Cosmiccoastalc

Cosmic Coastal Chronicles Adventures along the West Coast By: Meade Fischer

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CH. 1 THE BIG SUR COAST: MISTY, MYTHIC MAJESTY

Driving through the rolling hills of California’s central coast during the luxuriously long spring of 1993, I watched the scatters of violet lupine on the hillsides and the poppies, like veins of gold ore along the road. This was the spring that ran to months rather than the usual weeks and created an illusion of permanence among the patterns of transient color. Lost in the sensory flood, I couldn’t help think of a line from Wallace Stevens’Adagia: “Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places, and that is the trouble.” I was on the road alone again, as I’ve often been since I fell totally in love with every facet of the magnificent world around me. Often alone, I’m seldom lonley. The experiences I collect fill spaces in my heart that can’t be reached simply by the company of another. My old Toyota pick up droned steadily over the undulating hills past green waves of artichokes, toward Moss Landing and on to Santa Cruz and the promise of surf at Pleasure Point. A kayak was strapped to the top, mountain bike hung on the back, and surf gear stashed under the camper shell. Many times, during summers and weekends, this sturdy little truck, faded and rusty, has been my home. The long bed accommodates my long frame. A mat from a patio lounge fits between the wheel wells. The built-in, carpeted compartments give me storage and shelf space. My pillow is stuffed against the back of the cab, and a long, thick 1

sleeping bag is rolled and ready. A battery powered lantern is stowed in a compartment along with a pup tent, mask and snorkel and assorted gear I’ve been too lazy to unload. A good book is always stuffed under the sleeping bag in case I spend the night in some scenic turn out along the road. Naturally a bottle opener and a cork screw are in the glove box at all times. I’d rather not drink twist off beer or screw top wine. Each of these trips adds to the growing collage, the ongoing coastal trip. Slowly, I was starting to fathom that these trips were more than isolated experiences, unrelated islands of joy. They were signposts, stepping stones, a trail of crumbs through the forest of my life. They were all personal miracles, as numerous as stars in the night sky. Some were as big and dramatic as the sun, while others were like the glow of a nebula in a distant corner of the universe. Each one, whether my first art sale, reaching the almost mythical waves I’d dreamed of, or watching a fall leaf silently drop into a calm and dappled forest pool, were infinitely valuable events on the path my life was taking. I was on the road to discovering the full measure of what it means to be alive and aware, a road that may take lifetimes to travel. I remember a night two years earlier when I went down to the San Simeon area for a long weekend. It was the year when almost all the year’s rain fell in March. Big Sur was so green that it was probably, at that moment, the most perfect stretch of coast on the planet, and the usually tiny creeks were raging torrents, with Yosemite-like waterfalls dropping from the narrow, vertical, redwood-choked canyons. I passed through Big Sur to check out Pico creek at San Simeon and Moonstone Beach in Cambria. Sunset found me on the San Luis Obispo coast. I think of this as the gentle coast, with its wide turn-outs beside 3

rocky little beaches, slapped by perfectly starched little waves. The view inland is of Hearst Castle and smooth, rolling hills, like mounds of melting coffee ice cream. There are big RVs with smiling retirees for neighbors. Further north, past Ragged Point at Big Sur, the landscape erupts skyward. This is a coast of narrow turn-outs perched on cloud-high cliffs, with people stranger than myself parked in odd busses under the shadow of trees, plotting bizarre cures for mankind’s ills while chanting mantras and smoking copious amounts of pot. It had started to rain at sunset, so stopping for the night sounded cozy and comfortable. The sunset was a cauldron of fermenting color, a recipe for heady dreams. I’d stopped in San Simeon for a bottle of wine after dinner at the walkup grill at Ragged Point. At a good spot above a small cove, I parked at the edge of the head-high bluff that dropped down a yard or two to the perfect little crescent beach. After removing my bicycle from the back and chaining it to the bumper, I put the surf gear in the cab, leaving the shell with nothing but my narrow bed, book, lantern and bottle of wine. Curled up with my pillow propped against the back of the cab, I uncorked the wine, tipped it to my lips and opened the book, The Holographic Universe, about the Physics of the hew age. The storm kicked up; the rain buffeted the truck, rocking it back and forth on the suspension. Lightening flashed, while sheets of water rolled off all the windows. Why the old shell didn’t leak was incomprehensible. Tilting the bottle back for a sip, I saw between the gushes of water, the regular pulse of Peidras Blancas light house just two miles north. Surrounded by darkness, and for all I could see, totally alone in a wild and surreal world, I read and imagined a primordial land where we all were privy to this rush 4

that touches the human psyche at its most primitive and abstract level. When, a couple of chapters and the bottle gone, I slid off to sleep, rocked by the benign power of nature, I was more at peace than I’d been in years. Awakening in the wee hours to a still and star-blazed sky only added to the magic. The next morning was clear. Glassy, tiny waves still lapped the beach, and the two huge rock islands off shore glistened in the morning light. The image stuck in my mind, waiting for the right time to germinate. There is something about islands that draw me, fascinate me. Now that I have a kayak, I can follow my impulses to get close to them. One of those impulses overcame me one day more than a year later at the very spot I’d spent that stormy night. This time it was summer, a beautiful day with hardly a breeze and just enough white puffs overhead to give the sky some depth. It was as close to a photograph as nature gets, art in the raw; the stillness of the scene marred only by the regular swells, emerging soft and plump from deep water to lap with a gentle tongue at the warm sand. Those two stone islands stood dark and quiet about a mile from shore. I had to get to them. I spun a quick U turn and pulled off the road just above the little beach. Within minutes my kayak was off the truck and on the sand. I pushed out between the little waves and made for the mouth of the miniature bay, toward open water. A very gentle swell bobbed me ever so slightly as I dipped my paddle, drawing ever closer to the dark shapes. In fifteen minutes I was looking up at smooth granite surfaces rising thirty or forty feet above me. The dark stone gave way to the white of guano deposits from the hundreds or maybe thousands of birds that used the rocks as an apartment house. From water level I could hear the fussing and fuming that naturally follows high density living. 5

I paddled around the back of the biggest rock, and for a few moments the mainland disappeared. The smaller rock angled gently down to the water, and the surges from each swell washed over it, creating eddies and transparent layers of water that shimmered in teal and white and glowed as if on fire. Paddling with the surge, I slipped between the rocks, lost for a second in their shade. Then turning around for one last look at the ancient, aloof and implacable monoliths, I started back toward shore and the toy truck on the distant beach. These islands have infected me like malaria. They call to me wherever I roam. I have my eye on many other islands. One of these is out at Goat Rock by the mouth of the Russian River near Jenner, a huge rock with a natural arch in the middle. One calm summer day I’ll go out and paddle through that arch, which may be, when I get close, five, ten or even thirty feet wide. Why do I plan to do it? Just, I suppose, for the experience of being one with the surge under or inside this great rock far from the rugged shore. Also, there are rocks at La Push I should have kayaked around, wooded islets that will haunt my days until I’m along side of them, looking up in awe. What is it about islands that draws me so and fires my imagination. I assume that others must feel the same way. I’ve thought about this fascination with islands since I began to explore them with a passion. For me an island is a metaphor for the human condition. We seem to be separate individuals, forever unconnected to others around us; like these islands, seemingly isolated even from their partners only yards away, by a totally different and fluid medium. Yet, this is an illusion. They don’t bob about in the water unattached. Below the surface every island is rooted in the same great crustal plate as the continent they surround. Look beneath the water and there are 6

no islands, only one great piece of land with peaks and valleys. So it is with the continent of mankind. I look out at others, individuals with their own thoughts and feelings and lives, and only occasionally do I realize that we are like those islands, each a peak, a sunny hill top on the vast topography of the giant continent of humanity. Those two massive rocks a mile offshore and only twenty feet apart are not lovers forever doomed to long for each other without a chance of exchanging a loving touch. They are mated through the ages, intertwined at their bases, below thirty feet of surging ocean, forever touching, forever merged. It is impossible for me to think of the stretch of coast between Morro Bay and Carmel without the image of Sand Dollar Beach coming to mind like a slide forever projected on the threshold of memory. It is impossible for me to drive through Big Sur without stopping at Sand Dollar. Arguably the most beautiful beach on the planet, it sits along the southern Big Sur coast, just south of Pacific Valley. My favorite memory of Sand Dollar is from a brilliant, blue-white early summer day. The ocean was an undulating mass of emeralds and sapphires. Long, lazy waves welled up from a quarter mile off shore, giving long board riders an easy, casual cruise toward shore. The giant, apartment house-sized boulders on the south end created eddies of translucent foam at their bases. People wandered the beach, sunning, throwing Frisbees, peaking into the tide pools at the extreme south, and making platonic love along the cliffs. About fifty yards from the knot of surfers, a small pod of dolphins played lazily, star bursts and liquid gemstones bounced and flickered off their backs at they emerged wet and joyful from a playful dive. Totally absorbed in their group rituals, the surfers and dolphins seemed unaware of each other. In this world, this micro7

cosm called Sand Dollar Beach, all manner of beings are able to exist in peace. Out on the horizon sat the fog, always patiently waiting, always ready to slip silently in with a curtain of dreamlike mystery, always poised to bring down the curtain of the day. At times like that, perched above the beach, checking the surf and the beauty, I feel as intimately bound with all life, animal, vegetable and mineral, as is possible for someone located within the shell of a jealous ego. From around Morro Bay to as far north as I’ve wandered, and from the edge of the ocean inland to where the cool redwood forests give way to charred shrub and the occasional oak is the land that my psyche recognizes as home. Within my spacious home is fog-bound San Francisco, the rolling hills of Marin, the Santa Cruz mountains, the valley of the Eel River. It is also the seemingly endless Oregon coast, the perfection of the Smith River, the lush palate of the Olympic Peninsula and the endless waterways and peaks of British Columbia. This is more than a stretch of coastline, it is a poem of cosmic proportions and infinite shades of meaning. Like some super fractal design, each millimeter of this land offers a universe of shape, color, movement and mood . The raw, visceral meaning of life is encoded in every fallen leaf and in every microscopic gully carved by every individual rain drop. Each great cliff dropping hundreds of feet to the sea is the product of an almost infinite number of fragments of cliffs each dropping one to another. Like a painting or like life itself, this structure is built up of layers placed upon endless layers, each adding some tiny bit of information, some piece of a puzzle so complex, so unfathomable as to perhaps be synonymous with the concept of god, whatever that may be. Sometimes, standing high on a coastal hill, above some place as magnificent as San Dollar Beach, I am overcome 8

with the beauty, the joy, the ancient cellular and atomic memory of the earth. Feeling the damp, salty breeze on my face and watching the liquid diamonds on the ocean surface, like stars dancing out to the horizon, brings tears of happiness and gratitude to my eyes. This feeling, this opening of my heart like a flower to the wonder of life can surprise me at any turn. It can arise from the gentle heartbreak of finding myself alone on Gibson Beach, north of Big Sur at Point Lobos. The perfection of the scene calls the stranger to end the painful isolation and join in the common heart of the place. Faces of curious sea lions bobbing in the waves, gulls standing above water on the blanket of golden-green kelp, and rhythmic tidal surges through the tiny sea arch combine in a tender communion of animal, plant and rock. This nameless rush of pure emotion can also contain a moment of universal consciousness such as the one that came upon me suddenly years ago an the high bluffs of Palos Verdes Cove near L.A. While checking the surf from the bluff, the view from the bluff was suddenly replaced by the view, pulled from memory, of the bluff seen from a surfboard out in the cove. And in that superimposed view, I saw myself looking down at myself, looking up at myself; and for a moment that could not be measured in time at all, the world opened up, exploded, and the entire history of the planet appeared instantaneously before me, like a universe emerging from a big bang. This wasn’t as a picture external to me, but as a deep memory, as if I were somehow identical to this earth and every thing that has ever been or will ever be upon it. It was a flash of personal memory. It was me knowing every facet of me, remembering that which is eternal but hidden in us all. For want of that feeling again, to be able to summon it at will, I try to create some clumsy art, some static picture 9

of the dynamic process that moves on the periphery of my senses and just below the surface of normal awareness. I try desperately to create something in stone or paint or words that will show me those extra sensory memories, those personal connections to everything around me. In the process, I hope these manufactured artifacts will trigger something in another, so that for a brief moment we can look on these things and see each other, ourselves and every speck of cosmic dust and every drop of protoplasm adrift on the vastness of the sea. To me Big Sur will always be a place of awesome beauty, spiritual insights, and art. It has been a place of inspiration and a studio for creation. I suppose 1 should back up just a bit to trace the unusual events that led me to start sculpting. It was during the summer of 1990, the summer I moved to central California, after living in the Southland and in the Bay Area. Big Sur had always held a mystical attraction for me, and now it was my closest open coastal area, and I was spending three or four days a week there. I was prepared to enjoy it all intimately. My bedroll was in the back of the truck, along with all my surf. snorkel and photography gear. My bike was hanging on the back bumper, and I kept a full canteen and a pair of hiking boots for a spontaneous excursion up the wooded canyons and to the windswept hills. I’d been down as far as Morro Bay, enjoying the soft summer day and hoping for some good waves. The windows were down and the stereo turned up. I hadn’t a care. Every detail of my surroundings was imprinting on my mind, creating an intimacy, an illusion of being a local. I’d pulled into the Pacific Valley store to pick up some snacks, and I was driving down the ramp to head back north. At the bottom of the ramp was someone who looked like a mountain man. He had on old jeans, an animal hide coat, and a droopy felt hat. 10

His hair and beard hung down to the middle of his chest and back, and he was carrying a dirty bucket with burlap sticking out the top. He looked to be hitching a ride. I stopped. He hopped in and told me his name was Ewing, and that he lived up the road at a scenic turnout in an old van. I asked him what was in the bag, and he pulled out a rock, said it was soapstone and that he’d mined it at a local beach. Sharing a joint with him got him talkative, and he explained how he carved pot pipes for the surfers and hippie types. He made enough from this to buy food and gas, and that was pretty much all he wanted beyond just being able to live at Big Sur. Back at his van, which was broken down and hadn’t moved for days or weeks, we talked a bit longer; and he showed me some of his work. Realizing that I was fascinated by it all, he gave me a five or six pound block of dark green stone, telling me to try my luck at it. I drove off with the rock in the back of the truck. I wasn’t to see him again for a year. A month or so later I pulled up at Fuller’s beach in Big Sur, a couple of miles south of Nepenthe, determined to climb down the trail and try the waves there. There were a dozen or more surfers already parked, and the overhead waves were fairly crowded. I saw a strange looking old guy in the parking area, next to the road, sitting on a five gallon white bucket and apparently carving something. I carefully hid my wallet and climbed out. He shouted to me that he was watching the cars, keeping them from being broken into, and that for a couple of bucks he’d watch mine. It sounded like a protection racket to me, that he was saving my truck from being broken into by him. I declined, and started down the cliff wondering what I’d find when I came back. After climbing out into the surf through the boulders and 11

making a poor showing of myself in fast overhead surf that demanded considerable talent, I made the four or five hundred foot climb up the steep trail. The old bum was still there, and my truck was untouched. There was a twinge of guilt. This was probably the only way the old guy had of making a buck. Too late to pay him to watch my stuff, and just a bit curious about what he was doing, I recalled the six pack I had in the cooler in back, the one I was going to enjoy at my campsite later that afternoon. I pulled a U turn, stopping along side the guy. I offered him a beer, and he invited me to sit a spell with him. So I fished out my tattered lawn chair and joined him. The two of us were facing the highway, sipping a beer, and he told me his story, how he’d lived there for years, since coming back from the Korean War, how he lived in an old tent in a secret spot right off the highway just a mile south of there, how he made food and booze money from watching cars and from carving little stone pipes like the one he had in his hand. I remembered Ewing and the piece of stone and scratched around the back of my truck until I found it. Ewing was a friend of his, like just about everyone who hung around Big Sur. In fact, he had taught Ewing to carve just months before, when the younger man first arrived. I offered him another beer, and he introduced himself. He went by the name of Robot. The name came from some tricks he would do to entertain people. Before we finished the beer, he had explained how to carve a pipe. Before I left, he gave me an old file, claiming he had another and couldn’t use more than one at a time. That was a start of a friendship that lasted a couple of years, until he moved down the beach to a place I’ve yet to locate. He shared the secrets of Big Sur and the delightful stories of his life and adventures, and I more often than not, 12

provided the beer, some epoxy from town and sometimes a “loan” of five or ten bucks. I took my piece of stone, along with a small piece of Minnesota pipe stone Robot gave me, and I carved a couple of pipes. They turned out very well, and soon I was giving pipes to my pot smoking friends. Just making pipes got boring after a short time, as much as I went out of my way to vary the design. The artist in me craved more expression. I carved a dolphin, which turned out almost perfect. People liked it, and I was hooked. Soon I found a place in Oakland—Renaissance Stone— where I could buy bulk stone, and I was carving all sorts of things occasionally bringing pieces of stone down to Robot at his twin tent compound on a cliff overlooking Fuller’s beach. My second Summer carving found me confident enough to try to sell. I’d long had a fantasy about being one of the “local” artists whose stuff sold in the eclectic collection at the Phoenix Shop at Nepenthe. One day I summoned my courage, while on a camp trip, and came, dusty and unkempt, out of the forest to show pictures of my work to the buyer. She saw a piece that interested her, and I told her I’d bring it down on my next trip, a week later. On that next trip, I had promised my oldest pal, Jim, down in Seal Beach that I’d come down for a visit. And, after a couple of days of beer, memories and smoke, I missed the open spaces and started north, up 101 to San Luis Obispo, and up highway 1 to Big Sur. I walked into the buyer’s office and placed the piece, an abstract of two people hugging, on her desk. She liked it, we agreed on a selling price, and I left, elated. In less than two weeks, it sold, and in a very small way I became both a professional artist and a Big Sur local. From that day on Big Sur started to feel like home. I’d get into conversations with locals over breakfast or over an 13

afternoon beer. I’d sit by the side of the road with the mobile artisans. A lot of hanging out went on, and I became part of the scenery. There is a kind of regional wisdom that goes along with becoming a local. Part of that wisdom is road savvy. I learned over the years that there are places I will pick I up a hitch hiker, and there are places I will not. I will rarely consider it in the city. Why? I’m not sure. Perhaps because in the city there are other ways to get around, so hitching becomes synonymous with bums and criminals. Naturally, not every urban hitcher fits that mold, but enough do to be off-putting. On a major highway I tend to play it by mood. If I’m in the right place and the guy doesn’t look like he’s packing or covered with lice maybe I’ll stop. In areas Iike Big Sur I almost always stop. Hitching is normal there, as it is in some mountain areas and probably out in the desert. If there isn’t a phone, a restaurant, or a gas station for dozens of miles, the person standing by the side of the road isn’t there for some spurious reason. In Big Sur the worst I’ve picked up were the panhandlers. Many years ago I made my first roadside stop in the Big Sur Area. I was still in San Luis Obispo County, but almost into Monterey County. I was planning to camp at Pfeiffer State Park, along the river in a thick stand of redwoods. That was back when you didn’t need to reserve 17 years in advance through a computerized ticket agency. I was thinking of wooded hiking trails and deep swimming holes when I noticed a stalled car. Along side the road two young women were standing by their car, obviously broken down. It was late afternoon, with darkness a scant hour or two away. I knew from driving the road that there wasn’t a damn thing for miles. I stopped. Their car had quit running for some reason that escapes 14

me now, and the women didn’t really know the area. I did, and knew that they didn’t need to be stranded out there after dark. I drove them back fifteen miles or so to a gas station around San Simeon. I don’t remember now if I left them there to get a tow or if I brought them back to the car with what they needed. That was probably twenty five years ago, and I was a Southern Californian then, which means that roadside manners were new to me. They made it to their destination, and I still managed to make the state park in time to get a site and set up a tent before total darkness. Call it karma., or call it selective memory, but it seems that the next time I made that trip it was I who was stuck by the side of the road. This time the little pin that connected the shifting shaft to the transmission in my old VW bug had broken. There wasn’t a VW dealer for a hundred miles, no auto supply for fifty. A couple in a late model sedan came by. They had one of those clothes rods that went across the back from door to door, and it was hung with all the nicely pressed duds they’d need in Carmel or Monterey or wherever they were headed. They stopped and asked if they could take me to a phone or whatever. I thought about it for a moment, and then one of those “out of the blue” flashes of insight hit me. I saw the coat hangers in the back of their car and asked if they could spare one. it was a strange long shot. They handed me a wire coat hanger and asked if they should hang around in case my plan didn’t work. Oddly confident, 1 told them to go on ahead, that I’d be OK. I really didn’t know if I’d be OK or not. By the side of the road, flashlight in hand, I pulled out the back seat, twisted the coat hanger into a pretzel-like pin, and secured the linkage. I limped into Big Sur making the loosest and noisiest shifts imaginable, each one a breathholding adventure. Some luck or some magic resided along that coast, and I had caught it or it had caught me. Either 15

way, I was hooked, and I suspect that my eventual exile from Southern California was set in motion that weekend. From a VW that constantly needs creative attention to a Toyota pick up that rarely quits is only a matter of attitude. One gets a real job because one gets tired of being so bogged down in the little maintenance details of life that the whole point, the goal of the trip is somehow lost. Judgment? Justification? Not really. It’s just a different focus. I’ve done the mechanical challenge of getting there, and I’ve extracted all the adventure and romance I could from it. Now my focus has shifted, and I’m exploring the adventure and romance of other aspects of the trip. Naturally, the trip is everything, be it Big Sur, the high Sierra, or Africa. Once you’re there, you re there. You’ve done what you came to do, and you go back. Like they say about sport, “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.” You can say much the same about life. The end of life is death, not something you are necessarily working toward. The point of the exercise is that trip you take from birth to death. As in life or on the road, you’ve got your highways, byways, and trails. if you don’t know which you should take, try them all. Each one has value and insights. You can walk, hitch, struggle along in an old car, or cruise in a new BMW. Highway one or 101, always the same road objectively, but it is radically different subjectively. Still, I’ve watched a banana slug inching along a trail, and I’m convinced that you never know a road until you’ve crawled, nose on the ground, along it at twenty feet per day. Once you made the trip, the big trip, It begets side trips, like a tree trunk begets limbs and branches. Each of these is its own adventure, with its own moods and magic. For example, Cooper Point at Molera State Park, near the northern end of Big Sur, is a bubbling, joyful place. It’s that 16

way in just about any weather, any time of the year except in the spring. In spring the place is like champagne, fancy wrapped gifts, and children’s laughter. I’d wanted to surf Molera for a very long time, but I’d never hit it at a good time. Molera is fussy about what kind of swell it takes. One gorgeous Spring day I found my perfect surf. Since the beach is a mile from the highway, there are only two ways to check the surf. You can park and walk, or you can drive about a half mile up the Old Coast Road to an overlook point. Since that puts you almost two miles from the beach, you need a pair of binoculars, which most traveling surfers carry. It took only a quick look to tell me the time was right. I pulled off the highway at the trail that leads straight off down the hill to the old Cooper’s cabin, the oldest building in Big Sur. It had recently rained, and everything was exploding in tender-shoot green and budding flower pastels. The meadow had awakened and was celebrating the start of a new cycle. I had my body board in a carrying bag along with the fins and wet suit. I slipped it on like an awkward backpack and started off. The air was so thick with birdsong it seemed almost liquid. The wildflowers reached almost to my waist. The great, annual rebirth worked its magic on me; I almost skipped down the trail. I was light as a feather, and I felt all of sixteen. There were a few campers and day hikers around, and I exchanged a lilting “good morning” with everyone I passed on the wide trail from the campground to the beach. I was almost dancing when I entered the little forest, coming in range of the ocean’s music. I emerged from the forest and onto the beach. The river was full and flowing fast and clear. There was the perfect gravel bottom, ready to seduce spawning steelhead trout. A party of ladies were taking off their shoes, hoisting their skirts and testing the water with 17

their bare feet. I had on sandals, so I just stomped into the river and straight for the other side. It was still far too early in the season for the summer footbridge over the river. The rain swollen river would have washed it out to sea. Six or eight guys were out in the water. The wind was howling on shore as it usually does, and shoulder to head high waves were bending around the point. Further up the coast I’d passed big, unruly, pounding waves, unridable liquid bombs, exploding on the shore in shades of frothy gray and military green. But in Molera’s protected cove, the hooked, rocky point shields against the wind and allows the waves to stretch and smooth out. They peeled neatly off to the right and were almost perfect. While I pulled on my wet suit, I watched the sightseers walk along the beach or crawl behind the Protection of the stacked driftwood logs. Chilled surfers had been stacking these logs for years to gain a respite from the hard wind. The Big Sur river pumped into the surf, over the rocks that were half hidden in the surf line. The Water’s surface in the little cove was almost smooth, but outside, beyond the hook of the point, white caps danced to the horizon. I paddled out to where a few guys sat. Two aggressive surfers were hugging the rocks, ready to grab the bigger waves as they bounced off the point. I maneuvered out to line up with the second peak. And, for the next hour and a half I slipped into a series of great, steep rights that peeled off as if generated by some video game. The two guys inside paddled in to the tiny notch beach at the point, and I slipped into their spot. It was a day where there were waves enough for twenty, but we were less than eight. The tide was dropping, causing the waves to get better and better, until it dropped beyond a critical point. Then the shallow bottom caused the waves to start sectioning off, shortening the rides to almost nothing. As the perfection 18

slipped away, others came, swelling the crowd. No matter, I was almost ready to make the long trip back. Almost sated, before paddling in I paused to just gaze shoreward at the natural art that unfolded before me. The point with its driftwood littered beach was cut by the river and backed by the little forest, the Big Sur river’s riparian corridor. Above the forest the rolling hills rose, adorned with newly sprung grass. The steeper, distant hills were cut by deep redwood canyons that climbed upward almost to the dark, wooded peaks. It was a fairy tale panorama, nature’s wonderland, the playground perhaps of centaurs, unicorns, and elves, a great gift to the imagination. This endless variety of shapes formed by mountains gradually gives pieces of itself back to the sea with every drop of rain and wisp of wind. The complex patterns of vegetation gain footholds and prepare the way for generations to come. The perfect interplay of all the elements, physical and ethereal were all spread out before me like the meaning of life written in the most passionate and vivid poetry. I experienced one of those moments of happiness in which everything in the world, from a speck of dust to the entire human race, was incredibly dear to me. I caught a wave to the beach, quickly changed and washed my surfing gear in the clear river. I felt so damned good that I could have hugged and kissed everyone on the beach. I still had a mile walk with a heavy, wet neoprene wet suit on my back. Then there was an hour’s drive just to get back to Monterey. It would be another hour and a half on the highway before I reached home, shower and food, but time and distance didn’t matter one whit. Every moment of the walk up the trail, past the cabin, through the wildflowers, below that ceiling of hungry song birds, was a golden experience, one to be savored and filed away. Every curve of the drive home, every song on the radio, every 19

familiar building, every inviting food smell, every motorist on the way to every private adventure was greeted like an old and cherished friend. A stop for a six pack and snacks was done as if it were a sacrament. Even the mundane film on the TV that night brought a special warmth to my heart. This was love, the love of a perfect day in a perfect world. As all these pictures, these memories, well up in my mind, they bring with them a train of related images. According to the cosmology of some native American people, Big Sur is just one long power place. It weaves a special magic, even when one isn’t expecting it. Sometimes this is simply a matter of light. One early morning, after climbing out of the back of the truck, with time to kill before the Big Sur Inn opened for breakfast. I took a walk on Pfeiffer Beach. Walking south past the people in sleeping bags propped against the hill. I came to a small canyon that climbs steeply through some trees onto someone’s land. Where the canyon met the beach, there was a broad tree, its limbs stretched out in a hundred-handed prayer. The sun was streaming through the branches, making brilliant beams of yellow-white, beams so bright that I could barely see past them. It was a perfect fan of light, imbuing the tree with some supernatural glow. Everything around it was in shadow, and it stood in its own light like a divine messenger. We are all creatures of energy, radiating energy, touched by energy. The energy around that tree invaded my being, healing the doubts and sorrows of the night. Was it that same morning after breakfast or another day? Perfect days seem to run together like mountain streams. I walked out again on Pfeiffer Beach, where usually a driving wind chops the ocean to a frenzy. That morning was different; no wind. A couple of surfers were out in the narrow., washing machine-like spot between the southern cliff and 20

the huge rock stack with the sea arch in it. There is eighty to a hundred feet of beach exposed between the rocks, and the waves push and cram and often tumble over themselves to reach the shore. These guys were catching waves, so I suited up and paddled out. It took me the longest time to get the crazy surf wired. They caught rides, and I was always in the wrong spot. Then suddenly I got into the rhythm and feel of the place, and I simply dropped into every wave that came my way. It was a wonderful feeling, starting out by the rock and letting the wave funnel me toward the shore. The half dozen early sunbathers were casting occasional looks of half curiosity at the three men playing in the water. With each ride my senses were heightened. I listened to waves booming through the sea arch, watched birds circling overhead and glimpsed puffs of clouds peering over the high cliffs. The world of traffic, phones, drudgery and stress was a million miles away.

