Christmas 2020

 

It’s 7 o’clock on Christmas morning.  The house is still asleep.  Outside a milky blue glow to the east silhouettes the trees and telephone poles.  No snow this year.  Just an icy stillness beyond the windows.  I am the first one up, as always, so I have already played Santa and stuffed the stockings that now hang distended from the mantle.  In a few hours all the packages underneath the tree will have been opened, their wrappings scattered about for the cat to play with.  But for now, there is a look of perfection, a kind of symmetry in all the squares, rectangles and oddly shaped bundles under the tree.

 The silence of winter,  The memories gathered over seventy Christmases.  Yuletides in the desert.  Yuletides by the sea.  And the almost ancient family ones in the heart of suburbia, when petty differences and misunderstandings were temporarily set aside for the laughter and comfort of home.  And mom was Mom.  And dad was Dad.  And the siblings were not a nuisance but necessary cogs in the familial wheel.

 The lites shine brightly this morning in spite of the decades.  Each ornament seems to have its own story so that the tree becomes an anthology of little vignettes and events, bound by the turning earth and all the people I love and have loved, and all the places I have been like this one, with a decorated tree in a corner of the room, on a cold morning in December and the beginning of another winter.

The Skylight

Several nights a month the full moon pokes its opal colored dome over the Grand Mesa, and slowly ascends into the Colorado night sky, losing both its warm hue and imposing size along the way.  As it rises ever higher, it gradually floats over Mantey Heights, sending milky shafts of light through the skylight in our bathroom.  Depending upon the time of year and the moon’s position in the sky, the light will slide down along the wall and into our bathtub or it may tickle our towel rack before reaching the floor. For a few hours, it becomes a celestial night light both calming and intriguing, and I look forward to its arrival every month.

 I have always wondered why more houses do not have skylights.  Why more people don’t eschew electricity for that natural light. When I was a small child in San Francisco, we had a skylight in our upstairs bathroom.  It was one of those kind that had chicken wire inside the glass that made a pattern of hexagons across the ceiling.  My grandmother’s old house in the City had one too.  Always emitting that clean, airy glow even through the numerous foggy days in the Richmond District.

 And when we moved into our new house just one year ago, I was immediately delighted to see that small rectangle of glass on the bathroom ceiling.  Since our bathtub was not fully functional, I put a dozen or so house plants in and around it, and it has become a nursery, the plants sending their tendrils upward toward the skylight and reveling in the humidity from the nearby shower.  And speaking of the shower, there is a real pleasure in soaping up under its steamy and streamy output, while looking up at a window of deep blue sky where I can gain some measure of what the day may be like outside. Sometimes I can watch the movement of whispy clouds overhead as I rinse the shampoo from my hair. Even on winter days when the snow lies heavy over the top of the skylight, the glow still filters through as if I am caught under some weird avalanche.

 But it is those moonlit nights that I love the best.  As I lie in my bed looking into the bathroom, the light slowly enters.  I’m never quite sure what part of the wall it will decide to invade, but it always makes a shaft that mirrors the skylight above it.  When I move in for a closer look, it seems as if the plants are swaying and reaching toward the ephemeral glow. There is a vibration of illumination. 

I know it is all reflected light from the sun and I can appreciate the science of it all. But mostly I can be grateful for that skylight where, for a few hours every month, I can capture pieces of that rather holy moonlight, and make it my own

Riding the Steel Bronco

Aside from a few commuter train rides from Los Altos to San Francisco, the first real train trip that I ever took was from Thompson, Utah to Oakland, California.  It was early January of 1975.  Three months earlier I had accepted a park ranger job in the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park and I was determined to take my live-in partner Susan with me.  This time we would pretend to be man and wife to avoid the quickie Reno marriage that I had endured as a very naïve seasonal ranger several years before.  In October, 1974, we left our home in the Salinas Valley with Susan driving her old VW bus, while I wrangled the small U-Haul truck with my Datsun pickup hooked to a tow bar in the rear.

