March 18, 2025

Saving splendor in the nearby middle of nowhere

A rusted harvester combine belonging to rancher Jim Murphy, former owner of the Round Valley property, is among the many farm implements scattered across Murphy Meadow.

There was a time in East Contra Costa – before the arrival of Welsh miners and wheat magnates, Mexican farm laborers and Midwest snow fugitives; yes, even before humanoids crossed the land bridge of the Bering Straight, headed south and earned the title Native – there was a time when nothing here had a name. A nameless mountain ruled the western horizon; a nameless plain stretched east to nameless snow-capped peaks. And like a mother’s arms, nameless hills cradled a nameless valley.

That valley now has a name. Its splendor is invaluable but not inevitable; 39 years ago, these acres were in danger of becoming a garbage dump.

Those of us who tread the trails of Round Valley Regional Preserve rarely meditate on the people who made the trails possible. We focus on falcons and flowers, distant ridges and intimate ravines. But those trails don’t burst into existence out of the blue. They’re envisioned, paid for, shaped and maintained by the efforts of many.

Two key players in the rescue of Round Valley are Jim Murphy and Bob Doyle. In the mid-1980s, farmer and rancher Murphy – grandson of Irish immigrant Tom Murphy, who in 1873 bought the land we call Round Valley – learned that Contra Costa County had nominated his beloved 700-acre spread as a candidate for landfill status. Former East Bay Regional Park District General Manager Doyle, who back then served as the district’s assistant general manager of land acquisition, was tasked to convince Murphy to sell the land to the EBRPD.

Cattle crop frosty grass on an autumn morning in Murphy Meadow.

“All I knew was that he’d shot at somebody,” said Doyle, stipulating that Murphy had fired into the sky. “They were going to do the peripheral canal in the ’70s, looking to acquire all this area for the big reservoir. Jim Murphy wouldn’t let the biologists on his property. He loved this valley – no question about it – got very protective of it.”

Doyle’s first trip into the valley wasn’t his first view of it. “I’d looked down on it from Morgan Territory and lusted after it,” said Doyle. Among the park’s many virtues: it’s the only fully enclosed valley in the EBRPD – a district that operates the largest urban regional park system in the nation.

Round Valley is also a strategic piece of the area’s zoological puzzle. It occupies the center of a wildlife corridor that runs from Shell Ridge in Walnut Creek all the way through Mt. Diablo, Morgan Territory, Round Valley, Los Vaqueros and Brushy Peak. Residents of the corridor range from golden eagles to vernal pool fairy shrimp; bobcats to kit foxes. At dusk you can hear the Round Valley and Los Vaqueros coyote packs howl and yip before splitting up for the evening hunt.

But in 1986, few East County folk were aware of the existence of the valley – fewer saw it as the optimal site for a regional preserve. As Doyle put it, “Nobody thought, ‘Why not have a park out here?’ It was too far from everything.”

When Doyle showed up at the red gate surrounding the Murphy residence in Round Valley, he had no idea how the encounter would go. “This was the first chance I got to meet the property owner,” he said. “And if I said the wrong thing, I wouldn’t have gotten through that gate. He was standing at the gate – he didn’t open the gate.”

Fog and frost at sunrise in Murphy Meadow.

Despite his short stature and advanced age (he was approaching 80) Murphy cut a formidable figure. “He was a scary cowboy; hated everybody,” said Doyle. “He was a champion rodeo rider and horse breaker – the Jack Roddy of his time. Always wore his cowboy boots, always wore his big cowboy hat and a big buckle.”

And it was hard to ignore the rifle Murphy toted at that red gate.

Whatever dialogue Doyle had prepared for, he hadn’t prepared for Murphy’s opening line. The rancher eyed the park district guy and said, “What do you think of mountain lions?”

Murphy was a rancher; ranchers aren’t fond of creatures that prey on their livestock. No one would have blamed Doyle for pegging Murphy for a mountain lion hater. But the park district guy replied, “I don’t know. What do you think?” and held his breath.

“Well, I like mountain lions,” said Murphy.

“And that was it,” recalled Doyle. “I’m sure he’d shoot coyotes; I’m sure he hunted deer. But he didn’t have a problem with protecting mountain lions.” Who knows? Maybe the tough, solitary Murphy felt a kinship with the big cat.

Mt. Diablo viewed from the crest of Round Valley’s Hardy Canyon.

“He told me his story,” said Doyle. “He was very cautious, very anti-government. He’d had lots of ups and downs in his life; never had a lot of money. Most all of these longtime ranching families were only ‘land rich.’ Many of them were getting tired of ranching or needed to sell because they wanted their kids to go to college.”

Measure AA, the $225 million bond on the ballot in 1988 – earmarked for the purchase and preservation of 34,000 acres of prime East Bay open space – was vital to the negotiation between Murphy and Doyle. “The original 700-acre purchase was based on a pre-Measure AA promise,” said Doyle, “which was: ‘Mr. Murphy, if you give us an option on your property for $40,000, we’ll pay you $1.4 million if the measure passes. If it doesn’t pass, you keep the $40,000.’ We really wanted to see his property protected.”

Measure AA passed in ’88, the district bought Murphy’s 700 acres and over the years acquired 1,300 adjacent acres from the Murphy family. Doyle recalls that “within the first six months (after the initial purchase), as soon as I could get permission, I got Roger in here (the late Roger Epperson, park supervisor). And as local guys, we both thought, ‘Wow. This place is phenomenal.’”

Epperson launched into extensive preparations for the park’s public use: old houses and cabins were dismantled; trails were carved into hillsides; poorly placed roads were “disappeared,” as Doyle put it, and new roads created; the parking lot and main bridge were built – all elements we park users take blissfully for granted.

In 1998, a year after Murphy’s death, an entrance gate on Marsh Creek Road was flung open, ushering the public into a place that would have made a perfect setting for a landfill. But ask the runners, campers and cyclists; ask the exuberant families and solitary pilgrims who visit Round Valley – and they’ll tell you it makes a perfect setting for a taste of splendor.

March 4, 2025

Fleeting glimpse of the cat in shadow

One of the wisest things we hikers can do on the trail is stop hiking. Not to snap photos, chug fluids, devour power bars. We stop to listen, watch – stop to become invisible and inaudible. The best brand of hiking requires no hiking at all.

There’s a time in late winter when the air you breathe makes the transition from sterile winter to fertile spring: the scent of moist green fills the air. The silver percussion of water, churning up invigorating ions, ricochets off creek walls. You sense the presence of renewed life beneath your feet and through gaps in the forest – there, you spot a black-tailed doe and two fawns stealing behind distant oaks.

An hour from sunrise I was climbing a heavily wooded slope in Round Valley. A long brushstroke of ultramarine painted by a steady hand overscored the eastern horizon. Halfway to the crest, I paused to contemplate what I normally contemplate on my pre-dawn jaunts – nothing in particular.

I’d been inert on the incline for about a minute, wearing the stillness like a cloak, when the corner of my right eye caught the flicker of a shadow in motion. Then it came into focus: the silhouette of a bobcat loping along a cattle path, passing 30 feet in front of me in the smoky luminescence of twilight.

The air was perfectly still. The cat, despite its purposeful pace, was perfectly silent. Had I not stopped before it rounded the warp of the hill, had I been swishing my way through the hill’s short grasses, the cat would have heard me and taken a detour.

If you’re a hiker with a hankering to spot large wildlife, hit the trail before sunrise or after sunset. You’ll spot the coyote most often and the cougar least. The bobcat falls somewhere in the middle – more plentiful than the cougar but like the cougar: nocturnal, stealthy, unwilling to let you get close. You’d expect as much from a creature whose livelihood depends on ambush.

Though it tips the scale at 20 to 30 pounds, making it only twice the size of a large house cat, the adult lynx rufus is one tough customer. Like its larger cousin the cougar (120 to 150 pounds), bobcats have been known to take down adult deer. The cat’s preferred method of closing the deal is a leap uncoiled from cunning cover. In the unlikely event you get within 15 feet of a bobcat, be aware that it can make contact with you without ever making contact with the ground.

A chief reason why you’re discouraged from walking little Fifi down Mt. Diablo’s Mary Bowerman Trail.

A bobcat’s handsome markings and diminutive size might inspire you to offer the cuddly looking creature a saucer of milk. Resist that temptation. Here are three things every hiker should know about bobcats.

As a citizen of the wild, the bobcat’s a creature of instinct. You won’t find Raw Human on its menu. It interprets you – your scent, your mere presence – as strange and undesirable. So relax.

On the other hand, as a creature of instinct the bobcat is susceptible to mistaking you for prey. Should you crouch down, it doesn’t see a crouching human; it sees an object the size of breakfast. This is why children shouldn’t be roaming unattended at dawn and dusk – bobcat time. Pointer No. 1: In the presence of a bobcat, make yourself as large an object as possible. Stand up and raise your arms.

Another thing that flips the cat’s switch is an object in fast motion. The chase instinct in felines is powerful. It’s why runners and cyclists are at special risk in our regional parks at dawn and dusk. A bobcat that spots you zipping down the trail might not want to eat you, but it might not overcome the urge to run you down.

It’s especially wise to slow down on narrow, winding trails. In heavily foliated passages or when the wind is up, a bobcat might not hear you coming round the bend. If it knows you’re approaching, the cat will surrender the trail to you. If you surprise it and it make it feel cornered or threatened, you could be in trouble. Pointer No. 2: When hiking at bobcat time, slow down. And if you suddenly meet the cat up close and personal, back off nice and easy. Don’t run.

Daylight hikers who enjoy exploring off-trail should make a special point of engaging their bobcat radar. Bobcats tend to establish more than one den. See that cave or rocky shelter? It could be a bobcat’s main den – and a female bobcat’s natal den. Don’t assume any critter inhabiting a hollow log or fallen tree is giving you a pass. At dawn and dusk, avoid deep-cut arroyos laced with sheltering tree roots and pocked with large holes. These could be bobcats’ auxiliary dens. Pointer No. 3: Steer clear of rough neighborhoods.

If you encounter a cat in the wild, look for the bobbed tail, tufted ears and face, and dark bars on the inside forelegs. The cat won’t hang around for long, so savor the moment. You’re one of a fortunate few who’ve caught a glimpse of one of the world’s most adaptable and resourceful creatures, a true survivor – the cat in shadow.

February 12, 2025

Miniature marvels: the down-and-dirty crew

Red-banded polypore fungus clings to a blue oak in Round Valley Regional Preserve.

It’s spring, when forests become wonderlands. Tucked enticingly among the damp grasses, hung shelflike on tree trunks and splayed flamboyantly across boulders are fungi, lichens and mosses – miniature marvels of form and color.

There’s a lot to like about lichens, and it’s not odd to be fond of fungi. Those fleshy and scabrous organisms we associate with the monsters of sci-fi horror flicks (“The Toadstool That Ate Tahoe” comes to mind) are essential to the life of the landscapes we admire.

The toadstools that rise from the forest floor are only the tip of the fungal iceberg. Call them the “fruit” of the organism, the structures that hold spores for dissemination by wind, water or animal transport. The true heavy lifting of forest decomposition is done beneath the soil by a network of microscopic fungal threads called hyphae. The hyphae, aided and abetted by other small fungal bodies, plus bacteria and other microbes, can be credited for the decomposition of 80 to 90 percent of the dead plant and animal matter in the forest.

Fungi also provide food for creepy-crawly mites and the slithering, microscopic worm-shaped creatures called nematodes. But some fungi have turned the tables by evolving strategies for preying on small invertebrates. Sci-fi horror writers, take note: One type of fungus preys on nematodes by dangling a series of little nooses, each comprising only three cells, from its filaments. When the unsuspecting nematode slinking through the soil passes through a noose, the friction of its body trips a mechanism in the noose’s cells, inflating them and strangling the nematode. If you’re wondering why the nematode doesn’t have a prayer, well, the noose inflates in a snappy one-tenth of a second. The fungal cells then grow into the worm and digest it. That, I presume, is how the toadstool disposed of the citizens of Tahoe.

Foliose lichen is spattered across a boulder in Round Valley.

The fungal shelves that adorn tree trunks are among the most fascinating and photogenic of all – though we imagine the trees themselves take a less upbeat, aesthetically appreciative view of their partners in parasitism. The lovely (and expensive) Japanese maple in your front yard doesn’t desire disassembly by fungi. But like forest fires, fungi are nature’s way of telling a tree that it’s time to make way – in style. Those banded and multi-hued wedges spiraling up tree trunks testify, like the crimson and saffron leaves of autumn, to the terrible beauty of Earth’s rhythms.