21

CH. 2 RIDGES OF BIG SUR: INNER SPACES,, OUTER VISTAS

From any of dozens of turn-outs along the Big Sur coast, a trail disappears into the woods, usually along some steep creek, only to emerge from the thick forest higher up the hill on some grassy ridgeline, beyond the reach of human tinkering. After a long, lazy Spring day at the head of a canyon, above a densely forested creek, it’s hard to fathom the frantic and contradictory rhythms of modern society. Up on the ridge the ocean breeze is in your face, and the hills roll away in the distance like thunder that has erupted and cooled in mid-rumble. Big Sur, reaching for the clouds and stretching to the limits of the imagination, puts our daily lives in perspective. We scratch and plot to find work, yet most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. So many jobs have been so structured as to drain them of creativity, or your creativity is channeled toward a cutthroat world of survival, where your ability to make money for the organization is all that keeps the people just below you from having you for lunch. And there’s the hours. You are supposed to turn the juices on at a certain time and keep them on until a certain time. Then you are supposed to shut it off and go home. Sounds unnatural to me. Always has. At least over in Europe they have enough respect for the workers to give them a vacation that isn’t a joke. Once when teaching jobs were hard to come by, I went to work for a company where they proudly announced that they gave a half dozen holi22

days and two weeks vacation. To wait fifty weeks to experience what I was experiencing on that grassy, wind-swept hillside, in no hurry nor concerned about how much time I had, and to cram it all, with time to buy stuff and tune the car, into only two weeks is nothing less than an insult. In fact, I told the boss just that when I gave my two weeks notice, about nine months from my starting date. I decided that I’d rather grab work as and when I found it than to be put in chains for a modicum of security. These thoughts crossed my mind as I watched the squirrels scamper up and down the trees and the shy deer eat with one eye turned my way. A flock of birds argued enthusiastically in the tree above me while the world of man was reduced to a thin line of cars passing far below. I saw how much of a hurry each of those cars seemed to be in. We all seem to be in some kind of hurry, myself included. Life moves fast these days, and if you slow down, you become unessential, uninformed, unemployed, uncool, and generally an anachronism. We live in a busy age. Actually, we live in the information age, but no one has taken the time to really explain just which information is important and why. The world is crammed full of information, more that I can begin to retain, and I am supposed to have—according to the tests—a higher ability to absorb data than the average person. It is actually much more than I can even expose myself to, even if I do nothing all day and night but access information. This, of course, would give me no time at all to use the information for any purpose, assuming most of it has a purpose. After all, a computer can work in the nanoseconds—I think it’s even faster now, and it still takes me days to really read, think about and absorb a truly good book. Our screens are constantly flashing new information, whether we are watching or not. And then we have the TV. Once a half dozen channels of 23

news, comedy, drama, fine arts and sports were all we had. Now we have cable and dozens of channels of everything. I can’t watch that much TV. Even if I gave up working, leaving the house and sleeping, I still couldn’t watch that much TV. And if I could, what would I get? There are stations that broadcast commercial dramas and comedies, hastily made and generally mediocre because of it. There are stations that broadcast reruns of the same kind of stuff, just as mediocre but comfortably familiar. There is constant news, more than you can absorb. And do those people who watch all that news do a thing to solve the problems and right the wrongs that are presented to them? In most cases, I doubt it. There are lots of nature programs, which are good, but not nearly as good as getting in the car and going out to where you can take a real stroll in the natural world. The comfortable patch of tall grass under the sprawling live oak, up on the ridge, above the rugged, always dynamic coast of Big Sur provides more of nature than a hundred nature shows, with their carefully selected images. But these electronic images are supposed to capture reality. Getting reality from TV! What an interesting notion. And now the concept of virtual reality is coming to us. We can become so occupied with forms of virtual reality that we don’t have the time to experience real reality. Am I the only one who thinks this is odd? But information, particularly electronic information, is knowledge. This equation has become axiomatic. By that definition sitting under a tree up on a wind-blown coastal ridge is a vacation from real knowledge, perhaps from reality itself. Yet up on that hill, I never felt like a vacationer. Rather than escape, I always felt connected to a great flood of valuable information, knowledge, and wisdom, unorgnized but highly coherent. Good God, we civilized types know a lot! We know one 24

hell of a lot more than anyone who has lived before us. That being the case, why can’t we handle some of our basic societal problems? Why can’t we keep people employed, husband our resources, govern ourselves or interact without resorting to some level of war? I don’t seriously think more and more information or knowledge is the answer. I think we need to resort to an ancient concept, wisdom. The elderly used to be the repository of wisdom, and maybe they still are in some societies. I don’t think it’s the case in ours any longer. The generation preceding mine, my parent’s generation, is now solidly in the senior citizen camp, so I have some experience with the elderly. Generally, the young people don’t pay much attention to them and what they say any longer. Part of that is the fault of the young, and part of it is that many of our senior citizens, instead of spending a lifetime accumulating wisdom, spent it accumulating money, property, security, and a thousand unexamined biases. Forty years of punching the same time clock, paying the same bills, watching the same TV shows, and having the same conversations doesn’t make one wise, just old. Too many of our elderly play bingo, and take those bus trips to Reno or Las Vegas, just as too many of our kids play those pointless video games and shop for name brand sneakers, and whatever else they do to fill the hours. The young adults, while no more wise, have less hours to fill, between work, kids, and keeping up the house. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m nostalgic for a simpler time. I do not see our modern society as particularly complex. Most things we deal with have a simple order, in mathematical terms. We have social scientists who devise equations to explain individual behavior, political patterns, social interactions, and international affairs. To some crude degree, these formulations explain us to us 25

However, real complexity, orders of such high magnitude that they fall into the realm of chaos theory, are all around me up on this hill. The patterns of weather are among these, as is the slope and curvature of all these hills and valleys. Just the patterns made by a flock of birds, undulating in formation above me, are enough to, if really attended to, push one into an altered level of consciousness. For order of immense complexity, watch clouds go by. we, as social beings, as builders of things and systems, are still stacking blocks in comparison. Our problem isn’t orders that are too complex, but rather a contradictory mass of simple orders that are discordant with each other. The thought of it makes me dread the hike down the hill to my car and what we humans arrogantly call the real world. I guess I was lucky as a young man to stumble upon wisdom writers. people who nourished the inner me. Once exposed to those people, it was easy to go from one to another until I was fortified against all the nonsense that life has thrown at me. I’m thankful that I was that lucky. Had I not had generations of thinking minds to bolster me, there were times in my life that would have ruined me. As best I remember, the first of these writers was Henry Miller. Picking up Tropic of Cancer as a very young man, the book finally available in this country, I was touched by something that made me feel that in spite of what went on around me, I could somehow put it in perspective and emerge somewhat rational. Besides giving me some perspective on my society, he introduced me to other writers who then introduced me to other writers, etc, etc. At this point in my life, I have a lot of dead friends whom I’ve never met. But even the best of books pale compared to this coastal hill, the secrets of nature playing hide and seek with me, and the massive Pacific Ocean singing songs that I will never 26

fully understand. I know that all the insights that wash subliminally over me up here will fade as I go once again back to the world of routine and man-made experience. I know that with all the years of thinking and reading and accumulating brain ammunition, I still lack the simple wisdom of a deer grazing on the next hill. unlike me. she doesn’t eat too much or drink too much wine. She isn’t overweight or troubled by issues that she has no control over. Her mind, body and emotions seem to be in step with each other. She’s comfortable with her place, her role in the greater scheme of things. It humbles me. Less than three miles from a highway, I still have to have a canteen of water with me. I don’t know how I could spend the night without a sleeping bag. I’m not even capable of catching tomorrow’s breakfast. It’s hard to feel superior out of the comfort of a city, with electricty, forced air hearing, grocery stores and automobiles. The important thing for me is to not think so much about it. Thinking just complicates it all. My advice to me—and it may not be suitable for you—is to just live it, experience it, feel it, be part of it, like the deer and the redwood tree. Thinking puts experience in the past. it cuts you off from the full effects of what is washing over you at that exact moment. Thinking is for later, reflecting, sitting at the computer, remembering and sorting it all out, defining it all in human terms. As humans, we seem to need to find a reason, a greater purpose for everything, a natural law that causes it all to make sense to us. I’m beginning to suspect that there realy isn’t anything like that out there, that the order we discover is a product of our own minds. Even the wonderful concept of ecology may be rooted in our persistent need for order and reason. Life is probably reason enough for life. The purpose of my existence may simply be in the experi27

ence. Do natural systems work harmoniously, or do they appear harmonious because they work? God may be simply an answer to the persistent “why” that refuses to go away until we answer it. Or again, god may just be the sum total of all the life energy in the universe moving together in a great, complex, interrelated wave of interaction, like the infinite dance of chaos continually discovering itself. Or I may just be another foolish little human trying to comprehend things that are incomprehensible. I only know that there is something out there that touches me at levels that defy words, that takes me beyond this physical self and links me with feelings too profound to communicate, and I seem to feel closer to it up on a coastal hill than back in the city. The big dramatic, life altering events are as memorable as they are rare, but it’s the little, private, seemingly unimportant accomplishments that, piled one upon another, add up to a life one is glad to own. Should this book end up in print and become popular, my life would change, and many of my fondest dreams would probably come true. But, I would still be the same person I was the day before, save for the fact that I’d accomplished some personal triumph. I would have grown by one large brick. Yet, sitting here, unknown, unpublished, and unpaid, I can look back over the last few years, and I can’t count all the tiny bricks that have brought me slow and undramatic, but incredible growth. Some monthss ago a small brick was added. A year earlier I had started on a hike out of Garrapata State Park, between Carmel and Big Sur. I had partied late the night before, and running late in the morning, I’d left home with only a light snack. After two plus hours of motorcycling, I met up with the others and started up the hill. It was mid day and the coast was in the middle of Indian summer. Temperatures were in the high 80s. A few min28

utes hiking and scarcely out of Sobrantes Canyon, I was tired, and my feet felt like they were made of lead. The others, Sierra Club mountain mashers, marched on without losing a beat. Half way up the steep ridge section., they pulled ahead, and I found myself stopping often, sweat pouring down my face. Finally, the others urged me to quit, offering me some fruit to give me the energy to get back down. The fruit helped, and I descended, feeling vanquished. This was not a major mountain. The experience stuck in my craw, butting heads with my self image as someone totally comfortable doing vigorous outdoor activities. A year later, Indian summer again. a bit more rested and a bit better fed, I was driving by the same place. It was time. I parked, slipped my canteen on my belt and started up the canyon. Walking through the redwoods was cool and lovely, but at every clearing I could feel the heat pulling at me. I do not do well in heat and am at my best when it is foggy, damp and windy. I stopped just before entering the clearing at the base of that steep ridge. Taking a long pull on the canteen, I started up the ridge. Hot, tired and breathing hard, I passed the spot where I’d turned back the year before. Soon I was past the ridge and into a gentler saddle between two ridge lines. The view started to expand to reveal epic-making scenery. The coast range, while only about 5000 feet at best, is every bit as impressive as the Sierra, whose I0,000 foot peaks rise from 5000 foot valleys. These shorter mountains rise directly from sea level, right out of the Pacific, like the passionate fists of mighty Neptune. One more short ridge found me at the top, looking down at Point Lobos and Carmel, and even on to Moss Landing, blinking on and off in the shifting fog. No longer a bit tired, I roamed along the ridge line, checking the view from sev29

eral vantage points, exchanging expressions of joy with the few other hikers I came upon. Finally, walking up to the high spot on the ridge where I could scan the coast below and the coast range south to what looked like Mt. Carmel and Mt. Manual, I saw the fog claim first Carmel, then Point Lobos. It was time to start down, fulfilled once again by one of the little things that add up to make a life filled with joy and almost empty of regrets. On pausing for a moment to take in the distant peaks, I thought about all the times I tried to paint mountains rising up beyond the immediate. In my distorted logic, I ignored the visual evidence. I’d assumed that the foreground colors simply darkened with distance. So I’d tried different ways to darken the colors. I finally realized that these distant peaks really were “purple mountains majesty.” So, to hell with mixing colors. Purple is purple, and once I slapped it on the canvas liberally, my mountains became the mountains I was seeing from this windy ridge. To fully take in a hundred miles of purple peaks is to dance naked with the gods.

30

CH 3 MONTEREY BAY: GEM OF THE PACIFIC

A lover will naturally become incensed when someone attempts to violate his beloved. I’m no different basically. The major difference is that my beloved is much larger than average. She is 10 to l00 miles wide and a couple of thousand miles long. In some cases my passion for this seductive lover has been well spent, and at other times it has become the stuff of situation comedies. Recently, I came nobly to the defense of my love. I was on the Monterey coast and suddenly decided to walk around Point Lobos Reserve, billed as the most beautiful meeting of land and sea, probably a bit of an exaggeration but at least in the honorable mention range. I parked, crossed the highway and entered the park. The first trail off the road was to the left, just past the entrance station, so off I went. It was late summer and very dry. The Spanish Moss hung limply, and the grass was brown. I made short work of the gentle ups and downs until I was well away from the highway and into the rocky area that is just back from the beach. Suddenly I came upon Gibson Beach for the first time. I was stunned. It was as perfect as a fine seascape painting, but it had the dynamic tension, the energy of the passionately real, like a moment of repose before an explosion of experience. I could feel the high level of vibration, the raw, natural energy pulsing from the place. The tide was high, and the beach deserted. I walked down the steps in a state of awe. Sea lions were peering out from just off shore and sea birds stood watchfully on a mat of kelp. A plover paced nervous31

ly along the beach. Walking down the beach, I realized that there was a small sea arch in the rocks. I wished I could push my kayak out into this liquid dreamscape, this portal to a world behind the looking glass. With a sweet longing I climbed the steps to be an my way. Further along the path I saw bird island. white with guano, pulsing with avian life. Finally I came to the areas where the tide pools are accessible. People around every pool were squatting down to watch the great drama that unfolds four times a day in the intertidal zone. Primitive, delicate, little animals have learned to survive in conditions that would be impossible to most living things. The balance of nature here is incredible. One needs only to stand on a rock and look down into a filled depression in the rock to see life without the filters that render it distant and impersonal. One can look at each creature and instantly see the urgency and exultation of its life. One doesn’t disturb these tide pools out of respect for the passionate struggle for life there. One doesn’t disturb it because of the demands of basic compassion, and one doesn’t disturb it because it is protected by law. However. there are assholes in this world. A person who would meddle with this fragile tide pool life would throw ink on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carve their name into the Washington Monument., or steal food from orphans. As I walked carefully along the rocks. enjoying the dance of life and the appreciation of the onlookers, I saw a family pulling things off the rocks and putting them into containers, where they would surely die in a day or so. I tried to reason with them, explaining that it was against the law and that they could get fined. They said they didn’t care. I mentioned that if everyone did that, there would be nothing left but bare rocks. They said they didn’t care. I insulted them, and they said they didn’t care. The man and 32

his wife were setting an example for their children that was unthinkable, setting them up to carry on the role of junior assholes when they grew up. I flagged a passing car and asked them to send the first ranger they found. Pacing the road, afraid the asshole family would get away with their deed, time seemed to stand still. Finally a ranger arrived, and as I was telling him the story, the asshole family came up out of the tide pools headed for the car, obviously having figured out what was going on. I pointed them out. However, by then they had dumped the creatures out and had only wet containers. Mr. Asshole tipped his hand, though, by going on the defensive with me, accusing me of putting my nose where it didn’t belong, while all they were trying to do was to show their kids an interesting time. We yelled at each other until the ranger took charge of the situation. He thanked me and started to give the asshole family a dressing down. I turned away to applause from the other nature lovers in the park. My day had been made. It would have been just a bit better if I had thrown Mr. Asshole in the ocean right in front of his wife and kids. Next time, maybe. Then there was the comedy, the weird fish hatchery experience. It was I believe, my first hike through Henry Cowell Redwoods, at the other end of Monterey Bay, just above Santa Cruz. It was a day of getting my deep redwood forest fix. There hadn’t been surf worth suiting up for in Santa Cruz, so I decided to take a hike. I drove up highway 9 to Felton and pulled into Cowell state park. Adjoining the parking lot is the first section of trail, a flat wide path for non-hikers. This trail loops through some magnificent giants, trees solemn, massive and aloof, trees with layers of cross wrapped bark patterns. Close to a foot deep, these layers of bark are touched by every color imaginable. There are all the hues of red, dust red, rust red, sun33

set red, and beet red. The reds contrast with the various pale gray-greens of the lichen, moss and other damp-loving plants that burrow into the spaces made by these porous canyons of bark. There are more shades of blue and bluegreen in redwoods than in the ocean. When you add the oranges, yellows, browns and the charred blacks from ancient fires, one redwood tree could become the Iife’s work for a painter. In fact, I haven’t the guts to take on the Herculean task of trying to paint them. Had I unlimited time, I could have spent the day in this one grove, with its soft and silent, fern choked floor. But I wanted to explore the park. Past the end of the grove the trail ran between the river and a paved road. This was a narrow pass with the paved road doing sharply up toward the camp ground at the upper end of the park. Staying to the lower, hiking trail, I walked along the river to where the trail branched. One trail climbed a ridge above the river, and the other followed Eagle Creek, along silent redwood columns and tiny waterfalls, past fallen logs and ferns clinging to deep, stream-cut, damp-smelling banks. Before starting up one of those trails, I walked down to the river. It was starting to drizzle as if often does in the very early spring, when rains can change from light mist to downpour and back for days at a time. Near the top of the bank I found a round tank, protected by a couple of layers of chain link fencing. The sign said that it was a fish hatchery project and that it helped keep the stream populated with stealhead and the like. Wonderful, I thought. Then I walked down to the bank and looked maybe ten yards down stream. I saw in a swirling eddy a mass of froth, like suds in a washer. It was about the size of a laundry basket, so I stood there in the light drizzle to see if it would move, disappear, or change size. Nothing happened, and that bothered me. It looked like it could have 34

been some pollutant. With all the houses along the river in Felton and the adjoining communities, it could have been from someone washing the car, cleaning a driveway or any of a dozen other causes. My days as a park docent up in San Pedro Valley Park made me wary. I’d seen chemical discharges kill a generation of fingerling trout, a few moments of carelessness on the part of one human almost destroying a beautiful, viable creek. But the odd thing was that this foam was right at a point where the discharge from the hatchery tank probably came out. I decided to ask about it. But not yet. There was a deeply shaded trail that climbed to who knows where, the fecundity of the dark earth pushing up my nose like champagne bubbles, wild mushrooms popping through the layers of rotting vegetation, creating an almost mythic landscape on the forest floor. I walked along a musical stream called Eagle Creek, that splashed and bounced over every log, twig and rock on its way to the river, singing a joyful song at every turn and drop. Finally, at the top of the hill, a sign pointed toward some over-look place, so I turned south. Gradually I moved out of redwoods to small deciduous trees to a thick tree-like shrub forest, thick with glossy, reddish manzanita bushes. Coming out of the woods on the top of the hill, I found a platform, walked up the steps and over to the railing on the side that faced down the hill toward Santa Cruz. I was alone, and as I stood there, a great silence overtook me. I was motionless and face to face with the harmonious, natural world. No talking, no cars, not even the sound of my heavy breathing and footsteps. Silence, real silence, but only momentary. As my ears got used to the quiet, subtle sounds exploded. The wind played the trees like bass fiddles; the insect song rose and fell with an unexplainable rhythm. Then bird songs seemed to punctuate the regular 35

patterns like a lead guitar coming in over the bass line. The hawks made lazy figure eight’s in the air before me, over the tops of the trees that marched down the twisting canyon and below the hills that gradually dropped off on both sides until they left a gap large enough to reveal a patch of shining water that pulsed like a living gem on the horizon. I stood there transfixed, losing all track of time, staring off to the southwest, not thinking, just letting it all come to me and flow over me like the rising tide. Suddenly I saw the point of contact between matter and energy, the point that is always there but almost always invisible. Waves of energy came off each of the thousands of tress, as if the top branches had started to flap their wings. and gradually lift off, becoming less and less like branches, less and less like wings and more like the heat waves that throb ever upward just above a fire. I could literally feel as well as see the ambient vibration of the world, the frequency at which matter and energy become indistinguishable. At that point, nothing, not even myself seemed solid or definable in terms of physical laws. I could have and would have floated away to join the universe but for the intense joy of being both part of it and an observer at the same time. When I finally got back down the hill, I found an information center that had exhibits, sold cards and posters. I asked the docent about the fish hatchery, and she said. “Fish hatchery? What fish hatchery”? It was, it seemed to me, a glassy-eyed, hypnotized kind of look, and it spooked me. I explained that it was right off the main trail, not a half mile down river, but I could have been talking about some place on Mars from her expression. Confused. I walked through the non-hiker’s grove to the main visitor’s center, where a man in his late teens, wearing what looked like a ranger outfit was behind the desk. I asked him the same question and got the same answer and 36

look. This was weird. You could not walk past the flat, paved grove without passing right by the hatchery. I mean, this was my first time and I’d bumped right into it. I was getting concerned, like those guys who worked out all those conspiracy theories about JFK. So I got in my car and drove to the gate, where a serious-Iooking woman who was obviously a real ranger was taking the money and answering questions. If you think I got the same answer to the same question, you’re pretty much right, minus the glazed, spaced out look. At that point I figured that the entire park was involved in some massive cover up that centered around some chemical pollutant that originated at the fish hatchery. It took a couple of phone calls to put the matter to rest. I even got a complete report, with environmental impact information and an invitation to get a guided tour of the entire county-wide hatchery project. It seems that the foamy stuff was from who knows where, somone’s home or whatever and it had just lodged by the hatchery. A fluke. Still, the strange reaction of the people in the park haunted me for a long time. By the time I’d left the park, I was convinced that I could have run into a person leaning up against the tank, right next to the sign, and that person would have given me a glassy look and would have said, “Fish hatchery? What fish hatchery?” With Point Lobos and Carmel at the south end and Santa Cruz at the north, the Monterey Bay area is one of the most beautiful recreational areas I know of. In that fifty mile stretch there is great surfing, magnificent ocean kayaking, hundreds of miles of mountain biking, and world class scuba diving. There are also a vast number of places to eat, drink, and enjoy great entertainment. Unfortunately, the Monterey Peninsula is a long way from where I’ve been living, better than an hour and a half. In spite of the distance, 37

more than any other place over the last couple of years, this area is associated with pleasure and with a warm familiarity. I probably feel so good about the area because of the almost perfect summer day. Just after buying my first kayak, the inflatable, I designed my almost perfect summer day. Since the beach was so far from home, I wanted to always be prepared for whatever the day had to offer. I carried my surfing stuff and the kayak. My mountain bike was always swinging from the back bumper. A mask, snorkel and a pair of hiking boots were stashed permanently in one of the compartments. And, I usually toss in my camera and paints just in case. No matter what the conditions, I couln’t help having a wonderful day. I evolved my almost perfect summer day out of my passion to squeeze the last drop of nectar from each unfolding moment. I’d hit the beach in the morning and catch some waves if there were any. Then I’d put my kayak in near Lover’s Point or Fisherman’s Wharf and paddle out into lake-like calm Summer seas. The water was often so clear that I could look over the side and down through layers of different shades of green and blue to a bottom covered with multicolored kelp and dazzling starfish. Otters played around me in the kelp beds, and puppy-eyed seals watched my movements from every rock outcropping. Monarch butterflies darted among the profusion of flowers along the shore, and little ground squirrels would come out of their holes to beg a treat. That section of shore along Pacific Grove and Monterey bustles with unbelievable life and activity, while the meeting of rocky shore and sea creates the feeling of eternity, as if the scene unfolding there has emerged eons ago and has remained unchanged. Everything about the area is as heady as good wine and as rich as french pastry. 38

I would paddle out in this wonderland for an hour or so, playing among the kelp, rocks and sea creatures. After putting up the boat, I’d pull off the bike and take a nice ride along the scenic coast sometimes along the 17 mile drive to Carmel. During the ride, I’d find some restaurant with a view of the water and stop for some chowder and a chilled salad. One of my favorite stops is now called Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. on Cannery Row. I seem to remember it being called Steinbeck’s Grotto, and I only hope the crisp salad on a chilled plate and thick chowder are still the same. I know the view is still worth stopping for. I’d get a window table and look out at where I’d been a few minutes earlier, in the sparkling Pacific. From my window table I’d look straight down through the water at the waving forest of kelp, the colorful starfish and anemones, the playful seals, and the curious scuba divers. After the bike ride, I’d end the afternoon snorkeling among the tide pools, poking in and around the rocks, surprising the schools of shimmering fish, petting the multitude of rock-bound creatures, and playing hide and seek in the hula dance of the iridescent kelp. Then I’d dry off, change, and go to a local pub, like Doc Rickett’s Iab or the London Bridge, that had a band, have a few beers and listen to the music. Depending on conditions, sometimes I’d opt for a solitary hike in the hills, or I’d set up my canvas and attempt the painting of a seascape. Those almost perfect summer days had a bit of everything: exercise, fresh air, sunshine, a physical rush, the enjoyment of the beauty of nature, opportunities for deep reflection, communion with wild creatures, good food, the proximity of people really enjoying life, a mystical experience, and the feeling that I was as totally alive as any human being can be. During the summer I’d have perhaps three days like that each week. 39

It’s winter now, a time for big waves, good skiing, and majestic stormy days with clouds that hang like smoke in the mountain canyons, but nothing really quite serves the whole man like an almost perfect summer day. Since buying my new kaayak, a Prism, from Monterey Bay Kayaks near Fisherman’s Wharf, I’ve taken to joining their Friday night group paddles from their store to Lover’s Point and back. These summer evening trips depart when the shop closes and return at dusk. Often the return is accompanied by sunsets that are artistic masterpieces. On one of those evening kayak trips with other enthusiasts, the fog gently descended, causing the setting sun to fill the western sky with a soft orange-pink haze. The mast of the sailboats stood black against the glowing sky. The color of a harvest moon flowed out in all directions. Someone made a mental association and mentioned kayaking Elkhorn Slough by the full moon. The image got hold of me, worked into my mind like a virus and infected my daydreams. I was unable make the trip right away, but by the beginning of fall, the full moon coincided with the beginning of a weekend. I took off after work to find out what it was like to paddle the dark, silent waters without the aide of sunshine or man-made illumination. Pulling into the parking lot at Moss Landing, half way between Monterey and Santa Cruz, I found a few cars but no other people. It had been dark for at least an hour, and the moon was surrounded by a glowing ring of haze left over from the fog that was still clearing. As I’d left Monterey, I’d been concerned that the thick layer of fog might obscure the moon and ruin my trip, but at Moss Landing the sky burst through with the kind of clarity usually seen only after a rain. I pushed off, not really knowing if I’d be able to find my way in the dark. Still, I’d hiked wooded trails in the dark, 40

and in a boat at least I wouldn’t trip and fall down a hill into a mass of brambles or poison oak. Elkhorn Slough winds miles inland almost to Watsonville. Where it empties into the ocean the sea floor quickly drops off into an undersea canyon that dwarfs the Grand Canyon. Draw a line between Santa Cruz and Pacific Grove, and at about the mid point the canyon is well over a mile deep. Marine biologists use unmanned submarines to transmit pictures of one of the planet’s last frontiers. Paddling past Skipper’s sea food restaurant, it was invigorating to realize that some of the people eating would speculate on my trip and secretly wish they could also do it. Seeing that rapt, spectator look, just adds to the rush of the trip. Many of us entertain the fantasy of trying this or that, but too many keep these ideas securely in the world of fantasy. To me, if it is worth fantasizing about, it is worth giving it at least one try. With a level head and some basic situational savvy, most things carry only a minimal risk and a minimal discomfort. The only hard part is getting by the barrier between fantasy and standing there, equipment in hand and ready to go. Once you’ve gone that far, the deed is as good as done. The inner trip is made, and you only have to go through that experience and add it to the universe of experiences that is you. A sudden darkness under the bridge of Highway One, and I was officially out of the harbor and in the slough. Even though I still was in sight of all the lights of Moss Landing, the night had a mystical, errie quality to it. To make it even more errie and mystical, I filled my stone pipe and took a few hits. The silence became profound, as the dark, velvetlike water purred under me like a massive cat I was petting with every stroke. After a few minutes, I saw shapes coming toward me, backlighted against the rising moon. And 41

then sounds, ones that finally became voices. It was a group of kayakers returning from a sunset cruise. Comments exchanged, they disappeared into the unlit darkness behind me, while I headed into the shimmering moonlight. Then the magic began. Suddenly there was almost no artificial light, only the distant house lights of rural south Monterey County. The moon, low in the east, cast a broad avenue of ghostly white that led me ever onward. The low banks on either side were shifting, dark shapes, and nothing appeared solid, real and identifiable. The night plays tricks on the mind; it makes the real unreal. Practically all spooky and supernatural stories are set at night, a time when nothing remains itself, but constantly threatens to become something different, something conjured up from deep within the imagination, from the collective psyche. At that point, I wished that old C. J. Jung was along side me in another boat. And the water was digital. The light breeze raised a slight chop, maybe four to six inches high, and each of the crests of these regular little wavelets were brightly illuminated by the moon, while each of the throughs on my side were in shadow and somewhere between black and midnight blue. The human eye, being what it is, attends mainly to the light. Yet at that slow speed and with concentration. I was able to focus on both the brilliant light and the matching dark. It was like some vast CD, that if I could play it, would create the music of the night, the music that was first composed in the days of the primordial swamp when the only life on earth was the earth itself and its simmering soup of amino acids. Then off to the left, deep in the north bank that melts into a maze of side channels, I heard voices, strange voices that cut the night like electric saws. Then I saw the dim lights of boats, quietly plying the water, motors so cut back that 42

they didn’t make a sound, moving no faster than I. Moving invisibly in the darkness, I passed unseen and moved into the inner slough, finally alone and caught in an unimaginable world, dark, silent and private. Following the moon, I touched the water lightly, making not a splash, so entranced that I almost ran up on some sleeping marine mammal, a sea lion I think, surprised out of my reverie by its sudden splash as it ducked out of my way. Finally, in the middle of the slough where it makes a sudden northward turn, I stopped, pulling my paddle inboard. The world stopped. All sounds ended, and the silence was as vast as the star-filled night. I could have been alone deep in space or in a personal universe where I could play the role of god, planet, saint and sinner. The silence washed over me Iike an orgasm pulsing in geological time. Seconds became hours, became lifetimes, and then the cold of the damp night drove me to start back to the launching ramp. I followed the northern shore, resisting the temptation to slip into one of the many side channels that might only serve to get me stuck in the mud. Almost back to the bridge. I suddenly heard the voices of fisherman warning me off. I turned away from the shore, but too late. I was caught in two lines. I was being pulled back. Finally, almost to shore, I asked them to cut their lines, while hoping they wouldn’t start pelting me with rocks for ruining their fishing gear. After pulling me close enough to save the bulk of their line, they cut me loose, and I paddled free with deep scratches in my pride. After fighting the current under the highway bridge, I rounded the docks and pulled into the harbor. Skipper’s was closed and dark. Approaching the dock, I looked toward where my truck was parked. In the parking lot one suspicious looking person was shambling around, moving toward my truck. Intently watching this person and not 43

paying attention to where I was going, I ran into the side of the dock, realizing my mistake only seconds before making a loud “thunk” that rattled the night. Sheepishly, I backed up, rounded the end of the dock and landed. The person was only someone waiting for other boaters. We chatted as I loaded up, warmed by another kayaking fantasy realized.

