The Reader

My physical therapist, Will, reads my body the way Annie Dillard reads Tinker Creek, the way I read a book, depending on the book. Hardly every book I read gets the attention to content, nuance and voice that Will gives when he reads my body.

I’d like to be able to read the woods that wholly, respectfully, purposefully. When I look at a tree, I want to know the tree. When any bird comes along the walk I want to know its habits, its favorite things to eat, whether it will fly south soon or stick around for all winter. I’d like to know the story of the sky. Does the sky like best when it’s the brilliant blue dotted with some clouds like I do? Or might it prefer the veil of fog? Likely, the sky doesn’t think this way at all. My sense of nature is it’s a lot more accepting than I am. When I hear a scurrying sound or a slithering sound I want to know: “Who goes there?” It’s not tea leaves I wish to read, but the leaves of the Coffee Berry Bush and its full-near-to-bursting red, red berries that Roxane and I were greeted by on Earl Moser Trail. What exactly is in its leaf-veins? A kind of blood, perhaps.

Toward the end of the three hour walk Roxane said, “You don’t really know a place until you walk it.” That’s a kind of reading, I think. You can’t read a book when you’re driving a car. (Though I’ve seen people with the newspaper pressed against the steering wheel more than once. And I’ve been known to thumb through catalogs at stoplights.) How many things can we really do at once? How many ought we? Walking at my own pace has given me a new respect for slowness. One thing at a time has a new appeal.

My mother used to say, “Don’t just sit there, do something!” And I’d jump as though bitten. Except for when I resisted with a book in hand or a crayon, ignoring her till the grate of her voice made doing so impossible. It’s taken me a half-century to learn how to, if not sit there, at least walk there, amongst the trees.

My eyes read what they can. My feet read a different place altogether. My hands find the writing on leaves and stones and feathers a read-by-touch, a forest braille. The best way to read read the forest is in quietly, step-by-step in slo-mo. And I’m lucky Will takes care of reading my body because thus far, that’s not at the top of my tree of skills. And I need this very body to be out in the woods, climbing up and down the hills, arching my back to catch a peak at treetops and the startling blue sky.

Because of the Crickets

Because of staying late after class to chat with Michele which is always being held close but especially when in there’s thick darkness outside the windows, because the class had been sparsely attended and the students present were focused in a particular way, because of the night’s unusual heat, because I would have gone under a rock for cool—almost, because every time we have a really warm night, I think of Michael, because the policewoman who pulled me over for a burnt-out headlight was less than half my age and that in itself tilted me oddly, and because listening figures hugely into my new life of walking in the woods, the windows were wide open to the night, and despite that the road is being moved a mere few feet over and the bulldozers and the land movers causing disruption and destruction on a large scale for small creatures did not stop them, the worlds’ crickets were out in their black regalia singing for their lives in the cut-into fields and I heard them, oh, yes, I heard them. Because my windows were open to the night the crickets’ singing came in.

Fever

You give me fever when you kiss me fever when you hold me tight Fever in the morning... Peggy Lee

“Hang on, just a bit,” says Summer, sucking a dry weed between the teeth. “I’m not giving in to Autumn just yet. A few more things gotta get launched before I pack my bags and head over the hill, outa here.”

That’s what Summer often says around here. But beginning late last week and apparently continuing into this one, Summer is serious. Finally. This year, we’ve had to wait till late September to take our sweaters off!

At my walk’s beginning, the trees kept the heat from me like a secret. But after about 20 minutes, the secret had gotten out of the bag. By then I was deep in the woods; no turning back. Heat’s heft was like an invisible weight. Impossible to lift. Stopping to catch my breath and docile-y wave my hand near my face like a fan didn’t do me a bit of good. The heat prevailed; sunlight pressed through the forest layers into my body.

Summer, spring even, is making one convincing final gasp before opening the door to cold. The last time I saw such a profusion of flowers was July sometime: a near-to-the-ground bush with pursed buds opening to small sun rays; white-collared, yellow faced flowers resembling miniature narcissus; a bush whose flowers were flagrant, small white nubs.

The last time the bugs made an appearance en masse was a while ago too: little flies, flying spiders or spiders that seemed to, a few white moths—quite tiny, larger flies bent on my destruction, I’m sure, trying to get the salt of my body into theirs. Grasshoppers appeared on their way to morphing into locusts, jumping high as my Siamese cat Cloud jumps when she’s particularly happy.

I was not jumping. I was cajoling, begging, imploring my feet to move, albeit one step at a time: “Come on, little feet, walk us up the hill, would you?” Reluctantly they climbed. I think it was the promise of release from shoes and a cool shower that got them to go. Though sometimes they stopped because the whole of me was wholly entranced. Even heat couldn’t stop that.

Out at Jacks Peak—in the no-cars, no-computers, no-people (to speak of)—all the smells of every summer place in the natural world I have ever been appeared at various places along the trail. There was a magic to it: Big Sur for the first time in 1968 with my elementary school friend, Victoria; Yosemite for the first time too, 1970; and 10,00 feet above Saddle Bag Lake with Michael. A hint of West Springfield, Massachusetts in August at the end of my Grandmother’s block, watching trains come clanging into the train yard, standing there alone, feeling time itself chug like a train in the heat, 1972. And yesterday, one spring, which was like summer most anywhere else, in Death Valley and the bright smell of one star, drenched night I lingered past my bedtime in for the salvation of slightly cool air.

At Jacks Peak it wasn’t even noon yet. Heat kept rising and burning through me, a kind of truth salve. You can’t say it’s anything other than what it is when the sun’s this hot. You’d be a fool to lie.

When I got back to the parking lot there was one lone car. Only one girl had taken the forest’s bait. I was burning up. Certainly, I had a fever. Ah, but as Miss Lee put it, “What a lovely way to burn.”

Everywhere You Go

Everywhere you go
will be somewhere
you've never been.

Natasha Trethewey,
from Theories of Time and Space

Gertrude Stein was wrong when she said, “There is no there, there.” Oh, yes, there is. There is here—this cluttered desk, this woman with hair unbrushed, this dark-on-its-way-to-light sky. And down the road, at Jacks Peak there is there. Some days that’s what keeps me going forward into the arms of a difficult day. I’m in love with all the thereness, the minutia of it, slant of light, conversant chickadees outside my father’s window yesterday morning, the invisible fluidity of air.

Even though it’s a couple miles away, right now, I can hear the thereness of waves breaking at the ocean. I love how they break day in and day out, but the ocean never falls apart. (So far, I can say the same about me.)

Stein also said, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” I agree with her there. That’s the thing about roses and Monterey Pines and the red-faced turkey vulture I saw on the fence near my home yesterday; the earth never doubts itself. Maybe next time around I’ll have the privilege of coming back as an unself-conscious, voluminous cloud wholly full of itself.

On Saturday, my hands in dishwater, my mind on my father—now home from the hospital—to whose house I was headed, when on the radio came the most perfect words for this moment, for this little, vigorous life: “Everywhere you go will be somewhere/ you’ve never been,”

I had to stop my washing, take my hands out of the hot water, lean against the sink, and linger at the view of the back yard repeating Trethewey’s perfect words.

