Primal Mornings

Being an early riser has been much more of a blessing than a curse.  This is especially true when traveling.  The early risers get the empty roads, the uncrowded restaurants, the once-in-a-lifetime wildlife sightings.  We get that soft pastel light that sneaks upon us from the east, growing ever brighter until long shadows etch the landscape.  If I am driving west, I am driving into the shadow of my car.  I am the first to spot the pronghorn on the open range.  I am privileged to see the plateaus limned in smoky amber.  I can stop at a café in Austin, Nevada and it is just myself and the waitress and the smell of fresh toast.

When I was younger and camping out with my friends, I was the first one up.  I made the coffee and drank the first cup while listening to animal sounds in the chaparral and the snoring from nearby sleeping bags.  I walked to school along quiet streets lined with apricot and pepper trees.  I once helped my friend Steve Baltzer deliver morning papers through the streets of Los Altos.  I was thirteen years old and reveling in the freedom of speeding through suburban streets on my bicycle, throwing papers at houses still asleep.  It seemed like we had the town all to ourselves, that we were co-conspirators in owning the morning.

Recently I was staying at the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park.  I woke up restless at 530am, quickly got dressed, and headed outside where a dim dawn was just forming on the horizon.  Old Faithful Geyser, normally thronged with tourists, had two people sitting on a bench waiting for the imminent eruption. I joined them in the silence, and then the magnificent roar and rumble of steam and water.  The thermal plume climbed higher, silhouetted against a honey colored sky.  With only the three of us there to delight in the spectacle.

Later, along the Firehole River, the sun still not awake, I walked a primordial landscape of bubbling pools, steaming hot springs, and sulfurous air.  Then and there I was a man out of time, a man for all time, wandering the primal mists and mud pots of the geyser basin.  A bison bull came out of the forest to graze beside a sputtering cone.  And the first rays of sun spilled down the roof of the Old Faithful Inn.

I am blessed to be an early riser and not a slave to an alarm clock.  I get there first and I enjoy my time alone.  There is something in that pre-dawn light that is pure and deep, and full of hope for a new day, even if the later hours may disappoint.  I always have the morning.

School Daze

     School was back in session yesterday here in the Grand Valley.  I could hear the laughter and excitement of young voices coming from the elementary school playground just a few hundred yards from my house.  It is such a pleasant sound.  A harbinger of fall.  A soothing cacophony of delighted squeals and unbridled energy.  One of life’s more welcome audio intrusions, like the sound of a far away train whistle in the dead of night or a muffled fog horn in a thick coastal dawn.   It is the sound of innocence, hope and joy.

     This is the same elementary school that my daughter attended in what seems like only a few years ago.  Yet this morning I walked her to high school for the beginning of her senior year.  She never seems to mind my company, and I am always happy to share that half mile of easy conversation and companionship.  I know that all too quickly this opportunity will pass as she moves into college mode and adulthood.  So I am intent on reveling in every minute we can spend together be it the daily school walk or curled up on the couch with her watching Mythbusters.

     My senior year seemed so bumpy in comparison.  I was uncertain of the future but knew that I did not want to participate in an “unpopular” war in southeast Asia (as if there could ever be a “popular” war….I dunno, maybe World War II if I had to pick).  I was trying to grow my hair long like the Beatles.  I was learning that marijuana was not going to make me into a drug addict.  I was concerned about losing my virginity. And I was witnessing the rise of a youth culture intent upon being heard.

     My daughter takes it all in stride.  She ignores the awful for the enlightening.  She delves into quirky science.  And she questions the absurdity of this society.  She is not an activist.  She is a learner.  An observer. She walks with me, holds my hand, and humors me in my old age.  Yet it seems like only yesterday that one of those exuberant voices rising from the elementary school playground in the late summer air was hers.  All those yesterdays that just keep piling up.

WILLOW CREEK - A REMEMBRANCE

        
       Weird Chris picked the three of us up just north of Zuma Beach.  It was the summer of 1968 and we were hitch hiking back home to Santa Cruz.  He drove a pea green Ford van all gutted and tricked out in feathers and beads and weird psychedelic art.  His buddies Wes and Joel giggled in the back, passing the weed around as we hauled our tired asses into the vehicle.  Phil was just out of the army and traveling with an enormous duffle back and narc-short hair.  Steve had his old Vietnam field jacket and a pipe.  I had my camera and pack. We all had sleeping bags too. We were grateful for any ride.

 We had just spent several days in a big house in Palos Verdes, with a gigantic swimming pool and a hilltop view of the L.A. Basin.  Phil’s aunt had put us up or maybe put up with us as I tried to rekindle romance with Phil’s sister Nina.  She had absconded to this southern California retreat to reassess things and just get away from the bay area for awhile.  So we smoked dope and swam all day in the fetid heat and listened to the Cheap Thrills LP by Big Brother and the Holding Company.  But in a few more days we were back on the road.