We had determined to head to southern California first to retrieve some of Sue’s belongings before sequestering ourselves in the canyon country.  All went relatively well until we got to Santa Barbara.  I noticed that the U-Haul was driving erratically and when I pulled over to check it out, I was appalled to find out that somehow the Datsun had jack-knifed into the tow bar which had impaled itself to the Datsun’s front  bumper.  As fate would have it, we were rescued by a young mechanic in a nearby garage who separated said vehicles, but that left us with three vehicles to deal with and only two drivers. Realizing our dilemma, the mechanic told us we could leave the Datsun with him and pick it up at our convenience.  So, taking a huge leap of faith, we left my little pickup with a complete stranger in Santa Barbara, and continued on to Canyonlands.

By early January we had made arrangements to take the train back to California to retrieve my truck.  By that time, my friend Tom Ferrell had gone down to Santa Barbara on his own, rescued the Datsun, and had driven it back to Pinnacles where he was stationed.  These were the days before AMTRAK.  Our only option was to pick up the Steel Bronco, the northbound Denver & Rio Grande passenger train in Thompson, Utah, and make a couple of transfers to get us to our destination.  My district ranger Dave Minor dropped us off at the snowy platform in Thompson.  We were the only two people there when the train pulled in late in the afternoon.

It was the dead of winter and the cold night was only minutes away.  Sue and I were riding coach, of course, so we sat side by side sharing a blanket over our legs, watching as the hulking Bookcliffs turned into a long, jagged silhouette outside of Green River, then disappeared entirely. But we looked upon it all as just another romantic adventure.  We had only been living in Canyonlands for a few months, and already the sublime isolation and magic landscape had won us over.  We were feeling a little naughty as she gave me a hand job under the blanket as we rolled along.  We got to Ogden, Utah just before midnight and had to get off the train and board a bus to Salt Lake City where we picked up another west bound train around 1am.  I slept fitfully feeling cold drafts whenever anyone entered our car.  I remember waking up in Elko, Nevada and seeing snow falling.  But eventually we made it all the way to the bay area, got a ride down to Pinnacles, and retrieved my much-missed Datsun pickup, which was not too much the worse for wear.

After a day or two of visiting friends, we began the drive back to the Needles. I’m not sure where we slept that first night but I remember going through Cove Fort, Utah very late the following night with snow falling. Only a few pieces of Interstate 70 were complete so we were on and off of frontage roads most of the way, but happily reached our destination with two vehicles now at our disposal and a weird little adventure behind us. After all these years, I still love the sound and the feel of a train rumbling through the dark desert night as the steel rails rock me to sleep, and the mysterious darkness beckons.

 

And Then There Was Elizabeth

 And then there was Elizabeth.  She was part of a San Francisco State poetry group that would meet at our little house on Geary Street back in 1969.  I was 22 and she was 30.  I was smitten almost immediately.  And somehow, we ended up together.  I had only lost my virginity about a month previous, and was feeling sexually inept but she was pretty and pretty patient with me and not at all aggressive.  She hung out with a fascinating group of people, all of them nearly a decade older than me, and some of them holdovers from the beat generation.  Most of them were into poetry and music.

 Barbara was kind of frumpy, short, wore glasses, and was married to Larry, an intense black man who played the flute.  Dorothy was the real beauty of the group with high cheek bones, perfect skin and a patrician air about her.  She was married to Donald, another black man who sported a huge Afro and was very outgoing.  There were several others as well whose names I no longer remember, although I do remember the couple that decided to name their child Amadeus, and remember thinking “Oh, he’s gonna love that when he gets older!”

 Most of them lived either in Berkeley or Oakland.  Elizabeth worked over there as a bank teller.  She liked my poetry, and apparently liked me as well because we spent quite a bit of time together, and I had no money and no vehicle.  She pretty much schlepped me all around in her old sedan.  Elizabeth was from southern California originally and had a thing for Bob’s Big Boy burgers, so one night we drove all the way down the peninsula to Mountain View so that I could have a Bob’s Big Boy Burger, which I had never had before.

 Another time I joined her and her friends for a day at the beach, somewhere down near Santa Cruz.  It was a pretty intimidating group, and I mostly just hung out with them and smoked dope, and listened to their conversation, much of it political.

 In November of that year, we all joined in a huge anti-war march through the streets of San Francisco.  There were an estimated half a million people who began the march downtown and ended up in Golden Gate Park.  There we were serenaded by the Youngbloods and other local bands.  I really felt like I was part of something so much bigger than me and that, despite my poverty and reliance upon others, I would get by.  In December she and I went to the ill-fated rock concert at Altamont, took mescaline, and sat way on the edge of the crowd.  The vibes were just too creepy and we left before the Stones took the stage. Back at the Geary Street house, things were turning ugly between myself and my room mates.  I was spending more time at Elizabeth’s place in Oakland, a two-story Victorian in a rundown section of town near the freeway.

