Yet unlike so many
times this year already, when I had a full day of living planned that
required rising before dawn but just couldn't get my ass off the bed, I
threw off the sheets when the alarm rang, brewed the requisite coffee,
tossed my pre-made breakfast of fruit and nuts and deviled eggs in the
wagon, and in that icy darkness, I jetted. This time, at least - I was
facing it.
Over and through and around and
up and down I wound through the North Coast Range's fits and folds,
fits and folds that hold mystery - much of 'em are clothed in that
mixed-coniferous forest (albeit often the faintest expression heralded
by grey pines) that I write so much about, which has such resilience
and ability, a sense that it could reign in its form, its composition,
forever, so long as there's a little water, though the players may
change a bit (grey pines here, knobbies there, Doug fir over there).
Few mammalians scuttered about in the icy obsidian - the wildfires,
I've little doubt, smoked out a lot of 'em. But one was rife,
surprisingly, alarmingly, as I neared towns and villages - and just
towns and villages, not cities - so many fucking cars and trucks and
SUVs and vans, in the pre-dawn darkness like me, on the road already.
Humanity. Proof again that we need no more people on this planet, but
proof too that so many flow in a mainstream that I only graze - all
those vehicles zipped by in the opposite direction.
So when I reached the trailhead, off a rural road with nary another
car, with dawn just barely opening her eyes, I stood alone with only
the frosty silence of the little farming valley I was ensconced in.
Everything was so still, so quiet, the clanging machine-gun sounds of
humanity banished in the violet, crystal, newborn dawn. I layered up,
donned my near-death hiking boots - seams split, stitches popped,
waterproof layer long gone - and started up the muddy trailhead,
already enthused by the variety of oaks: white, black, scrub,
coast-live. And it didn't take long for a connie to scratch my itch,
and an uncommon one - California nutmeg. As I rose toward the ridge,
and as the sun rose, then the birds rose - suddenly the mountains,
still clothed with skeletons of gallant trees from fires past, glowed
in amber and ruby hues, glistening green sailing off the remaining live
conifers' dripping dew held on resilient needles, and the birds - so
perfectly matched, the elegant American Robins, tons of 'em, their
chatter laughter, lifting and lilting in flocks of a dozen birds or so,
all to perch at the tops of skeleton oaks, soaking up the sun, and
warming me with their always sweet songs and squeaks. Some smaller
birds, too - juncos and a lone, puffy Fox Sparrow likewise ascended the
higher limbs to bathe in morning glory.
I've neither felt much nor thought much this year - kinda depressing, I
know - but the birds, the utter absence of humanity, freed me, like
they always do, and I thrilled at the sights and songs of the beautiful
birds, my friends, and the joy was so overwhelming that it burst
through my self-imposed numbness into my consciousness - I realized it.
I need to never forget it.
The joy
flourished as I pumped up the ridge, only to be interrupted shortly by
the first - and only - clashing sound from mainstream humanity: the
fucking barking dog. Harsh as it may seem, heartless as it may seem, I
just have an innate, though misplaced, dislike for dogs. So many just
seem kind of, well, tuneless, toneless, barking at all hours of the day
at Christ knows what, scaring birds and mammals and fish with their
incessant barking and crashing and splashing and thrashing of brush and
water, they just seem to clash with Nature's harmony, as if they've
lost the memory that they once were sons and daughters of Wild - in
general. A small proportion of pooches, such as good hunting dogs, mesh
well with Nature - they're attentive, sensitive - but too many are
seemingly oblivious...no doubt reflections of their owners. And they're
the real culprits - those negligent owners.