If mushrooms are hard to find, nestled into the dark and damp crannies of the forest floor, lichens are hard to miss, spattered across rocks and trees like Jackson Pollack graffiti. Lichens wear two hats: they’re fungus-alga organisms in one. But unlike mere fungi, which don’t photosynthesize, lichens thrive in sunlight and don’t require much water to survive. They’re efficient little sponges, soaking up as much as 35 times their weight in water from fog, dew, even humid air. And they retain water like camels, enabling them to survive on rocks, deserts and tundra.

Like fungi, lichens play an important role in the nutrient cycling. They intercept air- and rain-borne nutrients, absorbing those they can use and contributing the rest to their host organisms, such as trees. Although they’re among the hardiest living things on the planet, lichens are sensitive to changes in their habitat, especially the intrusion of air pollution. This makes them valuable indicators of ecosystem continuity and helps scientists identify habitats that need protection.

The first mosses appeared around 350 million years ago – before reptiles and flying insects – making them among the most ancient inhabitants of the planet. Like lichens, mosses need external moisture to move nutrients from place to place – thus their penchant for damp habitats protected from direct sunlight. They’re the most luxuriantly textured of the forest’s miniature marvels, adorning rocks and trees like furry archipelagos.

Moss sporangia sweep across a boulder in Round Valley.

Mosses form a vital line of the ecosystem’s defense. Like soldiers kept in reserve at the outset of a battle, they reinforce the lichens’ shock-troop foothold on rocks, eventually creating a layer of topsoil in which more sophisticated flora can take root. On hillsides subject to landslides, mosses provide a mat that keeps loose soil from slip-slidin’ away.

Over the centuries, we humans have gotten pretty creative with mosses. We’ve mined them for use as a soil additive, fuel, home decoration and flavoring (think Scotch whiskey) – even as first-aid dressing for battlefield wounds (mosses contain a mild antibacterial agent and are highly absorbent).

As our grey winter has given way to the chromatic dazzle of spring, as our attention turns to bright blossoms and sweeping vistas, let’s keep an eye peeled for the miniature marvels beneath our feet, the blue-collar crew whose down-and-dirty work makes it possible for the pageant of spring to maintain its blockbuster status.

January 18, 2025

Journey up the white mountain

Mt. Diablo viewed from Marsh Creek Reservoir.

Darkness to dawn

The Moon was a glowing oval high overhead, a streetlamp casting clarity on Mt. Diablo’s North Peak. I looked out my driver’s-side window. A mile away, the north ridge of Perkin’s Canyon descended like a waterfall of tarnished silver. Below, shielded from the Moon, the canyon was dark. Above, the peak’s ragged mass took me in tow.

Many who make the pre-dawn drive from Brentwood to Clayton along Marsh Creek Road have seen North Peak lit by the Moon. This was different. The previous night’s rain had crossed paths with low mercury. The two had danced a drowsy samba in a late-night club named Diablo, dusted the place white. In the darkness an hour before sunrise, the moon was shining. And the mountain was shining back.

Diablo gets dusted nearly every winter, but rarely has the mountain’s junction weather station deemed a snowfall deep enough to record. By dawn on Saturday, February 18, 2006 the unofficial mark was three to four inches at the summit, decreasing to a trace at the 1,500-foot level.

The best news: the storm had passed. When at 5:30 a.m. I stepped outside to defrost the windshield and saw Jupiter burning in a scrubbed sky, I knew that we in Contra Costa County would be given a rare treat: a Saturday to play in the snow of our own back yard.

I left the car, dropped down a gully and headed south into Donner Canyon. Broad ribbons of clouds, high and thin, tinged pink along their eastern edges, cut diagonally across Diablo’s silhouette, motionless. The stillness settled into the canyon like a presence. The silence of expectancy.

A Coulter pine bends beneath the burden of snow on Bald Ridge.

An hour earlier, lacing up my boots, I’d wondered about the condition of the trail. The lower elevations had shipped water a few hours earlier. This could be a sloppy climb. But as I entered the canyon I smiled; glazing the trail was the thinnest layer of frost, a billion crystalline surfaces reflecting the paling sky. Magical footing.

I left the wide trail and hopped onto the single-file Hetherington Trail, crossed a wood-slat footbridge spanning Donner Creek and began the ascent toward the snow. At the tips of long, tender needles of Coulter pine hugging the path hung single drops of water like miniature Christmas tree ornaments. One more fording of the creek – this time by hopscotching the rocks – and I found myself loping, racing against the clock. The sun would be rising soon.

I hooked up with Donner Canyon Road again and then Meridian Ridge Road, hoofing it, hoping to get a clear view of North Peak at the moment of incandescent truth. A quarter mile past Meridian Point, at the 1,600-foot level, I reached the snow line.

Then I saw them. Embossed in the deepening snow were two sets of coyote track alongside the track of a single deer, all created a few hours earlier after the snowfall had ended. They tattooed the steepening trail for a couple hundred yards. Then, at the 2,200-foot level, something had happened. The deer, possibly sensing danger, had hooked sharply left up into the dense sage and chamise. One coyote had peeled off and followed; rhe other had kept to the trail – were the predators working as a team? Whatever drama of flight or fight occurred up here would not be mine to know.

Ahead in the west, like a balloon about to be popped, the argent Moon was drifting onto the tip of a manzanita branch. Without warning, the snow on the branches turned the color of Moon. I wheeled on my heel and there it was: sunlight setting afire the mountain’s crown.

The Mt. Diablo Summit viewed from North Peak Trail.

Farther up, further in

I had my trail and the Moon had hers. When she rose in the east, a pearlescent snail inching up her stalk of sky, I was preparing for bed. Eight hours later, as I climbed Mt. Diablo’s Meridian Ridge at sunrise, she had crossed the balance point of a stalk now bending under her weight, lowering her toward the western hills.

Unlike the Moon, I’d yet to reach my zenith. Starting at 530 feet above sea level in Clayton, less than an hour before sunrise, I’d climbed to 2,200 feet. My goal was North Peak, 3,557. If half the elevation was behind me, ahead was the hardest half – and the most fun. The mountain was covered with snow.

Sunlight was beginning to spill over the brim of Prospector’s Gap and flood the snow-streaked crest of Eagle Peak, the western citadel of the Diablo massif. Earlier in the week I had climbed the peak on a green and glowing afternoon, full of the promise of spring, and found a cluster of violet blossoms growing out of the rocks at the pinnacle. Now, clad in warm layers, gazing at the peak clad in snow, I wondered if the flowers would survive.

At Murchio Gap I cut back toward the Sun and began the trudge up Bald Ridge. Now came the serious stretch: narrow, steep and rocky, blanketed in snow. I pulled the hard rubber cap off the end of my pole and inspected the five-toothed metal tip. Good to go.

From a distance, Bald Ridge seems to live up to its name. Up close, you discover that the ridge has hair. This morning the hair – chamise, sage and ceanothus – was as white as my grandfather’s. I smiled at the sight of ceanothus, hoping it would entertain later hikers. Ceanothus is a chest-high shrub that puts out a profusion of tightly-packed spherical clusters of flowers. White flowers. When the snow melted off, the ceanothus would masquerade as snow.

The snow on Bald Ridge wouldn’t be melting anytime soon. Every branch crowding the trail was topped with a high crest of snow, flake on flake forming a crystalline house of cards. Running those gauntlets was an exercise in ducking down, fending off obstructing branches – and getting doused. There was more snow on my back than on my shoes.

After Bald Ridge, on the way up North Peak, I drank in the receding ripples of Morgan Territory and Los Vaqueros, greens and blues bleached in the sun’s low light. Behind me spread Napa, Solano and Marin counties and a view of hundreds of thousands of people waking up to a view of me standing on the mountain’s white battlements.

The city of Clayton viewed from North Peak.

The peak experience is no match for the journey to the peak. Or the journey back. On my way down, on Middle Trail, melting snow was falling from a million limbs, branches, stems, twigs. I stopped and closed my eyes. I could have been at the ocean hearing the seethe of receding surf; I could have been caught under a squall line hearing the hiss of the gentlest of hailstorms. I had gone up the mountain to see. What I’ll remember forever is what I heard.

Farther down, below the snow line, I heard another sound: human voices. In that place it was as unexpected as the music of the melting snow, Ten minutes later I saw a string of children followed by herding parents coming my way. Five kids, four adults; one man was carrying a saucer sled. I stepped off the narrow trail to let them through.

“How far to the snow?” the man asked.

I made a quick calculation based on the little ones’ strides. “About 30 minutes,” I said. “And you’ll have some good snowball fights up there. Perfect packing.”

“All right!” he said.

And I thought: yes – up there, down here, all around us. All right.

January 4, 2025

Raven talks man onto ledge

A nightmare

Photo by LongQuattro/iStock/Getty Images

The sound startled me, as if someone had crept up from behind and flung out a sheet of canvas like a bedspread. In that exposed and windswept place, it could be only one thing: the sound of a bird’s wing. A large bird. I turned and saw a raven’s silhouette disappear behind the foreground of sage and chamise; heard a raven’s crusty caw swing west behind a cluster of buckbrush and trace an arc southward. I followed the bird with my ears.

But before the raven swung behind the chaparral foliage I registered a disturbing impression: the raven was way too large to be real. A normal raven’s wingspan is a hair short of 5 feet. This thing’s wingspan was at least 10 feet. I’d been T-boned by an optical illusion or I was in for an eventful evening.

The raven reappeared about 50 feet away, sailing on a northwest wind: a black, eerily large presence cast on the purple-grey backdrop of Marsh Creek Canyon. Suddenly it wheeled toward me, hung at the wind’s edge and spewed a stream of staccato clicks like the noise of a woodpecker hammering on a resonant sea shell.

I reached for my camera, flipped the power switch, boosted the magnification and lowered the exposure a click – all while keeping eyes riveted to the raven. It hung there, kiting. I raised the camera to my eye and peered into the viewfinder. The raven was gone.

Twenty minutes earlier I’d settled into the sandstone contours of what I call Wek-wek Ledge in Morgan Territory late in the day in late January. Since the trail skirting the ledge is named Prairie Falcon, I named the ledge after the Miwok word for Prairie Falcon: Wek-wek, which mimicks the sound of the falcon’s call. Prairie Falcon was the son of Molluk the Condor and grandson of Olétte, Coyote-man and creator of the world, confirming the rumor that the Miwok gods had practiced flagrantly unbiblical sex. All bets were off; these gods might be crazy.

Due west a mile and a half across the canyon rose the apex of Highland Ridge, elevation 2,300’, masking the low Sun. Above the ridge hovered swirling bands of lenticular clouds the color of cream atop, flowing down to peach. My perch stood at 1,950 feet above sea level and fell 200 feet nearly straight down a sandstone escarpment into the steep east slope of the canyon. The canyon, carved by the headwaters of Marsh Creek, traced a snaking descent from below my perch to the foundations of Mt. Diablo and its twin peaks seven miles north.

The gibbous Moon had cleared the foliage behind me; the Sun would set in a half hour. By the time moonlight overpowered the light of dusk and set Mt. Diablo aglow in pale pearl, I’d be headed for a place on the far side of the canyon: Epperson Ridge, its bare undulations cresting beneath Diablo’s North Peak like ocean swells, lit by the Moon. The wind faded to a breeze. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them I realized I wasn’t alone. To my right, 10 feet away, sat someone staring at the sunset sky. My scalp turned to ice. The stranger had popped onto the ledge and sat down without making a sound. Or had I fallen asleep?

He wore a black poncho; its wide hood pooled on his shoulders. The garment, stippled grey in a design suggesting feathers, cascaded over his knees; its ragged hem brushed the floor of the ledge. The man’s skin was ebony, his chin long and thin. A goatee spread to thick black throat hair. He turned his head with a quickness that made me flinch. His eyes, pointing straight at me, were small and circular, his irises bright amber, his pupils large. That’s when I knew I was in trouble. Those were bird eyes.

“Beautiful sunset!” I said with strained enthusiasm.

He jerked his head back west. “Beautiful” was his reply. But the word wasn’t enunciated; it was croaked. He pulled back his hood and black hair jetted back like feathers. Damn.