 In spite of the rather bohemian group she hung out with, Elizabeth played it straight pretty well.  After all, she was a bank teller.  I liked going places with her but sometimes felt the age disparity between us.  As it happened, I abandoned the Geary Street house the following January and ended up moving down to Santa Cruz where I would spend the next year living on mescaline, unemployment, and the kindness of strangers.  Although we continued to see each other, the divide between us grew.  When I took up with a local girl that pretty much ended it.

 Eventually I got a job with the National Park Service.  And over the years, Elizabeth and I would see each other occasionally.  Some times we would sleep together, other times we’d just pass each other on the same road.  Ironically she ended up working for the Park Service as well.  We finally lost touch all together.  But I’ve been thinking about her lately, wondering if she is still around.  If she ever thinks back to those tumultuous times in the bay area when we shared in the energy, the uncertainty, the passion and the pain of a decade’s end. In light of what is happening now in 2020, it seems so distant and almost quaint by comparison.  But she got me through an equally difficult time way back when, and for that I will always be grateful.

Bud's Books

Bud Kalette owned one of the oldest book stores in Carson City, Nevada.  Books & Antiques was housed in the bottom floor of an old Victorian on Curry Street, which rumor had as a former brothel.  For many years, he was also my sister Elenie’s landlord for her vintage clothing shop, Revelations, which was located several blocks away in the same old neighborhood, dotted with Arts & Crafts bungalows and stately Victorian homes.  Bud’s store straddled the abrupt dividing line between the Sierra Nevada range just a few blocks away, and the Great Basin desert splaying out into an infinite eastern horizon. 

 Carson City had been the center of activity during the days of the Comstock Lode.  Mark Twain had lived and written here for a while.  The moneyed upper class, the successful miners and merchants built their fabulous homes as close to the mountains as they could.  And when the state of Nevada was established, Carson City became its capital.

 Drive a few blocks east from the vintage neighborhoods and the capitol building, and today’s Carson is an abysmal conglomeration of car dealerships, casinos, and strip malls lined along US Highway 395.  Several miles to the north is Reno, still trying to convince itself that it is the “biggest little city in the world”.

To the south, past Minden and Gardnerville, the road comes alive through places like Bridgeport where Robert Mitchum  starred in the noir classic Out of the Past, and Lee Vining, the gateway to Yosemite.  And just beyond that the tufa-studded shoreline of Mono Lake.

 In any case, my sister eventually abandoned the store idea, and a few years later old Bud passed away.  But Elenie knew Bud’s sister, who was liquidating the inventory, and who graciously allowed the two of us to have free reign in the store before all the books were sold off.  So one late summer afternoon, not long after the store had closed its doors forever to the public, the two of us were granted access to its dark and dusty shelves.  With only Bud’s sister hanging out at the counter, the two of us had as much time as we wanted to pick through boxes, open drawers, poke around the shelves, and just sit on the floor leafing through pages of history.

 

Bud had a fantastic collection of Western Americana, everything from books about Death Valley to the history of San Mateo County, California and the development of cable cars in the west.  He also had drawer upon drawer of antique postcards, the old hand tinted variety, carefully cataloged and arranged.

I ended up with a huge stack of hard-to-find titles, mostly regional tomes like a history of Inyo County and Memories of the Mendocino Coast.  I really could have looked for much longer but I wasn’t sure I could afford to do it.  As it turned out, when I went to cash out, Bud’s sister charged us a pittance to carry it all off.  

 

But the most priceless part of the experience was having the silence, the solitude and the time to just look to our hearts’ content, to graze through the piles of paper.  In the dim lower floor of an historic home. With no pressure to buy.  No crowded aisles.  But surrounded by the most wonderful array of written material one could imagine.  If I could have, I would have spent the night gladly on that hard wooden floor with all those books as my companions.  But eventually, like waking up from a blissful dream, we had to emerge into the harsh desert light and the white heat of reality.