But I escaped the fuckin' barkin' bother rather quickly, reached the
ridge, then dipped over and began a long descent down to my
destination, which, at that point, was still a bit hazy - felt it was
gonna be - as if this is a surprise - a waterway, a creek. Down I
skirted, swerving along the contours of the hills, obeying the swerve
of the hills, much like the glorious, glistening pack of coyotes I saw
lateralling along the hills, healthy rippling coats of tawny and snow
white with streaks of sable running through, reflecting the ripple of
well-exercised, strong muscles. They, unlike the barking bother, spoke
not a word, and, as is so usual of Nature's critters - they saw me
before me them. More quickly than I imagined, I reached the endpoint
at, indeed, a bubbling little creek, wafts of emerald algae swinging
from cobbles in the crystalline wintry flow. That I wanted more
revealed itself when I forded the creek and strived to discover another
trail, found one, but found one only in fragments - landslides after
the wildfire had smothered most of that trail with fallen, impenetrable
thickets of dead bays and oaks.
So I
de-layered and sat on a rock by the trilling stream for a while,
writing in an old notebook about this newborn year - much the same shit
I already wrote here - pining for a unique bird to show amid the
yellowed willows and skeleton alders, noting the lower-pitch hum of the
smaller creek compared to the higher-pitched, more boisterous one of
the mainstem. No bird forthcoming, pencil slowing, I re-forded the
creek and then perched on a towering rock, its existence in a place
otherwise comprised of soft, rolling hills evidence of intense uplift
and erosion. Antics of Acorn Woodpeckers dancing in the air above,
picking off insects now active in the warm air, drew my eye to a ridge
that promised quite the panoramic view, so I got off my tush and made
the push, and was rewarded as promised, an expansive view of the
endless rippling hills clothed with chaparral when facing south,
knobcone pines and bay and myriad oak species when facing north.
And then - She. The serenity of the pre-dawn violet had certainly
returned by then, and as I lingered on the ridge, scanning, I focused
on a valley, a soft valley seemingly coated in a bed of feathers, and a
feeling with no words but only visions, apparitions, flooded my being.
She, once again, us, together, young, on a bed, naked, only soft
natural light coming through the window, window open to allow the soft
brush of a warm breeze, touching, twinkling, running fingertips slowly
over smooth skin, an enveloping energy of youth, no words, just
feeling, a higher feeling, a fusion of young man and young woman. Of
course a total fantasy - I never had it. It hurt feeling it, that which
I never had, never had the ability to have, too scared and too scary.
To really look at a woman and totally lose myself in her, with her,
into something more, something greater - really never did it. I thought
of the one I was with the longest, and I never looked at her once with
all of me - a sign that that relationship was destined to die before
either of us did...and it did. Then I felt kind of silly, kind of
stupid and wasteful imagining an experience I never had but desperately
wanted over 20 years ago because nothing remained to be found, its
chance forever lost, and chasing it and imitating it would be so hollow
and obnoxious and fake - the best I could do with it was to understand
it and accept it. The truth - I never had Her, then or now.
Then a mighty raven soared towards me then circled repeatedly around
me, squawking his guttural croak, no doubt announcing my presence, but
unlike the usual raven interaction, this one was alone - so frequently
they're paired up. Then I realized, with no other raven showing during
the several minutes of croaking and careening - he was talking to me. I
could only surmise he, and
that, like me, he, too, was void of love of the most expansive kind,
but he still had some, and me, too - each other.
He finally zoomed off, and I felt that was the cue for me also to zoom
off, so back up the trail I ascended, air still still, sun up and
unalloyed by clouds. My exertion coupled with the stillness to make me
sweat, so I stripped from waist up, feeling the occasional breath of
soft, soft wind on my glistening body. Passed two bubbas on the way up,
overweight, one huffing a cig, but as usual Out There, friendly, in
good humor, and, for their sake and the world's, it's only better they
were out there stomping around. I reached the ridge seemingly much too
quick, and I felt that the length I'd traversed was much shorter -
maybe only a few miles - than I'd pined for. And then the descent, it,
too, was seemingly so short, and I ran into two others near the
trailhead - elderly women, silver-haired, one spry and the other not so
spry, but both getting out there in that cool, clean air and fuckin'
doin' it. Good for them, too.