If ignorance isn’t bliss, I don’t know what it is. Were I ignorant of Native American myths I’d be merely hyperventilating. What I knew of those myths graced me with the calm of certainty that I was about to die a picturesque death. In the silence of familiar dusk on a familiar ledge above a familiar canyon I realized I was sitting in the presence of Kókol, raven god of the Native American Volvon.

Or I was dreaming. Before I could fully form the thought “I vote for the dreaming thing,” Raven said, “Do you have the time?”

Were I given 100 chances to guess what he would say, “Do you have the time?” would have snuck in at around 83.

I looked at my watch. “Yes. It’s 5:37.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“So what time is it?”

“The time is always now. Right now.”

Raven delivered “right now” with such authority that I swallowed hard and poked my hand into my pack for my flask of bourbon. Dreaming or not, I needed a jolt of liquid anesthesia. I threw back my head, felt the spirits burn down my throat and grabbed my hiking pole. In its folded state it made a respectable club. I might have little chance against Raven’s assault, but it would be a fighting chance.

For a moment we sat there, Kókol eyeing me more in amusement than malevolence. “What is it that you drink?” he asked.

“Bourbon,” I replied. “It’s a barrel-aged distilled spirit that –”

With an outward thrust of his left hand, Raven cut me off. Then he dropped all but his index and middle fingers – more talons than fingers – and curled them back and forth as if to say “gimme some.”

I tossed Raven the flask. Still staring at me, he unscrewed the cap with a practiced deftness and took a long quaff, letting the bourbon swirl in languor down his throat. He took another swig and said, “Don’t imagine that my fondness for this liquid offers you any ray of hope.”

So discombobulated were my senses that “ray of hope” flashed through my brain as Ray of Hope – a name, like Joan of Arc. Then I knew what I must do to prolong my stay of execution. The Volvon believe Raven is a jokester.

“I’m not Irish,” I said. “So if you insist on calling me Ray O’Hope, I insist on calling you Baril O’Monkeys.”

Raven’s eyes blinked and his head shook, as if he’d swallowed vinegar, not bourbon. He whipped a glance at me, paused a moment, then burst into a hybrid caw and snort. He seemed to smile – the man-bird face was hard to read – and said, “No. I insist on calling you Patakasu.”

A long silence followed. Had I given Raven the impression I was some sort of Miwok linguist? Then he croaked in exasperation, “Patakasu: tiny ant that bites hard.” And leaning toward me, Raven rasped, “Surely you can bite harder.”

What on earth did “surely you can bite harder” mean?

“I challenge you to Kamata,” said the god.

“Kamata?”

“Game of risk. You believe yourself clever; you believe you can abuse me better than I you? Ha! You suffer from delusions of adequacy.”

It took a moment for the sarcasm to sink in. Hey, not bad for someone for whom English was decidedly a second language. Then it struck me: if Raven is a jokester, could this be the Kamata? A Silly Insults contest?

“You call me Baril O’Monkeys,” he croaked. “But since you are human, Ips O’Facto, I call you Mired in Illusion.”

Yikes. The Miwok god speaks Latin. Fine. If he wants a Silly Insults contest, I’m in. But “Mired in Illusion”?

I leaped back into the fray: “Your voice is the mating call of two pieces of chalk,” which had the virtue of being accurate as well as descriptive.

Raven shook his head with the rapidity of a dog shaking off water. “Your insult is Lokni,” he said and paused, staring a hole through a spot precisely in the middle of my forehead. Then his pupils rolled upward. “Rain dripping through small hole in roof.”

Not the most withering slur I’ve heard. Depended on your domicile, I suppose. We’ve got the roofing guy’s cell number magnetized to our fridge.

My turn. “Speaking as an outsider, what’s your take on ‘wit’?” I asked.

Raven snapped his head down and sideways, absorbing the drift of the quip. “Ah, I see,” he said. “Mere Notaku.” I shrugged in ignorance. “You are the growl of a lazy bear as I pass by,” he said and flung the flask vaguely in my direction. I dove for it, scarily close to the edge of the ledge.

I hung on to the flask – not the ledge. The first few vertical feet, as I road-rashed my way over small but edgy speed-bumps of sandstone, were exhilarating. No time to pee the pants; time only to lunge at a scraggly manzanita sapling anchored in the escarpment. It held.

I looked up and saw the silhouette of Kókol looming above the horizon of the ledge. “Need you my help, Patakasu?” he said.

When your life hangs by a handhold, it’s best not to blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. “In all likelihood,” I said after careful thought. Is the contest still in session? Better take no chances.

“I challenge you to a Silly Names kamata!” I yelled while clinging to the manzanita like Harold Lloyd clinging to the minute hand of a clock 12 stories above a New York City street. Silly Names: in a world populated by D’Claude Katz and Dr. Loki Skylizard, I shouldn’t run out of material.

“Call me Claire Voyant,” I said, “but I’m about to fall to my death.”

“Well played,” croaked Raven. “And call me Miss Ann Thrope, for I might not care.”

The silhouette of Raven’s head disappeared. I heard a swoosh of poncho and a crunch of sandstone. Raven reappeared, closer and on his knees. He held out his hand. My flask was firmly clamped in my left hand; the flora of deliverance in my right. I lunged upward with my left, assuming Raven would catch my wrist. What he caught was the flask, picking it cleanly out of my grasp. My arm swung back down and I nearly lost hold of the manzanita. I could feel it begin to pull away from the rock face. Raven threw back his head and put the flask to his lips – if you could call them lips.

“Help me up!” I yelled. “Help me up, you Fractal Pterodactyl!” was the best I could do under the circumstances.

“C.C. Señor,” Raven cawed cheerily and spread his arms. The poncho billowed into wings. He leaped off the ledge and vanished above and behind me. I felt a talon like a curved dagger slide beneath my left armpit; three talons grasp my right shoulder. Suddenly I was hurtling upward, twisting and landing atop the ledge with a lung-scrunching thwomp.

I hoisted myself to an elbow. The light of dusk had contracted to a small dome of coral in the southwest. Below, moonlight like a tide began filling the depths of the canyon. A flotilla of high clouds drifted over from the east, dimming the Moon. In the lustrous but muted light I couldn’t tell if Raven’s mantle had returned from feathers to fabric.

What I could tell: Raven was quaffing bourbon like a guy about to get cut off by – well, by any bartender on Earth. “You are now in my debt,” he said, referring, I suppose, to saving my life. Never mind that my dangling from the escarpment was entirely Raven’s fault.

“But,” he said squinting and eying me sideways, “‘Fractal Pterodactyl’?!”

“That was a stretch,” I conceded, still panting and groaning.

Ah, well. Since I haven’t been able to shake this stubbornly vivid nightmare, I might as well swing with it. Who knows? I might find a way to avert catastrophe and suffer mere fiasco. The thing training its neon-amber eyes on me, whom the Volvon call Kókol, evidently is in no danger of dematerializing. I’m stuck with him.

Photo by Maksim Ratomskikh/iStock/Getty Images

“I accept your challenge,” said Raven, slurring the words. “Make it a Silly Sobriquet kamata. Now compose yourself or I’ll dub you The Archdeacon of Freakin’.”

Oh, no; here we go: nicknames. Okey dokey. If Raven’s getting drunk, it’s time to fry his circuits and make a snappy exit.

“Oh, yeah?! I dub you The Sibyl of the Crossover Dribble,” I said, more or less at random. Raven’s neck convulsed; his mouth spewed at least two ounces of bourbon into the moonlit air. Waste of a good small-batch product. And a pretty hackneyed sight gag.

Raven dragged himself to a small boulder and lay against it, head down. In a tone of queasy contentment he brawked, “You are truly The Marquis of Obloquy.” And his belch echoed down the canyon.

I waited what seemed a century – probably eight seconds – to see if Raven would raise his head and demand a comeback; to see if he was still conscious. No movement; no sound. I waited some more, what seemed an eternity – probably a minute. Raven began snoring.

Then, of all the evening’s remarkable events, the most remarkable occurred: I stayed. Instead of high-tailing it out of there, I sat and watched the final embers of light in the west die in a smudge of violet. I traced the canyon’s charcoal course north to a mountain paling in the slow crescendo of lunar light. A great-horned owl’s whoo-hoo hoo hoo hooooo rose from far below like smoke in a gentle updraft.

I looked at the dark heap of Raven slumped against the boulder, an odd posture for the god reputed to interpret visions and reveal mysteries deeply hidden. What insights had I gained from this crazy deity? What wisdom lurked in his dismissive quips?

An intense sensation of buoyancy rose from my core to my extremities. My bones felt light, as if hollow. I stood, walked to the edge of the ledge, spread my arms and bent my knees. Poised to launch. It seemed perfectly reasonable: surely the canyon’s dense air would support me. I leaned over the ledge’s edge and took a look straight down.

Then it hit me: I’d hiked to Wek-wek Ledge a hundred times; every time I stood on the drop-off, my knees would wobble and I’d retreat. Not now. I realized, to my astonishment, that I wasn’t afraid.

Were this a dream, I could choose to fly like a bird, push off the ledge like a cliff diver, see the umbrella-shaped crowns of oaks speed toward me, then recede as I thrashed upward on impossible wings. Was I a man who fell asleep and dreamed he was a raven? When I awaken, will I wonder: am I a raven dreaming I’m a man? I leaned forward and gazed into the canyon once more. The bleached branches of buckeyes glowed in the delicate white fire of lunar light.

Decision time: should I fall to my knees, crab-walk my way back from the edge and take flight down the trail, forever wondering if I could have taken flight off the ledge? Or should I take the plunge and risk doing something truly interesting with the last six seconds of my life?

A bank of cloud passed beneath the Moon, throwing a shroud over the ledge. I stretched out my arms; from my sleeves flowed the faint form of feathers. I couldn’t be sure. From beneath the back of my jacket protruded feathery wisps vaguely resembling a tail. But it was dark. Then I watched myself, as if from a distance, take three steps backward and without hesitation two long leaps forward.

Arms spread, I floated into the canyon’s moist air, falling with the drowsiness of a leaf in autumn. But I was a bird, and knew that by the time I reached the treetops I’d have lost the momentum needed to make a swift ascent; I’d be forced to flap furiously back up. I yanked my arms back to my torso and became a projectile.

My body, whatever it had become, obeyed laws of physics. I gained speed toward the treetops, spread my arms and began carving a shallow arc upward like a tower-buzzing stunt pilot pulling 7 G’s. When I finally lost momentum and started flapping my way back up to the ledge, fear overcame the urge to explore – fear of sinking so far into the fantasy of being a raven that I’d become a raven. Permanently.

Photo by Homunkulus28/iStock/Getty Images

Besides, flapping is hard work.

Exhausted, I spotted the ledge, overshot my landing zone and nearly crashed into Kókol. The racket of skidding on sandstone and plowing into the crackly sage didn’t matter. Raven was still out for the count.

I grunted my way to a standing position. Time to get outta here. But first I would get the last word and in terms the jokester would understand. “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening – but this wasn’t it,” I whispered, quoting Groucho as I tiptoed past Raven.

That settled it: I must be dreaming. No way in a waking state would I risk rousing a drunk demigod. A lightness of spirit spread over me. “I know the debt’s in arrears,” I sang softly to myself, paraphrasing the Dead song. “Raven’s not been fed in years. It’s even worse than it appears.” The ledge glowed in Luna’s silver sheen. “But it’s alright.”

From behind I heard a rustle. “Don’t be so sure,” croaked the god. I stopped. “Tonight’s ledge merely prepares you for tomorrow’s.” And a whoosh shattered the stillness. I looked up and saw a thousand edges of feather reflect a brief but searing flame of moonlight, heard massive wings whap straight up and cut back toward the canyon. Something heavy struck my shoulder with a splat and I realized Raven would get the last word.

Bird poop. With a whiff of bourbon.

December 18, 2024

Grey unveils the gift of here and now

Tendrils of fog wreathe Mt. Diablo’s Donner Canyon.

It drifted in like a tide, in silence; I never heard it coming. At dawn I awoke from one dream only to be seized in the grey and damp grip of another. No caffeine ritual could dispel the effect of this fog; only wind or a searing sun. Or a hike up Mt. Diablo.

A hike in the fog can be an exercise in aesthetic awe – or just exercise. When you can’t see more than 40 yards ahead, the assault of a 3,800-foot peak is the scenic equivalent of a traipse down your neighborhood sidewalk.

