Cool Reflections on a Hot Day

I spent my birthday this year as I have a number of other years…in a desert canyon surrounded by wildflowers, wind and stone.  I felt both humbled and assured by my ability to still be able to hike off trail, follow the animal signs, avoid other humans.  And No Thoroughfare Canyon, just on the edge of town, did not let me down.  Upon leaving the parking lot, I headed into a landscape covered in primrose blossoms whose normally subtle scent now hung heavy over the trail.  Soon after that, I left the maintained path behind for a more adventurous walk in the creek bed.  A coach whip snake slid quickly by and took shelter in a salt bush.  Whiptail lizards, now awakened and revived from their winter dormancy, scurried back and forth just ahead of me.  The air hummed and glowed in its late spring brilliance.

The dry creek bed soon turned moist, then muddy, then flowing with a trickle of cool, clear water.  The red Jurassic sandstone gave way to dark pre-Cambrian schists and granite.  The canyon narrowed, funneling me toward a large green pool of water fed by an ethereal cascade some ten feet above its surface.  One large cottonwood tree stood as a sentinel beside the pool, its leaves gently lilting in the breeze.  I stopped here and sat in a shady alcove where I could just look at the water, listen to the droplets breaking the surface, and watch the comings and goings of tiny critters.  I took off shoes and socks and waded partway into the pool, surprised at how cold it was.  A few minutes later I returned to my sitting spot to think about past birthdays and canyons.

Thirty seven years ago on birthday number 30 I did essentially the same thing.  Only then it was a very remote canyon far from any official trail, and I was living in a ranger residence not so far away in the heart of Canyonlands National Park.   At my secret spot, a small waterfall lightly poured over a limestone ledge on to a shelf of shiny stone where it scattered into several pools and puddles.  I too was on that ledge, stark naked in the sun, dividing my time between rescuing tadpoles stranded in the puddles, reading Robert Graves, and watching the humming diversity of life both in the deeper pools and in the hot dry air above.  I was a part of the eco-system that day, full of confidence, reverence and contentment. 
 
Thirty seven years have changed a few things.  I can no longer hike for miles into remote backcountry.  I will take off my shoes and socks but not the rest of my clothes.  I have lost some of the strength and stamina that I had back then.  But I have not lost the passion, or the reverence.  Give me a stretch of free flowing water in the middle of the desert and I will always feel a kind of magic in the miracle of it all.  The anomaly of cool springs bursting out of bare rock, unbridled under the sun.  The life that scoots, buzzes and thrives in that ephemeral riparian corridor.  And the pure music of drip drop and trickle through unbroken sand.

In Remembrance of Someone I Never Knew

I never really knew Bill Madlam in high school.  All I remember about him is that he always seemed to have a broad grin on his face as he moved through the otherwise faceless hordes in the halls.  I knew his name because I was on the yearbook staff and had been editor of the LANCE, our school newspaper, and therefore made it a habit to put names with faces.  So I knew a lot of people at Los Altos High School who had no idea who the hell I was.

Nevertheless, it saddened me to hear of Bill’s recent passing as I am always affected when I hear about the loss of one more individual from an extraordinary graduating class.  In retrospect, perhaps the times were more extraordinary than the class but there we were in 1965, all 400 of us, poised on the brink of huge social and political upheaval, the Vietnam War, the psychedelic age, the rise of civil rights, free speech, free love, and freedom in general to be who we wanted to be and go where we wanted to go.

We were down there on the sunny peninsula basking in our parents’ affluence, the warm embrace of a quaint and cozy suburban town, and the seemingly endless possibilities that lay before us.  Our generation was already making enough of an imprint to be named TIME Magazine’s Man of the Year the following year as they honored those of us “25 and Under.”  Yet there was an odd dynamic between those of us who could see that wild times lay ahead and those of us whose expectations were formed by television shows like Donna Reed and Leave it to Beaver.

I regret that I was so wrapped up in myself back then and so concerned about social survival that I did not reach out a little more to embrace the diversity of our classmates.  To get to know someone like Bill Madlam who always seemed so friendly and upbeat in the mass of adolescent humanity that swirled around us each day.  It has been my pleasure since that time to have made contact with some of these folks as adults and reconnect with our commonalities.  And in some cases, celebrate the differences.

Most of us made it and we made it well.  But with the passing of Bill Madlam, the LAHS Class of 65 is diminished just that much more.  The optimism, the energy, the determination of a group of disparate people is affected by one less member.  As aging baby boomers, we will all press on.  We will still make our own way through an increasingly complex society with the grace that has carried us through these past 50 years.  But I will miss Bill Madlam, and Tom Lowery, and Sally Reynolds, and Jim McGregor and all those others who will not be able to complete the journey with us.  And in my own stumbling bumbling way, I will continue to carry the torch.