44

CH 4 PACIFICA: A SHAMELESS LOVE AFFAIR

I had pretty much stopped surfing before I’d left Orange County for the Bay Area. I guess I’d gotten too involved with other things, and perhaps I’d just burned out on crowded beaches, crowded parking lots, crowded waves, and crowded highways. Maybe I’d gotten in a rut with the same friends, the same problems, and the same places to go. Looking back, my life was like that same endless city that stretched ever further and further, slowly giving up bits and pieces of its character for the dull uniformity that busy, desensitized. greedy people somehow manage to create. Whatever the reason, my spirit of adventure was locked in the safe deposit vault of routine. All that changed the moment I left Southern California for the Bay Area. Even the trip up north on the motorcycle, clothes and personal items for a couple of weeks strapped on the luggage rack was irregular. Armed with the excuse of looking for teaching jobs, I crossed back and forth from highway 1 to 101, and in the process, taking roads I’d never traveled, some I’d never even heard of. In fact, it was on this maiden voyage to my new home that I first crossed Hecker Pass, between Gilroy and Watsonville. From the east the road follows a stream flanked with a lush redwood forest. Coming out of the woods at the top of the pass, I passed Mount Madonna County Park, rounded a curve. and the awesome Pajaro Valley was suddenly spread out before me. Rich, verdant farms surrounded the little town of Watsonville and stretched out to the glistening blue Pacific. It was an image so strong that I can still close my 45

eyes and see every detail, experience every rush of emotion, even though that trip has since become routine for me. On that trip north, my task was to find a place to live and a teaching job or some likelihood of one. To that end, I explored the Bay Area in detail. After six weeks of exploration, I knew it better than many lifetime residents. I probably stopped at every school district in San Mateo, Marin, Sonoma, San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. I priced housing in any town worth living in, and I traveled the back roads in and out of every community in the area. I ate at the coffee shops, drank in the pubs, talked to the people an the streets and checked out the beaches and wildlife preserves. It was only after becoming intimate with the whole area, that I chose Pacificia as my home. It was, I can honestly say, love at first sight. It had the beaches, the little tucked away communities, the woods, hills for hiking, and weather that never got boring. After moving to Pacifica, I started hiking the coastal hills on almost a weekly basis. On that spine that runs from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, there are enough wooded trails to keep a hiker happy for years. Along those coastal, wooded trails, cool and damp from the perpetual shade, there are banana slugs, like huge yellow snails without a shell. They’re a sight unknown in the southland. Even though they turned up more often than door to door salesmen, I never tired of them. To me they symbolized the Pacific northwest, and I always stopped, squatted down and watched them intently. After all you can’t help show some respect for the mascot of U.C. Santa Cruz. I guess I’m lucky. Many people have to plan for months, spend a fortune, hire guides, and trek for days into Africa to catch sight of a lion or elephant in order to get that wildlife rush. Fifty cents worth of gas, a pair of hiking boots, a couple of free hours, and a freshly rolled joint, and I get the 46

same wildlife rush from a slug. These wildlife adventures are analogous to the thrill of gambling. Some folks have to drop thousands at the baccarat table, and others get the same thrill at the nickel slots. Life’s a gamble anyway. Just taking off for a short trip can be quite a risk. One weekend I decided to take a trip from Pacifica to Big Sur, with the goal of camping and surfing. At the time, my transportation was the motorcycle. So I packed a sleeping bag, tent and a body board with its related gear. I got as far as Santa Cruz where I stopped for snacks and drinks at a market along the highway. The bike wouldn’t start. Once upon a time they had kick starters on bikes, and then they took them off for reasons I cannot fathom. Now a dead battery is a real problem. After pushing the bike up and down the parking lot for a while, jumping on and popping the clutch, the bike finally started. The intelligent thing would have been to head straight back as quickly as possible, but quite often I’m not very intelligent at all. Feeling cheated that I’d come to far for nothing, and seeing that there was a couple of hours of light left, I decided to take the scenic route through part of the Santa Cruz mountains on the way back home. I found that I don’t know those mountains as well as I’d like to think. The road that was supposed to take me through Bonny Doon and back to highway 1, actually dead ended at some private camp. As soon as I idled down to make a U turn, it stalled. Now I was out in the middle of nowhere, in front of an apparently empty summer camp that had signs that warned about the horrible things that would happen to trespassers. And it would be dark in less than an hour. I finally pushed the bike up a slight rise, turned it around and rolled to a jump start. With it revved way up, I spun around and got on it through the curves until I came down 47

again to the highway. It was twilight and fifty miles to go and the headlight was down to a dull orange glow, like a dinner candle to lead my way. I think I set some kind of record getting to Half Moon Bay, never dropping below seventy until I saw the first signal. When I pulled into my driveway the bike naturally quit and didn’t start again until I replaced the burned out alternator. And during the entire trip, I never thought about being stuck somewhere. My concern was about leaving my bike unattended with all my valuable toys on it. The silliness of my materialistic, American mind! We aren’t brought down by illness, hunger or old age; we’re brought down by the weight of all our stuff. To save my very first surfboard, I threw myself between the board and the rocks, figuring that my cuts and abrasions would heal, but the board cost money. I could have killed myself driving over seventy with scarcely a headlight rather than leave my stuff on the highway. Someone might wonder why I’d bothered to haul surfing gear for miles when I lived on the beach. Surfers like safaris. You might have great waves right outside your door, but you’ve just gotta drive a hundred miles or so to a spot that you’ve heard of just to see if it’s really that good. Most of the time, it isn’t or you don’t happen to hit it at the right tide or the right swell, or the wind is wrong. Even though I’ve always liked to get on the road, I had good surf in my backyard the whole time I lived in Pacifica. At the foot of Paloma Avenue in Pacifica— which is an off ramp from highway I— there is a tiny pocket beach. The rest of that section has been filled with rock as a bolster against the encroaching ocean that is going to claim that entire beach no matter how clever we humans think we are. From Paloma north past the pier, the beach has been filled 48

to keep the road from washing away. To the south, homes back up to the beach, and many have lost their yards and have their back doors opening to empty space twenty feet above the waves. Between those two places there’s a beach about twenty feet wide that disappears at high tide. I would walk the two blocks to that spot, climb down the rocks and paddle out for some excellent surf. Sometimes the tide would come in, and I’d have no beach to paddle back to. Once while getting ready to go out. l sat on a rock while I pulled on my surf boots. The tide was rising, and a sneaker wave came in and knocked me off the rock. In less than a four by four space between rocks, the wave spun me around a couple of times and then sucked me out between the rocks. I got my head above water and my eyes open just in time to find myself being pulled into another breaking wave that sloshed me around the rocks again, barely giving me time to mouth “oh shit!” Finally getting to my feet, I was amazed that I wasn’t bounced over, slammed into and lacerated by the sharp rocks, and I was shaken by the thought that I could have been knocked cold by a rock and drowned. Besides loving a good safari, surfers tend to be lucky. My favorite surfing spot in Pacifica, in fact my favorite in the Bay Area was Rockaway Beach. The beach is less than a half mile wide, between two rocky points. A channel through the reef at the south end leads to a line up you can paddle around. You can slip into position without getting in the way of someone taking off on a wave. The place breaks from two or three foot waves, until it closes out, which can be double overhead at times. Rockaway also has a big rock outcropping just off the southern point, and the waves crash into that point before reaching the line up, so you can watch that indicator for a big one before it hits. 49

The narrow channel along the rocks has a riptide that runs whenever there are waves, so paddling out is a breeze. The rip dissipates just to one side of the take off spot, and it takes only a couple of minutes to get out and get lined up. It’s like taking an escalator rather than the stairs. The waves can break hard and fast, but they always shoulder off as they approach the channel. It makes for great surfing, which unfortunately makes for crowds on good days. Also the rocky headland makes a lovely backdrop to watch while waiting for waves. A walk out on that headland is a lesson on what the ocean can do and is doing to the west coast. Once upon a time the old coast road followed the shore line, and in doing so, went around that headland. The new road follows a straight, deep cut in the ridge line, a quarter mile in from the headland. One can walk along what is left of the old road. There’s maybe a couple of hundred feet of the road left, and much of that has hunks missing, places where a pie shaped slice drops down to the water’s edge. Try to walk around the point on that old road, and you are left to climb up the side of the hill when the flat road bed suddenly ends. Actually that whole section of coast shows the remains of that old road. In fact, the road isn’t that old, but I didn’t move to the area until the eighties, and it had been history for over twenty years at the time. Another spot that still has sections of the road is the stretch from Thornton State Beach in Daly city to the northern end of Pacifica. At one time, commuters routinely drove the narrow road, perched on an unstable sandy cliff, a road almost always shrouded in fog, save for a short time in winter and early spring when it rained like crazy. There isn’t much left of Thornton Beach or the road, most of it having collapsed. You can hike down, pick, up the road, and follow it a couple of miles south into Daly City. 50

It is grown over with weeds, and in places it’s no wider than a foot trail, but it maintains the sense of a roadway perhaps a hundred feet above the sand. At a steep canyon that drops from the highest point in Daly City, the road abruptly ends. The canyon yawns where once the road continued, and there is no choice but to slip and slide down the sandy slump to the beach. The rest of the walk north is on the beach. Now this is a beautiful beach, along Daly City. It’s better than four miles long and in the heart of an urban area, and almost nobody uses it, simply because it requires some effort to get there. At times even the surf is good. Millions of people crowd on sections of beach, kicking sand in each other’s faces, putting up with everyone else’s choice in music, feeling like they haven’t escaped the urban jungle, while miles of beautiful sand await the person who is willing to hike for fifteen or twenty minutes for some solitude. Even on the Pacifica end of that beach, the high cliffs keep all but a few from using the northern two miles. The bluffs, hundreds of feet high at Daly City, slope quickly down to thirty or forty feet high at Pacifica’s Manor District. Along Pacifica’s northern two miles. two or three people at a surf spot is a crowd. Along the sandy bluff, hang gliders and parasailers jump off the cliff, showing complete contempt for the stupid laws that supposedly restrict them to Fort Funston, five miles north in San Francisco. Here is the spot where I painted my first watercolor, which hangs on my wall and makes my heart ache with longing. There is a small park on the bluff, at the highest point in Daly City, at the top of that canyon that drops straight down to the beach. It’s in an area of town off Skyline Drive, that was immortalized by the song about, “little houses on the hillside, made of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same.” In the summer you can stand at the rail in that park 51

and look down toward the beach, and it’s like looking into the cold bowels of hell. The visibility is just about zero, and the fog blows strong and cold almost straight up into your face, and without a heavy jacket, you can only stand there for five minutes in the middle of August. It was during my stay in Pacifica that I became an active environmentalist. I learned a valuable lesson during my association with the volunteers in Pacifica’s San Pedro Valley Park. When, during the steelhead spawning season, Denise and I used to sit by the creek, cold and damp, up and out early on days off to guard some fish from poachers, I felt more important and more useful than I ever had at some desk, phone in hand, handling tons of company money and making a fat paycheck. I’d gotten to love those silly fish, even though I’d never even seen a steelhead before moving from the L.A. megaslopolis to Pacifica. During those days, I’d walk in the park as if it were mine, not as property, but as my home, my responsibility, my environment, my dance in the musical comedy of modern life. Working with others in several local organizations, we helped save lovely Melagra ridge, magnificent Mori point, San Pedro Creek, a viable stream, and hopefully McNee state park. A pocket beach is still relatively undisturbed in Pacifica. Wildlife still has a place to live and bring up young. Kids can still walk in a lovely wood rather than hang out on a busy corner, dodging drive by bullets. I will always love Pacifica, even though I lived there for only four years. It will always be home, rather than Southern California with my decades of personal history and monumental ennui. Even after several years I’m still totally awestruck when I enter Pacifica, particularly from the north, from Daly City, over the top of the hill on Highway One. Each time I do it, 52

it’s a different scene, a different town, a different world. It is a place where the light and fog play with each other to make a cauldron of endless change. These views of Pacifica make me think of art and music. Coming down the hill from the north, in late afternoon, is like coming upon one of those stylized paintings with colors so vivid as to seem unreal or perhaps super real. It’s a study in color and perspective, and it’s a study in angles. The colors give the illusion of that artificial depth that emerges from a well rendered painting. The immensity of the scene and of the shadows it creates convinces the eye that the amazing depth has been created by the deft use of lines and shading. The topography builds from soft, low, rolling hills to higher, more angular hills, to hills that seem to have sharp edges and hints of peaks, and finally to the jagged spines of formations that are more than hills, but not exactly mountains. Each is neatly superimposed on the other, as if nothing which is blocked from view actually exists. The lines between each successive geological shape are less like lines than subtle shifts in color. The greens, blue-greens and patches of brown in the foreground give way to various shades of deeper blues and blue-grays, finally ending in a deep violet that obscures all detail—a background barely discernible from the fading sky. Each shift in color seems to grow from the one below it. Along the seemingly broken line formed by the shore meeting the ocean, the line that seems to appear and disappear with the intrusion of each ridge line, there is that color that always appears slightly impossible when seen on a canvas. It’s that strange overlay of grays, greens—sometimes mixed with yellow and white—a spectrum of blues, and splashes of silver that give the impression of light coming from below the surface. It is an ocean of the imagination, shimmering and undulating hauntingly in the glow of an 53

unseen sun. A color is created at the juncture of land and sea that makes one think that the hills are not actually solid at all, that they are made of flowing lava that burns on first contact with water like some mixture of gold, jade and phosphorus. Each hill, with its suggestion of a valley, traces its own path downward from left to right, each rising occasionally, yet steadily and finally falling to the ocean. The glowing line of water moves sharply to the left, loses itself behind another line of hills and emerges again to make another, shallower bend to the left. The ocean as it moves to the foreground gradually asserts its preeminence over the gentler, less obtrusive land. One sees the dramatic points of land with their off-shore outcroppings of wave-battered, orphaned rocks, but one only senses the presence of the hidden coves. And the great San Pedro point, once considered the southern end of San Francisco Bay, deep in the right extreme of the background, slowly comes alive in the dying light with twinkling lights, like stars in some distant, invented sky. The evening haze makes the deep colors of the short end of the spectrum seem musical. The violins of the foreground blend into the mournful French horns and the plaintive woodwinds and finally into the basses and the timpani’s of the far, darkened ridges, disappearing into the gathering night. On the days when the evening fog begins its assault on the land, another transformation takes place. The dark and muted colors stand in sharp contrast to the shimmering gray/white of the octopus-like fog fingers that gently explore each valley in search of a passage to the high ground. It moves like a curious animal, sniffing and groping its way along the easiest path, gradually gathering courage and 54

strength in its desire to claim the entire landscape. The scene becomes surreal, hilltops seeming to float in a ghostly tide. When during those magic, late hours, the haze lifts along the horizon, an outcropping of rock, perhaps the top of an island, appears at a distance impossible to estimate, an occasional Brigadoon of the imagination. The lines of deep pacific swells move gradually into the field of this late and almost unnatural light, creating alternate pulses of light and dark —alpha wave resonance deep within the careful observer. It invokes joy and pathos and deep reflection. It can make one cry without knowing why. Those magnificent ridge lines were almost covered with condos and a convention center. The beautiful Vallemar district was almost severed by a massive freeway, and McNee State park was almost bisected by a new super highway replacement for Highway One. The San Francisco garter snake almost lost its last habitat to fill from a massive project. San Pedro Creek was almost rendered dead. Pacifica almost became another victim, like poor Daly City. Some dedicated people worked long and hard to keep those things from happening, and my association with those good people was one of the finest endeavors of my life. Sometimes I feel I must keep all these wonders in mind, that without loving attention they will fade away, will erode into the banal places where we try to accommodate the life of our heart’s desire to the life pressed upon us by society’s incessant demands. These places and activities that exist both as inner and outer experience are a sacred trust. We are responsible for maintaining them, not just by money or effort, but by the love they engender, by the archetypical symbols they evoke. It is an unpopular idea in a world filled with rights but bereft of the responsibilities that mirror them, like up with down, right with left. bad with good, and joy with sorrow. We are responsible, totally and completely 55

responsible for our places of drudgery and places of joy. An interesting example used in chaos theory says that a butterfly flapping its wings in some place like Katmandu, can ultimately generate a storm in California. You kick a pebble on the road, and a million years from now the landscape is totally different than it would have been if you had let it be. You throw a candy wrapper on the highway, and in 2174 a child starves. You ignore a beautiful sunset, and someday poetry ceases to exist. You hold back a tear of joy, and the mighty Mississippi dries up. I am personally responsible for everything that happens in the universe, every moment of happiness, every cry of pain. I am responsible for that, and so are you. Every breath that each and every one of us takes is the most important and most poignant act in all of eternity. With that in mind, how can any of us willingly live even a single moment in unawareness, absently going about life as if it were some mindless chore to struggle through? All the moments of my life that I’ve used and abused might have, if used properly, created a heaven on earth, if not literally, than perhaps just for me. My tenancy is to slip into regret, to feel sorry for all the moments wasted, but that only adds more of them, and this life isn’t going to last forever. There was a time some fifteen years ago when moments of awareness and joy were separated by weeks and months of zombie-like lassitude and sadness. I’ve moved light years since then, but I’ve got light years to go before I live life at the level I wish. Each touch of a paddle to water, each puff of breeze in my hair, each drop of spray off a breaking wave, each splash of color from a wildflower, each smile returned to me adds something incredible and eternal to my life. At times I catch a glimmer of insight. True freedom comes, I suspect, when you so love life and everything in it that you no longer have 56

even the most secret desire to be separate from it in any way.

CH 5 SUMMER DREAM TIME IN THE NORTH BAY

There are probably a hundred reasons why I’m not touched or impressed by rows of cotton or corn, even though those crops are a daily part of my life. Yet, riding through the gently rolling coastal hills, thickly, darkly green with artichokes makes me sentimental and poetic. I have actually scribbled poems on a fast food bag while driving through those fields. Perhaps I’ve formed a mental association between these coastal fields and the constant search for surf. Artichokes only grow along the coast from Monterey to Mendocino Counties. Actually, I can’t even relate the feelings that come over me as I pass through those fields. There is a mix of warmth, friendship, home, relaxation, and freedom. But that’s just a crude list for all the subtle interplays that are triggered in my inner universe. The same kind of thing kicks in the minute I get into wine country, but that doesn’t connect directly with beach activities, even though just about everything in my life has some symbolic connection to the beach, even, of all things, skiing, which I think of as surfing on frozen waves. The wine country is ripe with easy travel images, of lazy days spent in no hurry, with no concerns about chores and obligations waiting for me, with long bike rides in the Valley of the Moon, where spring colors are so rich that they make one dizzy and cause hallucinations, with trips up the almost mythical Highway 101 past all the wonderful 57

wineries and the fabulous brewery in Hopland, the home of Red Tail Ale. The wine country is walks in Jack London State Park with his ghost as a guide. It’s lunch at an outside table, by Sonoma Creek in Glen Elen, with a glass of cabernet and a delightful conversationalist. It’s the Fourth of July in Sonoma--small town America with just a touch of class. It’s catching the hint that blows in with the afternoon breeze, the knowledge that the true secret of immortality is to live every moment of life to the fullest, as if it were the one and only moment that has ever been or will ever be. It’s the windows down, the air thick as syrup and redolent of wildflowers and the stereo turned up with some rock band playing with wild abandon and animal vitality. It’s making love in the sunshine, deep in a field of green grass. It’s love cast in the basic elements, the protons, neutrons and electrons of our symbolic, multidimensional, holographic world. When I think of the wine country, it’s in terms of being self-indulgent. Wine country days are days that start with fresh clothes and a sumptuous breakfast at any of the many classy cafes in Sonoma. They are days of just enough activity, surrounded by bouts of good food, wine and conversation. They are also days that end with a hot shower followed by a relaxing evening and a night’s sleep as deep as a coma. The wine country is the one place I pamper myself shamelessly. Marin County is just a short drive from Sonoma, and I also tend to pamper myself in East Marin, the place where the affluent demonstrate that they really how to savor life. Along the US 101 corridor through Sausalito, Larkspur, Corte Madera, San Anselmo, Fairfax and the like, people balance the lovely, almost majestic outdoor world with the amenities and the luxuries that permeate the area. An East Marin bike ride often ends with a gourmet lunch and fine 58

wine. I offer the comfort and riches of east Marin to myself as a reward for times when I feel so damn good about myself that I think I deserve to spoil the hell out of myself. However, the Marin I’m really drawn to, the Marin that infects my spirit and sends my imagination into convulsions of rapture, is West Marin. A breathless wonder overtakes me at the unfolding of every West Marin vista. The place has the same mythic effect on me as Camalot or Atlantis has for others. However, the effects are subtle. Unlike Big Sur, west Marin doesn’t bowl you over at first glance. Rather, it gradually works its way into your brain like a fever, until your mind starts creating paintings of pure light on the subtle panorama that flows by and through you. One of these west Marin places is so etched in my mind that it plays like a big screen movie at the mere thought of it. This is Tomales Point at Point Reyes National Seashore. Just driving around Tomales Bay and out on the penninsula through Inverness makes you think you are entering a different country, a different continent perhaps. On my first trip to the point, I’d only intended to take a bike ride, off the road, along some trail. I drove to the roads end at McClures Beach and the trail head at the old ranch site. I thought I’d bike out to the end of Tomales Point, but the sign said that bikes weren’t allowed. Well, I wasn’t going to spend the damn day driving around, so I locked the bike on the truck and took off walking into one of the most incredible hikes imaginable, and I’ve also hiked Yosemite’s high country. The trail started out behind the historical old ranch. I stepped off, and within a minute the ranch had vanished in the blowing fog. If you like sunshine and good visability, take this hike in any season except Summer. Summer is fog season and the warm land sucks it in with awesome force. The result out on these unprotected coastal bluffs is fog that 59

blows onshore so hard that one has to lean into it at times. And it comes in giant waves, sometimes so thick that you can’t see thirty feet in any direction. But at times it will suddenly clear, giving a momentary panorama that has the effect of a photo, a stroboscopic scene flash frozen in your mind for life. While I still had on the shorts I’d worn constantly for the two weeks that I’d been wandering the coast, I slipped my nylon windbreaker over a heavy, long sleaved, tee shirt. I also wore a hat, pulled down hard to keep it from blowing away. Walking along, I caught occasional bright flashes of the scenery, exploding out of the fog, only to be engulfed again. Sometimes the views would be of the steep cliffs and pounding surf on the ocean side, and other times I’d be looking down the gentle, rolling hills to the deep blue calm of Tomales Bay. In a way this is more than a hike, it’s an excursion into the very nature of the human thinking process. Since we have a left and a right side to our brains, we tend to mentally cut things in two: right and wrong, black and white, poor and rich, civilized and wild, etc. Tomales Point acts as a symbol of that human tendency. The land narrows down until finally coming to a point, a point which juts north right at the margin of two huge tectonic plates. Tomales point and the huge crustal plate it rides on plows its way north at two inches a year, leading a strip of land that includes Los Angeles and Baja California. Along the entire walk, one is confronted with opposites. On the bay side, those gentle hills slope down to calm inlets and absolutely still beaches. On the ocean side the land crumbles away, creating rugged cliffs that hang out in space before plunging to pocket beaches constantly ravaged by a restless surf. The inland side is done in brown and tan, while the ocean side has 60

rocks coated with bright crimson and orange and lime green. Then there’s the constant flow of the fog which blows like slow and massive waves or glacial ghosts over the point. Walking along, you look off toward where the water might be and you see swirling fog. But in that fog you can find faint lines like the light pencil traces that can be found below the color in watercolor paintings. Then, just as you think the hint of some natural shape is playing hide and seek with you, the fog lifts for a moment, and a beautiful piece of coast, complete with beaches, waves, rocks, sea birds and off shore islands stands brilliantly illuminated in the sun. Then you blink or look away, and it’s gone, only to be replaced a moment later by another scene on the bay side. The result is a world of unreal images, a dreamscape that resembles the labyrinth of the subsconscious. And the animals! You see, there is very little natural cover. There are a few rocks and a small stand of trees at the one low spot half way out. Other than that, it is mostly waist high grasses and sage, all waving wildly in the wind. The constant motion of the grass and the dense fog serve as hiding places for the animals. In a forest, as you approach, the animals start to back away, taking refuge behind trees or boulders. You can’t sneak up on them, and when you see them, it is a fleeting look at a nervous thing. However, out on the point the weather is cover, so the creatures are going about their daily lives just a few yards from you, safe in the knowledge that everything is blended into the mass of swirling gray. When those moments come and the fog clears briefly, everything becomes crystal clear. Then you catch them all in the act, naked and engaged in whatever they’d be doing if no one was around. It’s like taking a strobe light into the wilds. The scenery is seductive, pulling you further and further in. 61

There is one deep canyon leading way down to a deserted beach on the ocean side, a great erroded canyon that spirals down in deep greens, blues and oranges into steep and dark walls, cliffs that drop to the beach. It’s like a fractal. No, a fractal is a poor math generated approximation of the wonders of a canyon. The complexity, instead of decreasing or staying the same as you get closer, increases. The total is a deep, intricate, wonderous maze. But moving into it, the depth and complexity grows and grows, each piece a whole unto itself, like looking at the milky way through more and more powerful telescopes. The most seductive part is that the canyon seems much too steep to climb down into, but you can walk a few yards to the edge for a better view. Those few yards reveal a trail, not too steep, to follow down to the next edge. The next edge you walk to reveals another section of the trail, winding down to yet another apparent dead end. That pattern repeats until you find yourself deep in the canyon, the walls towering above and the beach only a few yards below. The indentations you saw from above are now deep caves in the canyon wall above you, the only shelter big enough for the local mountain lions and coyotes. The ground is wet from the tiny streamlet that trickles down from the canyon’s head. All along the trail out to Tomales Point, there are those opposites, the tamed, calm, gentle, civilized, predictable bay side, and the wild, unknown, steep, mysterious ocean side, just like the two opposing forces that pull the human being. And all along the way each side beckons in turn, each with its own charm. You wonder which side will prevail. Will the trail’s end bring you to the bay or the ocean? It’s like asking which side of the human condition will prevail. Finally you reach the end, the big, sandy nose that points 62

longingly toward Alaska and its future reunion. Standing up on that sandy bluff brings it all together. You can see both sides from there, the calm bay and the angry ocean. You can look north to Bodega Head, emerging faintly from the gray. It’s then you feel like you’re on a massive ship, an irresistable force of nature, the tip of thousands of miles of earth moving relentlessly and deliberately north at an amazing two inches a year, cutting through the waves like the prow of a ship of dreams. But the end of the point, the last piece of land, was still down a sandy hill. And the bay and ocean drew closer and closer. Looking from right to left was like playing ping pong with the eternal principles of yin and yang. By then, I was obsessed. I had to know what was there. Was there a place that was neither bay or ocean or perhaps both? Would I end up on one of those gentle bay beaches or climbing down a cliff to a stormy, ocean cov? The trail dropped steadly. Finally the point was only a few yards wide, and the trail, deeply cut, dropped suddenly. A few yards walk, left me on a rise, maybe fifteen feet above the water. Here the trail split, dropping almost straight down to the bay and also to the ocean, the two opposities unresolved to the bitter end. And straight ahead, separating the two sides was a slab of rock right at water level, a dark slab maybe twenty by thirty feet. Great waves from the west crashed against it. sometimes almost washing over it. Hundreds of birds, gulls and cormorants, huddled and fussed and dodged the ocean spray. The point of contact between two unimaginably huge tectonic plates, the point where rocks are subducted and ground to molten pulp, one of the most wind blown and storm tossed places on the coast, and to these feathered creatures it was home, just as my warm house with its roaring fire is home to me. In the great cosmic painting that is our earth, this point is 63

a watercolor. Woods and mountains look as if they had been done by a god who works in oil. But Point Reyes was painted by a god whose medium is watercolors, misty washes and flowing colors, Turneresque and elusive, phantasmgoric and fluid. Along the trail back I happened to look down and saw what looked like the sky reflected in tiny mirror finish sunglasses. There were dozens of little beetles trudging down the trail. Each of the little guys was a highly polished blueblack mirror, and the fog swirled on their sturdy little backs. As I continued up the trail, something caught my eye from off to one side. Within the sea of swirling grasses, there was a patch of grass too dark and too billowy to be normal grass. I looked, but I couldn’t make it out. I took a couple more steps, turned. and looked again. There it was, looking more like fauna than flora. I stepped off the trail, and suddenly this patch moved against the wind. A few more steps and it emerged from the fog as a skunk’s tail. Inching closer, I saw the animal lift his head, acknowledging my presence. It’s tail moved furiously, a warning that a nasty spray awaited the animal foolish enough to venture closer. Barely fifteen feet from this beautiful, big animal, I realized that the wind was blowing perhaps thirty miles an hour, and I was upwind of the skunk. Grabbing the rare opportunity, I moved to about ten feet from him. His movements bordered on panic as he realized that I should have been repelled by now. It was not the fear of being sprayed, but the fear of upsetting this gentle creature that caused me to turn away and find the trail again. This was his home, and I was only a visitor. Back at the car, I looked up the hill to see a large herd of tule elk. I watched them for awhile as I relaxed and got out of my muddy hiking boots. A flock of birds made a pattern like notes of a symphony as they passed behind the black 64

phone lines strung over the road. Marshall, across Tomales Bay, emerged momentarily from the fog, and a young couple came off the trail smiling broadly. An unimaginably light and spiritual feeling carried me, through the rush hour traffic, over the Golden Gate Bridge and all the way to the dinner waiting for me at the home of good friends in the Richmond District of San Francisco. Going south on Highway One through Marin County, one must pass Tomales Bay for perhaps a dozen miles, past the little fishing town of Marshall and on to Point Reyes Station, where a decision must be made. One can turn right to Point Reyes with its wonderful hiking and biking but probably no ridable surf, or one can continue to the towns of Bolinas and Stinson Beach where surfers abound. Occasionally the draw of Tomales Bay is too strong and the trip is aborted. These are days when the bay is calm and deep blue, and the far side sits silent, inviting and foreign. One can look across the water and feel that this slice of blue is a time machine, and the only way to know when, not where, the opposite shore is located is to make the trip. Just before Highway One curves down the hill to skirt Tomales Bay, the highway follows Keys Creek, a tidal creek, shallow, placid and teeming with aquatic birds. On a straight line out into Tomales Bay from Keys Creek, and almost to the Point Reyes shore, is fascinating, wooded Hog Island. I’ve never passed it without thinking that I’d like to visit it. Last summer I had my chance. There was no surf at Salmon Creek, near Bodega Bay, and I was working my way south. Along Keys Creek, I found a parking lot which I guessed was mostly for fishermen. I stopped and walked down the short trail to the creek. It looked at least deep enough for a kayak, so I unloaded my boat and hauled it down to the water. I paddled down the creek toward Tomales Bay, leaving 65

nervous herons and egrets in my wake. The creek spread out as it merged with the bay. At the creek’s mouth was a mass of birds, pelicans, gulls and more. They seemed to be just standing on the water. As I approach, I realized that they were standing in the water, which was only inches deep. I was almost aground. I turned hard left and had to pole myself through the mud with my paddle for a few yards before I gained the freedom of the open bay. Then straight ahead of me was Hog Island, so I made for it, catching a hard wind in mid channel that broke wavelets over the side of my kayak and on to my chilled, bare legs. The going was pretty sloppy out in the middle, and the passing fishing and speed boat wakes didn’t help. The island drew closer only very slowly. Finally in the wind shade of the island, I saw a short sandy beach. Where the beach met the little bluff, there was the remains of an old stone building. I paddled to a scrunchy stop in the coarse sand. Pulling my boat up from the encroaching tide, I set out to explore. The old building was roofless and might have been a cabin at one time. Behind it, a trail led up the bluff to the main part of the island, a flat, wooded area somewhat less than an acre. Walking among the thick trees, I was assaulted by the irate protests of a thousand birds, decrying the violation of their otherwise peaceful home. I was the only mammal on the place. A quick stroll satisfied my curiosity, and I headed back to the beach. From the beach I could see the bay’s entrance, between Tomales Point and Dillon Beach, with the eternally marching wind chop and the promise of an early fog. I stood there and thought of Sechelt Inlet in British Columbia, wind whipping up the channel, deserted beaches and the feeling of being alone while only a mile or so from signs of civilization. 66