I struck out south into Donner Canyon and swung up Meridian Ridge toward the 3,000-foot crest of Bald Ridge, where I’d take stock of the atmosphere and head up to the Summit or back down by way of North Peak. No need to haul butt to a pinnacle that provides only a sea-level vista.

Fog is a form of optical illusion. The fog ahead seems blindingly solid but with each step through it, you’re able to resolve nearby images with surprising clarity. You’re trapped in a bubble of the present; your future is hidden. There is only here and now.

As I climbed the narrow spine of Meridian Ridge, the canyons called Donner and Back Creek to my left and right faded into haze below. Above, the fog thinned and Bald Ridge came into focus. Suddenly I was transported from the here and now of nearby images to the there and when of a smoky height: an object one mile, one thousand feet of elevation and one-half hour in my future. Tendrils of fog lacing the ridge’s northern face like steam from a kettle swirled and coalesced into waves. A northeast breeze drove the waves up to the crest, where they collided with a southwest wind streaming from the ocean and shattered like breakers against coastal cliffs.

Just as suddenly a tsunami of fog washed over the ridge and the vision vanished. I was alone again in the company of objects small and nearby: sage and chamise, clusters of bell-shaped blossoms dotting manzanita branches like snow, objects I could reach out and touch, objects whose scent I could catch if I paused long enough to accept the gift of the fog.

I never made it to the mountaintop. Brief glances through gashes in the ashen gauze confirmed that I’d gain no grand vistas this day. Ransome Point, 400 feet beneath the Summit, was smothered. North Peak was nowhere. I was condemned to embrace the proximate and the present, a fitting sentence for one who spends an alarming share of his energy inhabiting an imagined future. I mark my calendar, set my alarm and turn my gaze upward and outward, confident the river of time will deliver me to my destination, if not my destiny.

On my traverse down North Peak I came across a boulder robed in mosses of dense and deep green flecked with tiny ferns. What archipelagos, I wondered, what continents, what worlds of strange and tireless life grace the boulders of this one mountain in Northern California? There isn’t enough time in a life span to exhaust the marvels of this one place. There isn’t enough future, I thought – and caught myself straining again to imagine an existence on the far side of the fog. No, it was more than enough to have seen less than enough.

Farther down the mountain I crossed paths with a pair of hikers on the way up. It was their first time on these trails and they were lost, oblivious of the rough road ahead. I chimed in with factoids – distance, elevation, terrain – but offered no advice. Nothing heightens orientation like getting lost and finding your way back.

“You won’t see anything from the peak past 40 yards,” I told the lead hiker.

“That’s OK. It’s a good day to be out here,” she said. “Knowing where you’re going takes all the mystery out of life.”

I pinched the brim of my hat, they waved, and we disappeared into the mist.

December 6, 2024

Eloquent imprints tell tale of the trail

The hind track of a coyote on Vista Grande Trail at Los Vaqueros Watershed.

You’d think we trail mavens would hate the rain. Oh sure, we can figure out how to keep our skin dry. But all the waterproof apparel in the world won’t prevent mud from fouling our high-tech hiking boots. Scraping hardened goop from the Byzantine cleat pattern of my Altras, I assure you, is no walk in the park.

The other school of thought maintains that goop is good. Let it rain; let it pour. Wait a few days for the trails to dry out and take a look. You’ll find, right under your Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass, an array of wonders those pristine trails of summer can’t provide: animal track.

If wildflower enthusiasts love spring, trackers love winter. Mud and snow are the parchment on which animals write the signature of their presence. As a human signature can reveal the signer’s personality, an animal’s track can divulge what the beast was doing when it made its mark, allowing us to deduce, like Holmes, the creature’s species, gender, direction, speed and activity. It’s remarkable how much information can be contained in an impression a few inches square.

The track of a black-tailed deer on Hetherington Loop Trail at Mt. Diablo. The pointed ends, like arrows, reveal the direction of travel.

Sometimes the impression is dramatic. Many winters ago on Oak Savannah Trail at Los Vaqueros I spotted a mystifying deer track. Four close-spaced hoof prints had been embossed in the dead center of that 12-foot-wide avenue perpendicular to the line of the trail. I looked around for other deer sign and found none.

What I found, however, was sign of a pair of coyotes heading in the same direction. The freshness of their track implied they could have crossed the trail in the time frame of the deer crossing. And the spacing of their track suggested they were making serious time.

Then the vision came: A deer in flight, sailing in from my right, landing smack on the center of the trail and bounding majestically away to my left, disappearing into the tule fog of a bracing December dawn; the coyotes in urgent pursuit: one head down, led by the scent of prey; the other head up, ears forward and pupils dilated.

The track of a bobcat on the prowl on Miners Trail at Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve. Why no claw marks? Cats’ claws are retractable.

At dawn on a snow-capped Mt. Diablo many winters ago I came on a set of track that conjured another tale of fight or flight. Puncturing the snow on Meridian Ridge were two sets of coyote track alongside the track of a single deer, all created after the snowfall had ended. No more than six hours old.

I’d caught a glimpse of the terrible balance of the world: death and an uncertain rebirth. Did the coyotes catch the deer? Was the deer a doe or a buck? The answer carried consequences for both species.

A few hundred yards up, at the 2,200-foot level, something had happened. The deer, possibly sensing danger, had taken a sharp left up into dense manzanita. One coyote had peeled off and followed. The other had kept to the road trail. Were the predators working, as coyotes do, as a team? I never found out. What I found was the signature of mortality, and a reminder of my privileged place in the conscious awareness of the world.

Dust off your magnifying glass, Sherlock. It’s time for the trails to get muddy. Time for the beasts to sign in.

November 13, 2024

Golden age of lunar equilibrium

New Year’s Moon 2010, when reflected sunlight made the quarter-million-mile journey to Earth and was refracted through thin clouds above Brentwood, California.

Like an angel of heaven, she’s a creature of reflected glory; you can gaze on her and not be blinded. She’s a lesser power, yet she rules the domain of night unchallenged, delivering us from darkness but troubling our dreams. She can blot out the Sun or blush the color of blood. She has conjured images of werewolves and goddesses; fascinated ancient astronomers and enticed modern astronauts. Luna, Earth’s eternal consort.

In the course of hundreds of solo night hikes guided by moonlight, I’ve seen Luna in myriad moods from myriad angles: the slenderest of crescents suspended featherlike in the delicate updraft of dawn, or as fragments of pale gold flashing through gaps in trees as I stride through the forest. I’ve seen her as a pearl glowing from the Milky Way’s river bed as clouds flow past her like leaves caught by the current. And I’ve seen her in eclipse, an angry queen robed in red, majestic and terrible.

No matter your take on the Moon – adoration, trepidation or indifference – consider yourself lucky she’s up there. Without the Moon, Earth would be devoid of human life.

Our Moon is unique. Several other planets in our solar system are circled by moons (Jupiter’s number between 80 and 95), but none boasts a moon so large relative to the parent planet. And that’s good for us. Over the eons, our Moon’s mass has exerted a stabilizing force on Earth’s 23½-degree axis of rotation. Without that consistent tilt, Earth would resemble Mars, wobbling like a top in collapse. Earth’s axis wobbles only slightly, allowing our planet to develop consistent climate patterns that make possible the development of larger, more complex and fragile organisms – organisms like you and me.

The Moon hasn’t always been a pearlescent orb subtly gracing our sky. Fast rewind 4½ billion years: Earth is a red planet, not blue; a molten globe seething in the cold of space. Then it happens: Earth is sideswiped by a planetoid half its size, which shears off and spews into Earth orbit a huge glob of magma mantle. The debris forms a ring, and through the force of gravity gradually coalesces into a sphere.

Moon over Murchio Gap, Mt. Diablo State Park, California.

In that original state, our Moon was the ultimate NEO (near-Earth object). Our modern-day Moon orbits Earth at a distance of about 240,000 miles. The primordial Moon’s distance from Earth was a scant 12,000 to 18,000 miles. Imagine the Moon 15 times larger in the sky than she appears today.

But nothing in the universe stands still. In the ages since that colossal impact, the distance between Earth and Moon has been increasing. Right now is a good time to be alive: viewed from Earth, our Moon and Sun are roughly the same size, providing the awe-inspiring vision of the full solar eclipse. Eventually the receding Moon will appear smaller than the Sun, and the full solar eclipse will be a vague memory buried deep in human DNA.

One image buried deep in our DNA is the face of the Moon: “the Man in the Moon.” Since our ancestors first looked up at the night sky, we’ve seen only one hemisphere of our planet’s satellite – what we call the “near side” – right up until A.D. 1959, when unmanned spaceships snapped the first photos of the far side. In December of 1968, human eyes finally gazed at the far side as the Apollo 8 astronauts made the first manned lunar orbit.

Ever wonder why only one side of the Moon faces Earth? Just as the Moon has stabilized Earth’s axis of rotation, Earth has stabilized the Moon’s period of rotation. As the eons rolled along, Earth’s mass slowed Luna’s rotation until it equaled her period of revolution. The Moon is now tidally locked (“phase-locked”) with Earth: it takes Luna 27.3 days to rotate once on her axis and 27.3 days to revolve once around Earth, preventing us earthbound Moon mavens from viewing the heavily cratered far side.

Mark your calendar for Friday, November 15. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Moon rises at 4:38 p.m. and the Sun sets at 4:55 p.m. My advice as a friend: hike, drive or paraglide to the highest spot you can find and savor the spectacle: embers of Sun sinking in the west while another orb, rising in the east, pales from blood red to peach to pearl to blinding white. A good way to celebrate the golden age of Luna.

October 14, 2024

Tales of slerks and soul mates

A shopping cart disfigures the intimate imagery of Marsh Creek in Brentwood.

It was a bright and warm autumn afternoon in tarantula mating season – time for male tarantulas to cruise for chicks. I was on one knee along the dirt shoulder of Round Valley’s Murphy Meadow Trail, my camera at ground level trained on a tarantula about 4 inches away. The spider, having Googled “Burrow Bars/Murphy Meadow,” was halfway down a burrow in hopes of hitting on some long-legged, eight-legged brunette.

Suddenly Miguel went whirring past on his mountain bike, followed by Matt. At the time, I didn’t know their names were Miguel and Matt – but I soon found out. Matt slowed to see what the photo-op was about.

“Hey, Miguel!” he yelled. “We got a tarantula here!”

Miguel raised a zephyr of dust as he braked and spun back our way. When he pulled into the paparazzi zone, Matt was already bagging spider shots on his iPhone.

“Wow,” said Miguel. “Never seen a live tarantula. Cool.”

The three of us shot more than photos; we shot the breeze for nearly an hour, following the spider’s progress, sharing tales of the trail – instantly forming that bond peculiar to lovers of the outdoors. Scenic soul mates.

Miguel is a Tracy resident; Matt hails from Oakland. Since they were getting their first exposure to Round Valley, I appointed myself Docent du Jour and fired off a fusillade of tarantula lore, trail directions, distances and elevations. They were patient. I learned that Matt is a former U.S. Navy security guy recovering from PTSD. “This,” he said, gesturing to the gently undulating gold of the valley and its maternally enfolding hills, “is a healing place to be.”

Crossing paths with Miguel and Matt was healing for me, too. A few minutes earlier, I’d crossed paths with an empty beef jerky package discarded smack in the middle of the trail. “Well,” I thought, “the ‘jerk’ part certainly applies.”

Out on the trail, after hours of silent solo hiking, the simple sound of a human voice can be comforting, no matter what’s spoken; the simple image of a human can be reassuring. But “the more, the merrier” isn’t in my trail vocabulary. I need to know if the “more” includes litterers and vandals. Let’s call them, for purposes of verbal shorthand, “slerks” – slobs and jerks.

In my long experience as a trail tramp, I’m happy to report: the beef-jerky slerk is the exception, not the rule. Miguel and Matt are the rule. But as an objective journalist, I’m sad to report: the more popular our regional parks become, the more I see the handiwork of slerks. I smile when I see so many soul mates enjoying the scenery. And I cross my fingers. Statistical probability dictates that a few of them are slerks.