Elizabeth Reed and Me

Elizabeth Reed must have been one hell of a woman.  Not only did the Allman Brothers compose a 13-minute song in memory of her but she got me through a root canal process as well.  People make jokes about rather having a root canal than, say, watching FOX News for any length of time, or listening to a Barry Manilow record….but I wonder about that.  And I sort of put it to the test today.

The dentist office was only two blocks away so I walked to my scheduled appointment this morning under cloudy, late winter skies.  Into that brisk, enigmatic wind that blows down from the north this time of the year and forces you to pack a jacket with you even though the sun may be shining.  That was all a moot point anyway once I got inside the warm, glass-enclosed medical building.

Unlike the last time I had a root canal four years ago, I remembered this time to bring along my Ipod.   And my dental assistant Cassandra led me into a well-lighted room where I had a distant view of the snow-flecked Uncompahgre Plateau and the burgeoning mass of gray clouds coming into the Valley.  But I didn’t have that view for long as the chair was tilted back and the dribble bib applied.  As the hardware was being installed into my propped open jaws, I turned on the Ipod and held fast to it.

And as the noise of the drill escalated, so did the volume on the Ipod.  We started with Hard Work by John Handy, a breezy jazz number that lasted long enough to make me feel relatively comfortable under the circumstances. After John Handy came Huey Lewis with The Heart of Rock and Roll, a nice foot thumper.  I wasn’t going to think about any pain, only the music.  So I was delighted when the Allman Brothers announced from the stage of the Fillmore East that they were going to play In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.  I was immediately transported away from the sterile office.  No amount of pounding or probing was going to distract me from Duane Allman’s guitar riffs or Dicky Betts’ sinuous solos.

I thought about those old days at the old Fillmore off of Geary Street in San Francisco.  The anticipatory drives up from the Peninsula along the Bayshore Freeway.  Away from our safe suburban streets and into the concrete maze of downtown. Homing in on the music just a few blocks away.  Parking anywhere we could find a place in the heart of the black neighborhoods, and blithely heading for the dance hall entrance.  Bill Graham was usually hanging out in the lobby.  There were free apples.  Posters for next weeks concert.  And lots of smoke.

Then wandering into the hall itself and finding an appropriate spot on the floor in that mid-zone between the stage and the dancers.  The colored lights and film loops up on the wall. And that sweet, sweet smoke.  Four or five hours of hard driving music before being expelled into the street once again, trying to find the car for the long drive home.

This was a weekly ritual for a couple of years.  It only cost $3 to get into the Fillmore or Avalon back then.  I saw Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix on their first tours, when they were third on the bill.  Caught old timers like Chuck Berry and Howling Wolf.  Saw a new band, The Doors, up from L.A.  And reveled in our own local talent like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and Santana.

Santana is playing right now.  The Allman Brothers have left the stage and now Santana is doing Soul Sacrifice as the dentist makes his last few assaults to my jaw.  My oh-so-sore jaw.  But wouldn’t it have been so much worse without Elizabeth Reed and the memories of those youthful, naïve nights near the bay.  All these years later, Elizabeth lives on and I am grateful to her and the Allman Brothers and Santana and those artists who have infused my life with such magic and memory.