And Saturday night, having gotten into bed as close as possible to the wide-open window upstairs at father’s to get out of the heat, to get a peak at the just-past-full moon, I felt Trethewey’s words again. That used to be my bedroom but I’d certainly never been in that there before.

In the New Yorker, Israeli writer, David Grossman, in a piece about the Polish, Jewish author Bruno Schulz, says: “....[W]e feel our lives most when they are running out: as we age...Then we pause for a moment, sink into ourself, and feel, here was something, and now it is gone. It will not return. And it may be that we understand it, truly and deeply, only when it is lost....”

So this is a place I’ve never been before. And, frankly, it seems a little soon to be in this there. Michael and I talk about it too much, I think, but only because loss is up close and oh, so personal—with the age and illnesses of our fathers and Michael’s mother now 81. An awareness of our own aging is present like never before.

For our tenth anniversary, I finally began our wedding album! Ten whole years ago. Or a mere ten years. Looking back, I feel the time like an unbalanced weight on my shoulders, though the weight of living it hasn’t been much to bear, not too much at all.

It took me too long to learn to trust my own perceptions. But now, I do, much of the time. Yes, “...here was something, and now it is gone.” The force of that knocks me back. This is not nostalgia. This is living with loss.

“Everywhere you go will be somewhere/ you’ve never been.” No tree is the one I saw before—not the redwoods outside my old bedroom window, not the trees at Jacks Peak. Every single thing is new. Much is coated with sadness these days. And yet, even this newness, for me, possesses a luster.

In that New Yorker article, Grossman continues about reading Bruno Schulz, “[W]e sense the words returning to their source, to the strongest and most authentic pulse of the life within them... Suddenly we know that it is possible to want more, that life is greater than what grows dim with us and steadily fades away.”

A Sort of Oath of Friendship

I want to be your friend forever and ever without break or decay... When the hills are all flat and the rivers are all dry... Not till then will I part from you.

Anonymous, 1st century b.c.e., China

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship. If you’ve been reading these little essays, you know. I’ve been thinking about my friendship with this place, Jacks Peak, and my friendships with people—the enduring friendship with my dearest girl, Gina, my newer friendships with Rosy and Roxane, the loss of my friendship with W. There are a few others whose friendship I love and do my best to keep well. I’m thinking of Diana, who lost her husband way too soon. My renewed friendship with my sister is a great gift of late. There’s the abiding friendship I have with my husband, a kind of relationship that gets its own special name: marriage.

There are friendships I treasure with people who’ve never shared a meal, whose parents I’ll never meet, often not their best beloveds either—my grown-up writing and collage students. We know each other through a particular lens and share an intimacy that comes through making art, through being in that nature together.

The friendships I love with the children who I know through teaching poetry are, in some ways, the ones I hold most dear. They’re the friendships I feel most honored by, along with the close bonds I’ve been fortunate to have with a certain few animals. Our two young cats, Cloud and Ace Little, were born in our backyard to a feral mother who brought them inside to a corner of my office one day when I was out!

There’s a shared wildness between children and animals. Neither one is entirely of this adult, human world. I always feel I must be my best self with both children and animals and take the least for granted or they’ll shut like a clenched eye and not reopen. One must be truest with them both—not go back on promises, not move too suddenly or come close unless invited. I have hurt people in my life. I’ve hurt animals and children. There is little bad I’ve done that causes me more regret than the pain I’ve caused to anyone who’s given me their trust, but, most especially, animals and children.

And now, at age 53, there’s something new, a new trust I am receiving and want to be worthy of. The relationship with the natural outdoors is more subtle than with human or animals, and for me, anyway, less easy to read. It’s a foreign language; we don’t have the same words for things. In fact, in some ways my language and the language of nature are untranslatable to each other. So I feel must move with integrity, not go where I don’t feel welcomed. I feel a need to be attentive to details, to notice the abundant gifts on every turn of the path, to pay that kind of gratitude.

If I throw litter on the path at Jacks Peak or cuss wildly at the trees, will the trees join forces with the poison oak to weave an impenetrable thicket to close me out the next time I want to enter? Alas, no. Were that only so. The damage us humans have done the earth would have ceased long ago.

Vista Point

I love you with what in me is still changing...

Robert Bly

Years and years (and years) ago, my best friend, Gina, wasn’t my best friend yet, but we had begun to love each other. We got in her VW hatchback, named RNZ, for the first letters of the license plate for a wee road trip, headed north out of Santa Cruz. At 17 (me) and 18 (Gina), we’d never taken off in a car for much more an overnight, and, never before, together.

Her father had given her a pellet gun for protection. We camped out in unofficial campgrounds along the way. Gina slept with the gun under her pillow, pulled it out in the dark, and pointed it at god-knows-what, just once.

Somewhere near the border of California and Oregon, we pulled off the highway and drove down a dirt road, because I’d seen an appealing body of water. With no thought of modesty or decency, I ripped my clothes off and jumped in. Gina, I think, looked the other way, nervously—not at seeing me naked—but cautious of who might see me and what might happen next. Nothing did. Nothing bad. I got out shivering, felt reborn, put my clothes back on and we went on our way. It had been an awfully hot day. Gina’s always kinda looked out for me. And I’ve done my best to look out for her.

Another time on that trip, we drove down a narrow, rutted road looking for a place to camp, laid our sleeping things on the ground, ate something, slipped into our bags when, as if on cue, all the world’s mosquitos foisted themselves upon us with vigor and sharpened stingers. We hustled back to the car as fast as we could, made sort-of-beds inside, killed all the mosquitos who’d hitched a ride and turned our flashlights on the ones biting at the glass, blackening the windows, trying to get back to their supper. They never did. Remembering it makes me itch.

All along our drive north we saw signs that said, “Vista Point,” and we’d think, “Geez, can’t these folks think of other names for their towns?!” It wasn’t till we’d left Oregon, said goodbye to our friend Ginny and her brother Mitch and were on our way home that we realized the joke was on us.

A few years later, Gina and I took another car trip together. We drove to Vermont to see someone she’d not seen in quite some time: her mother. And years after that, moments after my mother died, Gina came to my door. I had a pair of socks in my hand and I was weeping, “I don’t know where to put these.” “Sit down, Baby,” Gina said softly. She put the socks on my feet, drove me to the hospital.

Gina checked to be sure my wedding dress looked right and then made sure the whole day went better than planned. Her daughter was our ring-bearer. One night, long before my wedding, I coached the birth of that daughter. She’s my go-to person whenever anything really good or when really awful happens.

Every time I see a “Vista Point” sign and get a perfect view, I think of Gina. Unbeknownst to her, she comes with me when I walk at Jacks Peak. When I look down on Monterey or Pt. Lobos or at the blue lap of the Pacific and marvel at the beauty, it’s Gina I think of.