 

The First Time

From infancy until I was about sixteen, I spent portions of each summer with my grandparents at their farms in the San Joaquin Valley. When I was really young, it was at “the old farm”.  That was the one owned by my maternal grandparents, Gregory and Katie, just west of Highway 99 in Keyes, California.  It was 20-acres of Thompson seedless grapes and an old farmhouse that they’d acquired sometime in the 40s.  By the time I was going there, the old house had been replaced with a more modern, stucco edifice with a detached garage.  But there was still the old windmill tower and several huge locust trees that dominated the property.

I loved staying at that farm.  I had a real fondness for my namesake Popou Gregory, and I’d help him out in the fields with weeding and other chores, like picking hornworms off of the tomato plants.  And once a week we’d drive into Turlock where the grands would let me roam through the old 5 & 10 Woolworth store and buy a few comic books or toy dinosaurs that I could play with back at the ranch.  From the well-ordered vineyards and vegetable gardens, I’d fashioned in my mind an untamed wilderness to roam through.  It was a great experience for an eight year old with a big imagination.

My Popou Gregory died suddenly in 1957 when I was ten years old, and after that my summer visits happened at the “new farm”.  Which was a non-descript ranch-style home my paternal grandparents had built off of Barnhart Avenue, about three miles from the old farm but much closer to Highway 99, the main arterial through the central valley at that time.  I can remember running to the end of the street when the big freight trains rolled through, and waving at the “hobos” riding atop the box cars.  This was about the time that Southern Pacific was phasing out its old steam engines for the much uglier but more efficient diesels.

My Popou Gus and Nany Elenie had most of the farm planted in peaches with some vineyards as well on their 20-acred plot.  A large dairy farm abutted the property so the smells of manure and fresh alfalfa often wafted over the property.  I loved the freedom to roam around on my own but by this time I was feeling less inclined to spending two weeks of my summer in the hot central valley.  For my folks, I’m sure it was a great advantage to drop my sisters and I off at the Farm every summer, while they went off on their own vacations, usually down to Southern California to visit my Uncle John.  But that meant that we seldom took family vacations together.

In any case, by the time I was fifteen I was spending most of my farm time reading books under the grape arbor, or making comic books of my own.  Once in a while I’d roam out to the edges of the property where I could watch the cows over at the dairy farm.  But just across the street from the farmhouse was an unusual property, fronting on the main highway, that was part motel and part residence.  The large two-story house had blue-tinted windows on its upper story, and was occupied by an old widow named Mrs. Lazar.  Occasionally my grandparents would take us over there for a visit where she would serve us tea from a large samovar she claimed she had saved as she was fleeing from the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.  Her broken English certainly gave her a cachet of credibility.

On that fifteenth summer, two interesting things happened at the Lazar place.  A large, above-ground Doughboy pool had been installed, and a granddaughter named Linda was visiting.  Linda had short blonde hair and was about my age, and clearly as bored as I was with being stranded in the hot, dusty valley.  One day my sisters and I were invited to come over and enjoy the pool with her,an invitation I was not about to turn down.  It had nothing to do with the comely Linda and everything to do with getting wet and cool under the unrelenting sun of the San Joaquin.  But I did notice, once we got to the house, that Linda was exceedingly friendly and looked pretty damn good in a blue flowered swimsuit.

As time went by, the four of us frolicked in the pool and Linda would often grab on to me and pull me under the water.  On one of those occasions, she grabbed me close and gave me a hard and heartfelt kiss.  We were underwater so my sisters had no idea of what was going on, and I was certainly surprised myself…especially when she did it yet again.  It was all I could do to hold my breath and to keep the bulge in my swim trunks from being too obvious.  As naïve as I was, I realized that something special was happening here and I needed to off-load my siblings.

After all these years, I’m not sure how we did it but eventually my sibs got out of the pool and went back to the grands’ farmhouse across the street, leaving Linda and I alone.  We eventually got out of the pool, stood against the old house, and kissed some more. I don’t recall talking very much and, if we did, I’m sure it was quite awkward.  But here I was finally able to practice a real movie-type kiss, and having it reciprocated.  But there was also a sense of guilt as well, and a feeling that this young woman was not only lonely but, given the circumstances, would probably go much farther than a mere kiss.which terrified me at the time.  She was clearly more worldly than I was.  A yell from my Nany Elenie across the street finally brought me back to earth, and the Farm.