Nothing breaks the spell of enchantment in the wild like the handiwork of the slerk. When gazing on the grandeur of Mt. Diablo framed by oak limbs and lichen-spattered boulders, it’s distracting and disheartening to spot a slerk’s initials carved on the oak, a power-bar wrapper nestled among the boulders. When we’re lucky enough to catch the silhouette of a black-tailed deer, as still as a statue on the crest of a sandstone escarpment, the sight of a discarded Gatorade bottle breaks the spell, symbolizes what we came to the wilderness to escape. We come to the wilderness to hear the screech of a golden eagle, the wind in the trees, not some slerk’s favorite tune blasted on a boom box.

Slerks assume that a place of natural beauty is just another sports stadium or street festival, where noise is encouraged, where littering and defacement are so rampant that crews are hired to clean up the aftermath. The annual Marsh Creek Cleanup event drags from our communal waters an average of more than 6 tons of trash, including tires and shopping carts.

Hey, slerks: knock it off. You know those trigger-happy space aliens toting planetary-bombardment weapons? You’re giving them second thoughts about sparing humanity.

Wallace Stegner wrote that “culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.” At the crest of Round Valley’s Hardy Canyon, elevation 1,100 feet, a cluster of randomly scattered rocks recently served as building blocks for a hiker-architect’s rock towers. Most of the towers stood on multiple foundations and incorporated about three dozen ingeniously balanced rocks – East Contra Costa’s Stonehenge.

The handiwork of a hiker/architect on the crest of Round Valley’s Hardy Canyon.

In a week the towers were gone, knocked down by some slerk who couldn’t resist the temptation to wreck the painstaking work of a genius. Like the Vandals who sacked Rome in A.D. 455, the Round Valley vandal saw the towers as an opportunity to destroy, not create; to subtract rather than add a stone of his own.

Oddly enough, the creator of the towers was in technical violation of park district Ordinance 38, which prohibits the moving of rocks from their original locations. But it’s hard to tar the builder and the destroyer with the same brush. Every time the park district chisels out a trail or builds a bridge, it disrupts an ecosystem – and absolves itself of violating Ordinance 38. I hike these hills and valleys for the awe they inspire. The rock towers, though a work of human hands, inspired awe. My unauthorized verdict: the builder, though breaking a rule, was no slerk.

The worse angels of my nature hope I catch a slerk in the act – witness someone tossing aside a bottle or wrapper; carving initials on a tree – and give him a verbal thrashing. The better angels hope I can find the words to discourage and encourage; castigate but not alienate. After all, we’re both out there for the awe. We should be soul mates.

October 1, 2024

Halloween gross-out: wasp v. spider smackdown

Tarantula, Round Valley Regional Preserve.

In the 1979 film “Alien,” a monster in hatchling form lays a parasitic larva inside one of the good guys. The larva matures in a couple hours and – no respecter of immaculate walls and ceilings – bursts through the host’s chest as a small (soon to grow really really large) beast with little or no sense of humor.

One factor that keeps our eyes riveted to the screen is the consolatory concept “it’s just a movie.” Just fiction. But where do these makers of horror fiction get some of their best ideas? From the facts.

Of the creatures we run across in real life, the spider ranks high on the creep-out quotient. A life form grotesquely unlike us, it sports eight legs and way too many eyes for our taste. It wears its skeleton on its sleeve and its abdomen in its back pocket. And it dines with a gruesome gentility, paralyzing its prey with venom, wrapping the victim in silk while its innards liquefy, and returning later to sip away with a straw.

But there’s another miniature monster in the mix, a creature that suffers from not a twinge of arachnophobia: the tarantula hawk, a large wasp that preys on tarantulas. As in “Alien,” the T. hawk delivers a nasty package to its victim. But the horror inflicted on the character Kane in “Alien” is a spa holiday compared to the tarantula’s ordeal. In the spirit of Halloween, let’s elaborate.

The male tarantula stops growing at about age 7 and sheds his exoskeleton for the last time. Normally a nocturnal creature, the mature male leaves the protection of his burrow in September and October and hunts for a mate in broad daylight. That procreative impulse is good for the species but hazardous to the suitor’s health. Out in the open, the tarantula is a prime target for the T. hawk.

A tarantula hawk sips nectar at Los Vaqueros Reservoir. The wasp uses the spider not as food, but as a larva nursery.

The T. hawk measures up to 2 inches in length, making it one of the largest wasps in the world. It stalks the tarantula on the ground, by scent, skittering around till it finds the female spider’s burrow or locates the male spider while he’s out cruising for chicks. The wasp probes the spider with its antennae, formulates a plan of attack and strikes with its stinger, delivering a paralytic blow to the tarantula’s nervous system.

A tarantula expelled from its burrow and paralyzed will be dragged back to the burrow; a tarantula ambushed in the open will be dragged to a burrow excavated by the T. hawk. The female wasp lays an egg on the spider’s abdomen and seals the crypt.

It takes about a week for the larva to hatch. Keep in mind that the spider isn’t dead; merely paralyzed. The wasp grub burrows into the spider’s abdomen and feeds – and here’s the icky part – bypassing the spider’s vital organs in order to keep it alive. Clever little grub. When dessert time comes and the spider’s vitals are finally devoured, the grub begins the pupation process, which takes a few weeks. The cute little grub morphs into an adult, then re-enacts the “Alien” scene in a climactic belly burst.

A public-service announcement: the T. hawk’s sting is hazardous not only to the tarantula’s health; it can put the human nervous system on pain overload. Although the wasp isn’t easily provoked, its sting ranks among the most painful of any insect. According to biochemist Justin O. Schmidt, the T. hawk sting delivers “immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations.” Outside Magazine’s Katie Arnold describes the sting as “blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.” The good news: the peak pain lasts only three minutes and isn’t lethal.

In Round Valley's Murphy Meadow, a male tarantula inspects a burrow in the hope of hitting on some long-legged, eight-legged brunette.

The male tarantula leads a hard life. He must fend off not only the T. hawk, but the female tarantula during mating. A famished female will kill (though seldom eat) the male if he fails to make a swift and smooth exit from the coital scene. As a defense, the male grows two tibial spurs (“stirrups”) used to hook and neutralize the female’s fangs before mating.

After luring the female out of her burrow and impregnating her, the male tarantula never returns to his own burrow. He puts his nose to the reproductive grindstone and continues pounding the pavement for poontang until the lethal winds of November – or a T. hawk – permanently ends his quest.

Tarantula mating season is nearly done. If you’re lucky enough to cross paths with these remarkable creatures, admire, take your snapshots, but cut them some slack. Unlike those cardboard creepy-crawlies infesting our haunted houses, they’re probably minding their own besotted business.

And if you hear a menacing buzz and spot a large, orange-winged, black-bodied wasp, follow the the tarantula’s inspiring example. Duck for cover.

September 13, 2024

Friday the 13th – perfect day for dental work

My dentist asked me to pick a date for repairs on a fractured tooth. I mulled it over and said, “How does Friday the 13th work for you?”

Jerry Seinfeld once remarked that one of his chief pet peeves is the term “pet peeve.” I know the feeling: I’m so unsuperstitious I’ve become positively superstitious about it. Show me a ladder and I’ll duck under it in a heartbeat; point out a black cat and I’ll cross the street, risking bodily harm, to cross the cat’s path. I’ve embraced The Dark Side.

Apophenia, the interpretation of meaningless phenomena in meaningful ways, seems hard-wired into the human brain. On Oct. 10, 2010 – 10/10/10 – more than 39,000 couples in the United States were wed, nearly 10 times the nuptial number of the comparable day the previous year. Elvis impersonators hit the jackpot on 11/11/11, when the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel recorded 200 bookings, four times the norm.

I’m no psychologist, but I’ve seen enough of human behavior to take an educated guess about who’s pushing the easy-to-remember anniversary numbers. It’s the grooms.

Some superstitions that seem numeric are actually sonic. Superstitious people in Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam shun the number four, a homophone for the word for death. This influences the assigning of numbers to cell phones, floors in buildings (skipping four, as we in the West skip 13) and names to streets. If this strikes you as foolish, imagine our Western numbering system containing an exact sonic match for “bloodbath.” How’d you like to live on Bloodbath Blossom Street?

What prompts some superstition isn’t numbers or sounds but wishful thinking, like expecting an inanimate object – say, a writing pen – to remember any fact of significance. Some folks believe that when taking a test, it’s a savvy move to use the pen you used when studying for the test, since the pen is likely to remember the correct answers. These folks’ pens are mightier than their gourds.

If I’m wrong about this, if our superstitions correspond to the way things work, if the number 13 is jinxed, we’re all in deep doo-doo. It means the cosmos is supervised by a malicious prankster, that the slightest slip-up can trigger tragic consequences, as when the groom who drops the wedding band at the ceremony dooms the marriage. Who knows what other innocent acts ignite icky outcomes? We can imagine the cosmic prankster laying a curse on dentists who whistle “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” while performing root canals, the most original sin of the modern era.

If you’re superstitious and want to break the habit, go break a mirror. Thumb your nose at the cosmic prankster and track the consequences. Keep a journal – in the case of the mirror, every day for seven years. That’s right: 2,556.75 straight days of journal entries. A more passive strategy: make a dental appointment for Friday the 13th. Dental work: drilling and chiseling on sensitive nerve endings in your mouth. Hey, it’s Friday the 13th; what could possibly go wrong?

But to the true believer on this inauspicious Friday, September 13, 2024: Relax. Embrace your superstition. Take a deep breath. And never mind that it rhymes with death.

August 23, 2024

Earth’s oceans thrive in lucky Lane 3

Does a 696-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bath condo going for $575,000 sound like a good deal? If its back yard is a beach on Monterey Bay, it might. Only five miles inland, in Watsonville, you can move into a 1,052-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath condo for a mere $295,000.

Ever wonder why oceanfront property is so expensive? Of course not; it’s self-evident: we humans love big bodies of water. The rumble and hiss of surf, the panoramic sweep of the sea, the galvanizing salt breezes all make an oceanside stroll hard to resist.

It’s no wonder the ocean soothes our spirits; we’re drawn to it as a weary wanderer is drawn home. When eons ago our aquatic ancestors dragged themselves onto the enticing strangeness of the land, did they never look back? Hardly. In a remote corner of our unconscious, we’ve never forgotten that the ocean is the womb from which we came.

We’re also drawn to the ocean by its otherness. Stand on its shore and see it recede and meld with the ocean of sky. Sail into its heart and feel lost in a vastness more featureless than outer space. Plunge into its depths and discover the cold, the crushing pressure, the creatures more outlandish than the monsters of sci-fi.

If you’re a well-adjusted Homo sapiens and love the ocean, thank your lucky star – the Sun – that it’s the right star at the right distance: 93 million miles. What makes that distance special? It falls within a range of 74 and 148 million miles, also known as HZ, the habitable zone. Of all the lanes in our solar speedway, Lane No. 3 – Earth’s lane – is the most conducive to oceans. Outside Lane 3, oceans boil off or freeze solid. End of life as we know it.

Luckily for us, Earth is in no danger of going off the deep (or shallow) end and wandering mindlessly out of the HZ. We’re safe for now. But how privileged is our status? In the last half century, speculation regarding the likelihood of life on extra-solar planets (exoplanets) has taken some curious turns. And the jury’s still out.

Before the era of space exploration it was assumed that planets covered by large bodies of liquid water must be common in our universe. We took our cue from the polar caps of Mars and the tropical paradise we imagined would lie cloaked beneath the clouds of Venus.

Sand Hill Cove, Point Lobos State Reserve, California.

Closer inspection by interplanetary probes gave us a jolt: Mars’ polar caps comprised not frozen H2O but frozen CO2 – dry ice. Mars was a frigid desert. Venus, we learned, was hell – a greenhouse machine radiating surface temperatures of 800 F.

But that’s only our solar system. Considering the billions of stars in our galaxy and billions of galaxies in the universe, it stood to reason that although Earth’s surface oceans are unique in our solar system, they’re common in the cosmos. With few exceptions, we imagined, all planetary systems must sustain their own HZs. Surely somewhere around the myriad stars out there must orbit millions of exoplanets adorned with life-giving oceans.

In only the last couple decades have we developed the tools – such as the now-retired Kepler mission and the current TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) – to conduct a serious search for planets orbiting other stars in our neck of the galactic woods.

As of August, 2024 the NASA Exoplanet Archive recorded its 5,747th confirmed exoplanet. Such abundance, plus the fact that many exoplanets reside in their star’s HZ, has led some enthusiasts to believe that Earthlike planets are a dime a dozen.