Ten Years: (Almost) All the Places We Have Walked, A Love-List, Not in Chronological Order

Come my beloved, let us go up the shining mountains, and sit together

Abanaki Song

Today is my 10th wedding anniversary. For a girl who thought she’d never meet a decent man she’d love, let alone her soul mate, a veritable prince, who’d ask for her hand, this is really something!

That I love walking as I do, I attribute, in part, to not being able to take long bike rides these days but also to Michael. He’s the definition of a walker, as I think I’ve said before. Here are some of the places over these past 10+ years where we have walked.

Soberanes: down the coast but before Big Sur. The whole walk is 4 hours long but more than 4 hours difficult. You can take the gentle approach and go up the lush, large-ferned, redwood canyon and sneak up on the barren hills or you can go up the 4 hills above the ocean and tackle the hardest part first. Then, if you like, you can stop at The Bench, look out at the view and enjoy a glass of wine and come back down, without bothering with the rest or you can push on and feel like you’re worth something.

Torro Park: off highway #68 between Monterey and Salinas, the definition of the rolling hills of California. This is the kind of place Kate Wolf sang about. Once we saw goats and a goat herder there. We rubbed our eyes to be sure. And once we found something to hide behind and made love!

Andrew Molera: one of our first walks. If we’d had cold feet, they’d have been cold, wet feet. There was no other way than to cross the creek to get to the other side, and neither of us shivered. Or if Michael did, he hid his goose bumps well.

Saddle Bag Lake: on my 40th birthday. Michael bought me a fine pack for the occasion. If only we’d stayed lakeside instead of climbing up to 10,00000000 feet, where I got horribly altitude sick and had to stay at camp while my darling went off traipsing to other beautiful places. I did manage to slip into Crystal Lake where I did get goose bumps but it was worth it to feel the many feet of the altitude fall from me. (Sadly, the pack is rotting up in our rafters.)

Two Rivers: the Arno, in 1999, not too far from Siena, where Michael proposed; the Seine, in 2005, on our 5th anniversary when we ate buckwheat crepes in the rain and forgot it was our anniversary!

Jacks Peak, Jacks Peak, Jacks Peak: When Michael walks up hill faster than I do he always waits before the hilltop. Well, thank goodness, he does that anywhere we walk together.

Alpine Lake: where we spent our honeymoon in a tiny cabin near the lake and spent lots of time not walking but enough time walking in the woods above the lake and rowing too in the lake in a small canoe, and breathing the alpine air to say we’d been someplace.

Best for last. In Santa Cruz—Pogonip: Having been dating a short while, but long enough, this is the first real walk we took together. From my house we went up the hill (don’t lovers always go up the hill?) along the main road to UCSC. We turned right onto the redwood dirt road and from there onto a small path and from there onto a smaller path that leads to a cold spring, koi pond where the water is freezing even in summer though this was in January so it was verifiably cold. There Michael and I expressed our intentions, never knowing they’d lead us on the walk of our life, all the way home...

Everything Broken

“Consulting the rules of composition before taking
a photograph is like consulting the laws
of gravity before going for a walk.”
Edward Weston

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless,
as it extends into the world around us,
it goes an equal distance
into the world within.
Lillian Smith

To walk you gotta know just where you’re going, don’t you? Or you might get lost. To write you have to know what you want to say, don’t you? Or you might get lost.

So that you don’t get lost in writing, your thoughts gotta be outlined either on paper or, at least, in mind. That’s what I used to think. My ducks needed to be lined up; my pencil had to be perfectly sharp; a particular kind of paper was required. And, perhaps the hardest to come by, an entire day free to write, no other work to do, no other person in the yard, let alone the house. A fine grasp on grammar was essential (and that was never, never going to happen in this lifetime).

The thought that I needed to know, pretty damn precisely, absolutely and exactly, what I wanted to say, threw daggers at me, time and time again, and sealed my mouth shut with cut-proof thread. The fact that that’s a lie, is a great revelation. It took a long time for that thread to melt, but eventually, through great persistence, it did.

Here’s the deal: if you begin, with just the smallest inkling of what you want to put on the paper and those words touch down, as the ink dries, words that had been lining up to be next as you wrote the first ones will come crawling or waltzing or climbing from your heart-mind onto the page! As they settle into their places the next ones have already formed and are becoming ink, making trees to stand up on the plain of white snow.

To write well, just like in walking, getting lost is often a good thing! You can end up in some pretty cool places. You’ll say things you’d never say if you knew exactly where you were.

I also used to think I had to be really, really smart. Far smarter than I was. I wish it hadn’t taken me till I was in my early 40’s to realize how smart I am. Part of the smartness one needs in writing is faith that their instincts are trustworthy, that their perceptions are interesting and credible, that their curiosity will serve them. It took me one hell of a long time to get there, and I’m no longer interested in placing blame anymore. I’d be a different writer had I gotten here another way. In fact, here wouldn’t be here; it would be over there somewhere. And I actually like the writer I am and I pretty well like where I am.

The other difficulty was theplague of self-doubt, a kind of binding, another thread that sewed me shut. Stitch-by-stitch by pressing my tongue against the thread over and over, biting through it finally—via the act of writing—the thread broke. I broke the thread! William Stafford said, "I have woven a parachute out of everything broken." Me too. I was broken too. And those broken parts make us the writers we are. The breaks aren’t the problem; thinking that they are is the problem.

I can’t say as I ever actually believed in myself as a writer, until I wrote my book Writing and the Spiritual Life, but I always believed in writing. My mother introduced me to poems and stories when I was a baby. Like the poet John Ciardi, in his poem “Echoes,” said, “Love echoes love...for my need to be held in the telling, apart from true or false... except that it pleased me to be touched in the telling.” That was all that was required.

I want to write. And I want to walk. I want the air filling my lungs that comes from both forms of expression. Both take me to new places, to caves and hollows and windy places, vistas that can be arrived at no other way.

The Weight of the Weightless

Yesterday morning, first Michael kissed me before he went out the door, then I grabbed a fistful of his t-shirt, held him to me a little longer. It’s rough with both our fathers approaching the end of their lives, and my Pop currently having one hell of a tough time. Which means I too am having one hell of a tough time.

Michael’s parting words, though I’d wrinkled his shirt, were, “All your life, you’ve been gathering your strength for this.” Then I could say, “You have a good day, too!” while a bit of the weight I’d been carrying attached itself to a nearby cloud.

When Michael and I walked at J.P. on Sunday, entering the park via the back way, since it was too early for the gatekeeper to be up, he kept having to wait for me. “Picking up the rear?” Michael asked? No, I wasn’t picking up the rear, it and the fore were dragging me down. I was walking in lead boots and granite pants, with a marble hat on, no feather in the brim.

Grief may be invisible but it sure does weigh a lot. Gravity is one of the “fundamental interactions of nature in which objects with mass attract each other.” Uh huh. Well, even objects without mass. My grief and fear have been doing more than flirting with each other these past weeks.

Even though Einstein said, “You can’t blame gravity for falling in love,” I do. When Michael and I met the weightless of the mass of my love was drawn to him by a force I can only call gravity or divine intervention which is just another form of gravity, isn’t it?