Despite the
numbness of the year, on the return trek I felt like a connection had
been established, evidenced in such a way that seemed so unlikely to be
coincidence. On the way up, I'd lost a binocular cap, a piece of drab,
black rubber about two inches wide. Had absolutely no clue where on the
trail I might've lost it, and given its camouflaged appearance among
the dark oak leaves and dank, dead branches, I considered it lost
forever. No big deal, though, just a piece of rubber, a mild
inconvenience. Nevertheless, on the jaunt out, I kept my eyes stuck to
the ground frequently, but nothing showed, and when only a mile or so
from the trailhead, figured I'd already passed it and so stopped
looking. A bit further along, a whisper of the most soothing, cool
breeze fluttered through me, so I paused, closed my eyes, and just
stood there absorbing it for a minute, and when it passed and I opened
my eyes - laying right in front of me was that two-inch piece of
rubber. Could've been a subconscious remembrance coming through that I
was totally unaware of, but it felt more like a little conversation had
taken place.
Then back to the old wagon,
where I espied a perfect little rural chocolate-brown-walled house,
dull-steel smokestack proclaiming soothing fires in cool, frosted
nights, and of course I longed it to be mine. Then back through those
rolling hills, though this time still in sun's light, and when a slope
appeared peppered with knobbies and ponderosa pines - I longed. Then
back to this city, ugly, out-of-climate lawns, people stuck like
Huxleyan-Orwellian androids to their telescreen smart-phones,
gluttonous on the soma of social media, the blaring cars, the hooded
frightened people, the lost people, and I got home, my little bastion,
and I looked at the pictures I'd taken on my hike, I listened to music
flooding my mind of apparitions of She, and, finally - I slept
well.
Got the fuck off the valley floor
yesterday, zooming west to a spur of the North Coast Range since I'd
been in the Sierra on my previous trek - gotta keep my relationship
tight with both mountain chains. Ranged up along a gnarly dirt road,
lots of jagged rocks erupting from the dusty roadbed, rocks that morph
driving from a mindless enterprise of well-worn mental monotony to one
of adventure. My goal: a local peak, and one not accessed through a
trailhead, one not advertised, but a remote one, an ignored one, and
one where I'd have to blaze a trail myself, at least part of the way -
ancient mining roads promised that I'd have a few stretches of easy
striding. Given all those features, I was damn near promised to be
alone with Momma, something I sorely need and needed - been a
human-saturated, urban-saturated week, what with working with two other
people on a boat all day, having to do domestic chores on Monday,
running into more and more people as society starts peeking its
horrified head outside its little womb doors, and as the neglected dog
next door barks into infinity.
I found it.
Only the rusty, faded memory of humanity haunted my first steps - a
short old mining road with little mini-forests of canary lotus blowing
up in its center, an ancient washtub fed by an ancient pipe sunk into a
little spring, a few shells from shotguns blasted long ago. The climate
was about as pleasant as you could get in a chaparral-dominated
landscape - a cheery breeze sang a pleasant song all the day long, and
though the sun was unalloyed by a cloudless sky, still, its angle hung
low enough in the southern sky to not sear but merely to warm. No doubt
the breeze, the sun, they eased thrashing through the seemingly
impenetrable brush I entered after leaving the road, where I found
myself dead-ended in several cloistered thickets of scrub oak and toyon
before finding a more open landscape clothed with the far more yielding
chamise, and that more widely spaced on a steeper slope. I gained
another miner's road, my trek eased, I attained the little peak, then
found, much to my surprise, a relatively cleared remnant of a road,
though now narrowed to trail, all the way to my end point, a little
overlook very close to the parched Indian Valley Reservoir. All it
really required for traversing above and beyond a well-groomed trail
was some maneuvering among poison-oak sprays and some swings up, down,
and around where fried pines from old fires had fallen in its path. But
so frequently, that's more than enough to chase away any potential
competitors for space - competitors that, these days, seem to need,
like in so many other aspects of life, a direction from some authority
on where to put their boot to work.