Problem is, HZ is more than a matter of distance. Size matters. Large stars sustain broad HZs but are subject to short lifespans, and small stars live long but sustain narrow (or no) HZs. Were the sun less than 83 percent of its present mass, it wouldn’t radiate enough heat to counteract runaway glaciation on Earth. On the other hand, were the Sun 20 percent more massive, it would have consumed all its hydrogen fuel before it reached its billionth birthday. Earth would have gone dead 3½ billion years ago.

The same principles apply to the size of planets. Were Earth only 10 percent more massive, it would have produced a jailbreak greenhouse effect. Had it been 6 percent less massive, it wouldn’t have developed a sufficient ozone layer to shield it from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. In either case, kiss life on Earth goodbye.

Our single-minded search for water worlds has also made us realize that too much water can be a problem. A computer modeling study suggests that an Earthlike candidate – Kepler-62f, 1,200 light years from Earth – might be covered by a seamless, global ocean. Lacking reasonable access to fire and metals – not to mention electricity – whatever life forms take hold beneath that endless sea would likely be strangers to technology as we know it.

Factors such as orbital eccentricity, axial tilt and rotation, the influence of a moon or giant planet in the vicinity, atmospheric pressure – even the density of the galactic neighborhood – also need to be finely tuned for a planet to be hospitable to our form of life. That, plus our meager understanding of the processes that govern the makeup and evolution of exoplanets’ atmospheres, have led some experts to conclude that Earth might be a special case.

Imagine the citizens of Earth, centuries in the future, on a quest to find an Earthlike planet somewhere in our galaxy. Were they to visit a million worlds, their chances of finding a grand total of one world graced by oceans and continents would be remote. When our spacefaring descendants leave the nest and flutter into the cosmos, they’ll likely never again get to enjoy a simple walk by the sea.

We Californians are doubly blessed: blessed to live on the edge of the mighty Pacific Ocean and blessed to live on a blue planet. The next time you take a sunset walk on the beach, don’t leave till the stars come out. Look up, and know that in all that immensity you’ll not find many gems like our sapphire Earth. The color of water.

July 25, 2024

Where cliff and surf collide

High tide and high winds churn the sea floor beneath the Pinnacle, viewed from Cypress Grove Trail.

Tendrils of fog drift through stands of pine and dissolve over coves cut steeply in granite. Squadrons of pelicans sweep low over rock castles battered jagged by eons of sea. On the lee sides of cypress limbs, rust-orange algae cling like frost. Sea lions bray from their island citadels and sea otters float on their backs in carpets of kelp. And accompanying every image and every scent is the thunder of water breaking against rock.

In the long, narrow display case of the California coastline, Point Lobos State Reserve is the jewel that glistens like no other. Nestled between Carmel and Big Sur off Highway 1, Point Lobos occupies only 1,300 acres of coastland. But they are 1,300 acres of concentrated beauty.

Point Lobos is both monumental and intimate: whales and wildflowers, the cracking of cliff against surf and the silence of grazing deer. But this beauty is fragile. Entrance into the park is limited to 450 visitors at a time, not only to reduce wear and tear on the ecosystem but to provide a measure of solitude in this inspiring environment.

The reserve is named after its Punta de los Lobos Marinos, Point of the Sea Wolves, where you’re serenaded by choirs of sea lions perched on archipelagos of rock. If you want to come straight to the point, take the entrance road straight ahead and park at Sea Lion Point.

The Monterey Cypress known as Old Veteran clings to the granite of Cypress Cove’s east wall in defiance of wind, rain and gravity.

From here you can get a good view – and earful – of Point Lobos’ stellar attractions: the harbor seal and California sea lion. The smaller and more plentiful harbor seal is a year-round resident of the reserve, while the adult male sea lion – some measuring 8 feet and weighing 800 pounds – leaves Point Lobos in June and July to cruise for chicks in the Channel Islands off Southern California.

If you’re out for a scenic hike with a dramatic arc, Whalers Cove at Cannery Point is a good spot to park. Along North Shore Trail, beginning at Whalers Cove, you can experience Point Lobos in a gradual crescendo of grandeur. You’ll see the ocean foam over the brown rocks of Cannery Point and follow pelicans carving a graceful glide around Guillemot Island.

Hop onto a side trail at Cypress Cove and behold Old Veteran, a Monterey Cypress that epitomizes the struggle for survival in this rugged environment, defying the force of wind, gravity and erosion. Anchored onto the edge of Cypress Cove’s east wall, Old Veteran’s roots dangle precariously over the ocean and its branches support banks of foliage that hover like clouds.

When you come to Cypress Grove Trail, hang a right and take the loop around Allan Memorial Grove, where the trail escorts you past a vignette of the Pinnacle, a mini-mountain jutting from the ocean floor. Cypress Grove Trail climaxes at Headland Cove, where all the reserve’s virtues converge: wave and rock, cliff and forest, bird, mammal and fish, and the ocean’s unfathomable span.

At Headland Cove you’ve reached the reserve’s midpoint. There are many more wonders to savor, both inland along the South Plateau and Mound Meadow trails, and at the sea’s swelling edge on the South Shore and Bird Island trails. If the sea is in a theatrical mood, head down to a peninsula of rock called The Slot, where the Pacific becomes a paragon of physics: gathering itself, cresting and striking with optimal force. Water becomes thunder; blue-green erupts in geysers of glinting white.

A word of caution about The Slot: observe the swelling and slamming of the sea from a safe distance. Let The Slot bear the brunt of breakers. Come too close and, in the most lethal sense of the phrase, you’ll “get carried away.”

The Pacific Ocean unleashes its fury at Sand Hill Cove, which pits overeager photographers against lethal plumes of seawater.

Beneath the surface of the Pacific a mile north of the point, the bottom of Carmel Bay drops a thousand feet down. In another five miles the Monterey Canyon plummets to a depth of 7,000 feet. The result: over half of Point Lobos is under water. A full 750 acres of the reserve is devoted to divers, who take advantage of the reserve’s proximity to deep water and the phenomenal variety of creatures it affords. At Whalers Cove, adventurers in wetsuits plunge into 70-foot high kelp forests where southern sea otters play and rockfish weave in and out of view. Harbor seals and California sea lions are plentiful here. From the scale of the tiny to the colossal, from iridescent phytoplankton to gray whales on their migration routes, the world under the water’s surface is one of the chief attractions of this place.

The reserve is one of three places on the coast where the Monterey pine grows naturally. Without the fog drip provided by the Point Lobos’ microclimate, the tree wouldn’t survive the area’s dry summers. The other tree for which the reserve is famous is the Monterey cypress. Its gnarled roots cling fiercely to sheer walls of granite along Point Lobos’ many coves. The rust-colored substance glazing much of the coastal foliage is, ironically, green algae turned orange by carotene pigment. Wildflower aficionados will enjoy the spectrum spanned by Point Lobos’ delicate petals, from blue blossom to the amber of sticky monkeyflower to the lavender tones of beach aster.

We Californians are blessed with an abundance of natural wonders. We’re also blessed with striking-distance proximity to the quintessence of coastal splendor. When our spirits sense the call of the sea, we know it’s time to get to the Point.

For more information, visit www.pointlobos.org.

June 29, 2024

German soldiers march through the Norwegian capital of Oslo on the first day of the invasion: April 9, 1940. Photo by Henriksen & Steen.

The flag in the trunk

What does the American flag stand for? Our anthem hints it might stand for freedom and bravery. Another anthem omits the flag and praises the landscapes we love: amber grain and purple mountains. My suggestion: throw in hope and courage.

Five years before I was born, Pfc. Victor Erickson sailed the Atlantic to join Gen. Mark Clark’s 5th Army in Italy. His mission: to assist in the eviction of Italy’s German occupants.

Dad’s preparation for war included the ancient art and science of marching in formation. As a method of armed assault it had gone the way of the trebuchet. But as a method of flying the colors down a city street to get the patriotic juices flowing, it had proven second to none. Recalling his feelings as he crisscrossed Aberdeen Proving Ground’s parade field, stars and stripes streaming in the breeze to the robust rhythms of John Philip Sousa, Dad said, “I was so proud, I thought the buttons on my uniform would pop off and kill the guy in front of me.”

Victor had crossed the Atlantic twice before. Born in Wisconsin to Norwegian immigrants who had earned their American citizenship, he sailed to Norway in 1934 to rejoin his family, which had returned to Trondheim, the nation’s third most populous city. He crossed the Atlantic for the second time in the spring of 1940, on the last ship to flee before the German invasion on April 9, Victor’s 21st birthday. His parents, Bjarne and Ruth, and sister, Lillian, remained in occupied Norway. Victor joined the U.S. Army; his brother, Bernard, the U.S. Navy.

Flags exert mysterious power. In the spring of 1940, as the Nazi red, white and black was hoisted up flagpoles across the Land of the Midnight Sun, in Trondheim the Ericksons buried a flag at the bottom of a trunk in a storage room. No one would have blamed them for burning that banner for safety’s sake, especially after Dec. 7, 1941, when Germany – Japan’s ally – declared war on the United States. The flag they hid bore 13 stripes and 48 stars.

When Bjarne died in a traffic accident in August of 1941, Ruth and Lillian were left to their own survival schemes. The Gestapo knew they were American citizens, and never took its eye off them. What the Gestapo didn’t know: they were mother and sister to members of the U.S. armed forces. For five years they lived under a pall as pervasive as darkness in Nordic winter.

May, 1945: U.S. soldiers march the Ericksons’ 48-star flag down a street in Trondheim, Norway following the city’s liberation from German occupation.

The spring of 1945 was filled with the scent of liberation in Europe – and the scent of an ember smoldering at the bottom of a trunk in Trondheim. When the city was liberated on May 9 and American paratroopers dropped by, it was clear that a parade was in order. After a five-year exile, the Norwegian flag would once again flow down Kongens Gate, Trondheim’s main thoroughfare – accompanied, of course, by the American flag … if the Americans had only remembered to bring one.

Word was put out that an American flag was needed, and Ruth and Lillian knew exactly where to dig one up. Old Glory, for five years hidden ingloriously in the dark, at last saw the light of day amid shouts and laughter and tears on the streets of Trondheim.

It’s said that our flag is a mere symbol of something greater. Yes, like the mere courage and mere hope of Ruth, Lillian and Bjarne. Next Thursday the stars and stripes will stream in the vanguard of parades across the 50 states of the Union. Some friendly advice: don’t stand in front of me on the curb. I wouldn’t want my buttons to pop off and kill you.

June 14, 2024

Strange sightings from the playpen

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke

We hikers who enjoy hitting the trail between dusk and dawn catch sight of some pretty odd things. Sometimes, those odd things consider us pretty odd, too.

I flowed downhill beneath a canopy of oaks in the shadow of Mt. Diablo. As I swung around a bend I spotted two deer spotting me. The doe, in three majestic leaps, disappeared into the fortress of trees. But the fawn didn’t follow.

I eased back, stopped four paces from the fawn and it bleated like a lamb, accessing its ancestral memory, searching in vain for the identity of the long, smooth and shiny, softly rumbling … thing. I was sitting in my car.

I’d quit the trail a few minutes earlier and was settling in for the steep and hairpin trip down middle-of-nowhere Morgan Territory Road. I’d caught the two creatures’ eyes in my high beams in plenty of time to slow down. The mother bounded away. The child stood there, mesmerized by the sight of an automobile.

I rolled down my window and bleated back at the fawn. It took a step toward me. We were almost nose-to-nose. Its nostrils flared and its head bobbed in excitement. The huge ears were fully alert; a riff of hooves timbrellated off the pavement. Then it dawned on me: I wasn’t doing that lanky toddler any favor by encouraging it to hang out in the middle of the road. I swung open the door and jumped out, shouting and waving my arms like a lunatic. The fawn sprang gawkily off.

Those who claim to have encountered extraterrestrial beings describe spaceships carrying passengers. This we take for granted. This is the way we imagine the human race, far in the future, will explore the stars. But what physical form would humanity have taken by then? Scientist and futurist Arthur C. Clarke believed the next step in human evolution will entail the transfer of consciousness into some synthetic vessel, something less vulnerable than flesh and blood. Extraterrestrials – possibly thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of years ahead of us in their evolutionary journey – might have attained such a state. According to Clarke, if UFOs represent an authentic extraterrestrial visitation, they’re not necessarily vehicular transport for space aliens. The UFOs might be the space aliens.