I paddled the rest of the way to the peninsula, into White Gulch, past a boat, either deserted or filled with late sleepers, to a pocket beach, probably almost inaccessible from the Tamales Point Trail, because of the steep cliff and the dense overgrowth. I quickly explored the solitary beach before starting back across the bay. To avoid the mud flat by the slightly submerged bird island, I swung north and came in past what looked like crustacean traps. I should have swung further and come in right along the steep bank where I’m now sure the only deep channel was. Instead I grounded, forcing me to walk in some seriously deep mud for several yards. A painful lesson kayakers learn quickly if they navigate estuaries is to be very careful not to ground in the mud. These tidal mudflats are the consistency of tar mixed with Elmer’s glue and are often eighteen inches deep. The mud grabs and holds on hard, making each step a slow motion comedy. Mud gets all over the kayaker, the kayak, clothing, everything. I’ve destroyed two pair of sport sandals pulling them out of this super mud. One is now a fossil in Bolinas Lagoon. The bay narrowed entering Keys Creek. The egrets and herons again flapped with fright, and that peculiar tidal creek calm overtook me again as I moved silently up toward my truck. Like songs, one Marin adventure brings a dozen more to mind. I remember another early summer day in west Marin during my first season in the bay area, air so clear that given enough mirrors, one could see around the world. I had stopped in Santa Rosa and then Sebastopol to put in my application at the various school districts. It being too late to go to another district, I stopped at a friend’s place back in the hills. After a short visit, it was time to head back to where I was staying in San Francisco. Feeling loose, joy67

ful, full of summer, and unemployed, I decided to take Highway One back. The big 1100cc motorcycle came alive an the narrow, gently curving road, taking each curve like a polished belly dancer, shifting and bobbing with the rhythm of the road, slowing only to go through the little towns: Marshall, Tomalas, and stopping once at the deli in Point Rayes Station for a snack and a beer before pressing on toward Stinson beach. The road and cars rushed to meet me and disappeared behind me like images in some absurd virtual reality game, gone in a second as if they were never there, the stands of trees, browning hills, occasional half-hidden creeks, and the heady smell of the ocean the only constants. Humanity’s cares and accomplishments seemed insignificant as the wonder of west Marin unfolded in front of me, like complex music that arises spontaneously from the subconscious. I can’t remember if this was the first time I made a stop at Bolinas? I can’t be sure. Bolinas has the effect of disregarding chronology, as if it had always been a part of my life. Bolinas is a special place, a lost world hidden from the cancer that has claimed the majority of the towns in California. At the time, and it may still be true, every time Caltrans put up a sign on Highway One indicating the Bolinas turn-off, someone from the town would come out, probably deep in the night to cut it down. How could one not like a town like that. Pulling into town—mostly two streets at right angles— the first realization is that this isn’t a passing through place, but a destination. All roads end at the beach. Dogs and kids play in the streets, and nothing moves much faster than 20 MPH. People with Iong hair, boots or sandals, faded jeans and all the time in the world stroll in and out of the little cafes and pubs. 68

There are no chain stores of any kind in Bolinas, and I hope that there never will be, that any attempt to put up one of those plastic eating or shopping places will be answered with gasoline and matches, dynamite and matches, hurricanes, tidal waves. earthquakes, cataclysms, and catastrophes. I would rather see the town torn down board by board and brick by brick than to see a K-mart, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Walmart, Blockbuster Video or any of those other obscenities that turn lovely towns into Barbie Doll stage sets. If I could have my way, all those corner mini-malls that are the same from Cape Cod to Point Loma would be erased from the face of this country for all time. All of the days I’ve surfed Bolinas, walked Bolinas, stood in awe at the massive, stepping stone rocks at Duxbury Point, or kayaked Bolinas Lagoon have been golden experiences, medicine that I could call upon to get me through dreary days of mindless chores and ennui, get me through not only alive but still sane. One full day in Bolinas and you want to go to work, unzip your fly, and piss, in careful script, “I quit” across the papers strewn on your desk. Getting to Duxbury reef takes some driving back up the bluff from the main part of Bolinas. You just have to go up the hill to the north and drive around town until the road ends. Then you hike up the short hill to the cliff and look down and out to sea. At low tide the great slabs of dark rock seem to just keep going, slowly dropping beneath the surface. This is a great meeting of land and sea, a place where the magic of the ever-changing earth creates a show profound in its antiquity. At some time in the dim past, this point must have extended miles out to sea. Looking at what remains of the ancient point, reminds one of the power of the great Pacific. Bolinas isn’t the only place where wonders like this 69

greet you. Reefs and surprise beaches abound when you get north of the manicured areas that most people go to with picnic lunches, coolers, kids and no expectations save killing a warm day. Look beyond the parking lots, the public restrooms, the clearly marked trails, the snack bars and the comfort of others of your kind and discover the coast as it was meant to be seen, down a four hundred foot cliff along the lost coast, along a creek and down a deep canyon, at an obscure, small reef just a couple of miles north of Bolinas, or at a makeshift lean-to miles up a lonely Big Sur beach. Those who go to church for a taste of the divine have missed the finest cathedrals. That god you seek, the one who can give you joy and hope and a promise of forever isn’t crammed into one of those houses of phobia and guilt. He, she. or it, is out there at the deserted beaches, the trickling streams, the snowy mountain tops, rejoicing and celebrating the simple marvel of existence. Looking back now, there is a strange continuity of events and sensations in my life, a great movement of self-discovery, a movement north as well as inward. From my first wide-eyed experience of Big Sur to the prolonged sunset at La Push, I’ve been on a journey of exploration into the mythic structure of the psyche, the psyche that molded the world and is modeled after it. A painting on the wall of the gift shop in La Push shows a rather dramatic scene of a dugout full of Indians rowing madly for shore through ten to fifteen foot storm surf. The conditions look catastrophic, and the expressions on the faces look determined. To use a word from the works of Carlos Castanada, these Indians had focused their intent on the goal of reaching shore. The intensity in the faces and the intensity of the surroundings made me certain that, had I been born an Indian a century ago, I would have wanted to have been born there, although I have no idea what life 70

was really like back then. I doubt that life was as compartmentalized as it is now. For instance, there is the intensity I feel when I’m out there living the experiences I love, and there is the intensity I feel now, sitting behind an old computer, in a little box of a house writing about it. In a perfect world, there would be no division between the experience and the sharing of it. In a perfect world. there would be no need to share it. Everyone would share all intense experiences as they happen. A long chain of events has fallen into place from the moment of the experience to the sharing of it with you. Perhaps another chain will ensue between the reading until you actually end up at one of the same places, doing one of the same things, and feeling one of the same feelings I’ve shared here. Through this complex chain, one that only appears to be taking place in time, we are connected, and through this connection we have experienced what it’s like to be part of the divine order. The writing and the reading are meaningless by themselves. Together they create a world of meaning.

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CH. 6 INLAND: ENDLESS HILLs, DISTANT MOUNTAINS

While I lived in Pacifica, I explored the chain of state and county parks that stretched along the coastal hills from Sonoma County to Santa Cruz. Within minutes, I could be in any of a dozen parks along the great spine of the peninsula that rises up just south of San Francisco and drops again to the Pajaro River valley near Watsonville. Through San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, these parks can be reached from Skyline Drive, also known as Highway 35. This is a mountain road, a redwood forest road, a fantastic motorcycling road (if you don’t get a ticket), and the jumping off place to parks that are as delightful as any you can name. The center of the area, around Woodside, is only a few minutes drive from most of the bay area. You can get up early drive the highway to Skylonda, have breakfast at Alice’s Restaurant. and pick a park to hike in. Most of these parks are dark, damp and thick with redwoods. Montebello Open Space, however, is open, warm, filled with brilliant light and deciduous for the most part. Montebello Open Space is a far cry from the fog of Daly City. It sits on the ridge at Skyline Drive and Page Mill Road in Santa Clara County, just a cannon shot from Palo Alto and Stanford University. If you park at the Page Mill lot, you walk onto a trail that divides almost as soon as you start out. To the left is the warm, round and rolling hills, 72

places with views, places for picnics, the main trail and path to Saratoga Gap, eight miles south. To the right you drop quickly to the headwaters of Stevens Creek, which eventually winds up in Silicon Valley by the boulevard named after it. It is damp and cool as you follow the gentle birthing of the creek, mud on your shoes, moss cushioning your hand as you make your way through the trees. It was down in that valley, somewhere along that creek where I first stepped off the trail to find out that ladybug beetles swarmed by the millions in certain seasons. It was in that canyon where a friend and I sprawled out under a mighty oak and discussed the vagaries of life and love and watched the remarkable pattern made by the overhanging limbs of an ancient oak as it interacted with the soft billows of white that floated past its branches. It’s only a hike, after all, and the Parthenon is only an old building, after all. Some people measure milestones in their lives by the songs that were popular. Some do it by the TV shows they watched, and some do it by the rung they’d reached on the career ladder. I measure mine by the hills I’ve hiked, the places I’ve surfed, the sights I’ve seen, and the moments of contemplation and unrestrained joy I’ve experienced. It makes it difficult to place events in chronological order in the average conversation. But then, I’m inept at the average conversation. To many the natural world out there isn’t personal. It’s all just places, some fun places, some boring places. It’s hard to really explain, logically, why it’s so different to me. Perhaps it stems from a way of looking at the world. In the classical physics world view, we learn that what goes up must come down, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, that a body in motion tends to stay in motion and one at rest tends to stay at rest. Einstein came along and showed us that all this motion and action is rela73

tive to the observers position and motion. Then quantum mechanics deduced that we can only play with all these little vectors to determine the probability that one thing or the other will happen before, after or at the same time as something else. The holographic model postulates a non local universe where things can affect other things simultaneously regardless of distance, that the universe is just waves of energy causing interference patterns, and that the whole damn thing can be reproduced from any small part of it. Some mystical traditions claim that all lives are happening at once and that we are living in an infinite number of parallel universes. At the end of these chains of thought, one can only say for certain that something’s happening, an event in the here and now. Since I’m experiencing this something, it is happening for me. So there you have it. I just happen to have this beautiful, custom made, personal universe. All that energy doing all that shifting, interfacing, bobbing and weaving, is being filtered through this perception that is me, and it comes out a universe with sunlight, cool breezes, perfect surf, singing birds, furry little animals, rich fragrances, brilliant sunsets, delicious food, fine wine, smiling faces, dramatic music. and a billion little details that all blend together to create the effect of something very close to perfection. And it’s mine. Out of the infinite probabilities inherent in infinite universes, this glorious panorama emerges just for me to experience and enjoy at exactly this moment. And that, I suppose, is the reason why it seems so personal to me. In this personal and altogether magical universe, wonders can happen at any time. I’ve just returned from Point Reyes Station in West Marin County where an art gallery that handles some lovely work, accepted three of my sculptures. Without adding any qualifying clauses, I can respond to “what do you do,” with, “I’m an artist.” To me, that’s more 74

important than being famous or rich or good looking. In this personal and altogether magical universe, I’m defining myself in terms of who and what I want to be and what I want to present to the world around me. As the late Alan Watts might have put it, I’m doing my particular dance within the great dance of life. The idea of dancing brings up some fun free associating. It brings back a memory that goes back maybe thirteen years. An old girlfriend and I were camping in Yosemite, in the Wawona area. We took a day hike up a trail by a creek that leads to a minor waterfall. Part way up the trail, we decided to abandon the path and bushwhack along the stream, under the trees, on the soft carpet of generations of fallen leaves of every color imaginable. For a hot, dusty hour or two we worked up along the stream until we reached the bottom of the waterfall. No longer able to bushwhack, and not really into finding the trail and continuing upward. we turned back, angling away from the stream with the intention of eventually reconnecting with the trail. Once back on the trail, we’d worked up a lather. Off to one side we spotted a tiny waterfall, scarcely wider than a shower and maybe fifteen feet high. Without a moment’s deliberation, we pulled off our clothes and frolicked in the little, snow-melt cascade, catching our breath at the first contact. We were clean and cool, but we had no towels, so we danced in the sunshine like elves at Christmas until we were dry enough to get dressed. Weird, these things I recount as if they were just experiences. Looking over them, I see that they’re all symbols. I’ll risk ridicule and venture that just about anything beyond basic survival is symbolic for humans. Jobs are more than work for money. They are symbols of status in a highly complex web of interacting, interpersonal roles. Graduating from high school or college is a milestone, a 75

symbol of transition from child to adult, from dependent to independent. A hike becomes a symbol of perseverance, of attainment, or even of manly vigor. My best guess is that all outward experience is a reflection of an inner, shapeless experience, a quest for some abstract meaning on a level that is purely energy. The music is in the head, the heart, and the essential spirit. The dance is performed in the physical world, just as a work of art is conceived in the imagination and realized in some physical medium. I’ll push the concept even further and say that no act in the physical world has even a modicum of meaning aside from the inner, symbolic meaning. That said, I confess that this chronicle is not a record of travels along the west coast of North America. It’s merely a record of the inner quest of one being to find, explore and define himself. In that context, La Push isn’t a place in Washington at all. It’s a state of mind, a feeling tone, an inner blend of energies that create a series of shapes, colors and impressions. It’s also a symbol of the part of my nature that is defined by a quest. These various symbols define me, generate me from the generalized background known as humanity, touch me and create the “I” that makes life personal. Once I was even touched, defined and moved by fields of parsley. It’s easy; all you need to do is make the right associations in the labyrinth of your consciousness. Actually, it was on a motorcycle camp out weekend. A dear old friend from Southern California had done several of these and had been after me to go on one. These trips were organized by the folks who own the motorcycle campground. I did attend a couple with her, the ones that were held over the Labor Day weekend. I would leave home on a Friday after work, sleeping bag, tent, and change of clothes bungied on the rack of my 76

Kawasaki 1100. I even brought a body board along for a surf stop on the return trip. Anyway, I’d get to her house in the evening and we’d have dinner and then talk and drink wine until late. Still, the next morning would find us up early and ready to go, the other member of the party meeting us around nine. We’d check our loads, have breakfast, gas up and head north on the San Diego Freeway. We’d branch off at the Santa Monica Freeway and take Pacific Coast Highway to Topanga Canyon, then up Topanga to Mulholland. Single file we would bob and twist out Mulholland until we reached the Rock Store, a small eatery and beer pub in the Agoura Hills that caters to bikers. And there we’d stop, hang out with the other bikers, swap stories and power down a couple or three cold ones. Next, we’d take a short hop down the hill to the 101 and north again for a quick freeway run to highway 23 in Thousand Oaks. The 23 freeway ends after just a few miles, and that’s where the fun really begins. It’s up and over some rugged, steep, dry and inhospitable hills that suddenly drop away almost roller coaster fashion to the Simi Valley. It’s hard to watch the curves in the road coming swiftly up to meet you when all you want is to memorize the expanse that seems to be right below your left foot peg. Then it’s a dash across the valley to the 126 at Fillmore and west to the 150 at Santa Paula. Once on the 150, the L.A. megaslopolis is forgotten as rolling, green, rural hills give way to sudden mountains at the head of a truly dramatic pass. Interestingly enough, these hills behave like the ones on the south side of the Simi Valley. They rise slowly, lazily, through rolling hills dotted with farms and ranches, and at the head of the pass the topography changes suddenly. Go around one curve, and rolling hills become steep, mountains. On this second range of hills you look a few hundred 77

feet down the dry slopes to the incredible lushness of the Ojai Valley, the land of reclusive artists and of the late J. Krishnamurti. Even a big cruiser is low on gas by now, so we stop at Ojai, stretch, and gas up. Just past Ojai on the 33 is Meiners Oak and a great little beer bar right on the highway. It’s called The Wheeler Inn because it’s right across the highway from Wheeler Hot Springs. This is another mandatory motorcycle stop. The 33 quickly moves into true mountain country, a biker’s fun zone. Often there is very little auto traffic, and by then our group has loosened up. Pouring on the throttle. we dog the tight turns, nose to tail, hunched low in the turns, taking short, hungry glances at the stark mountains galloping by. At the top of the hill on 33 is a funky little pub, appropriately named the Half Way House, so far from anything like a town that it has no phone or electricity. The beer cooler is run by the generator out back of the outhouse. This is another unavoidable beer stop. When this winding, mountain road finally straightens out, it’s along a wide wash that’s totally dry that late in the summer. At the end of that long wash, about five miles before 33 ends at Highway 166, a few signs of civilization appear again around an area called Ventucopa. Naturally there’s a small diner and bar on the left, Gail’s place. After killing an hour or so and checking the waning afternoon, we make the final sprint to Songdog Ranch in an area known as Cuyama. A dirt road leads back into the ranch and then turns abruptly up a steep hill to a bluff that points west like the prow of some great ship working it’s way slowly to the ocean some 60 or 70 miles away. There is a window of time to pitch camp and watch the sun moving down the long valley, ending up dropping finally over the hills just east of 78

Santa Maria and into the Pacific. Dark shadows reach up the valley for twenty miles or more, creating the image of a tunnel so long and deep that it seems to lead to the other end of the world. And we, tired and happy, sitting on a bluff at the head of the valley, with a view unrestricted for as far as the eye can see, sipping a beer and waiting for the dinner gong, are transported to a place where no words need be spoken about the view, the day, or the strange camaraderie shared by motorcyclists. The fading light shimmered over a pale green that extended miles down the valley. Asking someone what was grown in this seemingly high desert, I was told it was parsley. I’ve always like parsley; I like it even more now that it brings back the image of a 70 mile sunset. This bike weekend with all the beer stops and the endless bike talk with other two-wheeled travelers was the essence of motorcycling for my friend. However, at the end of the trip, I had something to show her. She wasn’t in a hurry to get home, so I suggested the Big Sur coast and then inland to my place. The only problem was her bike. It stalled out at The Half Way House at the top of the hill, the one with no phone. After a time of shaking, wiggling and kicking, we’d determined that it wasn’t going anywhere. The owner of the place said we could store it for a few days, and he even offered my friend his small bike for the duration of the trip. She had no qualms about taking the little bike all the way up the coast and bringing it back to the guy several days later. She lives her life as if she expects solutions to problems to simply materialize. and they usually do. Now, the little bike was kind of clunky, but that didn’t really bother her that much as we worked our way down the long winding valley toward the coast. After a little apprehension trying to keep up with traffic on 101, she actually got into it all the way to 79

Pismo Beach. We stopped for gas, food and a couple of beers. Then she announced that the coastal weather was just too damn cold for her. I was disappointed. I’d tolerated the uncomfortable inland, August heat for two days, and I’d hoped she could take a cool ocean breeze for a few hours. No use even discussing it. She’s a woman who, once her mind is made up, clamps it shut. So once again I took my time rambling up that magnificent road, sharing it only with the little. anonymous audience in my head. I made only one more trip to Songdog after that. This time neither of us had the time for long coastal wanderings, so on Sunday morning after breakfast we bid our good-byes until we’d see each other again a year later in Costa Rica. She went back up the hill toward Ojai, and I decided to explore the Carrizo Plain, a place that always jumped up from my map, hinting wildly of hidden, deserted, unusual places. My impression of the place was from a photo I’d seen, the path of the San Andreas Fault cutting straight across the plain. The San Andreas is the big one that runs near Los Angeles and through San Francisco, the one responsible for the big S.F. quake of 1906 as well as most of the other really heavy shakes. It’s also the same fault that ends at Tomales Point at Point Reyes. The photo I remembered was taken from the air and clearly showed a long furrow. The land was so dry and desolate that the fault stood out as if it had been made by the plow of Paul Bunyan. From the mostly gravel road the furrow could not be seen, being over near one of the hills. What I did experience is the closest I’ll ever come to traveling on the moon. This place is a long desert, a flat valley probably three or more thousand feet high, ringed by mountains, almost totally devoid of vegetative life. It was as empty, motionless and timeless as some lunar crater, like a place 80

that has escaped discovery for a billion years. But in the foreground, there were signs of life, low, brown, almost gray grass and scattered cattle. I couldn’t imagine how many acres it takes in a place like that to feed just one animal. But the animals and clumps of dead grass were anomalies here, almost as if someone had come through just minutes earlier to set it up so I would think that this place was real, was actually a part of the Earth. Slipping by in the gravel at no more than thirty miles per hour, everything with a life span of less than a million years seemed to be illusionary. Then I came to a small lake, some fences and a paved road, and the surreal image shattered to reveal the world of everyday life, of ranch houses, barns and signs of life. But, for over thirty miles, I was an alien on a alien world, and it was wonderful. In the perhaps 19,000 days I’ve lived, I’ve only made the trip over the Carrizo PIain once. I’ve been to La Push only once. I’ve yet to see Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. I’ve never hiked the Alps. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be in a sane world. With all the wonderful and personally fulfilling things to do, I find myself engaged in some of the most blitheringly, mind-wrenchingly dull activities. For example, I’ve just paid almost $450 to a major state university for the privilege of making an hour and a half round trip twice a week in order to sit through a total of six hours of absolute numbing drivel. Why do I do it? Just for the right to continue doing what I do for a living. As a special education teacher, I have to get a special credential for teaching special education. That is not the same one as the one I have for teaching English or elementary school. So I have to attend a university a couple of times per week for two or three years so that I can be fully qualified to do what I’ve done fairly well for over three years. 81

For non teachers, this may stop making sense at any point now. The perfect solution to this problem is to find a university with a quality, intellectually stimulating program that is close enough to drive to after a day at work and doesn’t cost more than a good used car. In the major metro areas, this is possible. Out here in the valley, one must settle for either good, close, or cheap. I opted for one that wasn’t too expensive and not too distant. Good options are few within a reasonable drive. This particular program is solidly based in adulterated behaviorism or behavioral science, “science” being used euphemistically. This behaviorism as learning theory is B.F. Skinner reanimated by Dr. Frankenstein out of body parts taken from deceased Cal Trans or Army Corp of Engineers executives. This fecal material is delivered by intellectual cultists very like much those bland, robed figures who used to plague us at airports. These are people who do clinical studies, which means they control the input and output and wouldn’t think in a million years of actually working in a messy, uncontrolled public school. Since behaviorism is touted as psychology, one might assume that it is based on human nature. Their model of human nature is a cybernetic model. You push this button and the thing does such; push another button and it does something else. They have all kinds of terms for all this, terms that are supposed to describe the results of applying the system. However, the actions and reactions they describe are the same as their definitions, so everything comes out just as they say it should. A stimulus is anything done to the subject. A response is anything the subject does back, and that pretty much covers anything that can happen. Does this sound like some kind of a circular argument? Give them more credit for intelligence. They twist the cir82

cular argument into a mobius strip. Since a stimulus is anything done to a subject and a response is anything done by the subject, their contention that a stimulus elicits a response can’t really be refuted. If the response isn’t the one predicted by the stimulus, they remind us that lots of other stimuli are acting on the subject. People, as we know, since we are them, are not cybernetic, binary response tools. We are complex, multidimensional beings that very well may have a non physical component that is commonly known as a soul but is called by many names in every culture. Anyone with an ounce of intuitiveness knows this. Intuitive knowledge of self and human nature is not a prerequisite for being a behaviorist, any more than common sense is. This behavioral science isn’t based on real human nature, and it isn’t really good science. Even the most objective observer in the most simple, inanimate observation with the minimum number of variables knows that the experimenter contaminates the experiment. We also know that one can bias findings by selecting just the data that confirms what you expect to find and by making up the terminology that proves your contention. Try this: a gribbit is anyone who disagrees with me. A faulty premise results in a gribbit condition. Therefore anyone who disagrees with me is working from a faulty premise. Gottcha! There is a indoctrinational thing going on. The professors say “stimulus,” and the loyal students answer, “sstimmuuuluus.” “Response,” intones the master. “Reesspoonnseees” echoes the students. And when you question the precepts of any of these true believers, they get this glassy stare and answer, “Fish hatchery? What fish hatchery?” I have a theory, as yet unproven. There is a certain type of person—one of Freud’s best metaphors, “anal reten83

tive.”—who grows up either to get lots of college degrees or to work in the public sector. The former become behavioral scientists, and the latter replace each morning the Bolinas highway sign that the locals diligently cut down each night. And we wonder what’s wrong with education today. Children are not intellectually sophisticated, but they do have a natural ability to sense bullshit in adults. They are also more closely connected to what might be called the natural state of humans. We push these poor young people to think and to become like us and we can be pretty damn scary examples. What’s going on out there? Well you can’t take one thing away from these behavioral, clinical types: their old pleasure/pain principle still works. I’ll go a long way to avoid pain, and I’ll go a long way for some pleasure. Keeping an income coming in is pleasure; starving is pain. So I take the classes and try not to laugh during lectures.