In 1907 Dr. Duncan MacDougall weighed patients right before and just following their deaths. He claimed the bodies were 21 grams lighter dead than alive. That weight loss, he concluded, was the weight of the soul. Upon death, it invisibly fled. If so, when my father dies and Michael’s father dies and when his mother dies and Michael and I do and your loved ones die and you do, will all those 21 grams turn into clouds or singing birds or trees for the singing birds or ants climbing up the trees or wind sailing through them?

Hidden Rooms

In high school, a few friends and I used to cut school after recess, pile into a couple of cars and drive out of town up High Street which becomes Empire Grade. To the left of the east entrance to UCSC, we’d pull over and slide through the fence to walk into the place we referred to as Hobbit Land. We’d bring food, instruments, blankets to sit on, substances for indulgence and whatever else we could carry for an afternoon.

Once you crossed the field and slipped through a second barbed-wire fence, there was a trail that went along a creek, Moore Creek, perhaps, and a bridge across that creek, at which point the trail took us momentarily deeper into the woods. Limestone mining had been done here and the remnants of the operation were still there. Then the redwood forest opened up into meadow again, but small meadow bordered with trees.

That’s when I discovered that rooms existed not only in buildings but in nature. I’d be walking along and see parting between bushes, no trail, just a subtle space. As if the trees and bushes intentionally leaned away, arching their branches, so I could enter. Once through the bush-and-tree-doorway, there would be an actual room—a large space surrounded by trees and bushes with a grassy floor. In spring the floor was lush and green; in summer, dry and brittle. There wasn’t just one such room but several, in various locations off the main trail. I used to pretend I lived on this land and imagined which room would be my bedroom, where the kitchen was, etc. I kept changing my mind. Until finally I settled on a particular arrangement and never veered again. I can see it now as though I’m standing there. My bedroom is to the path’s right. It’s before you get to the meadow where we always spent the day.

At Jacks Peak, I think there must be these kind of outdoor rooms too. But the poison oak is so lush, I’ll never leave the path to find them. Except, so far, in two places. Right at the beginning of the switch backs, on Skyline Trail, there’s a thick stand of young Monterey Pines, at least I think there Montereys. There’s little vegetation below their branches and the needles make a bouncy bed on the forest’s floor. I’ve found several cozy rooms there. And at the top of Moser Trail, where the bench is and the wind is and the view of Pt. Lobos, well, that’s a room for living in!

Maybe the reason I like the woods best, as opposed to wide, open places, is because I’ve always been drawn to small spaces, not too tight, but well-contained. I like the sequestered, the hidden, the place you have to work a bit to find. When I was little, my favorite rooms were the one behind the closet and up the back stairs at my grandmother’s house in West Springfield, Massachusetts and the tiny, entirely open to the world room below the stairs’ hand rail on the side yard of my grandparents’ house in Astoria, Queens. No grown-up could sit in that spot. No grown-up would move the brooms and mops and buckets out of the way to reach the back stairs at Gram’s. I could spend a long time in a world I’d made myself. It had most all I needed, except for supper.

I’m back in Santa Cruz this weekend for an overnight with my oldest friend, from 7th grade, Pam. We laugh together and get silly. And we can talk about pretty much anything; I can’t think of what I wouldn’t tell her. This is the just right medicine for me right now.

In middle and high school when Pam spent the night at my house we slept neatly in my single bed. It’s a good thing that though this hotel room has only one bed it’s way bigger than that! First thing Sunday morning, we set out for a walk close to that old place. But you can’t park off the road anymore where we used to, so we enter another way, which doesn’t actually lead us all the way to Hobbit Land. I don’t get to go back to nature’s rooms of long ago. We take a long, hardy walk from meadow through trees, veering far as we can away from poison oak, get a nice view of the ocean, slither (though not as elegantly as long ago) through a barbed wire fence, head into the trees, fall in love with an oak covered in Spanish Moss, and turn back. Pam’s going to see her mother and you probably know where I’m going.

It’s funny how certain friendships are. No, actually, it’s damn !*%!*!* lucky how they are. Only a very few in my life. Enough. Pam and I may not see each other for a year or two, yet the moment we get together, time evaporates like so much fog after the sun breaks through. It’s just like a room, our friendship is. It’s got all we need.

Reckless Encounters: Walking and Writing Go Hand-in-Hand

The Possible's slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.

Emily Dickinson

“Writing is a reckless encounter with whatever comes along.”
William Stafford

About ten years ago, I began my book Writing and the Spiritual Life with these words: “When a writer sits down at her desk, she initiates a journey that will lead her to language and personal transformation...to connect the invisible to the visible.”

With slight changes, that could be a present day comment on my walks at Jacks Peak. “When a person sets off on the path, she initiates a journey that will lead her to nature and personal transformation...to connect the invisible to the visible.”

My feet step on the path, feel the real beneath them, keep me steady and focused, while my mind flits among the branches, becoming transformed, step by step. For as much as I may walk to benefit the muscle of my heart and the muscles of my legs, I walk also (and more) for the benefit of the muscle of my heart-in-mind.

Funny, but when I wrote: “Writing can rescue us from emptiness. The paper is blank. And onto this blank canvas, a landscape of language will make hills and valleys and curves in the road,” I wasn’t much of a walker. Though I can’t tell you the number of times since writing those words that walking has rescued me from, not only emptiness, but fear and despair. (But if you’ve been reading this journal with any frequency, you’ve come across a few of those times.)

In writing, you begin with the page empty of your story. In walking you begin with the path empty of your story. Though you may be pretty sure your words will take you to the end of the page and pretty sure your feet will take you to the end of the path, in neither case, can you know, in advance, where you’ll actually go. The Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, wrote, “Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.”

If I don’t write, what I get is something I can count on, and that can’t be said for if I do. I get a clean sheet of cloud-white paper. It’s much safer not to go for a walk; I’ll not tumble down the path, and the walk will remain an idea, a lovely, dreamed about thing, unscathed by my shoe-prints. But if I begin writing, make paths and bushes with my words, I’m guaranteed a surprise. No way to know what turns I’ll take or if I’ll encounter a wild bear or a wild flower. Writing is a process of surprise and discovery. I get sand between my toes, sometimes a patch of poison oak. More often a view that, had I stayed in bed, I’d have missed altogether. That’s what I like best about both journeys—the written and the walked. When you set off on your way with pen or backpack you often end up in some pretty cool places you could have arrived at no other way.

A True Confession

Eyes downcast, head hidden in the clutch of my arms, “Forgive me, trees.”

This is not a normal reaction. All I did was to go for a walk in a place other than Jacks Peak yesterday morning. The day was about to clear early. I can count the times this summer’s offered that, and I wanted to be there for the light’s unveiling. I wanted to be out from under, to walk in the open, to smell the sea air.