Like the fawn, we haven’t a clue. Unlike the fawn, we think we do.

The main sticking point of the “little green men” theory of ETs is not that ETs look too weird, but that they look too human. Close-encounter witnesses speak of creatures with eyes, ears, noses and mouths – never mind the number – in more or less familiar locations. If there’s anything eerie about the aliens it’s their lack of eeriness: their head-mounted organs of sense; their bilateral symmetry and bipedal locomotion.

Our tendency to anthropomorphize space aliens is reinforced by the universe portrayed in sci-fi amusements such as “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” a universe in which nearly all intelligent beings in our galaxy speak perfect American English – with a Midwestern accent.

That extra-terrestrials resemble us contradicts our experience of the Nature we find even on Planet Earth, where extravagance is the rule. The Nature we know is Beethoven scribbling several dozen versions of a melody just to get it right, recombining tones of the diatonic scale like DNA molecules. What are the odds that sentient life on another planet would take a biological route identical to ours? Astronomical. “Genuine extra-terrestrials,” wrote Clarke, “would be really alien – as different from us as the praying mantis, the giant squid, the blue whale … We are products of thousands of throws of the genetic dice.”

“Is the human race alone in the cosmos?” is a question for the ages – ages to come, that is. That we can’t produce a single irrefutable shred of proof for alien visitation should be expected. Our radio and TV broadcasts began speeding out of our little corner of the Milky Way’s Orion arm in only the most recent and minuscule fraction of the life of the cosmos. We can’t blame ET for not picking up on hints of our existence. As Clarke put it, “It is not likely that ultimate questions will be settled in such short periods of time, or that we will really know much about the universe while we are still crawling around in the playpen of the Solar System.”

I slipped back into the driver’s seat and pulled slowly away from the site of the close encounter, wishing the fawn luck in its attempt to convey the incident to the herd. “UFO” – however it translates into bleat-speak – is about as helpful an expression as “non-dairy creamer.” Now that you know what the stuff in your decaf is not … what is it?

And how do we classify those smooth, shiny and unidentified objects in our night sky? Since, like the fawn, we’re all infants in this playpen, your guess is as good as mine.

May 22, 2024

Old dogs enter golden years of rusty gears

JD takes a breather on Meteor Hill, Mt. Diablo State Park.

JD’s about to turn 12. His hardcore hiking days are nearly done. It won’t be long before his old bones can’t take the pounding, before he feels an unfamiliar twinge in those Jack Russell sinews signaling the end of his time on the trail.

If it’s any consolation, my old friend, I’m headed the same direction.

I don’t take JD out for the companionship; I’ve been hiking solo all my life. Fact is, his need for water breaks and sniffing excursions slows me down. On hot days he’ll drag me over to a shady spot and sprawl for a couple minutes, tongue protruding past his canines like a lurid pink gangplank.

I don’t take him out for the primal vibe. The jangling of tags on his collar tends to wreck the reverie of bushwhacking through Pleistocene landscapes in search of a saber-toothed tiger; my barely domesticated hunting companion loping by my side.

I take him because he loves going … anywhere.

Time was when JD’d scramble out of the car at the trailhead, clamp the leash with his teeth, shake it till his head nearly popped off, and scamper away with a growl and a grin. I was happy to indulge his Alpha philosophy: Life is a dogsled team. If you ain’t in the lead, the scenery never changes.

But when I took him to Mt. Diablo last week, he exited the vehicle like a former Olympic gymnast – from the Rome games in ’60. He stuck the landing with remarkable grace for his age but didn’t earn any medals. He hit the trailhead at a trot, not the reckless gallop of his prime. Secretariat put out to pasture.

We hopped off-trail and trudged up a formation I call Meteor Hill. A few years ago he’d give me that “are we there yet?” look after three miles. Now it’s a mile. The first hint he’s done for the day: he falls behind. Oh, he can keep up; he’s simply suggesting a different direction – back. I stop to savor the scenery and he starts retracing our steps. Then his tether runs out. Sorry, Jack. Your pack leader isn’t ready to pack it in just yet.

One reason I choose off-trail routes is JD’s paws. Make that four reasons. Like the tread on old tires, his pads are wearing down. Grass goes easier on those aging tootsies than the hard dirt of the trail. A few years ago, when it became clear on our descent from Eagle Peak that his feet were killing him, I portaged him over rocky passages like a kayak over sandbars – and gave thanks he wasn’t a 70-pound Lab. Now, as the canine equivalent of me at 80, he’d be hard-pressed to pull off Eagle Peak in the first place.

Once upon a time, a hike with the hound required extra vigilance. A ground squirrel would scurry across the trail and JD’d be after him like a heat-seeking missile. He’d also be a handful when we’d run across another dog – straining at the leash, ignoring my reasoned directives. It was hard to blame him. Were I the domesticated minion of a more intelligent being (and what married man isn’t?) and spotted another human on the trail, I’d go bonkers, too.

But now JD’s as mellow as Grandpa out for a round of golf. I watch his ears flop merrily along and feel a pang of sadness. Since the first canine was domesticated some 14,000 years ago, our dogs have become so intricately intertwined with us that they’ve lost their beasthood. Condemned to the limbo between their ancestors and their tamers, they can’t fend for themselves in the wild; can’t open a can of Alpo.

JD surveys his domain at Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve.

And yet, something about JD strikes the wild chord. “One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human,” wrote Loren Eiseley. My old hound might lack the wariness of the coyote and the lethality of the cougar. He might lack the self-sufficiency of every creature giving us a wide berth in wild places. He might lack the jauntiness of his youth. What he radiates in abundance is abandonment to the moment, total immersion in every sight, sound and scent in a realm I visit, at times, in a haze of awareness that my tether is running out, too.

I watch him bob and weave up the trail, head down, and wonder what scents he’s catching. Boasting 25 times my olfactory receptors, he could teach me a thing or two about ecosystems. Suddenly he stops, cocks his head and lifts a paw. He doesn’t seem to be looking anywhere; just listening. His auditory reach extends to 45,000 Hz; mine to 23,000 at best.

In some ways – in the most meaningful ways – he’ll always be a better hiker than his master.

Maybe that’s why, when I first pull out the leash and utter the incantatory “outside,” he still whines, yaps and whirls like a dervish. He has no vision of the ordeal ahead; no grasp of his mortality. His imagination extends to memories of sights, sounds and scents – and days in the sun with another old dog.

April 15, 2024

Ticked off on the treacherous trail

Public Enemy No. 1: the Western black-legged tick. Photo by Unsplash.

I peeled off my sweaty hiking shirt and shorts, hopped into the stall and indulged in a scalding shower. The air swirling around Sunol’s Maquire Peaks that morning had been chilly; the trail sloppy; the trail shoulder wet and grassy. It’d take a half hour of painstaking scraping to make the mud-caked cleat pattern of my boots reappear.

As I stepped from the stall, a dark speck on my right thigh caught the corner of my eye. I bent over to check it out. There, like a hand caught in a cookie jar, protruded the hind quarters of a tick surrounded by a pale red ring – a perfect bullseye tattooed onto my flesh.

I’d gotten lucky. I’d discovered the little monster in the early stages of its burrowing and I’d discovered it in my bathroom; my medicine cabinet hung three strides away. I snatched a tweezer from the shelf and plucked the tick like a gardener pulls a weed.

Another reason I’d gotten lucky: I’d been targeted by a common tick – not Public Enemy No. 1.

The Western black-legged tick – aka deer tick, bear tick and sheep tick – is a creature that prompts a predictable chain of responses. As Monte Python said of the mosquito, “First you hate him, then you respect him … then you kill him.” Of the nearly 50 varieties of tick that populate California, the black-legged is the only one known to transmit Lyme disease.

In its early stages, Lyme produces flu-like symptoms. If left untreated, the disease can cause arthritis, abnormalities of the nervous system (including Bell’s palsy and meningitis) and irregularities of heart rhythm months or even years after transmission.

To call your tick incident a “bite” dignifies it with an air of elegance. What the tick does is break your skin, burrow into your flesh and drink your blood. And it drinks with the aid of a high-tech chemical weapon. Following a long sip, the tick injects a brand of saliva that prevents your blood from clotting, keeps your capillaries flowing and tricks your immune system’s itch response from detecting the tick’s bloody business.

Hikers in Mt. Diablo’s Donner Canyon are given fair warning.

The tick’s mouthparts are equipped with harpoonlike barbs. Contrary to legend, ticks don’t screw themselves into you. To remove a tick, first beg, borrow or steal a tweezer. If you pull out the tick with your fingers and its mouthparts break off stuck in your skin, you’ll need to see a doctor.

Grab the tick’s mouth as close to your skin as possible and tweeze it straight out. Don’t crush the tick with the tweezer until it’s clear of your skin. Your goal is to prevent the tick’s body fluids from coming in contact with yours.

You say tweezers aren’t a staple of your hiking paraphernalia? No problem. You can wait till you get back home to evict the varmint. A Western black-legged tick must be attached for 24 to 72 hours before the Lyme spirochete gets transmitted.

How do you know that the tick pitching its tent on your epidermis is the Western black-legged? The adult female is teardrop shaped and about ⅛ inch long. Its body is reddish-brown and its legs black. The male is brownish-black all over and slightly smaller than the female.

East Contra Costa County trails aren’t exactly Tick Central; ticks prefer moister climes. To our west, however, in the hiking havens of coastal California, the marine layer soaks the foliage. To our east, the Sierra Nevada range retains moisture from its snow cap. In those bastions of natural beauty, ticks in fearsome numbers wait to ambush unsuspecting passers-by. From Point Reyes to Big Sur, from Shasta to Whitney – and closer to home, from Briones to Sunol – hikers should heed the familiar traffic warning: stay off the shoulder.

Sounds easy enough, but in spring that shoulder can look mighty attractive. Why slog down a sludgy trail when you can glide along the tall grass? Why? Because in that grass, someone’s waiting for you.

The tick doesn’t hop, fly or drop from trees. It lies in wait at the tip of grass and other vegetation along trails, hoping its host will brush against its bus stop. Tick terminologists call this charming behavior “questing” – and the tick’s Holy Grail is your blood.

The trail’s fringe isn’t the only danger zone in Tickville. Ticks also thumb rides off logs. After cooling your heels on one of those inviting objects, submit yourself and your hiking companions to a thorough inspection.

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is supposed to be a romantic tune, not a hiker’s gripe. There’s nothing warm and intimate about the act of tweezing a tick from your hide. But don’t let the threat of the tick scrap an adventure in the wonders of the natural world. Remember: hate him, respect him, then … well, you know.

December 8, 2023

Epperson – footprints of precision and passion

Roger Epperson in May of 2006, standing where his ashes would be scattered, on the Ridge that would be given his name. Photo by Scott Hein.

I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love; if you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles. – Walt Whitman

Mt. Diablo was a mere silhouette, a tower of ragged black beneath a charcoal sky. Diamond Sirius glinted low in the west, but against the shore of the eastern horizon washed a thin wave of dawn – a ripple of blue above pale bronze. The sun would rise in an hour.

I was sitting on a stone monument anchored in Morgan Territory’s Roger Epperson Ridge. The inscription chiseled into the rock reads “In memory of Roger Epperson (1954-2008) in recognition of his significant and lasting contributions to the East Bay Regional Park District and the landscapes he loved.”

I never met Epperson, a deficiency that shielded me from the pain of his passing. He died on December 8, 15 years ago, in a kayak accident in Hawaii, leaving behind wife Carol Alderdice plus friends and admirers beyond count.

I never met Epperson – but I’ve seen his footprints all over the place. As supervisor of EBRPD’s Round Valley, Morgan Territory and Black Diamond Mines preserves, he bequeathed a body of work that I and thousands of Bay Area hikers, runners, cyclists, equestrians and campers enjoy on a regular basis.

Have you crossed the bridge that spans the deep arroyo in Round Valley? Have you pitched a tent in the maternal enfolding of Morgan Territory’s campground? Ever notice, after a drenching downpour, how fast the trails in Black Diamond shed water and firm up? If so, you’ve also spotted the track of Roger Epperson.

Epperson earned a reputation for devoting an artist’s eye and a bricklayer’s muscle to our access to splendor. “Roger would go out with the fire trail grader or the culvert excavator,” said Alderdice, who served for three years as one of Epperson’s rangers. “You had to let him tell you how he wanted the culvert headwall to look, or grade around a tree or down a slope.