Though
I love the North Coast Range as I do the Sierra, more frequently does
the Sierra really get down to my marrow - it's mainly the tall-conifers
fault. As is the case throughout much of the coast range where I roam,
they're much fewer, and they rare reach as high as the ones that really
enrapture my soul - knobcones and greys just don't quite get to the
majesty of sugars and ponderosas and white firs. But they get to me
nonetheless, and yesterday was no exception. I'd begun retracing my
path, in early afternoon, and had just arced around a bare-topped
rolling hill, one baked bare and hosting only scraggly chamise and
patches here and there of butterweed, when a small stand of knobbys,
one I'd already swerved through and one that was rich in birds, came
into view. An azure sky, the deepest spring blue, served as the
backdrop, brushed with a few strokes of streaking, heavenly high white
cirrus clouds, for the little stand of knobcone pines, which, from my
lower vantage, really did seem to tower high up into the sky. The soft
breeze, like the rest of the day, was present, tempting song from
caressing branches and leaves of the chamise and manzanita and coast
live-oaks and, from the distance, the gallant conifers. Gazing at that
scene, surrounded by the song, and that, that feeling,
that transcendence - it washed over me. It really did seem to be
ancient, like it was conjuring generations past through me, and I felt
it so close to that environment my old ancestors evolved in in
west-central Europe - cool, coniferous mountains. The sight, the
sounds, they echoed, they suggested, a cooler environment where the
connies towered higher, where the plants glowed an even brighter green,
where just over the ridge wasn't an anemic-but-tough creek but a
flowing, full river, abounded by more greenery, where the flowers
didn't exist in just patches here and there amid dry, cracked volcanic
rock and rusty dirt but by lush meadows of green grass and rushes. My
Home: the ideal found.
That it wasn't the
ideal but suggested it reinforced that its patterns, its forms, the
high conifers, the rugged hills, the stream, the patches of
wildflowers, though all shrunk relative to the ideal, still - the same
patterns. All they'd really need to attain that ideal would be a bit
more water - which they get closer to the coast in the Mayacamas
Mountains or, with more elevation, in the Sierra. A reduction in the
benthic habitat - those open patches of bare dirt around the manzanita
and chamise - a reduction in the pelagic habitat - the open air -
commensurate with a big increase in the littoral, both towering up
higher in the sky, the scrubby scrub oak and mountain-mahogany
superseded by the ponderosas and white firs and incense-cedars, and
occupying a greater proportion of the area. The terrestrial towering
littoral, represented by the knobbies, they show and hold the key to my
soul. I just ain't me without one.
I
escaped, once again, in black-hole pre-dawn darkness away from
civilization, the tottering civilization, the self-deluded
civilization, back to Nature. Once again to the North Coast Range's
eastern flank I fled to, and that it doesn't align to my core quite
like the Sierra and Klamaths do is mitigated some by the dearth of
people. Myriad well-developed trailheads with big-ass parking lots and
fuckin' urinals prostrate themselves all over the Sierra; on the east
flank of the North Coast Range, lots of times, you gotta make the trail
yourself, and creating things of value is just something an
increasingly large proportion of the Californian population has lost
the ability to do. Too, to those of limited vision, the xeric east
flank appears to have little to see - stodgy creeks with snotty algae,
rusty-baked land with impenetrable chaparral, rolling hills topped not
with snow-capped, majestic spires, but humble little rolls and mounds,
often with just a lone grey pine or two, short, popping up humbly from
the briar of the chaparral - all that doesn't capture the eye of the
average American like the hackneyed pictures of towering Half Dome on
the cover of National Geographic.
A reflection of the same phenomenon - takes some creativity to find the
beauty and the flourishing life in a subtle landscape.