For me, what had happened that day was monumental…and I gave a lot of thought to how I could get back over to the Lazar place and continue my amorous activities.  But the next day the Lazars were not home.  They had gone shopping in Modesto.  And the day after that, Linda was gone….back with her parents, no doubt.  And I was left alone to ponder the incident, and write letters to my friends to tell them what had happened.  Once my folks picked us up and took us back home to Mountain View, I tried in vain to get in touch with Linda again but never could connect.  And I wonder to this day what might have happened to her.  She seemed like the type who probably got pregnant early and maybe went through a couple of divorces and probably never found the companionship she was looking for.

As for me, it would be another year or so before I could practice my kissing skills again as I fumbled my way through high school relationships.  And it would be many more years before I lost my virginity.   But I always felt that it was Linda who pulled the little cord out from my back and wound me up for the world of mystery, romance and heartache ahead.

I did end up writing a little poem about it years later.

                in my fifteenth summer

I met the farmer’s daughter

who lived across the way

            by the walnut orchard

I was lanky adolescent

she was lonely young lady

            sent to draw me out of a turtles shell

            and setting my vision straight

her kiss was a fire in the magnet of August

             the slow beginning

            of my long road into the light

            an overture to bottled down dreams

            igniting one day of a summer

I never saw her thereafter

wondering still if she were real

or a prophecy of women to come

                       later she said

                       later

                       later.

Petroglitch

When Amy and I got married in the fall of 1991, I asked my parents as a wedding gift to get us two round-trip airplane tickets to Albuquerque, New Mexico.  I’d been to New Mexico a few times but Amy had not.  My parents obliged and we were off.  We had planned about a two-week travel circuit that would take us all over the Four Corners area.  My friend Tom, who had driven all the way up from Arizona to attend our nuptials, graciously offered to take a bunch of our camping gear back with him and meet up with us along the way.  And so it went.

We flew to Albuquerque and spent several days in romantic B&Bs in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos, taking in all the sights and falling in love with the Land of Enchantment.  We had perfect weather the entire time.  From Taos we drove up to Durango where we met Tom, and he gave us our camping gear so that we could continue on to Canyonlands where we spent several days getting lost in the slickrock, immersing ourselves in the Colorado Plateau autumn.  We eventually packed up the camping gear and sent it home, returned to Albuquerque via El Morro NM, and I returned to my job at Whiskeytown.  But we had been bitten by the bug, and thereafter I spent lots of time looking for National Park jobs in New Mexico that I could transfer ito.

As luck would have it, several years later in 1994, I saw a vacancy for Petroglyph National Monument, a relatively new national park area on the outskirts of Albuquerque.  I applied for the position and, son of a gun, if I didn’t get the job….as Chief of Interpretation and Cultural Resources.  By April of that year, we were back in New Mexico and absolutely thrilled to be there.  The job had its challenges as Petroglyph was an urban park right on the edge of rapid development along Albuquerque’s west side.  The City wanted to keep expanding and we were in the way.  But we had a dynamic young superintendent and a motivated staff, so for the first two years things went relatively well…until our superintendent got a better offer elsewhere and moved on.

His replacement was an Hispanic female with no prior supervisory experience.  But it didn’t matter to us at first because as a staff we knew we could keep the ball rolling and make her look good.  Suffice to say, that didn’t work out.  Early on she asserted herself to the staff, asking for strict schedules and subservience to her will.  And it became obvious, as well, that she had a real chip on her shoulder for Anglo males.  We began to feel her wrath daily.  She was particularly bothered by my air of independence.  She had me move my office from the visitor center where my staff was, to the administrative office where she could keep an eye on me.  Then she began to make up lies about me not attending meetings and not doing what she asked me to do.  She was becoming the Captain Queeg of the good ship Petroglyph just as  I was taking on the responsibilities of becoming a new father once again.

By the summer of 1998, the writing was on the wall.  She was out to get me. Several of the staff had already moved on.  I began compiling a file on her, and calling the regional office for help.  Everyone on the staff was miserable at this point.  We even got a visit from a Regional investigative team who spent several days interviewing all of us, but in the end they were powerless to do anything.  Meanwhile, I was applying for vacancies all over the place. I was a GS-12 at this point and looking for GS-9 positions anywhere that would get me out.  But every time my superintendent got a call about me, she denigrated my performance.  But then fate stepped in.