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TRIP ONE:

CH 7 EXPLORATION NORTH

A couple off summers ago I decided to take a surf safari to Canada. The plan was to load surf gear, camping equipment, backpack, and my bike onto and into the pick up truck and head up the coast, no itinerary, no obligations, no people to see or deadlines to meet. Once I was over the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco in the rear view mirror, the trip officially began. I drove 101 north to the brew pub at Hopland for a late lunch and some wonderful Red Tail Ale. From Hopland south has always been weekend fare for me, but further north was the topography of a true vacation, an adventure in self-experimentation. Passing Leggett at the junction of Highway One and 101, I was overtaken by a weird nostalgia. I’d last passed that way, with a rest stop at the tree that was made into a store, a few years earlier on a motorcycle trip to Oregon. I’d stopped there, not because I’d had any desire to go into a store carved into the base of a tree, but because several hours hunched over the handlebars produce an excruciating back ache. I’d taken the time to look at everything there while the pain lessened and I could again walk naturally. Then taking a moment to decide which road to take, I’d headed down 101 to home. Had I not been delayed on that last trip, I’d have taken Highway One and the many hours of pure motorcycling delight it offered. But, it had been late afternoon, the sun making long shadows from the tree covered mountains rising up from the Eel valley. I’d gotten an early start, having camped at a state beach 85

between Crescent City and Eureka, a beach that has since added a ranger shack at the gate and now charges campers. At the time, I’d simply pulled in and had thrown my sleeping bag down in the hollow of a dune, on the finest, softest sand I’d ever felt, and drifted off to sleep, lulled by the waves pounding not more than thirty feet from my bed. That next morning had dawned dark and damp, driving me to quickly pack my bed roll and pull on my heavy jacket. After a very early breakfast in Orick, I’d checked my map and found an unimproved road that had led back to the Hoopa Valley, to the Indian reservation. I’d roared up the narrow road, leaning to the tight turns, and in ten minutes the temperature had risen from the high fifties to over eighty. The jacket came off first, and soon everything but shorts and a tee-shirt. After just a few miles the pavement had ended, leaving me on a logging road, dodging logging trucks every few minutes. The dirt had been loose, the road narrow and winding, and the turns so sharp they’d doubled back on each other. But the scenery was the same classic mountain kind that you find in the Trinities or in the Sierra. The strain of fighting the big 1100 CC had made the time seem to slow to a stand still. Dusty and tired, I’d finally dropped into the Hoopa Valley, cut wide, sharp, and deep by the Klamath River. Where this logging road junctioned with highway 96, I’d stopped at a country store for something cold to drink and some snacks. Once on 96 I’d followed the river from a rocky ledge that had been blasted out of sheer rock high above the KIamath valley, flat and grassy and dotted with small farms that drew their sustenance from the clear, wide river. After a quick trip west to the coast on the 299, I’d headed south through Eureka and up the hill towards Fortuna, away from the coast and the fog. Just before 86

reaching Fortuna I’d seen a big Honda Gold Wing broken down along side the freeway. As one biker to another, I couldn’t pass them by. They were at the triangle formed by the freeway and the off ramp. I’d made sure I was fully inside the white lines of the triangle before dropping the kickstand. it was downright civilized how they’d pulled little folding chairs off the bike and the wife was sitting back on the highway, drinking a beer and watching her husband work. They’d had a flat, and bikes don’t carry spares, so one is dependent on the good will of passers by. I’d been in that situation, so I knew how relieved he was when I stopped. He’d offered me a beer, which I’d accepted. Getting the rear wheel off a Gold Wing involves removing all that luggage and light bars and exhaust pipes and just about the entire back half of the bike. Worst of all, it’s really a one man job, except for the raising of the bike while a part is wiggled free. So, I’d relaxed with a beer in the other chair out on the busy freeway, talking with the couple while the man grunted and cussed and got grease all over his nice, leather riding clothes. I’d been there at least an hour before he’d stood up with the wheel in his hand. He’d climbed on the back of my bike after I’d dropped my camping gear on the highway, and he’d held the wheel in one arm while I drove us back down the hill in search of a motorcycle shop in Eureka. Naturally the shop had been busy, and it was another half hour before they could sell him a tire. Once that was mounted on his wheel, we’d loaded up again and had gone back up the hill where his wife was half in the bag from having nothing to do but swill beer all afternoon. The morning had long since turned to afternoon, and I was still over three hundred miles from home. So, seeing that I could do no more to help him in his process of replacing all the parts that were strewn along the road, I’d wished them 87

well and headed out, having thrown one more chit into the karmic cookie jar. Passing Leggett some four years later, the whole scene played back like a movie. And, oddly, the things that remain the most vivid are the color and texture of the sand on the beach where I’d spent the night, the inside of the store on the Indian reservation, and the look of the KIamath from the road along the cliff. This time I didn’t stop at Leggett or the tree store. In mid summer there are not always camp sites available, so finding a place before dark was a priority. There are a number of state parks along the Eel, in an area called the Avenue Of the Giants. I pulled into Richardson Grove. By summer the Eel is wide, shallow and lazy, perfect for taking a cool dip on a typical broiling summer day. I camped above the river, the sites at water’s edge already taken. A swim dispatched the dust of the road, and a quick trip down the road brought food and drink. Curled up in the back of the truck, surrounded by towering redwoods, I thought of how long it had been since I’d camped along the Avenue of the Giants. There were subtle differences between this area and the redwoods around Big Sur, just as there were subtle differences further north in Del Norte County, where the rain forest is so thick and lush that leaving the trail is sometimes impossible. Even though I was in a state park, the area had the feel of logging country, as much of the surrounding hills and mountains still are. This wasn’t a redwood grove like we have down south. This was a forest, one that once stretched unbroken for hundreds of miles, where animals that humans call game numbered in the millions and perhaps billions. I was looking out my window at the remnants of the forest primeval. Creatures long extinct had prowled between the grand parents and great grand parents of these trees. Many of these trees were standing when 88

Caesar was assassinated, and some were saplings when Socrates was challenging young men’s minds. Of all living things on this earth, my feeling is that trees are the most benign. They provide shelter, shade, food, and anchor for the soil. They teach, by example, patience, peace and contemplation. Their very silence indicates a wisdom that our race will never aspire to. Do trees think? They may well wonder the same thing about us. Do they communicate? Apparently some studies have already proved that. Do they make good companions? I’ve never been bored in the company of a tree, particularly a redwood, the philosopher of the tree world. Were I charged with making laws, cutting down a redwood would be a capital offense. The following morning, my next stop was Shelter Cove, the one town on the lost coast, a place that leaps from a road map to tickle the imagination. The one road to the coast leaves 101 around Garberville, passes through Redway and takes twenty or thirty winding, slow miles to arrive, after a steep and breathtakingly beautiful drop, at Shelter Cove, vacation home sites, fishing village, surfing spot. The rest of the lost coast is indeed lost. Much of it is accessible only by hiking through some of the most rugged country in the state. This is one place in California’s coast range where roads are closed in winter due to snow. This is where one lane dirt roads lead to wild back country, where even the paved roads lead to places where people are far less common than deer and even bear. I’d wanted to surf Shelter Cove, but the waves wouldn’t cooperate. Having breakfast at the cafe that overlooks the harbor, I saw some locals walk a couple of miles down the beach to a spot. Pulling out my binoculars, I couldn’t detect anything worth the long walk. Surfers, being what they are, will go surfing when they have a day free to do so, and the waves be damned. 89

Having checked out all of Shelter Cove by bicycle, I was ready to move on. Scanning my map, I saw that I could go back up the road, turn north to Ettersburg, through Honeydew then west to the next coast access at Punta Gorda. I was on my way. For part of the trip the slow, winding road followed the Mattole river, and I have this irresistible urge when I get around unspoiled rivers. The Mattole is about as unspoiled as you get along the coast range. Crossing a wooden bridge near Ettersburg, I saw a group of kids from some local summer school having a picnic along the river. I parked and walked past them to a spot almost to myself, a spot where the river hugged a steep bank, overhung with mossy trees and vines, where the water was slow, deep and forest green. Two local women were there, and we talked a bit while I swam and played in the cool stream. Splashing lazily along, I turned quickly to find myself face to face with a garter snake, which reacted to my face by swimming madly for cover. That was the final touch. A good river is one you share with other creatures. Fill a cool, clear river with fish, reptiles, mammals, birds and whatever else you have, let it boil and bubble with teeming life, and give me a running start, and I’ll be in the midst of the party, whooping it up with the ducks, bears, alligators, manatees, herons, hippos and all their cousins and neighbors. Let’s have a Noah’s river, man and beast cavorting naked and innocent in the old swimming hole. Let’s never get so damn civilized that we become uncomfortable sharing our spaces with the wild and wonderful life around us, the brothers and sisters of our distant past. Back in the truck I was still a few miles but many experiences short of Punta Gorda. Before reaching Honeydew, along the river I passed an open field that had been converted 90

to a large encampment. There were tents and people everywhere, and a big banner proclaimed that it was Earth First! I pulled in to see what was up. If you’ve never spent time with the people of Earth First!, you most likely have some serious misconceptions about them and their cause. You probably see them as unruly, irresponsible eco-outlaws. I spent a day with them, and I found the whole bunch to be dedicated, sincere environmentalists, people who do more than send in their money and write the occasional letter to their congressmen. I also found them to be delightful people who have inherited the spirit of the sixties flower children. I took the welcome at face value, and was directed to a place to park and to the camp center where food was being served and groups were involved in various ecological seminars. Within minutes I blended into the crowd. However I still hadn’t checked the surf around Punta Gorda, and being passionately attached to my quest, I couldn’t rest knowing that great waves may await. So, thinking that the twenty or so miles would only take a few minutes, I started off. These were roads designed for twenty miles per hour, tops. I drove up and down the semi-paved, winding roads, following the Mattole river and dropping from majestic views to little stands of woods until I arrived at Petrolia. A road turned off the main road and headed along the river to the beach some five miles away. Off I went, pavement soon giving way to gravel and dirt. And then there was a parking lot, buffered from the beach by huge drift logs, arranged to create the feel of camp spots. There was an outhouse type of toilet and one sign, a sign I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It was a perfect juxtaposition: the Earth First! encampment and this most wonderful sign. They were the two poles of environmentalism, the yin and yang of the deep, 91

human compassion for this benign jewel of a planet that gave us life and has nurtured us to the point where we have the power to slay or to save it. Earth First! represents adult outrage against acts so heinous as to be unthinkable, acts that must be redressed immediately by whatever means necessary. But the sign was the simple, tender plea of children, an innocent outpouring of love beyond anything we adults are capable of. It was a lovely sign, a brightly painted scene of the beach, complete with pictures of the land and sea creatures common to the area. The caption read, “We Love Our Beach; Please Take Care of It.” Below the caption it stated that the beach was adopted by the second and third graders of Petrolia School. It even listed their names. I was touched so deeply I wept. Standing on the clean sand, wind in my face, great waves of emotion rushed over me. Somewhere deep inside the remnant of the child I’d once been before the truth of the adult world eroded my innocence and trust, awoke for a moment, and I felt life the way it was supposed to feel, with total compassion instead of condemnation. I wondered, when I returned to myself, if there is any industrialist, any greedy corporate raider, any corrupt politician, any unfeeling slob who dumps household chemicals into a creek, who would not be touched, who would not, like Ebenezer Scrooge, experience a life altering revelation at the sight of that sign. Who could be so heartless that they could look into the eyes of a child and tell her that her precious beach is standing in the way of progress and must be leveled to make way for a hotel, or some monstrous amusement park, or some glutinous shopping mall? If I had my way every person who seeks to destroy natural beauty for a profit would be made to come here, alone and unprepared and stand before that sign. I finally climbed over the drift logs and onto the beach. The dark gray, coarse sand was strewn with bleached 92

driftwood, and there wasn’t a footprint, beer can, or candy wrapper to be seen. Little shore birds darted just ahead of the lapping water. The overcast was low, perhaps only a hundred feet. The big rock out at the point disappeared into the misty ceiling as if it had been topped with a giant knife. The ocean was the color of the sky, but for the tiny explosions of white created by the onshore wind. The surf was one to two feet and mushy. I headed back to the encampment. All the seminars and meetings were over by the time I returned. People were visiting and just hanging out, enjoying the lovely late afternoon. I was wearing a Sierra Club tee shirt I’d bought in San Francisco on the first day of the trip. Walking down toward the river, I passed a young woman, perhaps 17 or 18. She asked with a hint of sarcasm what a Sierra Club type was doing there. I told her that there’s lots of ways to save the environment, and I’m interested in any or all of those ways. She had taken a Mendicino-type of name, Spirit, a blend of hippie and new age, back-to-nature. I was impressed by her dedication. given the apathy demonstrated by most teenagers. Still, I was disheartened by the divisiveness of her comment. Until all the various people who want to save our world see each other as brothers and sisters, the spoilers will always win, united as they are by greed. After a brief conversation the afternoon heat drew me again toward the river. The river was full of frolicking people, and swim wear was not part of the program. I pulled off my dusty shorts and tee shirt and dove into the cool water. Soon I was laughing and splashing with the rest. Even a stranger was made to feel at home. Free food was offered, followed by song and environmental news and updates around an open fire. We were recruited to write letters to various government people in defense of our ancient 93

forests. Later in the evening, one of the women leaders of the encampment—named after a warm season of the year— asked me to join a small group in some late night operation some two or three days later. I was to be a distraction while the others did a bit of monkey wrenching, nothing dangerous, just something to aggravate the corporate honchos and their profit timetable. I would have done it if it had been that night or even the next. But I wanted to go north, and I didn’t want to hang around for a couple of days only to wander way back into the woods with strangers, people who might or might not have been trustworthy. I didn’t want to be mucking around in the woods with someone who might be totally irresponsible. Besides, the encampment was breaking up that afternoon, and only the core people were remaining. I wasn’t part of that core, and being basically shy, felt uncomfortable being the new guy, the outsider, for 48 hours. There were a number of reasons why I turned them down, but the bottom line was that I wasn’t totally comfortable with the whole program. At times I still regret my decision. What they did promise was a big publicity thing the next day over along 101 at the bridge at the north end of the Ave. of the Giants. They were going to string a banner over the highway and hand out flyers to motorists. That was more my style, so I decided to join them. The next morning I left after breakfast, telling them I’d rather take my own truck, as I would be heading north afterward. I left as they were still packing up, feeling awkward just hanging around. Everyone seemed to know what to do, and they worked like a construction team with a history. Once I got to the spot along 101, I parked and started riding my bike among the trees and along the river, returning every few minutes to look for the group. I figured they’d be 94

about an hour behind me. After almost two hours no one had shown up, so I drove up and down the Avenue of the Giants, thinking I misunderstood the meeting place. Nothing. So back I went, rode the bike some more. Still nothing. Finally, realizing that it had been four hours and they probably weren’t coming, I loaded my bike up, took a quick dip in the Eel river, stalling as long as possible, and took off north. To this day I wonder if they’d arrived just after I’d left, gone to another spot, or if they’d thought I would alert the authorities and postponed the operation. I can only hope my actions or inactions didn’t interfere with their work. They were some of the most worthy people I’ve ever met. From the Avenue of the Giants to Eureka through the lost coast is a major expedition. but on 101 it’s a short hop. With the exception of a stretch of beach around Punta Gorda, Eureka is the next really accessible piece of coast. So, being the eternal optimist, I figured that maybe I’d catch some late afternoon waves. There is a long strand that separates Humboldt Bay from the ocean. It takes at least a half hour to get out there from the highway. All along the drive, I checked out the places to camp for the night, the afternoon rapidly waning. There were tracks, regularly spaced, going back into the dunes from both sides of the road. Nestled back in these tracks and against the dunes were encampments. But these were not folks in tents and R.V.s out for a weekend or a week at the beach. These were old busses, cars, lean-tos, and tent complexes, places that looked like squatters’ camps. There was junk and trash piles and seedy people with weasel glances that spoke of desperation and territorialism. I’ve camped just about everywhere, legally and illegally. I’ve had all sorts of characters for neighbor, but this place made me feel like there were some unposted rules, some system 95

for deciding when and where you camp without getting in the space of someone who would take it as an act of aggression. The area looked like an unpatroled zone, where the squatters’ rights and subtle hierarchies prevail. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of camping there, not being a local and all. The feeling along the strand reminded me of how I’d felt in Rio Dell and Scotia, just back up the hill. I’d pulled into those towns just an hour earlier and had cruised the main street for a pub or cafe. The big lumber mill dominated the area. All along the road I saw cars with bumper stickers such as, “Save a logger, eat at spotted owl.” On some there was a variation on the theme: “Save a logger, eat an environmentalist.” The people on the streets were obviously loggers. Now, here I was with stickers on my truck promoting ancient forests, Earth First!, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, and just about every other pro environment, and by implication, anti-logger sentiment. I had a rough idea what would befall a guy with earrings and a Sierra Club tee-shirt in one of the local bars. Some fellow the size of an ancient redwood would start an argument, and all his buddies would shout things like, “kick the shit out of the goddamn tree hugger.” One of the benefits of maturity is being able to realize in advance that certain situations carry almost a guarantee of getting the shit beat out of you. Another benefit is understanding that being covered with painful bruises is not a badge of honor on a sign of manhood. It’s the mark of the foolish. I figured I’d rather eat in Eureka. Perhaps I’m biased. I’ve never known loggers personally. Perhaps they would have ignored me, or maybe they’d have engaged me in a lively debate about the proper way to achieve a balance between conservation and employment. Some might have come up to me and said that they agreed 96

with my position but were compelled by economics to continue to engage in their traditional occupation. I stereotyped the whole town and continued on my way. I’m ashamed of that, but I didn’t get a black eye or a broken nose. All this was going through my mind as I drove out that incredibly long sand spit. Finally the sand spit ended, and I was at the entrance of Humboldt Bay. There was a parking lot filled with mostly rusty, old cars. There were no surf racks. There is a look of vehicles that belong to hard core fishermen, just as there is a look of vehicles that belong to hard core surfers. This was a fisherman crowd. I parked and walked over the dunes for a look at the ocean. It was the color of slate, cold and indifferent. There was a chop that was almost the size of the waves. The rock jetty, slick and gray/green, went out a few dozen yards into the mucky water. Out there, surrounded by water on three sides, there was a general dampness that pervaded everything. There was a soft drizzle, and everything was wet, mildewed or rusty. Even on a lovely afternoon this surf would have been a waste. On a day like this, so late in the afternoon and so far from a meal and a campsite, it wasn’t even worth a moment’s speculation. I drove back all the way around the bay to the highway and toward Eureka. I don’t how many times I’ve passed the sign that advertises the Samoa Smokehouse, but this time I decided that I’d take the bridge, check the surf on the north end of the bay and eat at the famous old place. No surf, naturally, but the food was great and filling, very family-style and casual. But I didn’t have time to linger in Eureka. Further up the coast at Redwood National Park there is a camping area that’s actually a long parking lane between the highway and the beach where mostly R.V.s park. It’s cheap, there’s the 97

sensation of having company, and one wakes to a view of the ocean. I’d picked up a six pack and positioned my truck near one of the periodic outhouses, not wanting to wander too far in the middle of the night when the beer clamored for its freedom. And there I was, mister American camper, by the side of a scenic highway,, watching the cars press on to unknown vacation wonders, sipping a beer. and curled up snug and happy with a good book. The next morning and an hour further north, I found the surf shop in Crescent City. It was owned by Rhyn Noll, the son of surf legend Greg Noll from the old days in Hawaii. The lady behind the counter was friendly and brought out a map of the area, marking “X” on every local surf spot. She gave, me directions and a bit of information. I’d picked the wrong time to come up here. The locals were, if they could, going south. Mid summer was usually flat. I checked the various spots to confirm what I already knew. I even parked out at Point St. George, hiked over the dunes and down to the beach where in winter the waves would likely be eight to ten feet. Children were playing on the beach. I zipped my nylon windbreaker tight and walked along the trail, watching the whitecaps bobbing out to the charcoal horizon. The hardy little plants that cling desperately to the dunes were pressed flat to the sand by the wind. The sky was so low, you could reach up and run your fingers through it as if it were dirty cotton candy. Old folks were doing a heel and toe for exercise, and young couples were walking along the bluffs hand in hand. And as anywhere in the country from 110 degree desert highways to ice covered Maine byways, there were the joggers in their standard tee-shirts, nylon shorts and $200 shoes. Between Point St. George and the protected fishing harbor is a stretch of beach that is haunting to look at. While it was an unfamiliar spot, something about it was familiar as 98

home, but I can’t explain the what and why of it. Perhaps it’s because it reminds me of the Monterey and Pacific Grove coast, with calm, glassy water and a great assortment of dark, jumbled rocks protruding from the ocean. I stopped to gaze longingly at it, wishing I had a way to go out on those inviting waters and among those beckoning islets. The staring at it created a picture postcard in my mind that stuck tightly, forcing me back there two years later, on my way home from La Push. Looking at this spot again two years later, it looked like an old friend. Once again, with only a tiny surf slapping the shore and no signs of any currents, this was, while an exposed beach, bay conditions much like Monterey. There was a long jumble of rock that constituted Point St. George, and there were dozens of dark rock stacks all along the stretch of beach. On that next visit, equipped with a kayak, I was prepared to sample the water. I dragged the boat down to the beach. It was only nine in the morning, but the sky was brilliant, and the air was warming rapidly. I’d spent the night in the back of the truck in a rest stop in the mountains, along US 199, on the Oregon, California border, rising and getting under way at the first hint of light. I welcomed the pink and violet dawn along the Smith River, as it broke in radiant shafts between the redwoods. I was walking in Smith River State Park, alone with the hungry animals of morning and the soothing whisper of the water. But the morning was already aging and had become purely intoxicating. I pushed out through the small waves and started to stroke for the point. Before getting close, I could already hear the rowdy tenement sounds of hundred of seals, arguing, loving, and generally claiming their pieces of a seal’s world. I moved in between the rocks, so close that I could see the nervous indecision in the seals’ eyes. And then, feeling 99

I’d invaded too deeply into their space, I pulled away from the play and the din and moved out toward a fishing boat by the outer sea stacks, over a half mile from shore. I made polite conversation with two groups of fishermen as I made an arc around and between the big stacks, over the gentle surges that bounced like echoes off the rocks. It was like being on a poster photograph or one of those perfect television nature shows. The world was indeed a stage, and I was a star for a moment, delivering my own monologue, the stage to myself and the lights up in the house. Riding a small wave to shore, I came around too quickly and was swamped, early in the morning, in shorts and a tee-shirt, and almost to the Oregon border. I expected to experience a shock of cold water, but I was refreshed by the cool sensation. Grabbing my stuff before it floated away and pulling the boat up on shore, I jumped back in, enjoying the exhilaration of the unexpected dip. But back on that first trip, two years earlier, the day was cold and bleak, and I’d yet to even consider owning a kayak. Since there was no surf, it was time to head north through the main part of town and toward Oregon. On the way through town I spotted a new age, crystal and book store. I had to take a Iook. I came away with a tape called “You are Entitled to Miracles,” from a series of expensive and ponderous books called A Course in Miracles. What a delightful little tape! It set my mind exploring interesting and different spaces as I made my way up the road, with its clearly mystical message couched in traditional religious jargon. And one thing it did was make me feel the need for a little human company. I thought of the long drive up the Oregon coast, a drive that, knowing the way I stop to check out everything, would take me many days. I also thought about how every surf spot I’d checked had been crappy. Then I thought about some friends who live in Ashland, 100

Oregon, and I called them. They would be happy to see me, as would their little twin girls. I turned inland on Highway 199. Up to that time I had kayaked once when a friend had suggested renting boats in Monterey. I’d enjoyed it, and she’d bought a used boat. The seed had been planted, but Oregon turned me into a kayaker. Up on an Ashland hill overlooking the lights of the town below and the mountains above, it’s hard to see how life wouldn’t be good in this idyllic spot. This is where the Shakespeare Festival happens every year. The area is scenic to a fault. There is Lithia Park, one of the prettiest I’ve seen, where ducks and swans beg food in the ponds, where a little creek wanders by the picnic area, and where cherubic children play on the swings while their mothers talk of art and crafts or literature. This is a small town just filled with wonderful hand-crafted goods and art works. This is a town that has more delightful little eateries than one can count. And that’s part of the problem for my friends. They own one of those places, and life revolves around the competition for the hungry tourists. But looking out the windows of their pleasant hillside home, talking with the wife and watching the twins play wildly for the benefit of the friend who only comes around once or twice a year and always pays lots of attention to them, life takes on a genteel and easy guise. It was good to get out of the truck, wash some clothes, and finally shower and shave. It was nice to sit in a chair and drink my wine out of a wine glass. It was nice also to plan the next day with the family, a day off for him, and a day’s trip up to some waterfall along the Rogue River. And that was what did it for me, the Rogue. We drove up the river to a spot where we parked and walked along a lovely trail to a very impressive waterfall and on further to 101

some rapids and a deep spot in the river. I took a swim in the cool water, using the boulders for a water slide. But what really caught my eye was the place along the river that rented inflatable kayaks. For twenty bucks, one could rent a boat, get shuttled up river, and spend half a day coming back, a trip that included some fun-looking little rapids. I made a note of it. On my return trip over a week later, I again called my friends and headed down for another visit. Remembering the kayak rental, I planned my trip so that I’d hit the river late morning. At Sandy Oregon I stopped at the first rental place I found. I pulled up to the little store front across the road from the river, took off everything except trunks, hat and tee-shirt, and rented a boat. The guy inflated one for me, loaded it on the flat trailer behind his van, and I climbed in. Ten miles up river, just below a dam. I put in. He described the pull-out point and told me to leave the boat there, walk to the shop, and they’d get the boat. It was as simple as that, point down river and have fun. I had no idea what kind of rapids were ahead of me but figured that they wouldn’t rent boats on a class four river, what with the liability. I floated for a time, paddling some, leaning back and looking at the trees and mountains and appreciating not having a road to watch. The day was hot, and hanging a foot over the side into the water felt good. The forest was thick and the signs of life were everywhere, fish-jump splashes, bird chirps, the scurry of squirrels, and the occasional scent of skunk. It was green in a way that only bits and pieces of California are green in mid summer. The river was lush and seductive. The day hung suspended as if it were going to last an eternity. I could have stretched the experience out to the day’s end save for the promise I’d made to be at my friends’ for dinner. 102

The series of little rapids were just exciting enough to punctuate the gentleness of the rest of the river, brief episodes of tension and activity. The challenge was not, like it is in dangerous rapids, to survive. It was a test for beginners: stay in the boat. The guy who falls overboard loses, gets very wet, and may lose the boat. It was like a minor roller coaster to drop into a series of standing waves, quick drops followed by sudden bobbing back to the top, only to look down into the next trough. I was so turned on to the whole thing that I bought a used boat from the guy. It was beat up, but the price was right. As I headed back down the hill through Medford, I decided to check the big sporting goods store, and sure as hell they had a big sale on just that kind of boat. The new ones were only slightly higher than the old, beat up one, so I bought it and planned to return the other. I talked my friend into going down the river with me the next day, since the boat was supposed to be a two man craft. So, after breakfast we loaded up and drove to Medford and up the river to the place I’d bought the used boat. After some debate, the man at the boat place gave back my check and took back his boat. It helped that we paid him ten bucks to transport us the ten miles to the launch site. I opened the package that contained the boat and assembled the foot pump, laced up the front and back aprons, and pumped up the boat. Hang the instructions, which had blown away and into the water. After stashing the pump and personal stuff behind the back seat, we were off. The term “two man boat” refers to two men about 5’9” and maybe 140 to 150 lbs. It doesn’t refer to two men over 6’2” and better than 200 lbs. each. We were way overloaded, and it was almost impossible to control the kayak. We hit the first rapid sideways and got thoroughly soaked. I was surprised we stayed afloat. It got better as we went, 103

but we never negotiated a rapid with any degree of expertise, or even with the boat pointed down stream. There was only one incident. My friend tried to turn by a sudden back stroke, launching us over the side. I made a quick grab for the plastic bag with our keys and wallets, and with the other hand I grabbed my new foot pump. My friend grabbed his hat, the boat and the paddle. The river was a lot swifter and colder than it seemed, and we struggled for 60 or 70 yards before we got to the shallows, just before the next rapids. Luckily the day was hot, and we sun dried before long. The rest of the trip was a float, relaxation, and probably the first stress-free day my friend had had all year. But all that was on the return trip, and I’m getting ahead of myself again. The night following my northward, first pass through Ashland was spent at beautiful Yachits State Park on the coast. The park abutted the beach and was set in a small coastal forest, cut by a tiny creek. Where Ashland was clear and very hot, the coast was cold, windy and overcast, with the threat of rain. I was forced into my sleeping bag fairly early to read, have, a glass of wine, and savor the velvet darkness. The morning found me looking at a day that guaranteed rain. The visibility was possibly 100 feet. It was one of those days that was blessed with both fog and a cloud cover, making the entire day seem like twilight. I wanted to check for surf, so I walked the beach down to a point a couple of miles north. I had to walk the whole thing, not being able to see the waves until I was standing right in front of them, almost in the water. Naturally, the surf was small and mushy, so I loaded up and got on my way north. The guys in the surf shop at Florence told me to check the jetty (jetties usually produce good waves). It was starting to rain when I got there, so I slogged through the damp sand to 104

the water’s edge. The only other person on the beach was a grungy, middle aged guy who was also a surfer. Both his car and board looked to be as old and rumpled as he was. We stood in the rain, like old alley cats, for a time, talking waves and watching the gray lumps wobble in and splatter, like broken eggs, on the wet sand. We agreed that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Standing on an almost deserted beach in the rain is a special experience. I love the rain and could walk in it for hours. There is a drama to the ocean on a dark, deserted, rainy day that cannot be explained to folks who only go to the ocean on hot sunny days. It is mournful, alien, brooding, and passionate. It is uninviting and impersonal, but there is something that draws you to go in. It’s like the draw of strong drink, indifferent lovers, and forbidden vices: the more your head says no, the more your heart says go. With water dripping from my nose and my hair limp in my eves. I crawled back in the truck and headed north. The rain got worse. Up around Hug Point things changed for the better. The rain stopped, and the sun was trying to sneak out. I pulled off at the state park where cars with surf racks were parked, the first I’d seen in days. I hiked down the hill through the thick rain forest to the beach, hopping from rock to rock to cross the creek. I climbed up on the head high pile of driftwood and looked out at a perfect little cove, bordered on both ends by the steep cliffs of heavily wooded headlands. The forest grew right up to the sand, like it does in the tropics. There were surfers in the water. Only the long boarders were getting rides in the I to 2 foot waves. I stood there for a long time debating. The sun was out, and the forest was drying out. The water was a brilliant blue, and the air was warm and musty. It had been so many days since I’d surfed, that I wanted to just get wet, waves or not. A local 105

walked up behind me and started a conversation. There is instant camaraderie between surfers, so we basically told each other the stories of our surfing lives, that being the only parts of our lives that mattered to each other. He was a jolly, expansive guy who had to tell me how he first got into surfing and about some of the bone chilling winter days he’d spent in the water. We pretty much divided the coast between us. I’d surfed the south, up to California’s north coast, and he’d surfed from there up into Washington. He explained that there was a fairly small but dedicated group of surfers in the area, and that they had an informal network that kept everyone sort of informed about where and when there were waves. I’d heard a friend from Pacifica tell about visiting Cannon beach and seeing some surfers out. Well, this guy said that Cannon was an OK place but that Seaside was better. As if it had just come to him, he added that with this particular kind of swell, Seaside might just have some good surf right then. He said he lived in Seaside and that he had to cut his lawn before going out surfing again and that I should follow him to where, if there was any surf, it would most likely be. So I jumped into the truck and took off down the road after this guy, both of us hauling down the highway as if the devil were hot on our tails. Seaside was fifteen or twenty miles away, and I hung on to him the whole way. We turned off the highway, turned again, and ended up in some residential neighborhood which ended at the beach. The last part of the road was half gravel and full of pot holes, as most far north surfing beaches seem to be. This was the south end of a long crescent shaped beach at the extreme end of Seaside. Beyond where we pulled off, the road wandered up into the hills to some homes out on the headland, and from there it apparently ended, there being no roads around the headland and over to the next beach. For someone like 106

me, not being able to look around the headland for that perfect, secret spot is maddening. We hopped out of the cars, and he pointed at the dull gray ocean. Surf! There it was, finall, three to five foot waves peeling nicely to the left. We were beyond the beach, along the rocky curve that leads out to the point and the undrivable headland. There were maybe five or six guys out, a crowd in Oregon. I suited up and made my way carefully through the three or four yards of boulders, slipping and ouching my way to water deep enough to paddle in. After a couple of bruises I was out in the surf. Id expected the water this far north to be freezing, but with my 5/3 mm wetsuit, gloves and booties, I was comfortable. In fact it actually seemed warmer than San Francisco surf, which on a foggy Summer day feels like the coldest water on earth. I’d been on the road for almost two weeks, and this was the first good surf I’d found, and I made the most of it. However, tides are much more extreme in Oregon than in California, and tidal changes naturally affect the surf more dramatically. I had maybe an hour and a half of great waves before the tide dropped so far that the waves turned to unridable mush. So, almost a thousand miles from home, catching great waves and shooting the bull with the locals in the water, I’d found what I’d come for, my first taste of Oregon surf. And later that afternoon at the Cleanline Surf Shop, the one local store, the people recognized me as the stranger in the water, and we stood around swapping stories and warming up with cups of free coffee. Standing there with several locals, surrounded by boards and wetsuits, swapping stories and laughing, I felt perfectly at home. I’d come, surfed, been accepted, and was happy beyond words. I hung around Seaside Oregon for a couple more days before the road called me away again. That strong swell 107

that rolled through that first afternoon was a fluke and didn’t last. The surf dropped to less than two foot. The rains that had almost obscured all of the Oregon coast south of Seaside were over, probably for the season, and the skies were almost totally blue, save for the artillery puffs of clouds that drifted by as if from a neighboring war. I felt lonely in Seaside. It’s a working class tourist town, probably serving the greater Portland area. There were lots of lodges and motels along the gently curving beach and up through the main part of town. Then there was Broadway, with all the restaurants, curio shops, tee-shirt palaces, game arcades and the rest. It was primarily a family place, everything catering to people with kids. Family groups wandered the street, shopping, looking, and eating. And there I was, alone and dressed like someone who was camped out, which I was. My hair was sticky and matted from the salt water, my cut-offs were wrinkled and faded, and my dirty feet were stuffed in beat up sandals. I needed a shave and a shower. I found an inexpensive looking restaurant on Broadway and got a table for one. After dinner a quick stroll of the main part of town was enough. I felt out of place in all that communal interaction. With the exception of one funky little beer bar called the Bridgetender, a place filled with locals dressed much as I was, there wasn’t a place where I felt at home. This rustic little bar was farther up Broadway, away from all the little tourist shops. It sat on the channel next to the drawbridge. Boaters and wharf rats in tee shirts and tattered jeans hung out, drank gallons of beer and swapped stories drawn from a common pool of experience. This little, dark, wood-walled bar and the beer-fueled conversations helped me while away a couple of hours before it was time to go back to the little mom and pop campground, just south of town on the highway, 108