        Up the coast we drove, now six strong and smoking up a storm on wheels.  Up past San Luis Obispo, through the hot San Marcos Pass and out to the coast again at Cambria.  Up Highway 1 with no planned destination other than to keep moving north.  Until the late afternoon caught up with us near a place called Willow Creek, one of the few stretches of coastal highway where a road descends to the beach.  The rest is all imposing cliffs of shale and serpentine rising like a dry wave to the crest of the Los Padres with occasional green arterials winding down through gullies and narrow canyons full of redwood and fir forest, ferns and alder trees along shiny, singing water spilling eventually into the sea.
        
      And Willow Creek was a fine example.  We stumbled from the van and on to the dark sand beach, but it was the creek that drew us in.  Upstream we hiked through blackberry brambles and wild hemlock, around boulders of marble and jade, staying close to the cool water.  Maybe a half mile or so before we came upon a lively cascade over a rock face by a deep pool and a boulder on which someone had painted the words “Life Is” in glowing paint.
       
  We took that as a good omen so went back for our bags and camping gear, and then returned to the “Life Is” rock to set up a quick camp.  I don’t remember much about that evening but I’m sure we smoked freely and that I slept well.  I slept so much better back in those days.
     
 And the following morning we bathed in the Life Is pool, hung out in the sun for awhile, and then piled back into the van to continue north.  Laughing on wheels and looking ahead. 

Los Altos Lost

Here I sit on a Sunday morning whilst the girls are at church, having just watered the garden and eaten a few ripe tomatoes off the vine.  In two weeks, I'll be sitting on a bus bound for the Badlands, leading a tour of the Northern Rockies but looking toward the west.  

Been thinking about Los Altos a lot lately and the old bay area days.  I've said it before but I am so grateful that my parents decided to move down that way in the mid-50s.  Had I grown up in San Francisco, I'd be an entirely different person now, though who knows if better or worse. Would growing up in an urban environment have made me more competitive?  In the predator/prey relationship of young boys, would I have been the prey?  Or would I have been a hustler?

Just got lucky, I guess.  I look back an amazing 50 years now, and I remember the summer of 1963 hanging out with friends, walking the railroad tracks just outside of town.....the old Vasona line…feeling like a mid-century modern Tom Sawyer. There was the intimacy of the small town, the proximity of open space, the golden humming hillsides. 
 
I had my first girlfriend too....a sophomore named Marilyn who lived in a big, sprawling house up in the Los Altos Hills.  Her family owned five cars, swimming pool.  She was way out of my league and I think she knew that.  We were a hot item for a few months, but she broke up with me that summer.  I was devastated, of course, as only a lonely teenager can be.  But I had my friends, and a warm summer of apricot wind, and that intangible feeling of the world opening up to me.   

 It was a sad day when the railroad tracks were torn out to make way for the Foothill Expressway, when the last fruit orchard was removed to make way for subdivisions, when Hal’s Record Den moved from Main Street to the new super-mall on the El Camino Real.  It didn’t all happen overnight but the changes came soon enough.

But 1963 was a year unto itself.  As my late friend Jim said about it
“the last great expression, for us, of innocence and childhood."   Most of that changed too in the fall when JFK was assassinated, and our world went south.

Little Los Altos, tucked away from the world for so many years, was my isolated Eden, my salvation from a bigger reality and now, half a century later, a still warm village of memory.

Last Tango in Durango

My assignment was to drive to Durango and meet up with a representative from the Western Energy Project to photograph potential oil and gas leases near national park boundaries…in this case, nearby Mesa Verde National Park and Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico.  Just to keep things interesting, I took the long westerly route.  That first day's drive through Moab and down along the edges of the canyon country added an extra hundred miles or so but I had all day and I wanted to see the desert in bloom, and reconnect to some rock art, and just once again be amazed at the diversity of this country.  Just outside of Cisco, Utah the globe mallow and sego lilies were in a blooming frenzy, covering the normally barren landscape with color.

South of Moab, I took a detour toward Newspaper Rock, not far from my old Canyonlands haunts in the Needles country.  As I dropped down the Dugway, the canyon of Indian Creek came alive in bursts of lime green from new spring foliage.  Cottonwoods.  Box elder.  Gambel oak.  After a brief stop at Newspaper Rock, I drove a little further along highway 211 looking for other rock art sites not marked for the general public.  In spite of the fact that it was Memorial Day weekend, there was very little traffic.

From the edges of Canyonlands I turned around and drove up Harts Draw, over the Abajo Mountains through aspen and fir forest before dropping down again into the pinto bean farm country of western Colorado and the hustle and bustle of Durango. Magnificent dynamics in the highs and lows of the landscape.

I met Ti on Friday morning....a lanky young man in his late 20s, I would guess.  Easy going.  I didn't feel any condescension or discomfort.  With his maps, we drove down several county roads looking at potential drill sites and their impacts on the Mesa Verde view shed.  And I took my photos of same.  We spent a large part of that first afternoon in Mesa Verde before heading south to Farmington, New Mexico which is the total antithesis of a Colorado mountain town like Durango.   Farmington is rife with industry.  Pickup trucks.  Cheap hotels.  Fast Food.  And drill pads and well sites everywhere.

