Three trees and a dog

 

I park in the lot above the meadow in Bogart Park. It’s early and cool. As I step out of the truck, the quiet settles on me like the light embrace of a beloved friend.

This is how I know it’s October: The slight bite in the air. The scent of wood smoke that drifts down and hovers in the meadow. The tone of the leaves rustling; soft and lilting in mid-summer when the leaves are new and tender, it is a crisper sound now, as they dry and die and fall.

Maya alights from the truck eagerly, her nostrils twitching. She knows where we are, where the trail begins, and she heads that way at a trot before I’ve barely had time to close the door and hit the lock button.

Finding the trail, she pulls to the end of her twenty-foot leash and takes the rolling hills as if they are red-carpet flat, while I laugh, struggling to keep up as I tell her, “My, slow down, honey.” But she is thrilled to be out here, so I let her charge on, and my tempo increases as my boots kick up dust.

She slows when we reach the big hill. She doesn’t like this trail because she cannot see around the corners as we wind up and around on the climb, but she comes along beside me as I reassure her. Halfway up, she veers over to a single-track trail, a deer path that she has asked so many times to follow. Every other time, I have said no. Today I tell her, “Okay, My, let’s go your way,” and once again she is charging along. I gently slow her down; I have to watch her feet and mine for rattlesnakes, as it is still warm enough to see them out.

I know where this trail goes, and I know it will double the distance of our walk today. But it is a trail I have taken before with Sgt. Thomas Tibbs, and one I have loved—though not chosen—for several years.

We wind down to the far side of the hill, Maya surprised to find the trail opening up and skirting an expansive meadow. She glances often to our right where she can hear the penned sheep that sometimes graze here.

Then we come to the first tree.

 

A fire in the fall of 2016 burned much of this side of the hill down to rubble. Black ash is still visible in the soil along the trail. But look at these oak trees. Strong. Steadfast. Beautiful. How old is this one? How many fires have threatened it? Still it endures.

The last oak we pass before taking the steep trail back up toward the parking lot boasts a picnic table beneath it. Maya waits patiently as I snap a photo… and I imagine myself sitting down with a book or a notebook and a snack, whiling away a few hours in the shade… in the quiet… in the solitude.

 

Maya does that all-over dog shake—as Frost’s “little horse” did when the poet stopped to watch the snow fall in a similarly hushed and serene place.

I, too, have promises to keep.

So we tackle the last arduous climb, then pause briefly in the shade to catch our breath before heading back to the truck and civilization.

There is another way I mark the path into October, and that is by the shorter days, the diminishing light. At one time, October was my least favorite month. As the darkness came on, my spirits would flag, my anxiety rise, often leaving me depressed until January.

No more. The cure for darkness is light. So I will be out here as often as I can be, letting Maya charge up the trail (as long as it’s safe to do so), pushing myself to walk farther each time, to take the longer route, the steeper trail, to hear my heartbeat pounding, to know that I am still alive, still surviving, and will be when the light returns once again in spring.

The Thing With Feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all.... 

Emily Dickinson 

 Yesterday, Thomas and I went out to walk here:

But as I pulled up to the trailhead, I could see other cars parked there, so I turned around and drove to another spot. Again, I saw cars. I get it; people are doing what I'm doing, walking off into the hills to exercise instead of walking around town on the sidewalk where others might be walking (because our sidewalks simply aren't wide enough to stay six feet--or even half that--apart).

So I turned around again and drove to this spot:

Heavy, dark, early morning clouds were looming, but we had plenty of space here and no one else on the trail. Well, almost no one else. About a quarter mile in, we happened upon this pretty girl:

You might have to peer closely to see her, but she's a lovely, light-colored tarantula, probably a "desert blonde tarantula." (I'm assuming female, as they live much longer than the males, but I could be wrong.) Generally, they hunt at night and remain burrowed during the day, so I'm not sure what was going on with this gal (or fellow). We sometimes see them when they migrate in August. I've never seen one in early spring before, so this was quite surprising.