and curl up with my book. The following day I blew off Seaside for the more picturesque Cannon Beach, five miles south. Every memory of Cannon Beach involves Haystack Rock, several stories high and right in the surf line, sometimes partially beached at low tide, but always visible for miles. Along side the rock is a surf spot (“Shark Bite” to the local surfers), crowded even on almost flat days. I looked over the wide beach, almost a quarter of a mile, to the knot of surfers trying to catch a wave or so. Along the beach, rented three wheelers raced and spun around in the sand. The warm weather had the beaches packed by any standard north of teeming Los Angeles. I hopped on my bike And rode up the hill from town to Ecola State Park. The park is just north of town with a deep wood that hugs the steep bluffs, giving the hiker occasional bursts of wild and seemingly untouched shoreline. The trails were for walking, so I chained up the bike. I walked in mud that probably never dries except in September, in dense shade, cool and obscure, and among the tangled growth of generations of trees, shrubs and vines. Off trail hiking there was impossible for more than a couple of yards. Back at the parking lot, there were trails that ran through eternally green grass out to lookout points and down to a pocket beach ringed with dark rocks and littered with drift logs the size of fallen Sitka Spruce. I sat on a picnic bench watching two surfers trying to stand up on waves not more than 18 inches high. Then I tried to paint the scene, finally giving up and opting for seeing the town by bike, a short ride, punctuated by lunch in a touristy little place across from the art gallery. I took photos of the little pocket beach I’d failed to paint. Someday I’ll try again to capture the thick forest extending to the cliff’s edge, the coarse, eroded bluffs, the gun barrel 109

gray of the drift logs, the cocoa colored sand, and the sparkling little waves. By the third day, it was obvious that I would become a local before I got more good waves, so I grabbed some breakfast and drove back to Cleanline Surf Shop. Naturally, there was the mandatory bull session about favorite beaches and remembered really great days where the crowds were someplace else, and one had overhead waves to oneself. This little ritual dispensed with, I asked if I could expect any waves in Washington. I wasn’t sure if I should follow the coast, a very slow trip, or make for the freeway. All the locals hanging out agreed that Westport was the place to go. If any surf was to be had in Washington at that time of year, it would be there. And the good news was it was only about two hours away, a short hop for a surfer on safari. So I bid my good-byes and headed for the border, over the amazingly long bridge and through Astoria. I‘d like to spend a few days in Astoria, Washington sometime soon. Sitting as it does right on the wide mouth of the Columbia, it is like something out of some old fishing story, perhaps even from the days of iron men and wooden ships. In fact, Astoria looks like what I imagine Nantucket Island to be like, although I’ve never seen the island. I passed reluctantly through, over that incredibly long bridge and into Washington. A momentary picture remains in my mind, one of weathered, wooden buildings with a waterfront atmosphere, set under a low, gray sky, and perched on the widest expanse of moving fresh water I’ve ever seen. I suppose the Columbia wouldn’t seem all that impressive to someone who’d spent time on the Mississippi or the Amazon, but to someone who was raised to regard the Sacramento River as a major waterway, the Columbia is the great exhaling of liquid America. I cannot even guess how much water passes Astoria in a minute, let alone a day or 110

year. The river is so wide at Astoria, only a few miles from the mouth, that Washington is like an illusion, a painted backdrop, unreal and unreachable in the distance. Further up river, near Portland, I’d seen windsurfers. Down here the river looked empty. There was only a huge, lonely, sighing surge, as if this tired river was sensing the ocean and was whispering “home at last.” Crossing that bridge that seemed to stretch forever, I lost my Oregon state of mind. I can’t explain it exactly, but my consciousness shifted slightly. Oregon had become familiar, the local surfer’s somewhat known and the beaches pretty much wired. The highway followed the beach, never more than a few miles west. But, when I think of Washington, I picture great, fog bound bays that take hours to drive around. I also think of the Olympic Peninsula, a dark and mysterious place where beaches may well go deserted for days or months, and where roads end at obscure Indian reservations. Driving into Washington, I thought back a few years to my last visit. The best I could recall, there were no real towns north of Aberdeen until way around the peninsula at Port Angeles. I’d remembered camping along the Strait of Juan De Fuca near Crescent Beach and feeling as if I were at the end of the world. Damp and dark it was. At that camp ground, I’d seen my first banana slug, which fascinated me for hours. It was there I woke to see men walking out on the mud fIats to fishing boats nowhere near water, only to doze off again while the tide rose and carried them silently away. Following the almost deserted coast of western Washington, along Willapa Bay, I pulled out that tape I’d bought in Crescent City, “You are Entitled to Miracles.” Listening again, I savored the part where the woman said that suffering of any kind is in only an illusion, and that no accidents were possible in this universe. That rung true. At 111

that moment, I knew I would be perfectly safe and secure any place I happened to be. I was safe because I saw the world as a benign place, filled with subtle magic and love. We humans, I surmised, love the dramatic so much that we paint our world and our lives as some cauldron of conflict, danger, pain. blind chance, despair, treachery, betrayal, sickness, and endless sorrow. At times I’d certainly felt that way, but at that moment and at more and more frequent moments since. I realized that those things are generated by our minds and projected on the world around us. I looked back on my travels alone along the coast, the times I’d gone alone into strange surf, hiked alone deep into unfamiliar woods, teamed up with strangers along the road, dove headlong into rivers far from another living soul. I’d taken more chances than I could remember, with never a back up, never a person to go for help. I’d fallen and twisted my ankle miles from a road and simply gotten up and limped on deeper into a canyon. I’d been caught in rips and pulled near wave-washed rocky headlands. I’d skied into gullies in snowstorms, and I’d kayaked into places where conditions were completely unknown. In all these adventures, I’d never been even slightly at risk. There is a harmony in life between conscious beings and the environment, which is also conscious. To realize that I am one with the rocks, the waves, the forest, and my fellow man, is to realize that I have no more to fear from all of that than from my own elbow. There is no wealth like that feeling. I knew that I could go anywhere, do anything, and it would be just me, exploring me, loving and protecting me, meeting me, and appreciating me. I knew that when I finally get to La Push, you all go there with me, and this book is written simply to remind you of what a wonderful time we had. I don’t care how much of a couch potato a person is, how 112

much he loves his TV and air conditioned auto, how much he detests the great out of doors, anyone would love western Washington in the summer. So much rain falls there that things are always lush and green. Stands of trees seem to stretch to the horizon, and where the hand of man has cut them down, the undergrowth flowers in thickets of yellow, pink, red, blue and orange. Even the weeds in western Washington are lush and beautiful. The multitude of little lakes all have an other-worldly shimmering quality to them, like deep, liquid saphires. The blues, greens, and violets are deeper and stronger here, just as the reds, browns and oranges are in southern Utah. And there is a sensation of suspended evolution, of time frozen at the era when the wonderful diversity of life was exploding into full bloom, when mother nature was turning out her finest experiments. You don’t really watch the scenery of western Washington, you drink it down like some heady, thick, wildly intoxicating brew. Heading down the peninsula that separates Gray’s Harbor from the ocean, I had my first negative experience. Rolling joyfully toward Westport, now only minutes away, I hit a bird on the road. I can honestly say that after thirty some years behind the wheel, I can’t remember ever running over a wild creature. I was devastated. The shock of snuffing out the life of a tiny creature who’s only offense was to try to grab a bit of food off the highway unsettled me for some time. It occurred to me that this little fellow probably had a hungry family back at the nest, fledglings that would never see their parent again, and a widowed mate. Perhaps the young birds would starve, deprived of their care provider and food bringer. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. Finally, the only small offering I could make was to watch the road very carefully for any birds. squirrels. lizards, skunks or whatever. 113

My memories of Westport include a stiff breeze, the bluest skies imaginable, expensive film for my camera, an overwhelming sensation that this was the sportfishing capitol of the west coast, and absolutely no surf. By now I was getting good at finding my way to the surf beaches. They don’t put up signs. I drove to where the dirt road ended at the beach side of the harbor jetty. There were other surfers’ cars there, and it was a lovely day, so I was anxious and excited. I jogged over the sand to the crest and looked down on a placid, blue ocean. Jetties create good surf conditions, giving shape to what would otherwise be a beach break. Jetties also give the swell something to bounce off of, thus adding to the size. Looking at the waves moving down this jetty, I saw two cute little kids, perhaps six or seven, in cute little wet suits, trying to catch waves that wouldn’t reach my knee. Walking back to the truck, I passed an ancient, rusty Honda hatchback with a bodyboard and wet suit sticking out of the back and British Columbia plates on the bumper. The owner was standing next to the car, wearing a tee shirt, and shoulder length blond hair. I struck up a conversation. I told him that the surf was lousy further south too, and I said I was considering checking the waves on Vancouver Island. He said, “that’s quite a hike. It’s easier to come clear down here.” That was discouraging, considering the guy was from Vancouver. But, how was the surf, I wondered. I knew the answer before he opened his mouth. It was pretty chancy in the summer, probably not even as good as Westport, and Westport was just about dead flat. I decided that I’d be better off heading back south, trying my hand at kayaking, seeing my friends in Ashland, and trying California again, where one can usually find waves, even in late July. I remember really enjoying this Canadian’s accent, and I 114

wondered if it was typical of the B. C. folks, or if he had come to Canada from the British Isles or perhaps Australia. I’d pretty much made a decision to turn around, after checking out the town first, getting some food, buying film for my camera, and having a beer. I really didn’t want to get back in the truck after that long drive. I was enjoying the slightly cool breeze, the salt smell, the vacationers on the sand, and the fishing boats rounding the jetty on their way out to sea with their load of eager fisherman. I figured I’d take a few minutes to soak it all up and engage in some brief social interaction, a few quick words exchanged between strangers that can expose a whole history and create a microcosm of a relationship. I’ve gotten good at these quick relationships. Sometimes when I’m on the road, a fifteen or twenty minute encounter satisfies my need for verbal expression and friendship. It’s like having a bit of hors d’oeuvres when there isn’t time or appetite for a full meal. Two young, scruffy looking surfer types were walking my way, looking like a combination of beach bum casual and Seattle grunge scene. I nodded and opened with some comment about the lack of surf. They answered that it had been this way for awhile, typical mid summer surf. I mentioned that I was up from California and had found some good waves at Seaside. They agreed that Seaside was a good spot and that the same swell had hit up here. They mentioned a trip once to Santa Cruz and how great they thought it was, great but seriously crowded. By now the three of us were just standing there with our hands in our pockets, idly glancing occasionally at the surfless ocean. I jangled the keys in my pocket and announced that although I was originally headed for Canada, I was about to head back south. What followed next was a pivotal moment, something 115

that would shape the next couple of summers, something that would act as a catalyst to an imagination that is always ready to take flight. While they agreed that Canada would probably be a wasted, as well as a lengthy trip, there was a place much closer. They said that I should go to La Push, only three hours or so north. I told them that there didn’t seem to be much point, the surf being really shitty just about everywhere. “Yeah.” they agreed, “but there’s always surf at La Push.” They could have walked away just then for all it mattered. They had said it, had triggered that mystique of far away places that by some mystery of god or nature are able to suspend the normal natural laws and produce the miraculous. There may not be surf anywhere for a thousand miles in either direction, but there is always surf in La Push. There isn’t surf there most of the time or on any decent swell. There isn’t surf there that is a bit better than surf in other, neighboring places. There isn’t a 62.3 percent chance that ridable surf can be found there. No. What they said as matter-of-factly as if they had commented on the present temperature was that there was always surf at La Push. Naturally I asked them how they knew this, hoping that they’d just arrived from La Push the moment before I ran into them. No, they hadn’t been up there for weeks, but every time they’d gone, be it summer, winter, storm, or dead calm, there had always been surf, and usually pretty big surf in the bargain. The surf, it seemed, wrapped around the rocks and hammered into shore. I pictured a wild and woolly version of Steamer Lane or Four Mile back home. I asked a bit more. These guys were adamant. If I go to La Push, I will find some serious waves. This information could be used as legal tender anywhere in the state. They wished me a good trip and wandered upon their way. Watching them walk way, I had the same thought that 116

crosses the mind of someone in a restaurant who has just had another restaurant touted to him by the people at the next table. If that other place is so damn great, what the hell are you doing here? I pulled out my Washington map and looked for La Push. I had to go east to Aberdeen and then wind up 101 almost to the top of the peninsula. Then there was a fourteen mile side road that ended at the beach. It was at the very least three more hours. By the time I checked the place out, I’d have to start thinking about a place to stay, and I didn’t know what camping spots were around there, but I did know that the state parks had a tendency to be full. I also knew that some Indian groups in the area had ticketed surfers who trespassed on their land. The argument that was raging in my mind was whether it was worth all the time and trouble to check out a place that might well be a waste of time. Someone else might have figured, “what the hell, I’m this far.” I don’t understand why I didn’t do that. Perhaps there is some additional flavor, drama, symbolism, anticipation involved in letting an idea like, “there’s always surf in La Push,” ferment and age in my mind. Had I gone straight up there, it would have been over then and there. If it would have been flat, I would have written the guys off as typical bullshiters. Had there been some waves, I would have never known if it were a fluke or not. Instead, I turned south to get hooked on kayaking, and I let those words hang in the back of my mind for over two years, to charge my curiosity and my already fertile imagination.

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Ch. 8 CALIFORNIA: familiar turf

As I entered California again after only being away a week, my truck was stuffed with one more toy, an inflatable kayak that had been broken in the previous day on the Rogue River with my friend from Ashland. It was hot and sunny as I followed US 199 toward the coast. The Smith river was spring green and inlaid with rounded, pale boulders. I knew that once I got down the hill near Crescent City, the weather would change abruptly. Sunshine would give way to overcast, and the heat would give itself up to the damp sea air. But for now, I might have been a hundred miles inland rather than fifteen. Rounding a curve, I saw a couple of cars at the side of the road. On the Smith, that means a swimming hole, so I stopped. Looking down the steep bank, I saw a half dozen people swimming or sunning on the room sized boulders. Natural rock piles had dammed and slowed the river for a couple of hundred feet and had spread it out to the width of a interstate highway. Even from sixty feet above, I could look through the clear water to the twigs, pebbles and leaves on the bottom. I slipped off the shorts that covered my nylon trunks, slid the key on a shoestring over my head like a necklace, and bounded down the narrow, steep trail. A young couple was lying on a giant rock, almost to the other side, and a woman with her children were playing along the bank on my side. I swam up the river as far as I could and floated down on my back. Great redwood trees reached almost to the sky, and the rocky cliff on the south bank was a series of terraces, each with a soft, green fern blanket. The 118

air was thick and warm and filled with buzzing insects. Right above the river’s surface bright blue dragonflies made tight patterns, and as I floated by, they performed their aerial ballet only inches above my face. There is a lushness, a richness along the river that can’t be copied in the cities. The luxury of a fine hotel, the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, the manicured excesses of a theme park, the carefully arranged abandon of a shopping mall all have a tinny hollowness about them. If one just stops and quietly takes it all in, withdraws for a moment from the frenzy of activity, these man made places take on the quality of a sparsely furnished waiting room, where what you wait for never arrives. There on the Smith, one could lie in the sun or float down the river, hypnotized by the buzz of life, drugged by the thick air, redolent of pine and pungent fungus. An hour later, after air drying in minutes on a granite slab and climbing back to the truck, I was standing at the mouth of the Smith, at the end of the road, looking down the steep sand bank. A long sand bar beach held back the river, wide and slow here at sea level. Where it breached the sand bar, it sluggishly gave up its identity to the ocean. I was wearing a jacket, and my legs, still in shorts, were sprouting goose bumps. With hands stuffed in the jacket pocket, I looked at the gray, choppy ocean. Another potential surf spot with no surf. That’s the way it is on this kind of safari. The chance of stumbling on great surf at some unknown beach at just the time you happen to arrive there is pretty damn slim. But that’s OK. Big game hunters don’t expect to bump into a lion the minute they hop off the truck. Bird watchers often go into the woods dozens of times before seeing some elusive feathered friend. Gold miners can go years looking for a strike. It took the Greeks a decade to bring Troy down and get Helen back. In some ways surfing 119

can be likened to fishing. The trip is often as rewarding as the potential wave. Standing alone at the mouth of an unspoiled river, much of the crap that bounces around in my head was at rest. Back home, in the world of human interchange and activity, the internal and the external noise can grow to construction site proportions. There are calls to return, meetings to not only attend but to remain coherent during, bits of small talk to exchange with people, schedules and agendas to balance, things to remember, phrases and complete expostulations to recite in some proper order. Man, the social animal, has so many roles to play: superior, subordinate, friend, lover, parent, child, husband, wife, casual acquaintance, knowledgeable professional, neighbor, customer, and just familiar looking stranger on the street. We learn early to do it all automatically. Or do we? The more complicated it becomes, the more of our attention it demands. The result is stress, lots of stress. Some people opt to veg out in front of the TV. Some go to a resort to be pampered by paid strangers. Some spend lots of money on analysis, and some just stay drunk. Being out here at the lonely mouth of a river isn’t necessarily a better way, but it does involve fresh air and exercise, and it doesn’t cost much. The secret is to be able to stay out until you actually miss the stress, all of us having become addicted to the speedy quality of it. Is it anymore real to be out here? Is small town America more real than New York City? Is life in the fast lane more real than putting in your eight a day behind a broom? Is “real” even the right term? “Authentic” seems to be a popular word these days. The advocates of a gritty artistic version of reality, life on the city streets, poverty and violence, use terms like authentic to defend their visions and to denounce those who offer what they consider a sugar coated rendering of life. 120

Life on the streets of our rotting and hopeless inner cities isn’t something that you can insulate yourself against with a cheap pair of rose colored glasses. I won’t argue that it’s cold, hard, dangerous and real, but it’s only one version of the game of life in our modern world. However, at the time of this writing, it’s a currently popular theme in film and music. While less sensational in media terms, also authentic and real is a lonely old lady sitting in front of a blasting TV, not because she’s watching the show, but because of the illusion of human contact in a life alone. Authentic and real is a family playing some little game in some suburban tract house, as is a night club full of affluent, young professionals or a bunch of students drinking beer and constructing a future of castles in the air. Being out alone on a windy beach, a gray river silently trudging home to the vast ocean, with no reason to go or to stay is also an authentic experience, one that promotes a reflective state of mind, and one I’ve consciously chosen. When I look around our cities or read the papers, I wonder what are we trying to do and what have we really managed to do. We seem to create an awful tension whenever we interact. Children fuss and fight. Nations and ethnic groups wage eternal war. Families bicker and hurt each other. Neighbors eye each other with mistrust. We can’t seem to get along with each other, and there’s over five billion of us, so it’s getting harder to avoid each other. Perhaps in twenty or thirty years it will be impossible to come to a place like the Smith River and simply stand above it alone, peaceful and reflective. If so, there will be no escape from our love/hate relationship with our fellows. Too cold to stand along the river, but not quite ready to head for home, I went up to Brookings, Oregon to dine on good Italian food and watch the sunset spread an orange film over the darkening ocean. Later that night, along a 121

wooded stream ten miles back in the hills, alone in a National Forest campground, a light drizzle accentuated the darkest night I’ve ever spent. Nurse trees are something you don’t see further south, but up in Del Norte County, in the temperate rain forest, they are as close as a short walk into the woods. Within yards of Highway 101 at Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, you can be lost in a green world that could be the haven for an undiscovered community of dinosaurs. I’ve looked at all the shades of green available in oil and acrylic paints, and I’ve mixed many combinations of those colors, but the subtle shades of green in a redwood rain forest defy any attempt to capture them on canvas. Deep in those forests, where one can drown in hallucinations of form and color, life springs constantly from anything and everything. Trees don’t simply fall and rot. They become the seed beds for new trees. As little pockets of organic material collect in the rotting bark, saplings take hold. Sometimes young trees are lined up, like children after the morning school bell, along the trunk of some fallen giant, roots gradually seeking the ground below and forming patterns like demented lace work or frozen fingers of a tiny waterfall. Sometimes they seem to me like crazy cages designed for trapping the madness we humans generate. It would be wonderful to take our social dementia and, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, give it form and place it among the roots for safe keeping. I think the redwoods would gladly watch over our collective ugliness, allowing us to uncover our glorious inner light. From that rain forest along 101 to Punta Gorda, where the Petrolia School children have their beautiful sign, is less than a hundred miles, but it requires the better part of a day’s drive. The cut off from the north on the 101, starting 122

at Fernbridge, is the narrowest and most deserted paved road I’ve ever traveled. It’s so deserted that when you do pass another vehicle, the people wave madly, assuming that you must be a neighbor. This little road, after winding forever through the hills, drops suddenly down to the water at Cape Mendocino. Next to sections of the lost coast, this is the most deserted beach I’ve ever seen. Looking at the driftwood, the rocks, and the little sand dunes, I felt that nothing on this section of beach had been disturbed for decades. I was going to get out and walk on the beach, but I felt that I’d be violating a place where humans have no business at all. Along this little, hidden section of coast, time seems to move at a slower pace. The truck seemed to crawl along the road, and each log or rock came slowly into view, claimed my full attention, imprinted itself on my memory, and slowly slipped away. The tiny waves seemed to hang without breaking, and each bird became a still life study. I really expected to be the only one at the beach at the mouth of the Mattole River at Punta Gorda, but there was a small family and one other solitary camper. I had made sure that I’d loaded up on water, snacks, and drinks before arriving, since there isn’t anything for many miles except the five building town of Petrolia, seven miles away. It was a quiet, peaceful night. Actually, it was like a long twilight with the moon causing the overcast to glow softly, like a lavender dream. It was a night that descended from whispering quiet to a dark and absolute stillness. I awoke to a cream and purple morning, with the soft rattle of the water on the gravel beach the only sound. The shore birds darted along the water’s edge, poking eager pointy bills deep in the wet sand. The air was as still as frozen eternity, and the sun-bleached drift logs looked like ghosts in humorous and demented poses. Walking on that 123

beach, for a moment I felt like the last person on earth, like the progenitor of a new era. It was time to head for home. Past Honeydew, headed toward Ettersburg, I passed the site of the Earth First! encampment. There wasn’t a sign that anyone had so much as passed that way. It was August, and everything inland from the coast was hot, brown and dry. I tried a bike ride along the Ave. of the Giants, above the Eel, but the heat was so oppressive, that after a few miles the fun had totally gone out of it. Without hesitation, I took the Highway One cut off at Leggett. Just before hitting the beach, I took the old, dirt, Lost Coast road back north for a few miles. Scarcely one lane, winding, and full of holes, it has seen little traffic and few changes since Jack London toured it by wagon at the beginning of the century. From a rise a couple of miles in, I stood and looked over the coast, stretching on and on into the far haze. An endless series of parabolic coves marched north, each one deserted. This was the California coast for millions of years, until one or two hundred years ago. I thought that, in the past, Native Americans may have wandered up here to meditate and become one with the great spirit. This spot had to be an ancient holy place, a place of inner peace and power. As thick skinned and civilized as I was, I could feel it, and it brought me a joyous melancholy, a longing for something I’d never known. From the lost coast, even with stops to enjoy the beach and check the surf, it was an easy drive to my next destination in Sonoma County. But I had to stop to poke around the secret surf spots of the Fort Bragg and Mendocino areas. From Mendocino I looked down at Big River and thought of kayaking either up the river or out from the beach along the Mendocino cliffs. I resolved to take that trip some day, and I’ve since done so, but it’s a trip so lovely and so recent 124

that it must digest like a fine meal before I can put it into the perspective of words.

125

Ch 9 TRIP TWO: DESTINATION NORTH

I suspect that every journey, every quest, every destination is symbolic. Our journeys are inward trips to a ground, a playing field, where we pit ourselves against our self-perceptions, our self-limitations, and attempt to emerge victorious, to survive and to redefine ourselves. Each excursion into the physical world is a brick added to the edifice of self revelation. So it was in the two years I thought about La Push and about the labyrinth of the British Colombian inlets. The actual journey amounted to a confirmation that I am who I’ve chosen to become. Naturally, it’s a bit more complicated than that. There is a physical, emotional and, spiritual rush associated with superimposing your inner blueprint on its physical counterpart, with bringing all the elements together to experience the moment with all your attention and passion focused. It doesn’t even require major adventures that have fermented for years before being realized. Sometimes a short hike in damp, misty hills, an encounter with a banana slug, or a visit to the mouth of a singing creek will fill the spaces in your soul and add something priceless to the totality that, in the final summation, is this life you call yourself. In the two years that the dream of La Push and British Columbia had been fermenting in my mind, I had seen New England for the first time and had surfed Cape Cod. I think I could live on Cape Cod if I wasn’t already in love with the west coast. The Cape is a place of beauty, a place for artists, a place for lovers of the sea, and a place of seasons. 126

Unfortunately, it is also a place too tamed by the hand of man. I had kayaked rivers and bays in several New England states. At the time I still had the inflatable boat, and I’d packed it in a suitcase and had taken it along, in addition to a body board and wetsuit. I loved the east, but was anxious to get back to the rugged cliffs, cold lonely beaches and deep redwoods forests of home. The summer following the New England trip I’d seen Costa Rica for the first time, hiked the cloud forest in the rain, ankle deep in tropical mud, dove the clear bays, and surfed the warm, tropical waters of Tamarindo. Those major excursions and the innumerable trips up and down the coast and into the mountains make it seem that I’d done plenty in a very short time. But something was still missing. For two summers I’d thought about the aborted trip north, the turning around at Westport, the failure to try the Canadian beaches, and that nagging affirmation: “There’s always Surf at La Push.” I had spent much of my summer time and summer money in Costa Rica, and even late in the evening on July 31, I debated with myself about making a long, possibly expensive and perhaps fruitless trip north. On the morning of August first, at the start of a record heat wave, I tossed everything in the truck, dropped the kayak on the top, packed a bag, put film in the camera and started up interstate 5. My plan this time was to do Canada first, knowing myself well enough to realize that if I took the coast, I’d never make it to the border before fall. My truck doesn’t have air conditioning. Actually, with the stuck dash lever and the inability to close off the vent, it doesn’t really have heat either. Hundred degree wind blew in the open window as I hurried north, hoping that once past 127

Shasta it might cool down. The roar of the highway almost covered the roar of the stereo as I pushed up the highway, as if more speed would help me escape the oppressive heat. I passed Lake Shasta without slowing. The lake was sadly low, boat docks sitting high and dry, waiting with upturned, bleached timbers for the first rain. The only problem I have with California, the majority of the state that is, is that rain falls only during a fairly short season, and sometimes precious little of it falls then. I’d been amazed in New England to be almost washed away by a summer storm several times in a couple of weeks. That simply doesn’t happen out here. When it does, every decade or so, it makes headlines. Usually rain comes along as early as late October, but usually well into November, and by April we are lucky to get the odd shower. December can be wet, but more often than not, January is mild. If we are going to escape our usual drought, February and March are the times we get lucky. Forget summer and most of the fall, which are the dry seasons. In order to squeeze a profit out of every square inch of land, we have to stash all the water we can. To this end, the powers that be have erected giant dams along almost every decent river coming down from the Sierra. These busy planners make lakes, fill them up in the winter and spring and slowly drain them the rest of the year. When we dam our rivers, we damn our rivers. We damn the beauty; we damn the natural patterns; we damn our once plentiful fisheries, and we damn the future. The environmental movement grows louder and more impatient, because nobody in industry or government seems to be in any real hurry to change things. When natural rivers are outlawed, only outlaws will have natural rivers. Dam the Eel or the Smith, and they might just make an outlaw out of me. 128