Up the coast from here is a rather new park, Fort Ord Dunes State Park with nearly 1,000 acres. Endangered species live there: Smith’s Blue Butterfly, the Western Snowy Plover, the Globose Dune Beetle, and the Black Legless Lizard. For as much as I’d have liked to see a legless lizard, sadly, I didn’t. But the Snowy Plovers were out in their fine tuned glory.

The fog horn moaned in the background, and the fog dissipated, rising smoke-like. The scent of sage was made pungent by the warming sun. My stride was unrestrained, free of caution—no tree roots here, no fallen sticks and pine cones, nothing to hinder my step. Usually I prefer the sequestered. I like the hidden as opposed to the read-me-like-an-open-book.

But yesterday, another landscape called me. For several minutes and more than once I stood in the sun so its heat could slip below my sweater and heal me. And it did. The blue of the ocean was more vivid than vivid more true than true. For awhile, I felt like a thief who’d stolen the jewels and wouldn’t be caught.

Till remorse set it. I’m tell you, this isn’t normal. My affections for Jacks Peak have turned the place into a lover I’m afraid I’ve spurned. Is this what it means, after all, to befriend a place, that you feel an allegiance such as mine? Or am I more of a loo-loo than I realized?

In any case, if you go for a walk at Jacks Peak, please don’t tell on me. Keep my secret close to your chest or in your back pocket, would you? And when I get up to that nearly-home place today and a bit of beach sand falls from my shoes, I’ll pretend I don’t notice.

Veils and Hammocks

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Lewis Carroll


If you get out early, you get the day’s lucky charms, the chance to see things that are impossible to see once the sun has stretched its rays. Once every Tom, Donna and Harriet have got their eyes open and set their feet upon the day, the magic of the early has pressed a finger to its lips and retreated back to where it comes from. I nearly had to get a crane to hoist Michael from his weekend bed to convince him to walk with me. And on a Sunday! What nerve. But the day was going to take us in different directions and I wanted some of him for myself, all of him beside me in the morning woods before our paths diverged.

Since the park doesn’t officially open till 11:00, we had to enter via the back way. I always like the back way into any place better than the front door. Do you? In writing that’s usually the only way into what’s calling to be said. The front door is, well, too much of an affront on the imagination. Facts use the front door, that’s the only door that will take their key. But truth prefers the back, to shimmy the lock with a rusty hanger.

To enter Jacks Peak thusly, you have to park in a space big enough for a motorcycle. But never mind. The morning was draped in fog, cold for early September, and the park was unequivocally untouched (by humans) and utterly beautiful. The kind of beauty you feel is yours even though it’s not, because you’re the first person to see it. The birds were still quiet; dubious that morning had actually arrived?

Never have I seen so many brides at one time in Jacks Peak! Actually, before Sunday, I’d never seen a single one. And all along our walk hammocks had been set up everywhere. Might the brides invite their grooms there later?

On every bush and on every tree there were miniature brides and miniature hammocks. A universe of nuptials, a galaxy of veils, a massive mattress showroom transformed in the night into a haven of hammocks. The spiders must have used up all their thread! And the fog all of its droplets. My imagination was having a heyday with the spiders’ webs. Wouldn’t yours?

It’s All in How a Thing Is Said

After my family had moved to Santa Cruz, when I was a child, my father went back to Queens to visit his family. My grandpa asked my pop what it was like out west.

“Well,” said my father, “we’ve got gophers in the garden and they dig up everything.”

“Gophers?” my grandfather asked, “Whatsa that?”

My father tried to explain, but no capish. Until my cousin Roseann, who was just a little girl, said, “You know, grandpa, goferé, goferé.”

“Oh,” he said, quite pleased, “Of course, goferé!”

Only then could my grandpa get a picture in his mind of the small, brown furry creatures, with the big front yellow teeth who removed each and every plant my parents even contemplated putting in the ground. I’m not certain that he did, in fact, know what a this animal was, but because of my cousin’s “translation” at least a gopher was conceivable. And maybe, in southern Italy, where my grandpa came from, gophers are the same voracious Italian garden pests that they are in California.

On Monday afternoon I came over to Palo Alto to see my back doctor because of this pesky ruptured disc that makes the nerve running down my leg sing an awful, high-pitched wail much of the time. That meant I could come to my in-laws (not that, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, I think of them as in-laws, but rather, more as my second set of parents) for dinner and a sleep over. I get the little bedroom with the single bed where I am comfortably surrounded by the ones I love. Mom always sets the room up sweetly for me with little sayings, miniature bottles of lotion, and something else that doesn’t fit in a bottle.

We go to bed early there. Monday evening that was a particular relief, with my own father still not well and the news that I ought to have back surgery causing me to want to lie down. Snuggled in bed, I heard Michael’s parents saying goodnight to each other.

There was a fierce tenderness in dad’s voice when he said, “I love you, Barb.” And an equal tenderness in her reply, the words of which I couldn’t hear. Only the sway of her voice. How she lingered.

By now, if you’ve been reading these walking-in-the-forest-notes, you know I’m going to bring this back to the woods. At Jacks Peak, it’s all in how a thing is said too. A harsh word is rarely spoken. Here nobody grows impatient with me. There aren’t a bunch of voices within my head or outside of it, saying, “Do this,” “No! This is what must be done.” Which isn’t to say harsh things aren’t said, like, “That’s my nest, you louse! Get out!” Or “Right now, I’m going to eat you.” It’s just they haven’t been said to me. Thus far, I’ve not been in anyone’s line of fire, though once a pine cone came rocketing down and fell neatly at my feet, instead of on my head. I certainly don’t understand the language of the woods, but I am listening and very slowly, perhaps, I’m learning.

Here, no shoulders get close enough to brush mine unless they’ve been invited. Except, the shoulders of the trees which sometimes, I swear, bend down to drift their branches along my back.

Letters Sent and Otherwise

When my former friend W. sent me a vitriolic letter, telling me to never use her name in my writing again, to remove it from the blog post in which she was the star of the Sticky Monkey Flower and of listening, I do so. Right away. Not wanting her unhappiness directed at me, not wanting her to spit in my face.

The first letter I wrote (and sent) to Michael I composed on yellow, lined paper in a Washington, D. C. hotel room. I was working in D. C. for a few days. A thrill raced through me when I licked the envelope closed and let it fall from my hand into the mail slow. How would he respond to the circuitous routes of my rambling mind reaching for him across a few thousand miles?

Words on paper have a particular weight. One can return to received letters with ease (if you remember where they are). Doubt what was written? Just unfold the letter and feel a sheet of paper turn into a slap or a hundred blown kisses.

Though I've been dumped by lovers, it's a relief to have never received a Dear Jane Letter. Other than a few mailed misives my alcohol-addled mother sent me when I was in my mid-twenties, W.'s is the harshest letter I've ever received. It lingers. The day after receiving it, those written words gave me a brutal migraine. You never know how a person will respond when you write about them, even when you do with respect and kindness. That point was proved to me in awfully sharp spades.