We also saw some lupine that had already jumped out of the ground to celebrate all the rain we had in March:

Forgive the poor photo; it's challenging to juggle my phone while holding Thom's leash and making sure that when I go down on one knee to take a picture, I'm not crushing anyone or anyone's habitat.

What surprised and delighted me even more than the wildflowers or the tarantula, though, was this:

Behold the rolling waves of grass! From a distance, that oak looks just fine. But a close up view (which I took but discarded as it made me sad) reveals that the tree is actually completely charred.

This is where the wildfire burned in October. These hills were burned to ashes last autumn. Now they are covered in beautiful, lush, green grass. Some of the old oaks burned, but some survived, and clearly our little arachnid did as well, as did the seed pods for the lupine and other flowers that grow here in the spring.

Nature is absolutely amazing, isn't it?

As Thomas and I turned and walked back toward the truck, the gray clouds of early morning began to brighten into fluffy white cumulus, and I thought about the ability of so many living things to survive the most catastrophic events and still emerge with such beauty and resiliency.

And that gave me hope.

We will survive. We will endure. We will emerge with renewed joy to celebrate all that remains.

Recipe for a Sunday morning

When Robert Frost began his poem "Directive" with this line, "Back out of all this now too much for us," he did so as preface to asking his readers to separate themselves from a world that Yeats would have characterized as being "full of weeping." As I've discussed previously on this site, Frost's "Directive" is a journey, in a sense, toward peace, gotten at by employing a childlike imagination.

Exactly. That is exactly how I felt this morning. I needed to separate myself for a time from news reports, from social media... and I needed to seek quiet and beauty. When I start out, and I encounter a place that looks like this:

my childlike imagination is awakened. Where do those roads go? What will we find? What will we see? And suddenly I feel myself begin to breathe deeply, to think about possibilities that are less negative, more ripe with beauty.

For today, my recipe was a simple one: Start with one good dog. Add a pack of water, snacks, emergency kit (just in case--always) and binoculars. Use a sturdy pair of hiking boots to begin a slow, methodical blending of yourself with the scenery. That's it.

Having Thomas with me today was essential because he often alerts me to things I can't hear or see. When we'd made the five-minute drive down the road to where the dirt roads pictured above are accessible, I got out and began my preparations--cap, sunglasses, pack--and immediately saw a small hawk, a kestrel. I did not take this picture, but this is what one looks like:

If I'd been in possession of my Pentax camera with the telephoto lens, I'm sure I could've gotten a shot just like this. Kidding, but I was able to get pretty close watching him through the binoculars, and my guy looked like this guy--only much fatter. When he became annoyed with my creeping ever closer (and who wouldn't), he coasted away with a couple of wing flaps. I then returned to the business of getting Thomas out of the truck, and as soon as he hit the ground, he saw a bird. Far off in the pasture we'd parked next to, he'd seen movement, and he watched. I, of course, said, "What the heck are you lookin' at? I don't see anything," as I usually do, but swung the binocs up to have a gaze--and immediately spotted a roadrunner. No, not the cartoon guy, this guy:

Well, not exactly this guy, but his cousin who looks exactly like him. There is something about roadrunners that is absolutely comical. They're very large birds; this guy was bigger than the kestrel by far. But, I mean, look at his tiny wings and his way-too-long tail feathers and his goofy, adolescent boy hairstyle (or, er, featherstyle). They run. Stop. Run. Stop. Run. Stop. as they alternately look for lizards and check for predators. I watched my goofy guy until Thomas pressed against my leg, reminding me that we were about to wander off into the countryside.

We didn't walk far before we came upon a puddle still left over from last weekend's rainstorms. It was cold last night, and the ice on this one was still melting, glinting beautifully in the morning sun. In the mud next to the large puddle we saw some tracks:

To give you some perspective on size, here's my size 6 boot next to one:

I was not surprised, then when we rounded a bend in the road and saw, three hundred yards or so in the distance, the biggest damn coyote I think I've ever seen. Seriously. This guy was the size of a Mexican gray wolf. And as he began to slowly slink off to the west, he did that characteristic coyote look back over his shoulder like a thug who's been caught loitering before committing a crime, and he looks back as if to say, "Fine, I'll leave, but I'll be back when you're not around, pal." He was beautiful, though.