But Shasta was behind me, and I was going over the pass into Oregon. Normally, I’d be gearing down for a visit and a stay with my Ashland friends, but their marriage was coming apart, and they didn’t want anyone in the line of fire. Stopping there was a warm habit, a haven on the road, and I missed having it, as I pressed on into the waning day. Not sure how far I would go or where I might stay, I felt a bit sad as the sun set. I’m an animal that likes to be holed up somewhere after dark, so I started looking around. I just couldn’t bring myself to pay the exorbitant motel prices, so I pressed on into the settling, graying, purple dusk. Twenty-five miles north of Roseburg, at the 150 exit off I-5, I found a private camp ground called Trees of Oregon. Seeing that I didn’t have an R.V. and didn’t intend to erect a major camp for the night, the lady gave me a space for seven bucks. I parked under a tree at last light, made up my sleeping bag bed, opened a beer and my book, and let the song of the night creatures sing me to sleep. I love those little mom and pop camp grounds where everyone is friendly and the price is low, and folks are polite enough to shut up late at night so a tired traveler can fall asleep easily to nature’s sounds. After all, if we wanted to drift off to the sounds of traffic, yelling, loud TV sets and all that city crap, we could save a few hundred miles and simply stay home in the fetid and festering bowels of the city. Sleeping out of doors in the back of a pickup truck guarantees early awakening. Up at first light, I watched the sun, like a bubble of molten lava, rise from the eastern hills. I dropped off the restroom key and headed into Drain--which I assumed was a suburb of Sewer--for breakfast at one of those little places that the local farmers go to stuff themselves for a hard day on the range. It sat near the railroad tracks on the north side of the road, just a few blocks from 129

the freeway. I always look for places like that, and I’m never disappointed. The price is always reasonable, and the food is always plentiful. Another advantage to putting away a heavy breakfast, is not having to stop for lunch. North though Oregon is an affair of low passes and lush valleys. It’s a slow-motion roller coaster ride through the plant kingdom. Wooded valleys are bounded by wooded passes and cut by quickly flowing, wooded rivers. Everything is sensuously green, and the wide, fast, lusty rivers run free, clear, and joyful everywhere you look. These scenic, rich undulations continue mile after mile until the last drop into the Willamette Valley, lush, fertile, and wet. Oregonians, please keep the Californians out, even if you have to pass pest control laws. Keep your rivers undammed and undamned, your forests green, your towns rustic, and your way of life intact. With the exception of coffee and stretch breaks, I didn’t stop until reaching Seattle in early afternoon. Seattle, the home of endless hills with views of the water, of plaid shirts and high top back boots, of L.A.-like freeway traffic, of music’s grunge scene, and of phone books without yellow pages, is a puzzle to wander in for a virtual stranger. All I knew was that there was a kayak store where I could get information on conditions in Washington and British Columbia. The word “kayak” was in the name, but I had no address, and there were no yellow pages in any phone book at any phone booth. So, I stopped for lunch, picking up one of the newspapers that are left around for customers to read. Thumbing through one of the papers, looking for a particular kind of ad, I found what I wanted, an ad for the kayak store. A bit more driving about and asking directions and I was there, along the water at Lake Union, feeling very much at home again with others who obsessed about being 130

out on the water. With the record heat wave, kayak renters were lined up on the dock, and the silver-blue water was dotted with the narrow boats. There, after studying the available literature, I bought a guide that saved my trip and possibly my life. But, I spent too much time talking kayaking and looking at books. I hit the freeway at rush hour. Seattle has rush hours that can make a Lost Angeles resident feel at home. After what seemed forever, I was free of greater Seattle and bound for the border. Thinking about all the information in the book, I wanted to be able to study it carefully before launching somewhere in the thousands of miles of inland water that stretches between the border and Alaska. With this goal in mind, I pulled into Bellingham to do what I almost never do on the road, check into a motel. A quick look around town made me feel that I’d made a mistake. Every motel was more than I wanted to pay, and I almost got back on the freeway for Canada. But, in one motel I got the word that the border was jammed. I’d arrived at the end of a three day weekend, in Canada, and weekenders were packed at the border trying to get home for work the next day. The border wait was two to three hours. That would finish my chance of catching a ferry to anywhere, and I’d be in the same boat, trying to find a motel, only much later at night. Walking out of a Motel 6 that was full, and feeling discouraged in the bargain, I saw a couple in an old Ford Pinto. They handed me a coupon and told me of a place that was 27 bucks a night, and they tried to give me directions, but finally told me to follow them. I paid my $27 and went up to the room, only to find an old sofa bed. For a moment I was upset, until I realized that the other door didn’t lead to the bathroom, but to a bedroom with a full bed. Upon looking around, I realized that the motel used to be an apart131

ment house, and my room was a one bedroom apartment with a full kitchen. Not too bad for the price. Not feeling like chasing down a restaurant, I walked to the local store, bought a load of snack food, a bit of beer and a bottle of wine. With these creature comforts, I pulled a chair out on my balcony and watched the mountains to the east become dark and mysterious in the failing light, the day’s colors dim, and the world settle down for the night. Then I drank wine and read my guide book until I had a good idea where I was headed, was pleasantly drunk, filled with the sense of the upcoming adventure, and thrilled that I was able to relax so totally at a price so affordable. The following morning would find me in Canada. For me, thinking of Seattle is thinking of damp, leaden skies, eternal drizzle broken up with occasional rain storms. Seattle conjures up images of walking against a stiff sea breeze, parka zipped up against the beat of the wet air. Yet every time I’ve been to Seattle, I’ve hit it during a heat wave. It must have been 90 that afternoon, my shorts, sandals and T-shirt appropriate dress. It reminded me of my first visit a decade earlier. Long before reaching town, I’d found victims of the heat. A grade miles south, near Olympia, had been littered with cars with hoods up and steam pulsing from radiators. Cars not used to temperatures above cool, were showing the results of years of lack of attention to cooling systems that had long been taken for granted. This last time it was even hotter, although it was cooler there than any place south or north of it. In fact I had a strong desire to pull my kayak off the truck and enjoy a few hours of urban kayaking in busy Union Lake, surrounded with apartments and businesses. The locals were taking advantage of the weather, even though it was a Monday. Most of the boats were out, and people were still coming in 132

for rentals. Perhaps I would have stayed, but I could Kayak near a town any time I wished. I have Monterey and San Franciso bays right in my back yard. I had a taste for more remote and natural waterways, places of stillness and elusive animal eyes peering through the woods. Besides, there is nothing more lonely for me than to be alone in a city, where I know no one. It’s suffocating to be a stranger on the street, eating alone, and driving the avenues looking for a motel where I can hole up in front of some banal TV show that will give me a momentary illusion of company while I slip slowly into sleep. I needed to be out of town well before dark. Bellingham was different. It wasn’t a city, big and impersonal. The managers of the motel, a young family, were friendly and told me all about themselves. People came and went below my balcony, exchanging words of cheer as they passed. Bellingham was an experience to remember, although I spent one short night there. I’ll never forget the sight of those dark mountains, canyons of shadow, marching summer clouds, the smell and taste of lands wild and mysterious, just outside the range of the well ordered little town. Sitting on that balcony late in a hot summer night, reading the kayak guide until the last light failed, I’d looked occasionally up to watch the landscape gather to a uniform darkness, in a drama that made the Napolianic wars seem like a grade school play. Even though the northbound traffic that Tuesday morning was still thick, and the border crossing a long one, I loved Canada from the moment I entered. Just beyond the border is the tourist information center. Inside there are racks and racks of maps and brochures for every part of the province. Facing that wall of information was a row of windows, like those in a bank. Behind each was a pleasant woman in a 133

starched uniform. I walked to the first and was greeted by a beautiful woman in her early twenties, sandy hair, chiseled features, lilting voice and deep green eyes. Even if I hadn’t needed information, I would have found an excuse to talk to her. I plied her with questions for half an hour, and she filled me up with the feel, the sights, the people, the roads, the mystique, the fragrance, and the hospitality of British Columbia. Through all my tedious questions, she never showed a hint of irritation or boredom. Finally, she drew a short cut on a map that allowed me to circumvent Vancouver and to make straight for the waterways I’d spent half the night reading about. A few yards past the information center I made a right turn and traveled the couple of miles to Highway 15, the next northbound highway. Away from the humdrum of the freeway and all of the suburbs that gradually compound themselves until they become greater Vancouver, I rolled down a narrow road, straight as a ruler, that went up and down hills through farms and ranches, past roadside fruit stands, selling every kind of berry one could wish for. Kilometer after relaxing kilometer went by, a border station on the radio, playing good rock and roll and giving weather reports in American and metric units. I was almost disappointed to hit the freeway. Somewhere an that freeway, Canada 1, I passed a great river. Signs of logging and industry hugged the banks, but that didn’t take away from the magnificent countryside. Even the edge of Vancouver that I skirted in route to the bridge was lovely. What kind of a country is it where even the damned suburbs are inviting! Before I could contemplate that question, I was over the bridge and turning off on Dollarton Highway. From Dollarton I went out Deep Cove Road to Deep Cove on Indian Arm. 134

The little guide book was well worth the money. I made my turn, stopped for some snacks to have out on the water and proceeded to pull right up to the launch point, at the bottom of the village of Deep Cove. This was, from the first glance, a perfect place to begin a solitary Canadian kayak trip. There was a delightful little community built around a bay located on the fifteen or twenty mile long inlet known as Indian Arm. This is an arm off Burrard Inlet, which empties out into the Strait of Georgia, near the ferry route to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Burrard Inlet separates Vancouver from North Vancouver, so Indian Arm is just three or four miles out of what you might call downtown water. There’s the lovely thing about British Columbia. You can paddle away from a city, houses and boat traffic, and in a few minutes you could easily be in the wilderness. So it was at Indian Arm. There was a parking lot with a three day limit, for boaters going all the way up the arm. I parked and carried the boat down the hill, past the club and rental place to the beach. I loaded my snacks, camera and extra clothes, and I launched right behind a party of four boats. This was kayaker country, a feeling of comfort, of familiar, popular day paddling water. When one travels alone, there is always the unease of going out into unknown territory, not knowing local conditions, hazards, and the like. So, my first paddle was in one of the most popular spots, and even though it was a weekday, there were people everywhere. The bay was lined with picturesque beach houses, most with their own boat dock. What a Life! There was a marina or public dock that I paddled by. I was hoping, having read and heard about the winds that come up and churn the water, that things would be calm outside the little bay. They were. Not only was it calm, but the heat wave was still in 135

full force, and I was sweating in my nylon shorts and tee shirt. As I followed the shore east of the little bay, the houses continued, some looking like weekend cabins and others like palaces, three story, multi-decked mansions. Civilization continued for a mile or two. Then I was out in the natural world, trees and rocks lined the shore, and the only other people were the motor boaters who passed me. The local kayakers seemed content to play about the islands near the cove. As I paddled through the hot summer afternoon, watching the thick, temperate rain forest on both sides, I suddenly became aware of things above me. Looking up above the hills and low mountains that rose everywhere from the water, I saw for the first time, the snow and ice covered peaks that rose silently and majestically behind the greenery. It was as if the high peaks that form the backbone of the Sierra had been moved right next to San Francisco Bay or Cape Cod or any sheltered coastal water. The juxtaposition was uncanny. At water level it felt like some tropical beach in Mexico, and rising all around was Alaska or the Alps. I was mesmerized as I pulled steadily up the arm toward a huge power plant of some kind, farther up the other bank. Curiosity got the better of me and I paddled for it. By the time I reached it, I’d left civilization miles behind, and this was the only man made object in sight. A big sign stood right in front of it, facing the water. I couldn’t read it yet. Several pipes, big enough to drive a train through, flowed over the tops of the backing hill and down into the building, which was about three or four stories high. Similar pipes came out the front of the building and ended at the water, gaping maws of rusted steel. I finally got close enough to read the sign. It said, “DANGER.” At any time, without notice, these pipes 136

could open, disgorging vast amounts of water. I hurried to paddle away from the front of those pipes, even though the place looked like it could well have been abandoned for decades. I followed the far shore back until I saw an island and paddled over to it. There was a boat dock and some signs that it might be someone’s place, but further down there was a beach, so I pulled in. I was alone on the island, and I walked around, following a path and checking everything carefully, thinking that one could camp here. As I left the island and rounded the tip, a sign told me that this was a provincial park and that I could indeed camp here any damn time I wished without charge. Another island, steep, with no place to land, was separated from what I thought was a much bigger island. But I later found that it was a peninsula jutting out from the south bank, wooded and covered with expensive homes. On that peninsula was a public beach, and I was amazed to see people swimming around their boat. This may have been a hot summer day, but it was Canada, the far north, frigid waters and all that. I assumed that the water would be that much colder than the ocean around San Francisco, which was far too cold for a refreshing dip without a wetsuit. I pulled in at the beach. The family in the water seemed to really be enjoying themselves, so I had to give it a try. I walked in cautiously, expecting my teeth to chatter. It wasn’t bad. I took a deep breath and took a plunge. The water was warm, not Costa Rica warm by a country mile, but warmer than any beach north of Santa Barbara, and one hell of a lot warmer than any mountain lake. I swam around, stretched my kayakcramped body, frolicked for some time, and climbed up on the beach to eat the snacks I’d brought. Sitting there in trunks, warm and refreshed, I looked up 137

at the white peaks, seemingly just out of my grasp, and I was amazed at this wondrous land of contrasts, breathtaking vistas, and startling surprises. Later, after loading up my boat, I debated whether to pack my camp gear and stay free on the island, but finally decided against it. Instead I took to the little town for some food and brew. I found a great little pub with good sandwiches and several local beers on tap. It was perhaps a block from the water, and I could look out the window at the long afternoon shadows over Indian Arm. It was late afternoon when I drove up toward the first ferry terminal along the sunshine coast. Just before the ferry terminal I turned inland on highway 99 toward Squamish. Just past Porteau Cove I found a campground across from a tall and spectacular waterfall. They had a store; they had restrooms; they had room, and the price was about 10 bucks American. Under Canadian stars, just a few feet from another major inlet, Howe Sound, which I’d explore from the other, more remote shore the next day, and with a view of a waterfall slipping centimeter by centimeter into the twilight, I sipped my cold Canadian beer and read my American book and thanked my international good fortune that I was blessed with enough awareness to totally enjoy this slice of heaven. At that moment, surrounded by campers enjoying a vacation in perfect summer weather, I knew that my trip would be flawless. There would be no accidents, no failure to find a camping spot, no sudden squalls, no thieves in the night, no financial or mechanical disasters. This would be a charmed trip. I couldn’t lose, couldn’t fail to have a wonderful time, couldn’t get sick, couldn’t drown. I was free to do whatever I wished. My life was totally charmed until I once again set foot on home and hearth. I was loose, alive, unfettered and so deliriously free. 138

It was another bright summer morning on the Sunshine Coast. And there I was, waiting to take my first ride on a British Columbian ferry. Talking to people, I realized that I had been wise to put off the crossing until morning. I’d considered making for a late ferry after dinner the night before, but had decided against it, figuring that there was a lot more on the mainland side and therefore more places to camp. Had I gone for it, I probably would have waited out a couple of boats and perhaps would have missed the last one. During peak summer season, people pack in from all over the place, and evening crossings can at times be backed up by three boats, mostly on weekends. As the massive ferry glided slowly into the open water, the entire world was zoomed toward me on every side. Great expanses of water gave way to massive islands and shorelines of epic proportions, each stretching in all directions including up to the sky and down to the mirrored sky in the glistening water. The high peaks above the peaks above peaks were perpetually strewn with glaciers. They stood at the top of the world and worlds away. I thought for a moment that if I could have climbed higher on the boat, I could have seen yet a farther, grander range of peaks, perhaps somewhere up in Alaska. Everything was on such a scale that islands the size of San Francisco jutted nonchalantly out of the water, bounded by other, much bigger islands, and then the mainland. Such an island is Gambier Island. I passed it realizing that I’d be seeing another part of it in a few hours. The ferry trip took perhaps forty minutes, but the scene plays out at any speed I wish. At times I remember it as a couple of minutes, and other times it becomes a epic journey in itself, rock, tree, water and ice lavished freely on a canvas of immeasurable scope. Bold lines moved upward and outward from any point of focus. A strange perspective 139

this was, space so vast that there was the effect of foreshortening. Everything emerged from everything else. Everything was foreground and background at the same time. Then it was time to go below decks and start engines. The bulk of the traffic went through Gibsons and north along the main highway. I turned right toward Port Mellon, per my guide book, which I found to be outdated. It said that I could launch from the pulp mill at the end of the road. I pulled in and asked the receptionist about it, and she said that there was no such place, that the gates are locked after the shift ends, and I wouldn’t be able to get the truck out until morning. Someone in a suit and name tag walked through, and she called him over. He told me that back up the road a few blocks was a brown apartment house, and I could turn there and go to the end of the road and launch. The short, side road ended between some houses, and a dirt track lead down to the water. I followed it until it ended at the shore. There was a wide spot to pull up and park, and an old, battered picnic table attested to this being the only place around that might pass for a public beach. Some teenagers wandered the shore a quarter mile away, and I wondered how safe my stuff would be, left alone in this out of the way spot for the whole day. I remembered the deep assurance that came to me under the stars the night before. So, without giving it another thought, I locked everything up and lugged the boat down the rocky beach to the water. There was a narrow stretch of water between shore and a huge log float or jam or whatever they call it. This went all up and down the beach, with occasional channels leading from shore to open water. One of those channels was about a half block east. I knew nothing about these big, floating log islands except that they can be dangerous to mess around with. I didn’t know if they shifted about, pos140

sibly blocking my return trip to the truck. I wondered what I would do if I couldn’t get back up that channel. Armed with no knowledge, I dismissed the notion, realizing again that this trip was charmed and that nothing bad could possibly happen. As I stroked into open water, a subtle change started to work within me. It was becoming clear that nothing in life is left to chance, and that I had never been, nor ever would be a victim, at the mercy of blind fate or some unknown event. I was starting to understand that it was only me in control of my life, that everything that had or ever will befall me was of my own choosing at some level or another. The idea planted itself deeper with every stroke of my paddle, and as the seed of that idea grows, uncertainty and apprehension slowly give way to unbounded joy and enthusiasm. I was out on Howe Sound, a vast waterway that went for miles. About a mile from shore was a large island, and behind it appeared to be another, much larger that I figured for Gambier. Keeping the giant pulp mill, with its mountains of tan sawdust and its smoking chimneys, to my left, I made for the island, checking occasionally for my position relative to my launch site. By the time the truck disappeared, I figured I could find the place no matter what direction I was coming from. I rounded the western tip of the small island, and there as big as a major city and as high as a small mountain was Gambier Island, densely wooded and seemingly uninhabited. It was another half mile to the shore of the big island, a shore lined with more of those log floats. It was disheartening to witness the scope of the destruction of the forest. I paddled close to them, studying the shore, looking for wildlife, and getting into the feeling of being alone. For, unlike Indian Arm, with the parking lot, boat club, houses, 141

and other boaters, this was deserted. I had put in at one of the few possible places for miles. The closest docks were miles back in Gibsons, and beyond the pulp mill there were no roads at all. I had an unbelievable expanse of water and land totally to myself. As my mind started to quiet, it began to expand to fill the space and time that stretched before me. My little book said that for scenic beauty the best kayaking in the area was the channel between Gambier and Anvil Islands. This was around the eastern end of the island, several miles away. The book also said that a kid’s camp of some kind was along the island, and from there a trail went to a lake in the high country of Gambier. So I followed the coast east, dwarfed by scenery that seemed to explode out of the water and straight up to the sky. It was so quiet that each paddle stroke was like a slap on a snare drum. Birds cried sharply as they passed, slicing the still air. WaveIetts sloshed dully against the logs. My paddle gave a regular pattern of slaps on the surface. Beyond these sounds, and the faint rush of a slight breeze, the world was silent. Perhaps that was why the seaplane came as such a shock. Lost in reflection and suspended in time, I was startled by the drone of an engine overhead. Looking up, I saw the little plane, pontoons hanging below, dropping down as it passed. Then it made a tight turn and came straight back for me. For a moment I thought it was going to fly low to see who was there, but then I realized it was landing. As fast as I could, I fumbled for my camera, opened it up, checked the light and speed, and tried to adjust the focus for where I thought the plane would be. This happened in seconds. The plane was coming in fast and suddenly was on the water. Bringing the camera up to my eye, hand on the focus ring, I snapped just as it passed me, perhaps sixty feet away. I spun around hard to follow it and saw it pull to a stop near 142

one of the many log islands along the shore. Timber people were there to check the logs, perhaps to earmark some for towing to a mill or wherever they take them. By now they were a quarter mile behind me, but I had my picture and wished again for the solitude. For an hour the island gave every indication of being deserted and endless. Then around a curve there emerged a dock with some paddle boats on it. Then a beach came into view, with the cabins that are associated with a typical summer camp. A big sign on the beach told me that this was the camp in the guide book, the one that had the trail to the lake leading out of it. I pulled in to shore. There didn’t seem to be a soul around, and I was slightly uncomfortable about trespassing, but I was hot from all the paddling, so I jumped in the warm water and swam around, splashing lazily in the calm shallows, feeling I had the entire Howe Sound to myself, my personal playground. Then a young man appeared. He sat down on a bench up the beach, gave me a quick glance and started to read a book. When I got out of the water, I greeted him, and he strolled down the beach to talk to me. I was thinking that he was going to tell me to move along, that this was private property, just as I had thought that my truck wasn’t safe back on the beach. But this was British Columbia, not California, and the young man simply asked me how my trip was going. I asked him about the lake in the high county, and he said that the trail was obscured and quite easy to lose. In fact, he said, a troop of kids with one of the older kids as a guide had gotten lost looking for the lake and had wandered around for an entire day getting back at dark. He said that he’d show me the trail head if I had a mind to go, but he couldn’t promise I’d find the lake. I didn’t want to wander around all day, only to try to 143

paddle back in the dark, so I fished out my provisions, had lunch on the beach, bid good-bye to the young guy, and set out again, thinking that I’d found the only human habitation on the island. In just minutes I arrived at the next cove and another boat dock. A sign proclaimed that it was a yacht Club. What a great place for one, miles from any road. One must have a boat to even get there. I had paddled for almost three hours from the closest road. A couple were sunning themselves on a boat and greeted me as I passed, asking me where I was from. I told them, and they said that I should give up that foolishness and move up here forthwith. I agreed, and told them I intended to one day, and I meant it. What friendly people! In many places the attitude toward tourists is that they are tolerated for a time while they spent their money, but they certainly weren’t encouraged to hang around, let alone settle in. Even though I was spending most of my time alone, I’d met dozens of locals, and every one of them was delightful. Then I rounded another small point and there was Anvil Island and the touted channel. I started into it. The far shore, the eastbound highway, and the place I’d camped the night before, loomed dimly in the hazy distance. This passage wasn’t anything special as far as I could tell, and I wouldn’t have time to explore Anvil Island. In fact the afternoon was waning, and I could feel the tide coming in, so unless it turned soon, Id be paddling uphill on the return trip. I knew I had at least a three hour trip back to the truck. Tidal conditions and odd stops to check things out could easily make that four or more. After dark I would have had one hell of a time finding that narrow passage between log floats that leads back to the truck. Of course my mind was still fixed on California style sunsets. It hadn’t registered yet that one can still see fairly well by the light left at nine 144

at night. I decided to start the return trip. There seemed no point in retracing my route, between the islands and past the yacht club. There was a low spot along the shore of the mainland. While most of the shore rose almost straight up out of the water in steep expanses of towering trees, one stretch appeared to be the mouth of a river. There was something that looked like a beach, backed by a grassy-colored green. Behind the green area there seemed to be a canyon that gently ascended until it merged with the general background of snow capped peaks. It was the only spot that was really different, and I wanted to check it out. So I made straight for the shore, a few miles away. Being out in the middle of a huge sound Iike Howe creates interesting sensations. To begin with, there is the feeling of being small, very, very small. Sitting only inches above the water, surrounded by miles and miles of water and hundreds of miles of mountains, I felt like a speck, a solitary asteroid in the swirling vastness of space. Even the chop that came up in the middle, brought by the afternoon wind running up the sound. was higher than the boat. I found myself looking over the tops of the little swells like an old lady peering just over the steering wheel of her big sedan. The details of the island were fading, yet the low spot on the mainland didn’t seem to be getting closer. The chop, the tide, and the wind conspired to slow me up, and it took the longest time before I actually felt I was making for the shore. Details started to emerge. At one end of this low area. there looked to be a boat just inside the mouth of some river. I wondered if I’d have the time to explore a bit of that river before heading back. I put my back into the paddle, trying to make up some time, and my muscles were tired when I got close enough to see that it wasn’t a boat. It wasn’t a river either. I was very close to the shore now, and the boat was some 145

kind of crane or dredge. Big construction equipment all looks pretty much the same to me. The river it was sitting in was just a cove delineated by a short rock wall. A sign on the dock that held the machine said that this was private property and that I wasn’t to trespass. I turned west. That which I imagined a beach was indeed a beach. Grass behind it gave way to a forested canyon that sloped gently up toward the distant roof of the world. I pulled in close, but the water was so shallow that I grounded while still a hundred feet from the beach. I followed the shore back toward the pulp mill, now well out of sight. At one point there was a small tuck in the shore. In that tuck a tiny waterfall dropped almost straight down from a considerable height. I managed to pull in close enough to get partially under it. I was hot and tired from all the effort, and the shower was refreshing. But now I wanted another swim. My wants were answered by a little hook in the shore. Just out from the hook was a small clump of rocks that jutted up just above the surface. Between the rocks and the shore was a nice little swimming hole, maybe chest deep. Man overboard! It still amazed me that sea water this far north could be so absolutely pleasant to fall into. And there I was, not a soul for a couple of miles in any direction, and my own personal bathing beach, my own personal bird companions, my own personal mollusks on the rocks, had I wanted to harvest some. “Serenity” is the word that comes to mind. But serenity is alien to civilized man, and after a few minutes, I actually began to miss the sights and sounds of humanity, so I set out for the truck. I watched that big pulp mill for well over two miles as I slowly came up to it and passed it. I had it memorized by the time I finally sat in front of the massiveness of it. I can only imagine how much pulp a place that big can mill. It 146

was of the size and scope of an auto assembly plant, and the piles of sawdust were at least three stories high. Giant flat barges were tied to the dock. a dock so big that the barges weren’t really noticed from a couple of miles away. It took ten minutes just to paddle past the place, and I paddle quite fast. My feeling about the tide had been right. By the time I beached, the water was within five feet of the truck. When I’d launched, I’d carried the kayak perhaps fifty feet to the water. But now I stepped out of the boat, tossed it on the truck, and looked to see that nothing had been screwed with. It occurred to me that this could be a place to come back to at night, assuming camping was legal, the residents wouldn’t make a fuss, and the water wouldn’t rise much higher. I kept the idea viable, but for the moment I had to move on. There was no place near there to get a meal and a brew and I really had a hunger and thirst. Back at Gibsons on the main sunshine coast highway, I Saw my favorite signs of civilization. A place that advertised food and drink at affordable prices got my attention. I was dirty, sweaty, damp, tousled, sandy, wrinkled, matted, smelly, and unshaven. The hostess was delighted to have me choose that humble establishment, and she put me near the restrooms, perhaps as a hint that I might go in and freshen up. By the second beer, I got the hint. In retrospect, I can see why no women flirted with me on that trip. That wonderful little woman back at the tourist information center, at the border, had given me a list of accommodations with prices, so I opened it up. My goal was to bring the trip in at $500 or less, counting gas, food, camping, everything. I saw a place up the road that had spaces for about ten bucks American. It was near Sechelt, my next kayaking destination. So I hurried to get there before dark. 147

They had one very small spot left at that price, but all I needed was a place to park, so I took it, changed into my trunks and went for a twilight swim in their pool. On the road, a swim equals a bath, so I dried off and curled up with my book, hoping all the noise of the families pressed so close together would stop by the time I got sleepy. Again I forgot that this was Canada and that courtesy was alive and well. At ten sharp all the noise stopped. A few camp fires were going, and the occasional rattle of utensils and the clink of wine glasses were all that told me that others were still awake. Unlike the typical summer camper in California, Canadians don’t feel it necessary to crank up the car stereos and yell, “fuckin’ A, man!” in order to have a good time camping. We were a campground of laid back people enjoying the fact that we were surrounded by nature and not by the din of the city. There was a bit of a community abutting the campground. Sechelt is a town, with shopping, restaurants and all the rest. In fact there was a mini mall right next to the campground. This wasn’t out in the woods camping. It was on the highway, on the edge of town, near stores and services. It wasn’t actually camping at all; it was a place to crash after a long day and to rest up for another long day. There was a cafe in the mini mall next door to the campground. The service was friendly, and I got a hearty breakfast to tide me over. On these out in nature days, I never eat lunch, only light snacks, like trail mix or candy bars for energy. Stopping in the middle of some wondrous activity to sit down to a meal, seems both a bother and a waste of time. Whole days can lose themselves in routine activities. While in Sechelt, I also checked in with the local dive shop for information on the tides and the intimate perspective on the inlet. I found that, with all the miles of convoluted inland waterways, the tides up there are screwy. Each 148

area has its own tides, and there are books that you can buy to calculate the tides at each area, but these books read like navigational tables for international shipping. Figuring tides that way isn’t impossible, only a time consuming pain in the ass. It was easier to check in at each local spot, with a boat or dive shop. Tides that run for miles, through narrow inlets can at times flow like a river, and there are places where at certain times it becomes like white water rapids, complete with whirlpools and standing waves and a current far too fast to paddle against. Although I opted not to try any of those spots on this my maiden trip, I still tried to plan my trips so that the tide worked for me rather than against me. The object was, after all, to explore as much as possible in a given amount of time. Why spend hours going a couple of miles. The Sechelt inlet doubles back to the west from a sound further north and comes within a mile or so of connecting to the Strait of Georgia. There is a narrow land bridge between the inlet and the strait, and that’s where the community of Sechelt sits, a modern vacation town and an ancient site of a Native American tribal center. At the northeast end of the Sechelt inlet, where it meets the Jervis Inlet at the community of Egmont, there is a very narrow spot called the Skookumchuck Rapids. Passage through the rapids is unsafe except four times a day at slack tide, and one had better be able to read the tide book. At maximum flow the current moves at up to thirty miles per hour and equals a class five white water run. Well, I wasn’t planning on going that far. What I hoped was to paddle past the Salmon Inlet to Narrows Inlet and up narrows Inlet for a few miles. There was a kind of a beach that’s used for a launch spot. It was the only place where the road and the water came together. There was no actual parking area, so kayakers 149

just parked on the road in front of people’s homes. It was a popular spot, and I met a couple of groups packing their boats for a several day trip up Narrows Inlet, groups equipped with tents, sleeping bags, cooking stuff, food, changes of clothes, cameras, and all the rest. That much gear won’t fit in one boat, but these people travel in groups, distributing the gear so that everything fits and no one is overloaded. I considered packing over night stuff just in case, but in trying to pack it, I found that the heavy, oversized sleeping bag that works so well in the truck was too big to fit in the small compartment in the kayak, and I hadn’t bothered to bring the lighter bag. After all, I’d made the decision to make the trip, packed, and departed on the morning of August first. The next best idea was to bring all I needed for a long day on the water, change of clothes, snacks. sunscreen, camera, and a book. I started off along the shore, first passing a beautiful wonderland community on the water, among some picture book islands. Some of the homes were on the mainland, and others were on the small islands. Some islands had three or four houses nestled on them, and others were the private domains of a single family. Each had a dock and a boat. I paddled between them, gently brushing a serene, relaxed lifestyle that I could easily come to enjoy. As I moved slowly under a foot bridge between islands, scarcely eight feet apart, watching the delicate bridge and the well kept little docks, set against miniature pine forests resembling a child’s high Sierra, I had the feeling that this wasn’t a real community, a place where people lived and paid bills and left to go to work. This was a fairyland, a theme park, all so perfect, so flawless. I wasn’t in a kayak on a natural waterway; I was on a ride set on underwater rails, and I expected to see lifelike dolls come out of each 150