Hit the trailhead at the ideal time for me - dawn, violet light shading
to blue, weak still, not lighting much, and a weekday, a further
separation from the crowds, and therefore a closer connection to the
waiting Nature, the Nature that no doubt, even in this relatively
sparsely traversed part of the watershed, had to deal with some
maladroit humanity over the weekend. The air was a crisp, cutting, cool
freshness, a beautiful spring dawn in the low-elevation mountains, and
I needed three layers to keep the chill from touching all the way to my
bones. But the chill didn't last long as I charged up the trail,
ascending, and feeling life, and I mean feeling
life, which hasn't been much of me this year, expanding within me - I
was opening. But of course the newly sprung wildflowers, brilliant and
bold and seemingly exuberant at finally having their one chance - they
helped tease it out of me. Shiny buttercups, stately crimson Indian
warriors preparing for their eternal glory, red-wine sanicle, and gaudy
shooting stars, mauve and sable and blessed with a holy halo of canary
yellow around their proud faces. I burned some time with the flowers
and the camera. But not much time - though many species accompanied my
walk, like ushers alongside the trail, their numbers seemed low - a
symptom of drought.
The sun finally up,
painting all in golden light, more an evening phenomenon, giving the
illuminance a surreal feel. A haze was responsible, which seemed odd -
the black-hole morning, the dawn, they weren't stirred by even the
ghost of a wind. And up with the sun, the warmth, the birds came, and
damn did they ever come - so many: six sparrow species (whities,
goldies, rufies, Lincoln's, songs, and, the most abundant - Lark
Sparrows), four woodpeckers, including a rare Lewis's, brainy ravens, a
Red-tailed Hawk so high in the sky, rafts upon rafts of big-ass
Band-tailed Pigeons, always reminders that, though not so obvious, I
was in a mixed-coniferous forest, and an undeniable signal that spring
had sprung - a Western Kingbird. Many ground birds, too - several
coveys of quail blowing up, their whirring wings a unique melody, and
wary turkeys, wary given that this was a Wild land, not like
domesticated Davis, but a Wild land where man, too, gets wild.
And with the rising sun did the wind finally rise, and I saw my first -
and only, really - people of the day. They were hunters, one a big
dude, beer belly slung over belt holding up worn denim jeans, another
clad in camo, both toting shotguns, the big dude sweating hard, working
it hard, like you're supposed to. And the typical wilderness experience
- they were warm, easily sharing a few words with not the warmest guy
around: me. But people they were, misanthropic I am no matter what, so
I quickened my pace a bit, pining to both gain some distance from the
hunters and see again a few ponds I'd visited and dove into during my
previous trip way back in last year's hot ol' summer.
But little was left to see - of the four ponds, two were totally dry,
one was damn close to it, and only one had enough water for a swim and
enough water for waterfowl - I blew a Bufflehead off of it when I
approached. One that was totally dry had a pile of smallmouth bass in
it the previous summer, an unusual occupant since ponds are so much
more the domain of their bigger-mouthed sister. The smallies,
obviously, had succumbed to the drought. But big bullfrogs, giants for
the species, certainly big enough for an indulgent meat-eating feast,
remained, big eyes popping up out of the shallow water. And certainly
the little water remaining was absolutely precious for so much life -
many tracks of deer and bear and elk were recorded in the dried mud of
the lost shorelines. Further, the tough, old cattails and tules, though
haunted sallow by the winter and threatened with sallow given the dry
year, retained thick, intimate clumps that hid numerous secret little
lairs and caverns, secret little lairs that myriad birds - Red-wings of
course, but also many of the sparrow species - certainly found solace
in. Memory providing grist for the mill.