A week later, out waking in the woods, I picked a sprig of Sticky Monkey Flower with two open orange flowers. Autumn's coming. Sticky Monkey knows that. Its leaves were singed in brittle brown. I brought the little branch home, put it in the middle of a blank piece of paper, folded it in three and slipped it into an envelope, licking it closed. I pressed my palm down to insure the seal. I was a bout to address it to W. but stopped. What had I here? A peace offering? A desire to not let her have the last word? Pen in hand, I got up, walked to the living room, stood before the fireplace, placed the letter on the hearth and lit a match, enjoyed the brilliant flare. Some letters aren't meant to be sent. Even flower letters.

Day by day, my life is becoming mingled with Jacks Peak. More of me is in those woods now. Someday I may walk by Sticky Monkey Flower in bloom and not think of W., but I can't say when.

Bird Walk

My friend Judy asked her friend Diane Tan, a birder, affiliated with the Pacific Grove Natural History Museum to take us on a bird walk at Jacks Peak. I’ve never spent so long walking so slowly and covering such a short distance. Birding is not exercise of the body’s muscles, but of the body’s eyes, ears and mind!

Diane said, “When I get to know birds they become like family. Wherever I go I can see members of my family.” That could make a new place less overwhelming, couldn’t it?

We stood on Lower Ridge Trail listening. I heard a bunch of birds singing a bunch of songs, a pleasant symphony but I couldn’t make out a violin from a flute. Diane has x-ray ears. She pointed in one direction and named those birds, then pointed in another and named the ones singing over there. She did that five times without moving her feet!

I listened as though for the first time in all my 53 years. Here’s who we had the privilege of hearing Friday morning. And some of who we also saw. Though it took me awhile to see more than what was visible to the naked eye—an occasional tail feather, the bop of a little head. (Judy was gentle as she pointed out that I’d been looking through the wrong end of my binoculars!)

The names of these creatures make me swoon. May you slow your pace, every now and then, so that you too can truly hear the birds’ songs, and may you swoon also: Dark-eyed Junco, Song Sparrow, Stellar’s Jay, Red-Breasted Nuthatch, Western Scrub- Jay, American Crow, Pygmy Nuthatch, Northern Flicker, Bewick’s Wren, Chestnut-Backed Chickadee, California Towhee, Townsend’s Warbler, Pygmy Nuthatch, Anna’s Hummingbird, Acorn Woodpecker.

Solitude: A Kind of Writing

Solitude was that too. A kind of writing.

Marguerite Duras

When I was little I loved to curl up on the couch alone when the house was empty or the living room was. Around age eleven, at my mother’s prodding, when she pushed me out the front door, I discovered tree climbing. There was a big pine in our side yard with ladder-like limbs. I’d bring book, journal and apple up there with me.

In his poem “Fergus Falling,” Galway Kinnell writes about his son:

“He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across the emptying pastures...
and saw for the first time,
down in its valley...”

From the top of my pine, in suburbia, I didn’t see even a small valley, certainly no ponds, not too many other trees. Mostly I saw houses, a few streets, the next-door cow pasture, and the boy who, a few years later, I would have a crush on. I’d hear the neighbors private conversations, the mewling cats, birds saying, “I’m here! I’m here.” That may have been what my eyes and ears held for me, but what I received out there, what I carried with me into my life was a perspective, an enlarged sensibility, the awareness of being, for the first time, outdoors in the world, alone. Wind at the top of a tree is not the same as wind on the street below. Alone at the top of a tree is different too. Suddenly, there was space around me for my thoughts, an open endedness, liberation. My thoughts had room to flutter and take wing.

Even though I only went up the tree during the day, it was like the poem, “Sleeping in the Forest,” by Mary Oliver in which she says there was,

“...nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths...”

Even before that, when I was really little, I remember sitting beside my bedroom window watching the light-fairies flit and how my thoughts softened then and I made big plans for my future but not anything one does with a body. It was a large imagining, a fluid kind of thought, as Duras says, solitude is a kind of writing. At Jacks Peak, my thinking softens much as it did looking out the window in upper Manhattan. There’s a fluidity to the movement between thoughts. I don’t hold anything with an iron fist; I don’t beat my thoughts (or myself) into the ground. Nothing feels crimped and captured.

Yesterday, walking down from Lower Ridge Trail to Loma Alta, I met a man and woman walking up. He was particularly friendly. She just wanted to walk.

“I’m walking here with my sister because I don’t want her to walk alone.”

“I love to walk here alone,” I said. The woman’s eyes lit up.

“I used to do that,” she said wistfully, “I lost 30 pounds walking here all by myself.”

I hope she’ll go back all by herself. I hope she’ll feel not necessarily pounds falling off her frame but the weight of daily conversation and city voices, the organized planning, the partitioned life. (That is, assuming her life, like mine, is made of those things.)

For as much as I like walking with others, it’s walking alone that I most enjoy. I get to hear the voice of leaf upon leaf, of scurrying animals heading for home in the bushes, falling pine cones, squirrel leaping branch to branch, the voices of Chickadees and Song Sparrows. I do my best writing out there alone. No need for pen and paper, just my open ears connected by a sinew of sorts to my open heart and less-clanky-than-usual mind.

When I’m out walking alone and the wind picks up, sometimes, not so often, I hear a voice on that wind and catch a word or the fragment of a word. “Ba...,” “If you...,” “I wa...” The pieces of sound aren’t always in English. Sometimes there’s an accent I don’t recognize. Swedish? The voice of a distant islander? Sometimes a plea. Other times a demand. And still again, a whisper.

Imagination, Revery and a Magic Bow

“The girl had a magic bow on her head.
She thought it worked.
but it did not because it was broken.
She still went for a walk though.”

Melissa Virotsko

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

Sometimes it takes so little. Sometimes we don’t need much. I don’t know the story behind Emily’s poem but I do know this one: Melissa’s older sister Lani came to my house for a children’s writing workshop. Their mom, Nancy, was planning to drop off Lani and then go to the park with her six year old but Melissa walked into my living room, saw the other kids and the big bouquet of flowers, got wide-eyed and wanted to stay. Fine by me; I like those kids who’ve got poems in their head before they walk through the door.

I don’t remember what the writing subject was. It didn’t matter to Melissa. Her poem was a nugget inside her, a stone she’d been holding in her hand, in her pocket for a long time. Without a breath of hesitation, after we sat down together on the carpeted step, she dictated her poem. And I wrote it down. The punctuation isn’t mine. It was how she said it that let me know where the pauses were.

That poem’s been a smooth, round stone in my hand, in my pocket ever since that day, maybe twenty years ago.

It didn’t matter that the magic bow was broken. It’s the symbol of the thing, the heart-stone of it. Her imagination had bestowed the bow with all Melissa needed to go for a walk.

My favorite picture book as a little girl was called Little Bear. Perhaps you remember it too? Little Bear wants to play out in the snow but it’s so cold. So his mother makes him a hat. Out he goes only to return, complaining of the cold. His good mother keeps making him more clothing to warm her little bear up: mittens and a coat. Little Bear is still cold! When he complains again, she removes all his outer clothing. His mother tells him he’s a little bear, after all and has all he needs, his very own fur coat! Out he goes to play happily.