I had applied for a vacancy with the BLM at Red Rock Canyon near Las Vegas. It was a great job and I even got a chance for a face to face interview.  And it turned out that my evil boss was on vacation at the time and unavailable for comment.  So I got the job and proudly walked into her office upon her return to let her know that I was leaving.  Instead of congratulating me, she made the next several weeks miserable, not allowing me annual leave to help pack my things.  Not approving travel.  She was a bitch to the bitter end.  But I made it out.  And I sadly had to leave the NPS culture behind.

As it turned out, the BLM seemed to recognize my abilities and quickly promoted me to manager of Red Rock, giving me my grade back as well as my pride, and from there things only got better.  But Petroglyph will always be the stain on my career.  And that superintendent?  She was demoted a few years later for using her government credit card to pay off thousands of dollars in gambling debts. And I eventually got the dream assignment that brought me to Grand Junction, Colorado.

Last Time in Little Spring

It was over 45 years ago that I blew into this bizarre and beautiful place to begin one of the most extraordinary periods of my life.  I was young and fearless and full of energy when I started my tenure as a park ranger in the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park.  That was back in October of 1974.  And now I am back again, under a tangle of trees in campsite A7 in Squaw Flat.  Wooden Shoe Butte dominates the eastern landscape spreading its tentacles of sandstone in all directions, into the drainages of Squaw Canyon and Lost Canyon and the very edges of Salt Creek.  The almost holy silence here is broken occasionally by a squawking raven or a desperate visitor looking for a camp site.  I grabbed the very last one this morning at 930am.

And that was after a full bore drive down highway 211, passing cars at every opportunity in hopes of finding a site.  It helps to have driven this road three or four hundred times over the years, knowing every curve and canyon, recognizing individual cottonwood trees and petroglyph panels.  It begins at Church Rock junction with a long open stretch through overgrazed grass and sagebrush, the long climb to abandoned Ogden Center and through Photographers Gap, then down toward the drainage from Harts Draw and the flanks of the Abajo Mountains.   The section down the Dugway is steep and curvy and used to be treacherous in the winter months.  A few errant ponderosas have taken root in the Navajo sandstone.  Just beyond the switchbacks Indian Creek flows in from the south to give the canyon its name and character.

A thick canopy of trees heralds Newspaper Rock and forms an arboreal tunnel for several miles as the canyon walls stay close.  Here and there an etched big horn or shaman figure show themselves on a sandstone wall.  As the canyon widens, the trees stay with the creek while the road meanders along the base of high red cliffs.  The sky opens up, the sandstone pulls away, and the cattle appear around the grasslands near the Dugout Ranch.  The first signs of historic humanity for several miles.  I could finally put the pedal to the metal on the Subaru and make like lightning for the campground where I felt welcome and secure.

Little Spring Canyon welcomed me back again as well after a hiatus of many years.  My secret place, private getaway, and pleasuring ground is harder for a 69 year old man to get into than a 29 year old but I managed.  I kept thinking that this would probably be my last shot at it so I was determined to make it at least as far as the first set of springs under the cottonwood gallery downstream.  Having a walking stick really helped but I still stumbled and bumbled my way over the hard gray limestone and the crumbling weathered sandstone shelves.  I bouldered down a small pour off and squeezed through a rocky tunnel before reaching the edges of the canyon where I descended on an old deer trail to the sandy floor.

The memories came flooding back even before I had reached level ground.  I recognized an old juniper snag, little changed in four decades.  I remembered the first time Susan and I discovered this place, in the dead of winter no less. Frozen formations of ice along the banks portended bubbling pools in the spring.  And so it was.  By mid May there was lots of cold, fresh water seeping to the surface at the cottonwood gallery, then trickling on down the canyon in a series of pools, cascades and freshets.  Places to soak a naked body.  Places to make love in utter privacy and openness.

There was the time that Phil and I ingested some mescaline and spent a very long day hiking downstream as far as we could, to the imposing confluence of Big Spring Canyon and then to the even more imposing confluence  of Salt Creek.  We traversed ledges full of fossil crinoids and brachiopods.  We walked through dark polished halls of limestone.  We thought we could walk all the way to the Colorado River but we eventually got rimmed out.  And then we hiked all the way back to the front country.  All in one unbelievable day.