Duncan of the Desert

   Duncan had the weed and we had Duncan, in a manner of speaking.  Clay and I met him by the cottonwood tree just south of the big bonfire where the rest of our group was singing and laughing after a long day on the road.  A waning crescent smiled above the Great White Throne.  The dark cliffs of Zion Canyon imposed a crooked horizon against the star spattered sky.  It was the spring equinox before the Summer of Love.
    I didn’t know Clay or Duncan very well.  We were fellow travelers in a geology field course on a charter bus that had left the Peninsula only four days earlier.  Clay was a short, straight looking dude, as collegiate looking as they come.  But Duncan looked dangerous with his leather biker vest, pompadour hair, and neatly trimmed beard.  Somewhere between the Grand Canyon and St. George, Utah, he let it be known to the two of us that he had a small amount of grass with him and was all too willing to share it once opportunity knocked.
    I was more than ready for it.  My earlier attempts at getting high were a failure.  Only a week before Stan and Jim had driven me up into the Los Altos Hills under cover of darkness where the three of us huddled in Stan’s little VW bug, and I was given a lesson in inhaling.  The pipe was passed around with its little ball of glowing hash, and I hacked and coughed and tried to keep it all down.  Soon enough the guys got the uncontrollable giggles and I tried to play along until Jim said, “You’re not high!”   And he was right.
    But now I was getting a second chance on a significant day in a spectacular setting, still reeling from the immense influence of the southwestern landscape.  Before last week, I had only seen pictures of it.  But now I could say that I had hiked all the way to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, walked on red earth, smelled the burro shit along the trail, built a bonfire by the Colorado River where the guys went native crazy long into the night, and been overwhelmed by the weight of all that sky and sandstone pressing against me. 
    Duncan hunched over his little matchbox full of dope and carefully extracted a few pinches, putting them into a crude clay pipe.  “Let the games begin!” I thought as he passed it around, and this time I inhaled but did not cough.  The cool March air enfolded us as the smoke curled up and over and blended with the bonfire smoke and the singing students just a hundred yards away.
    Within minutes the deed was done, the campfire circle breaking up as budding geologists slipped into their respective sleeping bags strewn all around the group campsite.  I lay in my bag and waited.  Looking up at the stars.  And looking.  And looking.  And feeling myself floating over canyon walls.  And realizing that I had at last achieved euphoria.  Hung up on the moon and the silhouetted matrix of tree canopy and the smell of clean earth.
    Duncan was riffing nearby, singing “Do You Wanna Be a Rock n Roll Star” in a Bela Lugosi voice.  And I thought it was the funniest damn thing I had ever heard.  I was convulsed with laughter, snorting and shaking to catch my breath.  The night was alive with sound and color and clarity.  The big sky over southwestern Utah was smiling down too, as if it was digging Duncan as much as I was.

Just Sayin....

   

Some random thoughts to ring in the New Year….

When will the residents of the western slope of Colorado (and the west in general) begin to realize that extractive industries will never create a stable economy?  Instead of the constant grousing about government regulation, environmentalists, unscrupulous mine owners, and fluctuating prices, they need only look back to the long history of boom or bust cycles throughout the west to see the repeating pattern..  After all, we are talking about a finite resource here.  It‘s gonna run out, folks!  Yet every time a community falls prey to the exodus of some big oil company, they cannot understand why and the blame game begins.

    Recently a man in Colorado Springs accidentally shot and killed his 14-year old step daughter who was sneaking back home at 4am.  He said he thought she was a burglar.  Two more victims of Americans’ obsession with guns.  The girl is an obvious victim.  The step dad is also a victim--- of a culture of paranoia, right wing talk radio, and fear mongering in general.  So what did his loaded gun get him?  A dead child.  A really high price to pay for not being burgled.

    Mesa County, Colorado has steadfastly refused to hop on the legalized marijuana bandwagon by not authorizing any retail pot establishments and banning most of the medical marijuana businesses.  I predict this holier-than-thou attitude will change quickly once they see the business and tax revenues pouring into Denver, Glenwood Springs and other Colorado communities where weed is legally sold.  Big money will trump all unrealized fears of a cannabis-crazed populace.

    Colorado continues to be a state of anomalies.  We legalized pot but we’re stuck with tea-bagger representatives like Scott Tipton and Doug Lamborn.  We tightened up gun restrictions then watched while some of the politicians responsible were recalled by the gun lobby.  Not to mention the random shootings that keep happening in places like Aurora and Columbine.  We have the liberal burg of Boulder just up the freeway from Colorado Springs, home of Focus On the Family and other uber conservative groups.

    And the Front Range communities keep looking for ways to divert more water from the Colorado River, a river already so over-allocated and endangered that it no longer flows to the sea, in order to continue the pattern of rampant growth.  No one ever steps forward to say, “can we slow down a little?”

    And why is it that one still cannot walk into a grocery store and buy wine or liquor?

    Just sayin….

A Secret Place

 The canyon became my secret little place, a rugged defile that started out as a shallow sandy wash but quickly etched itself into the Permian sandstones and limestones of the Colorado Plateau.  I discovered it on a cold December day while walking along an unremarkable arroyo that wound, like so many others, through sage and saltbush and cow-beaten grasses along the edges of Squaw Flat.  But within a half mile or so, I could see that this one was somehow different from the rest.  The shrubby landscape quickly gave way to cottonwood-lined banks as the wash became a creek and the creek became a gorge.  And along those banks were occasional masses of ice, attached like burls to the sides of the streambed and bedecked with rippled icicles.  These were clearly frozen springs.