Edwidge Danticat’s new children’s book, Eight Days, A Story of Haiti is about a little boy, Junior, who’s caught beneath the rubble of his home, during the earthquake and he can’t get out. Junior describes what he’s doing down there, in the dark, how he’s playing the biggest marble game of his life with his friend Oscar, how they’re flying kites together. That’s the work of the imagination, it’s the imagination’s imperative, lifesaving power.

Sure has taken good care of me, not that I’ve ever been in such physical need of it. I’m remembering the Russian poet, Irina Ratushinskaya, imprisoned for crimes she didn’t commit, who wrote poems on bars of soap, kept the soap until she had the poems memorized and then washed the evidence away.

On my walk the other day, I didn’t have a magic bow—broken or otherwise. I did have the new pair of walking shoes Michael bought me. They kept me from slipping! And the revery? That’s my finest companion, walking on holy ground. My imagination made a picture of my father feeling better than he does. Sometimes it takes so little. Sometimes, the lucky ones, have not everything, maybe not enough, only what we need most.

Hats

Even in the hospital my father wears a hat. During the day, it’s a blue baseball cap. At night it’s a bed cap my sister made him. He’s always worn a hat during the day, but this night thing is new. My father’s hats include: narrow-brimmed hats of the 50’s and 60’s, assorted fisherman’s caps, one with a brass pin I got him from Greece and others with whale pins from my sister. He’s worn wide-brimmed straw hats. Silly hats have not been out of the question. His sense of humor have saved him more than once. Like the other day when his mind was pretty much on vacation and the neurologist asked him his last name, he answered, “Well, Doctor, it translates, ‘little, wizened old man.’” Which it does.

When out walking Michael always wears a baseball hat. He’s got a bazillion of them. But inside the hat it’s his beautiful head I get to see.

When out walking I’ve tried to wear a hat. I understand their function, appreciate keeping the harmful rays off my face but the brim of the wide brimmed white one is too wide and the narrow brim of the cloche that I decorated with a green velvet ribbon and a fairy pin is too wide. I want the trees above me to be above me, to seem them there. I don’t want anything between us.

Just like last night, as my father’s mind cleared, and he reminded me of a bill that’s due on the 12th. I was glad everyone else had gone home. I pulled up a chair close, wanting nothing between us.

Spent

Like I had a nickel and I spent a dime.

Like after a big winter storm and the place where the trail was good and solid is almost as gone as if it never were, just a bare length of dirt along which water rushes down and down till the ground dries and somebody with a shovel gets out there and sweats like the rain poured.

My Two Dogs

Tomorrow is dark.
Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.

Charles Wright


Yesterday, I felt one foot was a dog and the other a woman with a leash. Step by step, who was who kept going back and forth. First the left said, “Come on, boy.” And dog Right wagged his tail and picked up the pace. Then the right foot said, “Good dog,” and dog Left pricked up his ears.

And then my dogs, both of them, stopped dead still and howled at the moon though there was no moon shining anywhere in the visible sky.

If I’d had a bone, I’d have given it to the dogs. If there were a hole to be dug I’d have urged them to go at it.

My father is terribly ill. My dogs know it. That was sadness bursting through their throats and souring the air.

The Lineage of My Fondness for Walking

[S]ometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour of four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for. Henry David Thoreau


Sometime around 1875, my great grandfather, Alphonse Aqualino, left the orphanage in the Jewish ghetto in Rome, stowed away on a ship bound for America, expecting to arrive in New York. The ship made port, however, in the south. New Orleans probably? He didn’t hop a train or get on a bus, nor hail a cab. Alone, at the age of twelve, my great grandfather walked to New York City.

Years later, he told his grandson, my father, “It’s a good thing it was autumn. The apple trees were full of fruit. That’s how I survived. It was a little rough at first, but I got used to it.” (We are a people who like to eat.) That's pretty much the only thing he said about his sojourn.

My great grandfather who loaded his pockets with candy to satisfy his fondness for sweets, become the foreman of his bricklayer’s union, was a Manhattan pinocle champ, shared that candy with his young grandson.

All four of my grandparents: my wrought-iron worker Italian grandfather, my pull-the-family-through-the-depression through hat and jewelry-making Italian grandmother, my Irish grandmother who was foreman of a munitions plant during W.W.II and my Irish fireman grandfather were all walkers but not necessarily by choice. (Not only do I come from walkers but workers.) Walking was pretty much how one got around. It makes me sad to think how something that basic to daily life has been pretty well lost to us, and over such a short period of time.

I think if more people walked to and from more places and walked just to walk, we’d all be better off. Walking slows a person down. Jules Renard said, “Walk. The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird.” The mind needs a little fluttering time, to be unglued from it’s zippity-do-da pace of “I’ve got to get this done! It is so important!” When out walking I find it less easy to attempt to be in more than one place at a time. It’s so damn compelling to be exactly where I am.

My mother was a walker. From the time I could keep up I walked with her. And it was no walk in Ft. Tryon Park either! The Manhattan sidewalks were our turf. I had to hold onto my hat and move my little girl feet double-time. My mother did most everything fast—from typing to eating to cooking but walking, most of all. And, effortlessly, in high heels. (Lucky for me, she didn’t sing lullabies fast, nor did she read more quickly than served the poem or story.) Also, lucky for me, our New York City walks always took us someplace good: Schrafts, the Automat, the ballet, Bernstein’s concerts for young people, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

My father came to walking later in his life. When he got a job as a proctor at UCSC, he patrolled Stevenson College nightly. I’ll bet he holds the record for human beings getting skunked! He’s never walked quickly though. At work he always smoked a cigar wherever he went.

Michael—not of my blood lineage, but of my heart—is a true walker. I think he was born with boots on. Here’s a guy who’ll drive 5 hours, walk for 12 miles and the next morning, up at 10,000 feet, walk 18 miles! The last time we walked together at such elevation, I had to spend two days at camp suffering from an altitude induced migraine. That was it for my backpacking days.

Walking wasn’t my first choice for exercise. It used to be make my feet unbearably hot and unhappy—my feet felt trapped and got impatient in hiking boots. And walking is slow compared to biking, my favorite method of ambulation. On my 48th birthday I rode 100 miles alone on my beautiful bicycle. Michael arrived whooping exactly as I dreamed he would, scooped me and my bike up and carried us home. At age 50 I rode another 100. But that, for now, anyway, is that. My body and riding are on the outs.

Every time, like this afternoon, that I set my feet onto the path and slow down to a contemplative pace, I give thanks the whole way. I’m thankful for the sweat dripping down my back, for every curve in the trail and each unexpected thing, from vista to quivering leaf. I’d eat dirt, if I had to, in order to walk these trails, to feel the wind in my hair and the vitality of air filling my oxygen-thirsty lungs, to feel my heart’s exuberance, my feet firmly claiming their place on terra firma.

The Multipurpose World

About a pocketknife, John Berber said, “[O]ne could gut a trout with it, peel a pear, cut wild sorrel, open a letter, remove a stone from a goat’s cleft hoof...”