There was the time Cindy and I got caught in a savage rainstorm near the confluence of Big and Little Spring and hiked like hell to find shelter high above the creek.  I was expecting a flash flood that never came, but we spent a primal night in a large alcove above the springs, firelight flickering off of walls like a Pleistocene parlor.

One summer Mary Ann and I discovered a cache of ancient puebloan artifacts near the first spring.  There were several arrowheads, part of a woven yucca sandal, a ringlet of pressed desiccated flowers, an arrow shaft.  We stashed it all back where it came from.  I looked for it today but there are only a few flaked lithics left at the site.  For years we swore ourselves to secrecy that we would never mention the name of the place.  But people are still getting down there even though the canyon is not marked nor advertised. 

Yet today it did, indeed, seem to welcome me back.  The springs are not as vigorous as they used to be.  Clean, fresh water no longer bubbles out of the ground.  Instead there is a much smaller seep that feeds the creek with a shallow, algae lined run.  Maybe the water table has dropped.  Maybe too much water has been diverted over the years to keep the thirsty campers happy.  Maybe as with me, age has taken a certain toll. In any case, the big cottonwoods still hold sway.  They were all shades of gold and yellow today and huddled together thickly downstream, a riparian fortress I could not break through.

But none of that truly mattered.  I had made it back.  And I made it back out as well.  And I am grateful to be among a probable handful of people who have really experienced this place...and maybe it has become a secret place for them as well.  If there ever was an Eden it must have been very much like this hidden garden in the midst of a wilderness of stone.  I grow older and less able but the canyon remains and I know it is still there and still vital, and that's good enough for me.

The Art of Campfire

I have become quite adept over the years at making good campfires.  I am not talking about the big, blazing “white man” fires one often sees in campgrounds, but the quiet little fire that flares and flits around two, maybe three logs....large enough to warm the hands but not so large as to drive one away with smoke and heat.  I have started fires under some of the most extreme conditions in past times.  There was the little fire I got going when Phil and I holed up in a cave at Canyonlands during a snow flurry.  No paper and not much wood.  Just a bit of juniper bark and some twigs, but that was enough.  Then there was the time in Little Spring Canyon when Cindy and I got caught in a major rain storm and had visions of being flash-flooded down into the Colorado River.  But I led us to a large alcove that I had remembered and we found enough downed wood to get a fire going and make a sweet little campsite.  And the canyon never did flood.

So I’ve got one such fire going right now in the metal fire ring at the Pinnacles camp site I am currently occupying.  The sun finally shone brightly today as I drove north from Paso Robles, stopping in King City long enough to pick up a few supplies.  After that it was back to that oh-so-familiar road that climbs gently into the Gabilan Range, winding first through fertile farms on the edge of the Salinas Valley, then climbing up into hills thickly clad in chaparral and open pastures dotted with oaks, gray pines, and cattle.  I have a familiarity with this area going back more than fifty years now, and I lived in these mountains for four of those years as a park ranger.  When I stepped out of the van at one point to snap a photo or two, the air was redolent of memories and an internal kinship that is hard to explain.

In spite of the Sunday crowds trying to get into the park today, I found my campsite and unloaded as much stuff as I could.  And then I took a solitary hike along the south fork of Chalone Creek, through dazzling green grass and immense valley oaks all twisted and gnarled and leaning over like old men.  Quail darted out of the underbrush, and I scared up some rabbits.  Dotting the sparse ground cover here and there were bright orange poppies and johnny jump ups.  And to my left, the braided, shallow stream of the Chalone.  It was a perfect way to ease back into the Pinnacles experience.

It is wonderful to see the familiar brilliant hues that bedeck this landscape.  Luminescent green moss.  Pink rhyolite with bright orange lichens.  No wonder this was the spot where, as young friends we dropped acid, took psilocybin and smoked lots of dope back in the day.  Those highs have lasted me for decades.  Later when I trekked through the Bear Gulch Caves, I had more energy than I have felt in a long time.  The caves were full of deafening cascades and running water underfoot.  It was a real challenge getting through them for this old man.  But the pay off was being able to stroll back down along the Moses Spring Trail past bunches of shooting stars, and damp hollows filled with chain ferns.  All in all, I put in over four miles of walking.

So now my fire is nothing but glowing embers and, if I have done if all right, there will be nothing but a pile of gray ashes by morning.