 Hot.  Dusty.  Ugly.  Probably the worst way to enter New Mexico, "the land of enchantment".  Be that as it may, on Saturday we drove down to Chaco Canyon and once we were actually in the park itself, it was hard not to get caught up in the depth and level of sophistication of the people who once lived there.  I wandered alone through abandoned doorways at Pueblo Bonito before taking on the moderately strenuous hike to Pueblo Alto, an un-restored ruin site with unobstructed views north toward possible drilling rigs. 

The rest of the day was spent on more back county roads looking at drilling leases.  Not a pretty site.  But maybe some of the photos I took will be persuasive enough to help the Western Energy Project people with their cause.  I was able to get a nice early start on Sunday morning for the drive back to Durango.  Incredible clouds in the sky as the sun rose just south of the Colorado border.  I linked up with Tom, an old park service friend of mine, for breakfast in Durango.  I've known Tom since 1971.  He is my oldest NPS friend and, like me, long since retired and now living in Pagosa Springs.  We don't see each other all that much so it was nice to have the time with him.  And then, of course, there was the spectacular finale for me....the drive up and over the Million Dollar Highway through Silverton, Ouray, over Red Mountain Pass, Molas Summit, and finally descending into the familiar angular country of theWestern Slope.  And the dark hulk of Grand Mesa which always embraces me like a vagabond son.

Sunday Morning Goin' Down

It rained last night so the air today is clean and fresh and the earth smells damp like bay area mornings.  I miss those smells.  Especially that warm earthy aroma of dry grass and oak leaves on summer days in the Los Altos hills.  It is a kind of romantic smell, though I was seldom in a romance at the time.  Or a job.  Or even in school. Were those warm days wasted?  Not really.  Sometimes I would just sit on a dry hillside looking out over the bay and valley below, at all the humanity knocking themselves out down there while cicadas and quail made lively noises in the sticky underbrush around me.  I’d be soaking up the sun like a lizard, my mind and body in sweet, non-committal reverie. 

I still have those moments on occasion when I get myself out into some quiet local canyons.  Only now there is more to reflect upon as more years have gone by.  Past romances good and bad, childhood traumas, political inequities, the roads not taken, the doors that opened and the doors that closed.  There is no better place to wax philosophical than a warm piece of sandstone in a hidden side canyon somewhere.  A piece of solid earth under my ass and an open sky above. 

Non-committal reverie.  Is that what it is?  In the late 60s I dabbled in protest.  But I could never get behind the strident left.  I didn't trust the left wing organizers any more than I trusted the right wing extremists.  I had my own opinions and I felt strongly about them but I didn't like being pushed or prodded.  I can remember a sit-in or two at SF State.  I remember being chased by cops on campus.  But I was never right there in the fray.  I didn't want to be a pawn in someone else's game, I guess. 

What was all the fuss about?  We made some strides in women's rights, gay rights, racial equality but only incrementally.  Psychedelia ended up being used to peddle shoes and soap suds and flowery fashions.  But at the very least, hopefully, people like me ended up with a sound foundation for a right livelihood, for developing a moral compass to get thru the weird times.  Seems we are still fighting the same battles but might never win the war.

There was a "Freedom Rally" in Grand Junction yesterday.  I saw the signs first and knew immediately what that meant.  Whenever you see the word "Freedom" or "America" or "Patriot" tagged on to an event, it usually means someone is going to wrap themselves in the flag and rail about their freedom to do what they damn well please with total disregard for anyone else.  It's kind of an obnoxious western ethic left over from the 19th century when we were pushing Native Americans off their land and harassing immigrants.  And sure enough, it was covered on the local news last night....about 200 people with nothing better to do gathered at a local park to decry taxes, social programs, health care, gun control, and the dread Obama...the Anti-Christ. 

While the Freedom Rally droned on, young teens from my daughter’s church were going around the community helping senior citizens get their spring chores done....moving trash, washing windows, doing good works locally in something called Sharefest. A chance to lend a hand to people who really need help.  They accomplished their mission quietly while the Freedom Rallyers shouted to be heard.

It is no secret that these “freedom” seekers cannot extend that privilege to cover a woman’s choices over her own body, or a child’s right to a good education, or to those elderly folks on a fixed income that my daughter’s friends were helping out yesterday. For them, it is more important to vilify than to mollify, to tear down rather than build up.  And I wonder sometimes if they ever stop to feel the sunshine, or to look beyond their own front porches to consider the core of this community.

There are fewer and fewer non-committal reveries for me these days.  And fewer and fewer quiet Sundays in my mind. My late friend Jim McGregor put it pretty succinctly over forty years ago when he wrote “If we are to survive, I think this is essential; we must trust ourselves, regard ourselves as the central core from which all understanding, all searching must move out. We cannot know ourselves and we cannot lose ourselves.  We can only hope to know what we are dealing with...” 

And I wonder if I will ever really know.