Each of the knife’s functions connote a different quality. Both the cutting of sorrel and the gutting of trout lead to dinner. The pear being peeled sits sweetly beside opening a letter, and making the goat happy is a thing onto itself. I’ve never cut wild sorrel nor removed a stone from a goat’s hoof. Only once, as a kid, have I gutted a fish. And you?

What about your many uses? One use of myself is as a daughter. That was the very self I needed a little distance from when I went for a walk late yesterday afternoon. The trees hardly grow for my sake but in their tall steadiness I felt them being guardians offering protection. Walking back right many of the animals of the park were getting ready for night.

I needed to sweat my daughter hood out of me for just a bit. Though I took my father along on the walk, I paid more conscious attention to John Berber, thought of the multipurposeness of the elements of the natural world.

A leaf is a tree’s filigree, the bed for a bug, an umbrella for a lizard, a flute for the wind and, on some days, the whole forest of leaves make an orchestra’s entire string section.

A tree is an itching post for a bear, a claw-sharpener for a mountain lion, a chair back for someone in need of a rest.

A forest is a dense and circuitous maze in which to become lost, found or a little of both.

A mountain—even a small one—is something to look up and marvel at, a place from which to view the world below while gaining a bit of distance from it, a respite, a reminder of the larger story, a sanctuary away from the glut of busyness and responsibilities, a safe place for animals who don’t live in town.

How to Sneak Up on Birds

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..................- - - - shhhh!

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The Hierarchy of Litter

Before I began my regular walks, I never gave much thought to litter. Either I picked it up or I didn’t.

I’m embarrassed to remember when I was a kid and we were going somewhere in the ‘53 green Mercury throwing gum wrappers out the window along Manhattan streets, even when crossing the Queensboro Bridge. As if that were okay. It was okay then. Well, of course, it wasn’t but everybody did it. It never felt weird enough to cause me to stop. Till later. An odd sense of liberation was achieved when I flung small refuse from the car. As if the earth would contain everything nobody wanted. What if we threw something really big out the car window—clothes that no longer fit, old shoes, the radio when baseball games were so loud I couldn’t stand it anymore? We sure as hell know where that thinking’s taken us...

My father’s always picked up litter, even though he was the one who told me to toss out my Juicy Fruit wrappers. But he didn’t and he doesn’t bend for just anything. Never has he picked up trash to be a good man, though he is one.

Not too long ago we were in front of the bank. It wasn’t cash that caught his attention. He bent his old body down, having noticed, with his eagle eye, the blue corner of —perhaps a candy wrapper from my childhood? He held it up to the light and smiled.

“1924, I was two, we had just gotten off the boat in Naples. This blue is the exact color of the rattan chairs at the outdoor cafe where we had ice cream. This blue!”

He didn’t throw that scrap back down. He slipped it into his pocket.

*

Did you know that there’s a hierarchy to litter? When walking at Jacks Peak, I’ve retrieved many things from the path that were cast off without intention (or neglectfully): a woman’s red elasticized ribbon hair tie, that, when walking, I sometimes wear as a bracelet; a cheese wrapper— the scent of chevre strong as goat cheese is; several plastic bottle caps, one the color of a tangerine. I even went so far as to pick up a man’s handkerchief that I brought home, laundered, and now, carry it on my walks. Not that I get too sad there, but when I do...

There is one thing I can’t make myself bend down for though. Over and over, I’ve tried: used tissues. My gag reflex engages and I can’t do it. I’ve thought of carrying rubber gloves and a small trash receptacle but never have.

What kind of friend am I, there only for the good stuff?

This Is Where

“Can you smell the jasmine?” “What jasmine? There isn’t any.” “The jasmine that used to be here in the old days.”

Antonio Burgos

Along the way, when I walk my most frequent route—Skyline Trail to Iris, down as far as it goes, left at the yellow fire hydrant and up (up) Rhus—I often say to myself, “This is where...” followed by a remembrance of something that happened in there, a conversation or a memory of what I saw there once. Sometimes it’s a memory from long ago that got triggered in just that spot I find myself recalling. Or I think “This is where...” I thought about a particular thing.

It will be a long time before I walk by the tree stump where my father made a line and declared, “chalk” before I don’t recall that moment.

I hope I don’t have to wait much longer to be able to walk by Sticky Monkey Flowers and not think of W. who I offended here by writing kindly about her. Sticky Monkey Flower grows in abundance at Jacks Peak and ever since her harsh note telling me not to write about her ever again, in no uncertain terms, I think of that at most every orange flower, and something in me closes up much like a flower at dusk. The remembrance of her teaching me the flower’s name got crushed by that letter.

At the entrance to Skyline Trail Nikki introduced me to Yerba Buena for the first time! A minty scent I’ll forever recall, now recognize and often bend to smell.

On Tuesday Judy and I walked from the parking lot up Skyline to the lookout. The entire Monterey Bay seems to rest at one’s feet, and I commented to her that my father couldn’t walk even this far. Judy’s someone I can tell tender things to. She holds them gently.

Let’s continue. It won’t take long. Why not come?

Here’s where the sign was put in front of a trail they don’t want people to walk on. If you ignore the sign, which I sometimes do, you walk into a grove of small pines beneath which layers and layers of pine needles make a soft bed under your feet.

Next come the switch backs which always make me think of switch backs in the Sierra and how those back-and-forths make a serious hill less so.

This is where I found the heart rock that I thought was a sugar cookie.

Now we’ll turn right onto Iris, head down on what’s a dirt road, really. On the left is where a large pine fell. If you’re feeling nimble and the poison oak doesn’t daunt you, climb on up and walk out along the trunk. I did once with my friend Nanda. She snapped a picture of me.

Here’s where, to the right, if you keep your eyes open, you can see the trail that leads to where Michael and I met the man from Budapest and I later walked to Roach Canyon with Roxane.

Here’s tree #129. Oh, the things one sees, if one raises their eye level! (More about tree #129 another time.)

The trail begins to go further down, makes a curve to the left. In early spring, I found a fallen egg shell here that a baby bird had left behind. Perhaps in the enthusiasm of being born, the shell fell from the tree as the baby made its way out. That’s the story I tell myself. Nature isn’t kind. I have to remember to not romanticize it. Sometimes I forget and get caught up in the bucolic.

This is where I have to decide whether I want to walk longer or head home. Rhus Trail to the left is a series of hills, almost one long hill. Usually, I turn left and hitch myself to the climb, curse it sometimes but never loudly, nor wholeheartedly.

Right after the turn is the spot where there’s a breeze even on a still day. Can you feel it? It’s where, if there are going to be flying ladybugs, they’re here. Sometimes the yellow ones.

This is where the woodrat was hurt and I stopped and got down low and close.

Next we come to the bottom of the second to last hill that looks like the top of the last hill, and I always wish it were but it never is.

After the last hill the parking lot is near. I always hesitate. Next I’ll open the car door, get in and head back to the rest of life which I’m not always quite exactly ready for.