And I needed to expand on memory - too much, I've tread trails this
year, habits, behaviors, even waterways with the rod, that I've run
down in previous lives, seemingly losing the lessons of those past
lives only to relive their mistakes, and that's just cowardly,
stagnating. So I blew off the trail I knew and traipsed down one I
didn't, finding myself sandwiched by expanses of leathery chaparral,
then in an expanse of grassland, Western Meadowlarks flowering the air
with their warm warbling like the wildflowers flowering the dull
hillsides with canary yellow and brilliant red and pearly gilia white
and bold larkspur and lupine blue. The wind was all up in its unbridled
glory, and I realized that the wind in Wild - it's different than that
in domesticity: in the Wild, it flows, it's sinuous, swaying and
swirling and sifting through the canyons and pine needles and the
porousness of woodland and forest. But in the fuckin' city, it just
bangs and wails, slamming into monstrous skyscrapers, slamming into
right-angled tract homes, violent, a conflict, while in Wild, it's so
frequently a caressing. I paused for a moment and just listened to the
wind, feeling it, and I felt I heard, felt, something within it,
deeper, so much deeper, ineffable, however - a whisper, an argument, a
statement - something.
And to continue to
expand, to get wilder, I read the landscape and decided I needed to get
off the directing, confining trail - I needed to create my own. So I
veered off the trail and wandered up and through the grassland, up and
down the rolling hills, aiming for one of the ponds several ridges
over, and coming damn close just by gauging my position by a distant
ridge that I've also stomped all over. Then back up to the known trail,
but only for a short stretch, for I planned to jag down an
east-traversing trail, down deep in an unknown canyon, keep expanding.
But at that junction, I paused - some odd shapes, two of 'em, caught my
eye on the peak of a nearby hill - I took out my binoc's, focused, and
saw two dudes mounted on fuckin' ATVs, hidden in shadow care of a few
oaks. If hunters and not disabled - and by "disabled" I don't mean
willfully unfit, like most obese Americans, but with a fucking leg
deformity or something like that - they were fucking disrespectful to
the spirit of the hunt, they'd lost the point of it, which is an
actualization of atavism, to where it's just you, your own two feet,
and the minimum amount of gear you need to survive and to kill your
prey. Sure, I fish from a boat with a fancy motor, zooming from place
to place, but we're terrestrial critters, not aquatic, and need a
watercraft to access waters we can't by foot. Even then, I won't
consider a watercraft unless I know for sure I can't get to the water
by foot. And I'd never consider riding around in any motorized vehicle
with a gun, gunning for terrestrial wildlife, as hunting - that's just
murder.
I've little doubt the two hunters
I'd ran into earlier in the morning, who hadn't lost it, had a much
better chance of bagging a bird than the murderers - for sure the
turkey and quail and pigeons would much more easily mistake the crunch
of a boot on a stick as a bear or deer and not flee but not err were it
the wheeze and crush and dinosaur stink of an ATV.
But I didn't dally long in view of the motorized, quickly dipping down
and swerving along the trail, hitting the canyon floor in a warm
afternoon sun, doffing a few layers. Soon the trail veered up and
north, which would've taken me too far from the trailhead, so I created
my own trail by following the unknown creek east, or what was left of
it - the drought had withered it to bone, boulders and cobbles caked
with rime from the withering of an unveiled sun. Bouncing along the
creek bottom's bleached rocks and sailing over crescent little
floodplains, I reached the mainstem fairly quickly, a perennial stream,
much more perseverant, that would take far more baking to dewater.
Nevertheless, it rumbled low for the time of year, too, flanked by many
bleached bones, making my frog-like hop and jump downstream back to the
trailhead and my old Japanese wagon nearly effortless. Unfortunately,
running right by the road and thus easily accessible by the mass of
lazy, childish, unengaged and ever-booming Americans, trash littered
the bright little creek, and my pack's volume was maxed by the copious
plastic bottles I'd picked up on the way. What I didn't pick up was the
fucking diapers or diaper containers, such an ominous sign - not only
of the stupid increase in human population, but that kids at baby stage
are learning that trashing Nature is par for the course. They'd lost
it, too.
But within the context of the
whole day, the failures of domestication just pinpricked a smidgen, and
as I lounged by the old wagon, hike complete and muscles stretched, I
just dallied again for a while while the wind whispered and argued and
sang its ancient, ineffable song. One day, a day relentlessly coming
closer, I will be forever lost in that wind.