Beaten back by the frigid shadows, I made up my mind to return in a few months to see if my initial observations were correct.  And I was not disappointed when, in early May, I once again headed down into the canyon.  The cottonwood trees were now leafing out into galleries of green.  And the frozen globs of ice were now free flowing springs, alive with bright water.  In about a mile I reached a point where the cottonwood canopy closed in and fresh water came bubbling out of the creek bottom, creating a small but lively stream.  I drank from the spot where the water emerged from the earth….and it was the best water I had ever tasted.

On future trips I would continue to explore further and further down the canyon finding small waterfalls, deep pools lined with wild orchids, and large arching alcoves full of pale canyon columbines.  I began taking my friends there whenever I got the chance.  And if I were with a woman, the wildness and seclusion of the place created a primal playground where we could take off our clothes, make love, bathe in the cold pools, or simply catch a nap on a shaded ledge.  It was my Eden on earth.

As the canyon cut itself into the planet’s skin, it became more and more rugged.  The creek bed narrowed and was often overgrown with reeds.  Steep talus slopes descended on both sides, full of angular boulders and scree.  There were places in the blue-gray limestone where one could find hundreds of fossil brachiopods and crinoid stems.  On one occasion, near the source of the biggest springs, I found several arrow heads and part of a yucca woven sandal under a small boulder, being careful to put them back where I found them. 

One summer day I spent an entire afternoon by a single, shallow pool reading Robert Graves’ I Claudius.  Another time I decided to rescue as many stranded tadpools as I could, carefully removing them from cutoff pools with my Sierra cup, and releasing them downstream.  Cindy and I waited out a rainstorm one April afternoon in a protected alcove . Then there was the epic trip where Phil and I took mescaline and hiked far down into the cut earth, nearly to the Colorado River, only stopping because of a formidable drop off.

In those few short years when I was intimate with the place, the canyon came to represent all that was awesome, provocative, exciting and enabling.  The power of raw nature.  The miracle of water in the desert.  The gift of silence and serenity.  And while I may never get back to my special place any time soon, I know that it is still there.  And I am grateful for having spent some of the most supreme and enlightening moments in those rocky recesses where the water always flows and the ravens soar through a timeless space.

Saving Daylight

 The leaf guys came by this morning.  That would be the big city truck with attached vacuum hose that sucks up the piles of fallen leaves my neighbors and I have diligently raked into the street.  The city crews won’t be back again for another two weeks but the leafy mounds will return almost immediately.  The big cottonwoods on our property are still mostly leaf laden.  So is our apricot tree.  But with every gust of wind, the foliage falls.  And before long, all the deciduous trees on our street will be bare.  It happens so quickly.

I am not sure that I made the best of this autumn though I gave it a good shot.

I made a mad dash west in early October.  Up to Salt Lake and then across the Great Salt Desert under a wild and powerful sky.  Snow flurries on the fringes.  Thick rain on the road to Wendover.  Clouds stacked like spaceships hovering over the Great Basin.  But an icy blue sky by the time I reached Reno.  After that there was a week of mad dashes over the Sierras and around the bay area.  In one day I caught the sunrise on Lake Tahoe’s eastern shore, watched local fisherman in the early afternoon at Moores Landing on the Napa River, and settled in for the night at my sister’s house in Santa Rosa.



The next day I skirted the edges of the bay as I drove toward the delta, homing in on Mt. Diablo, giant windmills, and the farmlands outside of Oakley.  My sister in Brentwood took me out to Shermans Landing where the Sacramento River more or less empties into Suisun Bay.  Later in the week I was in my old Sunset District neighborhood in San Francisco under a flat, urban fog.  Spent a Friday night with friends walking through Golden Gate Park and admiring western art in the DeYoung.

Then there was the long drive south on Interstate 5 along the California Aqueduct, through towns like Buttonwillow and Avenal.  A night in Barstow, a morning scramble through Las Vegas, and a blessed return to the Colorado Plateau country through Zion Canyon and Kanab, Utah.  A night of film noir with my friend Mike. Pictographs on the Paria Plateau. Ascendant fall color in Capitol Reef.  And the triumphant return to western Colorado, just in time to herd the first falling leaves into the gutter.


 
There is never enough time in October. Autumn is the short season, the quick inhalation before winter.  And if the falling leaves and long shadows aren’t a strong enough reminder, there is always the setting back of the clocks.  That annual ritual that signals the end to my solo peregrinations and the beginning of a sort of hibernation.  I have never been one to embrace the coming of winter.

But saving daylight is certainly important.  We need all the daylight we can get in this world and then some.  We will save it up, use it sparingly for a few months, then unleash its full glory upon the spring mesas, the summer mountains, and the autumn arroyos that are the best of the American West.