door and bow as I passed. It was one of those places of dreams, a place unchanging through endless perfect sunny days. A cove came up, formed by a rocky point that was a picnic area, boats tied up all around and people enjoying the lovely day. I didn’t stop. Houses gave way to wilderness, and then one of those wonderful provincial parks appeared. There was a natural little beach with a provincial park sign in the middle, signs of a campfire ring just back from the sand, and a tent tucked under some trees. I was to find that these little parks, scarcely more than places for two or three tent sites, were all along these popular waters. Careful packing of a compact tent, lightweight bag, small butane stove, lantern and some food, and a kayaker could stay out, free of charge, for days on end. Not only kayakers used these spots. There were power boats beached along these parks. The roads may have been congested and highway camp grounds at a premium, but boaters had a wide open world to enjoy. The wind started to come up from the west, creating some chop. The wind was at my back, making paddling easier. But it was an illusion, like coasting down a hill on a bike. Sooner or later you have to turn around and go back up that hill. Unless I stayed out until the wind changed, probably late evening or early morning, I would have to paddle back uphill. I thought about that as the wind continued to build. Further up the inlet, I came along side a small power boat with three guys around sixty years old. They were picnicking, fishing, hanging out, enjoying the day, whatever. I hailed them, and being typical British Columbians, they tossed me a beer and invited me to pull up and talk awhile. They were over from Vancouver Island, from Nanaimo, and we described our respective homes. Time slipped away 151

in careless chatter, chatter that I’d missed, not having had more than scraps of conversation in days. When the subject of politics came up, the day was a goner. Just about everyone likes to bitch about the government, and we spent a considerable time practicing one-upmanship regarding the follies and foibles of our respective law makers. They objected to the high taxes that socialize the country, but I saw a clean, beautiful, prosperous land. Perhaps the old adage about the grass being greener really applies. As delightful as the conversation was, I could have stayed out there all day. However, suddenly I realized that the chop was bouncing me around like a baby carriage on a cobblestone lane. I bid my new friends good-bye and continued toward a cove that sounded interesting in the guide book. Unfortunately, at the Salmon Inlet branch I realized that I probably wouldn’t make my destination. The chop was higher than the boat, and the wind was blowing hard. Crossing the inlet meant almost a mile of open, unprotected water. My hat blew off, hit the water, and was carried rapidly around the point into the inlet. I chased after it, but it was moving too fast. I thought about crossing the channel, perhaps not being able to get back until after dark or the next morning. Had my sleeping bag fit in my boat, there wouldn’t have been a problem spending the night, but I wasn’t prepared. I turned around, taking five minutes to round the point I’d just passed in a matter of seconds. Going back was like walking up a very steep, very muddy hill. I seemed to be slipping back almost as fast as I moved forward. The chop was coming over the side, and I was lucky that the day was hot. Other kayakers shot past me, a group loaded with equipment, bound for that cove I wouldn’t reach, out for a couple of days of camping, and planning to return in the still of an early morning. After an hour on a liquid treadmill, one of those little 152

provincial parks appeared. I was getting hungry and tired of paddling almost in place, so I pulled in. My reasonable assumption was that it couldn’t get much windier, I could kick back with food and the novel I’d almost finished, rest up and then finish my abbreviated trip. I had to scout things out before settling down, so I walked past the deserted tent and camp site to a trail that led up the hill, through the thick, green temperate rain forest. I walked up the hill, clothed only in swim trunks and sandals. The forest thickened as I climbed the hill. The dense ferns crowded me, reaching almost to my chest. The ground was damp, and under the canopy of trees, the grass was still an early spring green. Millions of tiny insects buzzed around me. I walked until the trail became impassable, until I would have to kick and claw my way through the underbrush to continue. I turned around to see nothing but forest. The beach was gone, and I was alone, alone as far as my own species was concerned. From the forest came the sounds of a million living things, the busy insects, the birds singing in the trees, the small mammals and scuttling lizards, and the occasional crunch of a shy, hoofed animal grazing in a thicket. I felt almost like one of the animals, practically carrying no gear, on the verge of scampering into the dense forest like a nervous rabbit. Every so often that urge comes over me, the urge to just abandon my human trappings and dash off into the wilderness like some lost tribesman who makes news when he comes out of the bush, beard to his knees after twenty years alone. The first time I’d felt that way was on an early spring skiing trip, returning from Utah over northern, almost deserted Nevada, seeing range after range of empty, snow covered mountains. I would crest a pass, look ahead for twenty or thirty miles at a valley that seemed to contain no sign of 153

human or even animal life, see the road go back up the other side, still empty, to another range that stretched north and south for uncountable miles. I’d felt the strange desire to pull over, strip down, and dash out into the sage, howling like a demented coyote. I’d resisted the urge in Nevada, and again I resisted it in British Columbia. A certain conditioning holds us like a straight jacket, no matter how free we feel intellectually. This time a short walk brought me back to the deserted beach. I unpacked fruit and snacks and my book, sat down in the sand with my back against a log and lost myself in a fast moving story. The wind, however, didn’t abate, and I had to work my way against a squall, slowly back to the truck. But, on way back, I explored that little cove around the picnic area, only to find a young couple in kayaks. They were just starting out on a three or four day trip, each boat well packed. They were taking their time, knowing that there were plenty of places to stay and not being in any big hurry to get someplace. They were Californians, so we talked of home before we parted company. I’ll remember them, young, athletic, adventurous, and in synch with each other. It was an unbeatable combination of romance and friendship, something we all dream of in a mate. A summer day ends in Canada like a cat naps, languidly, luxuriously, and unhurriedly. As I drove the few short kilometers back to town, the day was already over, and I knew my first chore was to find a place to spend the night. It wasn’t dark, not even close. The sun was simply low in its arc, approaching the horizon like a commercial aircraft approaches the airport. I didn’t want to stay in the place I’d been the night before. The plan was to push a bit further north, as I’d done daily since leaving home. My tourist guide book gave me the name of a few inexpensive camp154

ing spots up the road. By this time I realized that the provincial parks, the ones you can drive to rather than boat to, would invariably be full. It was just like being in California or Oregon. Tourists go for the high profile spots, the national parks, the state parks, the provincial parks. People make reservations to camp, taking the spontaneity out of travel. Personally, I have reservations about reservations. The first and cheapest place had changed, the camping area was gone. The next was at a place called Madeira Park. The campground, a small community and a marina were on a small, perfectly scenic bay about 30 kilometers north of Sechelt. At first I was unimpressed with the piece of gravel, picnic bench, and fire ring that constituted my camp site. But I soon realized that it was ideal for this hour, this night, this mood. The owners told me of a place to eat over at Irvines Landing, only five minutes by boat but almost a half hour by car. I should have put my kayak in the water, yet I don’t regret the drive, down the highway to a side road, past one of the most lovely lakes I’ve ever seen, and down to a dock in a bay, the opposite side of the bay I was camped at. The place was crowded, and the few waitresses were on the run. I ordered a draft beer while I waited, and since the wait was longer than it should have been, another was brought to me gratis. Happy, laughing, talking boaters were sitting around, pouring down brew and rehashing the lovely day that had now become a soft early twilight. I ate alone, feeling lonely among all the chatter. The food was excellent, the waitresses cheerful in spite of how busy they were, and the beer. . . well I picked up a six pack to go. Twenty feet from my camp site there was a deck, picnic tables and bar-b-cues, and a view of the bay. I opened a beer and stood by the railing. The dying light pulled films 155

of color over the water, turning it from blue tinged with yellow to soft purple with wandering slicks of black. Boat masts stood black against the water, glowing darkly as if from an inner light. The wind that had bedeviled me earlier was gone, and the water was like dark, rich syrup. Somewhere in the distance Vancouver Island was shimmering softly, giving up its day just minutes after the mainland. Somewhere on the far side of the island, some surfer was stepping out of the water, turning around with a deep feeling of satisfaction and watching the last light extinguish in the broad Pacific. I was standing on a deck, under some trees, talking to some woman who was bar-b-cueing, words of summer, of home, of the soft night bouncing between us. And then I was alone as the last light streaked quietly above the horizon and the world gave itself to a soft, comfortable darkness. As the boats blinked out one by one, a gentle melancholy took hold of me. This was the immortal world, loving but impersonal. Part of me drifted free to lose myself in it, on it. Another part of me wanted some connection to the personal, the ephemeral world of human interaction. I was neither a man of the moment nor a drifting, timeless spirit. I was caught between two worlds, forever a passionate lover, but forever a stranger, out in the cold, below a lighted window. I awoke the next morning with the subtle knowledge that I had reached the outer end of my journey. I would start back before the day was over. I drove to the end of this particular piece of Sunshine Coast with the idea of spending some time kayaking Jervis Inlet, the large inlet that feeds Sechelt Inlet through the dangerous Skookumchuck rapids. I drove to where the ferry continues the trip further north, and I turned east to Earls Cove and Egmont, where I thought I’d put in for a morning 156

paddle. On the way I passed the trail head to the rapids and thought about how lovely a hike in the forest and a view of the famous rapids would be. When I got to the end of the road, I realized that Egmont and Earls Cove were not towns but rather fishermen’s resorts and private homes. Access to the water was only at the two resorts I found, and both of them had signs that said that access was reserved for customers. It was then I fully realized that the time had come. Money was low, and it was Friday. In a few hours the weekend crowds would come up for the hottest weekend of the year. All campgrounds would be packed, ferries would be backed up for hours, and the roads would be jammed. I opted to hike out to the rapids. It was a nice enough hike past some cabins, a pretty little lake, some giant trees that I assumed were spruce, and finally to a cliff overlooking the rapids. Approaching the view point, I heard the sound of an engine, and a dreary thought crossed my mind. I was unfortunately right. As I looked over the rapids, I saw boats passing through the calm water. I had managed to hit the slack tide, the only time when this narrow spot is passable. There were no great swirls, no foaming waves, no roaring torrent. There were boats going about their business as if at the entrance to some marina. So I checked my watch and planned my trip back toward Vancouver. Once off the ferry and only highway between me and the boarder, I was free to relax. I drove back up toward where I’d spent that first Canadian night, and stopped at a gift shop/art gallery, where I spent the longest time talking to the daughter of the owners, a woman passionate about the art of the area, much of it Native American, the beauty that inspires the art, and the lore of the area. Lost in conversation, I suddenly realized that Friday rush hour was starting, 157

and it was time to fight the freeway to the border. I would spend that night in Washington, and I’d go the hundred or so miles out of my way to kayak the Puget Sound area and to see if there really was always surf at La Push.

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Ch. 10 WASHINGTON: Destination Achieved

There was something comfortable, yet alien about Blaine Washington, looking like it had risen out of the tidal flats and standing bare against the dull afternoon sky. I had taken a wrong turn off a busy Canadian freeway but had used my trapper’s instinct to find highway 15 to get back to the border without taking the freeway through Vancouver and all the coastal suburbs. By the time I crossed the border, I’d already had a long day, filled with a hike, native art gallery cruising, lunch and a brew, a crowded ferry, and a trip through unfamiliar communities during Friday rush hour. I hate to be out in unfamiliar places after dark without a place to crash. I hate looking for a camp site at night, and I hate getting so frustrated that I give in to an inviting motel. It’s a quirk with me, and it only manifests itself when I’m traveling alone. When not alone, I’m more flexible, sometimes even spending the extra money for a better room and a bigger bed. Blaine is a border town, and there is something about border towns that can be stark and transitory. The late afternoon summer sun was still high in the air, but the town was closing up for the night. Bars and restaurants were open, naturally. A few of the standard chain restaurants were scattered along the highway, but most of the places seemed to be country-style bar and grills. It’s a town for eating, 159

motelling, gassing up, and moving on. I didn’t see much reason to hang around. I knew there was a state park to the west of I-5, down by the water at Birch Bay, and I thought it sounded like a good place to crash. I even thought I might put the boat in the water first thing in the morning or even for a sunset paddle. But a stop along the way at a country store set me straight. “Not much chance of a camp site, not on a Friday night in August.” The old man in flannel and denim behind the counter sounded pretty sure of himself. So where might I go? “left here and about a quarter mile. Nice place, cheap.” Cheap was good. Still, looking back, I could have driven much further toward my goal before finding a place. But I took the opportunity to settle in with nuts and beer from the store for dinner. I checked out the camp ground and curled up in the back of the truck with my makeshift dinner and a book, but it was too early to call if a night. I was parked under the only real stand of trees. The rest of the camp was an open field, filled with RV families. The sun was refusing to go down, and my body was refusing to unwind. I decided to take a drive back toward town to check out the local Friday night scene. On the way to the highway, I saw a great, barn-like, old roadhouse that advertised a band. I pulled in early, before the music had been set up, ordered a glass of wine, found myself a seat in this huge barn of a place, and watched the locals come in and mingle. A clunky, country rock band stumbled up on stage and played the sentimental old songs and heel and toe tappers that the patrons came to hear and to dance to. It was small town America, the roadhouse of song and fable, the place where the local girl, with dreams of a glamorous life, teams up with some drifter to make her escape. I looked around and saw the look of both familiarity and the accompanying contempt in the eyes that darted quickly 160

past me as they scanned the room. There’s a strange thing about small towns and rural areas. It’s comfortable to go someplace where you know everyone and are totally at ease, but there is that feeling of being trapped in a perpetual, cyclical holding pattern while the rest of the world rushes past on the great interstate and international highway. Romance, adventure, Seattle and Vancouver dreams played in the younger eyes, like the lights off the rotating crystal ball in the middle of the ceiling. Mine was a strange face, and that was enough to kindle the awareness of that fast and glamorous outside life. Not that I cut a glamorous figure. With little imagination, I could have just as easily been a bum who had stumbled in with the few bucks from a day of panhandling. Being a stranger, my life wasn’t a known quantity. I could be a banker, a murderer, a movie actor, or even a photographer for some fashion mag. I could be anything the pent up imagination wished me to be. The known person is a person; the unknown person, a symbol, a stereotype. I remembered a day perhaps fifteen years earlier when I’d pulled off highway 99 at some small town in California’s central valley. It had been “closed for the weekend” Sunday, and the streets had been hot, dusty and almost deserted. I’d loped down the street on my motorcycle until I’d found an open store. A lonely, desperate woman of indistinguishable age, wearing a frumpy print dress, home permed hair, and empty eyes had walked up to me to admire the bike. Within a minute she was asking me to take her with me. It didn’t matter where, and it didn’t matter who or what I was. Her life was a dead end, and I just could be a ticket out. She would have paid with her body and her overwhelming need. It was to sad to endure. I made excuses, not wanting to add even one more grain to her mountain of pain. 161

In that roadhouse just out of Blaine, with the clunky music and too loud laughter, I knew that woman was here again somewhere in the dark, in another body, with another face, with another story of pain and desperation, and I knew I wasn’t strong enough to confront sorrow that deep. I sipped my wine and stifled the urge to strike up conversations with solitary strangers. Sometimes you just get that feeling, and there’s no logical reason for it, but it stops you in your tracks. Unable to really get into the mood of the bar, the almost familial atmosphere, I returned to my patch of grass under the only stand of trees in a little private camp ground, behind the shack of the good natured, bearded, HarIeyshirted manager. Under the warm, fragrant Washington summer night, I drifted slowly toward sleep, thinking of the vague plans I had for the morning, the plans to continue west to La Push, perhaps to kayak along the way. I thought of the north woods in summer, and I wondered if it was as changeless as it seemed. Was it, like the redwood forest, filled with an eternal immutable quality. Evergreens are, after all, forever green, and the forest is so thick that wildflowers and grasses don’t flourish. The ground is wet in winter and only damp in Summer. The creeks are fuller in the winter, and there’s more of a chill in the air, in the muted light of the woods. Perhaps spring as we think of it, doesn’t exist in these evergreen forests that march up the hill to the snowline that never disappears. But even the subtlest change is change none the less. No moment is ever repeated. No sound or sight endures. No thought or feeling remains fixed for even an instant. The universe is forever becoming, ever perfect but never complete. Last Spring, Denise proposed we take advantage of the rare opening of the back road to Henry Coe park, in the hills 162

between the Santa CIara Valley and the San Joaquin. We joined a line of cars that rolled into this section of the park, usually only accessible to backpackers. Grassy hills rolled, one rising from the other. Patches of green and brown alternated, and wildflowers created a rolling ocean, with waves of color. Streams everywhere were choked with the Spring rains. Everything was fresh and new and blooming in that breathtaking celebration of the renewal of the eternal cycle. Tender young leaves pushed out from tree branches, and the hurry of small mammals shook the branches. Birds fought and loved with abandon. Even the tiny crawly things were passionate about their urgent scurrying. Plump cotton balls the size of apartment houses drifted lazily through the sky, and the softest breeze toyed with my hair. The temperature was almost perfect. It had been a day to remember, a day when one could walk forever. It was a hiker’s dream, the last ephemeral burst of new life before the cruel Summer sun drove on with a vengeance. The Springtimes, delicate as they are, are like perfect soap bubbles or snow flakes, beautiful and compelling but impossible to grasp, to hold for even a day beyond their time. I had drunk fully of that day, and within weeks that scene was a scorched memory. Seeds would dry and fall and keep the memory of fresh blossoms until the rains would again release the wonder and the promise of life without end, without limits. In comparison the coastal evergreen forests trudge languidly through the seasons of their lives, without hurry, without heed to transient changes in the weather. The great mountains too have their seasons, as do the galaxies in the vastness of the night. But I was rolling west now on Highway 20, out of Burlington toward Anacortes, the gateway to the San Juan Islands, a tentative kayaking destination. I would paddle among the islands perhaps, but at Anacortes, the sight of 163

islands with houses and boat docks left me a bit cold. Had I time, and it always come down to time, I might have traveled deep into the San Juans, taking days to get to remote sections of uninhabited islands, but that is another Summer, another adventure, another dream, another book. There will always be another place, another trip. Recently a friend departed to remote Patagonia, and I’ve yet to hear how it was. Patagonia, the Amazon, Norway, Indonesia, Guatamala, Greece all await. To kayak every wondrous place on the planet would take ten lifetimes. To surf every perfect wave would take another ten. To hike every marvelous trail, twenty more. I’m all for reincarnation; it’s the only way I’ll ever get my fill of this best of all worlds. Even Anacortes had it’s charm, a street fair with some of the best arts and crafts I’ve seen. I could have spent the day there, but I was determined to watch the sun set over the Pacific that night. So on I went over the bridge at Deception Pass, almost stopping to paddle through the rapids into the wonderland of Skagit Bay. Instead I continued to road’s end and the ferry from Keystone to Port Townsend and a sense of unrestricted openness that seemed both uniform and boundless. Standing on the deck of the ferry, wind hard in my face, I looked out past the sandbar landscape to open water. Puget Sound opened before me, the San Juans, the hundreds and thousands of islands that stretch along the inside passage, each with its own charm, its own beauty, its own story. To really love the earth, this part of it known as the west coast of North America in particular, is to see a full book in every island, every cove, every isolated beach. The closer you get, the more complex the beauty. To reach down and kiss the ground is to feel and taste complexity beyond the sum total of human history. Filled with a feeling of joy and 164

love that was intimate, yet elusive, I watched Port Townsend open up to greet me. Fate delivered unto me a kayak store only a block from the ferry terminal. The friendly kayaker in the store understood that I didn’t have much time and needed a paddling fix, so he gave me directions, a map, and the inspiration to discover Discovery Bay. I mentioned my final destination to him, indicating that I might kayak La Push, and he responded that it wasn’t a good place because the waves were always so large and rough. That comment caused the words of those two surfers from Westport to play back in my mind. When I got to Discovery Bay, to the little public parking lot, portapotty and public launching ramp, I was alone. A fat, gray cloud of fog sat over the other side of the bay, the Port Townsend side. The shore stretched away several miles to the end of the bay and open water. Some nice beach front places dotted the first half mile, and some pleasure boats were tied up just off shore. I set out for the open water, paddling against the wind and chop. Compared to the lushness of British Columbia, this was fairly stark. It had that windswept look that accompanies eroded sandstone bluffs and a thin forest. I wanted to make the entrance to the bay and what looked like a community at the point. Distances were deceiving, and after some time the point wasn’t coming much closer. This wasn’t what I’d seen in the photos, and the wind was blasting me the face, and I had an appointment with the ocean, so I cut the trip somewhat short, falling a just bit shy of the mirage-like point. Summer traffic slowed me down and tried my patience until I was past Port Angeles. Then I was out in the world of Olympic National Park, land of mysterious mountains, temperate rain forests as thick as anything in the Congo, 165

lakes so still and blue they looked to be coated in plastic, and colors so rich and deep as to make a painter swoon. High clouds were clinging to the mountains that seemed to rise straight up from the road, occasionally breaking to reveal a shining glacier moving ever so slowly down Mount Olympus. I passed the camp ground where I’d stayed a decade earlier, on my first trip to Washington, the place where I’d seen my first banana slug and had sat fascinated while it made its slow but steady trip over a fallen log, the place where the boats were moored in the mud at night fall only to float silently away in the gray hours before dawn. And then I passed dark and iridescent Lake Crescent and knew I was submerged in the Olympic Peninsula. These Olympic images flood back to me now, six months later, every sight, sound and minute sensation of each trip north, slowly blending into the sauce of memory. I sit here at a computer keyboard back in the center of California. Yesterday I watched the last storm of winter break up in a majesty of rolling clouds. The Diablo Range, just to the west, sat under the dark billows as they moved from the coast toward the mountains, where they would drop the last of their moisture. A couple of days ago I’d skied. The top of the hill bathed in a snow storm, the parking lot wet with rain. The air is warm now, and even though the calendar insists on a couple more weeks of winter, the air and the pink and white buds on the fruit trees proclaim the onset of spring. Those local mountains that are scarcely more than hills had snow on them a week earlier, but now they stand almost surreal, the contrast between the ridges and valleys so hard that they resemble the intense black and white photos of Ansel Adams. They almost lift me up and over and back to the coast where Spring, like love, is always incredibly new and painfully beautiful. 166

My trips to places that make the heart sing will be few for the next three months. There is work and the time consuming night classes to keep me occupied with busy work. That it’s a sin against nature to toil inside on a spring day, is indisputable. I will have to endure it, save for some stolen days of unrestrained joy. These are days of brilliant green hills, invasions of flowers, a chaos of young birds, dark crystal ocean waves, full and hearty creeks, the musty cool smell of redwood paths, and the blooming of new love in another “just spring” that as e. e.. Cummings put it is, “mud luscious.” Maybe three months isn’t a lot of time, but maybe it’s the entire future of the world. Sitting here while spring makes its early but unmistakable debut, the rock concert of a couple weeks ago still echoes in my head: the magnificent Canadian trio, Rush. Lines from “Time Stand Still” keep repeating in my mind. “freeze this moment a little bit longer; make each sensation a little bit stronger; experience slips away.” Every day is precious; every day is a choice between a host of activities. There are these practical and rewarding things that advance ones career, competence and stature. There are things one does for the sake of creativity, such as sitting behind this keyboard, trying to ignore the demands of Spring. And there is the multitude of purely natural pursuits, things that have no and require no rationale, the hiking, biking, surfing, kayaking, diving, skiing, frolicking, dope smoking, laughing, romping, singing, hand holding, love making, wine sipping, flower smelling, cat petting, picture taking, music listening, toe tapping, star gazing, poetry reading, tear jerking, laughter inducing, reality altering activities that make one absolutely certain that one is a human being living in a reality that is perfect but ephemeral. 167

One must choose, and each choice opens limitless possibilities, and, at the same time, closes doors. Had I a million years to spend on just this life, only to be reincarnated for a million times a million more, I might be able to let it pass without the urgency to drink it all in, to taste every tone and texture, to freeze each moment, each sensation, to make time stand still so that I can drown in the wonder of the billions of momentary sensations of life and experience. But here I am again, August in Washington. And there is Lake Crescent again, right long highway 101, well west of Port Angeles, where the busy weekend traffic thinned out. This is where the true sensation of the Olympic Peninsula really takes over. The scene is as clear behind the computer as it was that day over six months ago when, anxiously approaching my destination, my senses were tuned to every nuance. A fleeting expression on a fisherman on a boat out on the lake as I passed at fifty MPH, floats up now to touch me and remain with me forever, imprinted on the hologram that is my mind, both my physical and my eternal mind. And from 101 to La Push is 14 miles, 14 miles of cut and standing timber, 14 miles of wildflowers and saplings reclaiming the freshly logged forest, bold intrusions of thick brush, a dark, slow moving river, and tremendous anticipation. There were places to park at the first beach and the second beach, and I thought about stopping, but decided I’d go to the end of the road before making my decision. At the third beach I found the community, not really a town, but a fishing settlement, the real, working world of a group of Native Americans who cater to tourists in addition to pursuing their traditional occupation of fishermen. Cars were parked, and I drove on. A store and rental cabins appeared, and I drove on. The road rose up and ended at 168

something that looked like a school. From that raised parking place I could see a major part of La Push. Behind me, along the creek, were the houses and boats. The jetty went out almost to an island, steep sides with a thick stand of fir trees on the top. Looking around, all the coastal islands, and there were many, had miniature forests on their flattened tops, unless they were so eroded that they were jumbles of sharpened pencil points. The little wooded islands stretched up and down the coast. The sky was a dull, endless pewter and blended softly with the ocean at the horizon. I looked down the rocky beach at the late afternoon surf, and it was dotted with surfers, lots of surfers. Looking down the beach, I could see perhaps a dozen guys out. The dull gray waves were shoulder to head high and nicely shaped. They were also a couple of blocks south, so I turned the truck around. Back past the stores and cabins I saw gravel roads leading through the trees, toward the beach. I drove among the high brush until I came out on the beach. I was driving on cobble size stones that seemed to get bigger the closer I got to the sand. Soon I could go no farther. Cars were parked all over, and huge drift logs blocked off the actual beach. I parked and got out. People were camped all over, many of them surfers. There were tents, and there were people car camping . Surfboards leaned against logs and vans, and guys in trunks sat in folding chairs enjoying the warmth of the dull sun. The surf looked good, not perfect, not really big or really small or really anything. It was just good shaped, head high, not crowded, get out and do it surf. A short exchange with some of the guys who had been out charged me up. In a couple of minutes I was in the wet suit and ready. For an hour and a half, I had the surf I’d thought about for two years. It wasn’t the best surf I’d ever 169

had, but it was in many ways the most rewarding. It was all the romance and mystery of the far Pacific Northwest. It was a place that had waves when most places were flat. It was a Mecca for surfers from all over Washington; it was free camping on a perfect beach. It was forests that ended at the rocky shore. It was the promise of winter waves that were probably the size of freight trains. It was a destination, a place where one could be simply a dedicated surfer among dozens of dedicated surfers. It certainly wasn’t the city beaches of Southern California or the Santa Cruz scene. This was surfing like it was in California back in the sixties, basic and uncrowded. The rides were short but fast, and by 6:30 the tide and the wind had changed to the point where there was nothing but a take off, almost a close out on every wave. I hung it up. A parking spot right up against the drift logs was open., and I backed up until I almost touched the logs. Hungry from surfing and not willing to give up my parking spot to drive the dozen miles or so to the last roadside grill, I walked to the Indian store. They had some burritos, chips, fruit, beer, and all the odds and ends one would need to survive the night. The twilight that lasts for hours was washing over the day. The last surfers, down near the massive, dark headland, were finally giving up and paddling in. The guys around me were standing around, watching the waves and talking surf. I finished my quick meal, opened a beer and joined them. It seemed we talked for hours, while the setting sun crept imperceptibly toward the horizon. I learned all about the surf at La Push, and how, with few exceptions, there was always surf here. I learned about how and when Westport, the place I’d stopped two years earlier, broke. Used as I was to driving an hour and a half to the coast, I was amazed 170

that some of these guys drove three to four hours, around Puget Sound, through winding country roads, over ferries, and through tourist choked towns to get here. They came and hung on, cooking on the beach, sleeping in cars, and living simply in order to spend two precious days in the wonderful Washington surf. The waning day still refused to end, so I bid farewell, in the indigo twilight, to the other surfers, and crawled into my sleeping bag in the back of the truck. The tailgate was down, and I could watch the fading sun, hidden in the thick clouds, extinguish itself with a sigh in the west. I was still a thousand miles from home, a drive in a Summer rainstorm, a long haul through Oregon, a night in a rest stop on the California, Oregon border, a kayak trip at Point St. George, walks in the redwoods, a familiar swim in the Eel, a bout of kayak surfing in Pacifica, and a final, sad trip home. But at that moment, the future didn’t matter one damn bit. That the surf would be small the next day, and that rain would muck up my urge to kayak that coast didn’t occur to me. What hit me in the fading light was a song. It was a song from the “Fear” album by a wonderful new group called “Toad the Wet Sprocket.” The song was, “I Will Not Take These Things for Granted.” And, watching the last light play out in slow motion over the endless Pacific Ocean, thinking of all I’d seen and done on this trip and a hundred others, I thought of the taking of things for granted, of how much of life is wasted that way. I certainly will not take any of these things for granted: perfect morning waves, redwoods damp with spring rains and musty fungus, otters playing in the kelp, moonlight flickering on dark bays, seals sunning on the rocks, verdant coastal hillsides, wildflowers in the spring, winter storms in remote canyons, shifting coastal dunes, laughing children at play, glassy surf at remote beaches, starfish among the kelp, clam 171

chowder on the wharf, solitary, reflective beaches, wind swept coastal bluffs, snowy mountains, raging rivers, lizards scurrying on trails, perfect sandy coves, kayaking between storm tossed sea stacks, Carmel art galleries, carving stone along side the road, capturing some fleeting bit of beauty on canvas, kicking through layers of fallen forest leaves, tracing lines of eroded cliffs, sharing a beer with strangers, wading through cool rivers, sleeping under brilliant stars, deep silences of the heart, singing in the shower, dancing naked in waterfalls, looking down on cities, looking up at the universe, looking out for eternity. I will hold all these things in my heart, but I will not take them for granted. With the waves of La Push, a summer closes, a book ends. And as winter fades into spring, I sense the promise of another summer, another chance to get close to something elusive and wondrous, to follow my own path deep into the mystery of it all, to spit in the faces of the morbid and rabid gods that plague and pain us, to transform the self with every shaft of light, to dance through the fields of pure chance, to bend the spectrum of knowledge with the prism of imagination. I’ve never slept so well or dreamed so richly as I did that night. I drifted off with the knowledge that a pearl of perfection was at the core of every day, that the trials and tribulations of my life were simply games designed to add drama to existence, to life in its richness, its complexity, its perfection, its incredibly rich paradox: mortality and eternity locked in an embrace that is simply this moment, this moment that echoes down the corridors of space and time, this moment that is heaven, earth, matter, energy, god, you, me, and everything.

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M. L Fischer lives in the Monterey Bay area, where he surfs, kayaks, hikes, mountain bikes, paints and sculpts. He’s a semi-employed educator and an environmental activist. Other books by M. L. Fischer Spinning Real Life

Shattering the Crystal Face of God

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