So was the huge old redtail hawk we saw next. The old man was sitting in the top of a dead oak tree, basking in the rising sun. I got a good look with the binoculars before he swooped away. That's how I could tell his age. Old hawks are like old cars--a bit faded and banged up, with a few dents and scratches here and there. But his wings were still strong and steady, so he's got a couple more years of vermin hunting ahead of him.

It's been crazy-windy here lately, and at one point the road was completely blocked by tumbleweeds, so I took a minute to clear a path through. I only mention this brief pause in our adventure to applaud the behavior of this good dog, who knows that when his leash is dropped he is on "Wait" until I pick it up again, so he sat himself down and enjoyed the warmth of the sun while I worked (and got stickered up a bit, but that's ok; it'll make the going easier for the next guy).

I have always loved Frost's sense of taking his reader with him--on a journey of the imagination or just out "to clean the pasture spring." And you should know, Dear reader, that when I'm out walking on a day like today with my trusty bird-spotter and best friend, I am always taking you with me, wishing you were along for the walk with us. We might not even speak other than to exchange a few words about direction, or to point out to the other some interesting sight off in the distance. I am always mindful of you there, in my heart. So let me leave you with a tiny gift brought to mind by today's journey:

The Pasture

by Robert Frost

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long.--You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long.--You come too.

Wherein I misrepresent myself, ambiguously but, nonetheless, intentionally

Today, on my long Sunday morning walk down to 7th & Campus to snag a copy of the L.A. Times, I meandered through the lovely old homes on the Upland side of Highland Court.  Watering his lawn (at 6:30a.m.) was an elderly gentleman with his elderly gentleman dog, a golden retriever that reminded me of TJ Murray.  I asked the man if I could "meet" his dog, something I often do when I see folks out with friendly canines. 

The man looked confused for a moment, then nodded yes.  He continued running water from the hose on his parkway, but made a few remarks about the dog enjoying "new company."  I started to walk on when the man made a comment about the heat we've been having, and I stopped again to respond in kind.  At that moment he looked up from watering and the same look of confusion passed over this face.  Again I began to walk on, and again he attempted to continue the conversation.

"So how have you been?" he asked, and with this question his tone and demeanor changed, became familiar, as if he knew me.

"Oh... fine," I replied, somewhat confused myself by this time.

"How are your kids?" he asked.

"They're great," I answered.

"And the grandkids?" he asked.  "How many are there now?"

At this point, I realized he had mistaken me for someone else.  He clearly had not when I had first begun to walk past on the sidewalk, but for some reason, there came a moment in which his mind slid slightly sideways, and he recognized me--albeit incorrectly--as someone he had known at one time.

For a brief moment, no more than a couple of seconds, I contemplated full disclosure, correcting him in his error.  And then I thought of my mom... and how, just a few times in the last year or so of her life, she failed to recognize people she knew well or mistook them for others.  The truth revealed always humiliated her.  It's bad enough to lose memory; it's another thing entirely when people catch you at it and point it out.

"There are seven now," I told him, which is true.

"Seven!" he exclaimed.  "That's wonderful! And are they all well?"

"They are well indeed," I told him, and then I took my leave, telling him that it was great to see him, and that I would talk with him longer the next time I was out for a walk, but that I wanted to get back home before it got too hot.

"Great to see you!" he called as he went back to watering.

I share this with you now, my friends and family members, as a future request.  I hope that karma is kind... and that when I reach the age at which all the many beloved faces of my lifetime begin to blend into one another, those who know me--or those who are meeting me perhaps for the first time--will be kind.  I don't ask much.  Just... stop and chat with me for a while... whoever you are.