“And while a pond was being built or rehabbed, Roger was on site. ‘I want a swale here; I don’t want too much of a lip there,’ he’d say. It was meant to look like wilderness – not like a machine had pushed dirt up against a tree. He wasn’t a park supervisor who’d say, ‘Go do it and tell me when you’re done.’”

The late Jim Rease (aka “Roger’s other wife”) described Epperson as a man whose mind was always on the job: “When we camped and hiked in Prairie Creek Redwoods (in Humboldt County), he’d stop and notice trail work that impressed him. ‘That’s nice!’ he’d say and take a picture of it. ‘That would work over in Morgan Territory.’”

Hiker Leia Hartje stands by the brace that Roger Epperson designed to save the limb of this old valley oak at the Morgan Territory campground.

An avid art collector and photographer, Epperson marshaled his aesthetic sensibility to extract maximum beauty from the landscape. Whether creating a trail or wielding a camera, “He framed things like a painter,” said Rease. ‘That’s just the right pitch,’ he’d say, ‘just the right angle. You see this vignette when you sit here.’ And he’d refer to landscapes as ‘a Francis Gerhardt’ or ‘a Yoshida woodblock.’”

Former EBRPD General Manager Bob Doyle, a close friend of Epperson since high school, admired the fearlessness of Epperson’s work ethic: “A lot of staff sees land acquisitions and thinks, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to take care of that?’ Roger would get an assignment and take it to the next – three or four times – level. He never complained about a new acquisition. He had this uncanny ability to look at a piece of trashed property and enjoy converting it.”

Alderdice echoed Doyle’s impression: “When Roger was told there was no funding for a pavement project or to put up a house at a staging area, he found a way to make it happen. He wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. The new bridge at Round Valley was something Roger started. The district followed through on it because of his insistence.”

“Everything Roger built was heavy: ‘built for bear,’” said Doyle. “He worked in Shell Ridge Open Space before he got a park district job, and I can still find things he built. They’re 8x8s, not 2x4s. They’re big pieces of rock with a board on top. Heavy and strong – heavier than an engineer would need.”

Those who love the massive valley oak standing sentinel on the Morgan Territory campground have Epperson to thank. Faced with amputating a major limb or installing a tall, heavy iron brace to save it, take a wild guess which option Epperson chose.

Epperson’s perfectionism reflected no stern and stony personality. “He was Puck in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” said Doyle. “Lighthearted. Not just fun loving; he was the creator of the fun. He’d walk into my office, blow past the secretary, come in and do whatever he wanted. He’d sit at my desk with his feet up on it – muddy shoes – completely inappropriate. I really miss that.”

Spring sunrise at Roger Epperson Ridge, Morgan Territory Regional Preserve.

Epperson’s playfulness extended to his love of language, including a parody of his own fastidious personality. “Roger wouldn’t say ‘that hit the nail on the head,’” said Alderdice. “He’d say ‘that hit the head of the nail on the head with the head of the hammer.’ He was forever changing the words in songs: Elton John’s ‘count the headlights on the highway’ became ‘count the head lice on the highway.’”

The urge to tinker with words also permeated Epperson’s work as supervisor. Doyle remembers Epperson’s coinage for “overgrazed” as “cow burnt.” And following a saturating rainfall, Epperson would say “that was a real pond filler.”

Despite Epperson’s physically short stature, his commitment to excellence exerted a tall influence on those around him. According to Rease, “Roger’s obsession with details influenced me in my own attention to detail. Before we’d take a trip, he’d research the back roads – always a very circuitous, less-traveled and scenic route. The routes were as good as our destination. That didn’t mean an overbearing pushiness, but a direction that increased everyone’s enjoyment – a game plan with thoughtfulness, which I still strive for whenever we do things with our friends.”

Back at the monument in Morgan Territory, dawn had finally overcome darkness. As the top of the sun’s disk flared above the Sierra and lit the beacons of Diablo’s twin peaks, I read a secondary inscription on the Epperson monument: “All things must pass.” And another line in the George Harrison song came to mind: “Daylight is good at arriving at the right time/It’s not always going to be this gray.”

Ahead lay a morning of communal panoramas and private ravines, the screech of golden eagles and the silence of coyotes – all beneath a sky scoured by the light that had arrived at the right time. I faced the etched rock, pinched the brim of my hat and turned away, sensing the presence of Roger Epperson, one hand my shoulder, the other pointing down the sunward trail.

November 30, 2023

Light pollution threatens body and spirit

Galaxy gazer. Photo by Carl Nenzen Loven.

It was late. Late in the year and long after nightfall. I was standing on a tall hill a few miles from home. It was dark, but the darkness was more than acceptable; it was essential. If your plan is to get pelted by the glory of the Leonid meteor shower on a chilly November night – if you insist on paying that price – you find the darkest sky in the county.

Above, Leonids skittered across the pond of the cosmos like water bugs, some flaring out so brightly they made me blink. Below, in the moonless dark, the world was heard more than seen. I went quietly. Whatever creatures were out there, I wanted to hear them before they heard me. I didn’t use a flashlight. Whatever creatures were out there, I wanted to see them before they saw me.

One set of lights, however, was hard to ignore: a galaxy. A galaxy not above, but below. Spread beneath the horizon from northwest to northeast were the lights of East Contra Costa – miniature points of white and orange punctuated by blue and red, glittering like the stars of a spiral galaxy seen edge-on.

Brentwood formed the galaxy’s bright nucleus. Northeast beyond Brentwood glowed Oakley. Far northwest flowed Antioch’s river of lights against the backdrop of the San Joaquin’s dark bank. A ripple of white marked the galaxy’s eastern hinterland: Discovery Bay.

If the lights inspired a celestial metaphor, they also inspired dismay. The glare of human habitation bleached the black sky to a blue-grey that erased the dimmer meteors and stars. High overhead, in the darkest sector of sky, the sapphire pendant of the Pleiades was barely visible. Those primal lights blossoming in the meadow of darkness above were no match for the phony photons of humanity below.

We Homo sapiens have fought the darkness from the beginning, illuminated caves and continents, resisted night as we resist mortality itself. Step out into your back yard tonight and look up. On a clear, dark evening you should be able to spot about 2,700 stars. If you live near the center of an East County city, you’ll be lucky to spot a hundred.

Astronomy buffs aren’t the only ones to suffer from humanity’s assault on darkness. Our inefficient artificial light wastes energy, scrambles the life patterns of wildlife and disrupts human biorhythms.

The light pollution that washes out all but the brightest stars is due mainly to poor design, which directs artificial light not only downward, where it’s needed, but upward and outward, where it’s wasted. But poor design is the tip of the iceberg. Light – for billions of years expressed mainly as sunlight and moonlight – exerts its power on all the world’s creatures.

The artificial light that makes days unnaturally long and nights unnaturally short alters the feeding patterns, breeding patterns and migration schedules of birds. Some arrive at their nesting sites too early in the season. Ocean-based gas flares on oil platforms and land-based searchlights attract seabirds and songbirds like magnets, causing them to circle the lights till they drop from exhaustion. Birds on their night migrations crash into brightly lit skyscrapers.

Ponds and marshes, once far from civilization and now flooded by the light of highways, no longer provide frogs and toads the illumination signals evolved over millennia – signals that govern their nocturnal breeding habits.

The loss of darkness collides with sea turtles’ preference for dark beaches on which to nest. The reflective sea horizon no longer shines brighter than the artificially lit land behind the beach, confounding turtle hatchlings. In droves they head away from the water and die.

The lights of Hong Kong. Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski.

Light pollution is also hazardous to human health. Our biological clock depends on darkness as much as light. Increased artificial light at night from lamps, TVs and electronic gizmos disrupts our circadian rhythms and contributes to sleep disorders. And it gets worse: evidence gathered over the last decade is persuasive enough to have prompted the AMA in 2012 to support continued research into the connection between excessive artificial light at night and the incidence of breast cancer. In 2007, the World Health Organization’s cancer research division classified night-shift work as a “probable carcinogen.”

Were light pollution perfectly harmless to our physical health, it would remain harmful to our spiritual health. When we lose an appreciation for darkness we lose an essential component of human consciousness. The lights cast across the cosmos were not turned on by a switch thrown by human hands. We internalize that fact through awe and wonder: the direct experience of the night sky. The vast and cold emptiness between stars is the rule throughout our universe, not the exception. When we internalize that fact, we’ll treasure the warmth of our relationships more than ever. As darkness makes light sweeter, emptiness makes interconnectedness sweeter.

As I stood on the hill that night and followed the shining slashes above, I felt a connection to humankind more powerfully than if I’d stood smack in the center of the city. Far from the fluorescent tubes of the grocery store and prismatic acrylic refractor globes of downtown, I felt what my ancestors felt when they stood beneath the dome of darkness strewn with stars, planets and the gossamer river of the Milky Way: I felt the immediacy and ancientry, the greatness and smallness of my place in the cosmos.

My meteor stint was an all-nighter. By 5:45, as the faintest rumor of dawn betrayed the Sierra’s sawtooth silhouette, the local coyote pack had regathered and launched into its pre-dawn chorus, sharing tales of the evening hunt. A single voice – the pack leader’s – suddenly penetrated the shrieks, howls and rapid-fire yaps. The chorus fell silent. The leader took a few moments to speak his piece, and the pack erupted in another geyser of noise. The leader’s chant silenced them again. And again they answered.

The call-and-response ritual continued for a minute beneath a paling sky flecked by the final stars. And I wondered if any coyotes had remarked on the streaks in the sky or the two-legged creature atop the distant hill. The pack and I had pursued a different quest that night but had shared the darkness.

I wove my way back down the hill, guided by the immeasurably slow swelling of dawn, looking forward to reunion with the other creatures connected to me.

November 15, 2023

Guardian angel overworked, underpaid

Energy unleashed at The Slot, Point Lobos.

It was exhilarating – in all the wrong ways. One moment I was crouching; the next I was flying. Backward.

The time was November, 2006; the place: Point Lobos in Carmel. The sun was high and so was the ocean, swelling and slamming against a peninsula of rock called The Slot.

Every third or fourth wave was a paragon of physics: gathering itself, cresting and striking with optimal force. Water became thunder. Blue-green erupted in geysers of glinting white.

Imagine The Slot as a bent thumb protruding from Point Lobos’ south shore and hooking parallel to that line for 40 yards, forming a cove of sloshing seawater behind it. The thumb’s knuckle is a hill of nubbled Carmelo Formation rock that dips down to the thumbnail, the ideal spot from which to bag photos – up close and perpendicular – of breakers pummeling the promontory’s midsection. I hopped onto the thumb, clambered up the slippery knuckle and slithered down to the nail.

The ocean was in a cooperative mood. As the sun climbed toward noon the breakers burgeoned. I squeezed off my last shot and started back up the knuckle. I was almost to the crest when a breaker barreled in and launched a plume that rose high and fell hard. I reached down and found a handhold. The curtain of seawater stooped to my level. Whap. Feet slipped off wet rock but fingers hung on. I stood up and kept going, knowing I’d be given a three-to-four-wave reprieve before the next breaker would hit.

I knew wrong.

The next wave threw no curtain skyward; it threw a wall. I crouched, groped in vain for something to grip, and looked up. Sea and sky were erased. The wall, a Jackson Pollack masterpiece of silver spatter, rushed straight at me. I heard a seething noise and then something that sounded like – and felt like – swack.

Those who suffer physical trauma are often condemned to remember it too clearly. I was spared. My rough-and-tumble trip backward down the hill and into the cove began too suddenly and ended too soon for fear to take hold. The other blessing: I fell enveloped in seawater; couldn’t see a thing.

Three impressions stuck: the heaviness of the wall of water that hit me; the sensation of striking something that took my breath away; and the image from several feet under water of a fantastic swirling of green, white and gold above.

When I broke the surface I let out a whoop. I was alive. I had landed on my shoulder and not my skull.

I dragged myself out of the cove gashed and grateful. And embarrassed. I’ve apologized to my wife, my boss, my broken collarbone, my collapsed lung, my torn rotator cuff and my guardian angel, who must be thinking, “I’m not getting paid enough to cover this guy’s butt.”

Why do edges attract us so? Why do we lean over the rail and look down, climb to the summit and look up; scramble onto the promontory and look out? Is it, in the words of Mount Everest chronicler Jon Krakauer, because it’s “titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier”? Do we pursue these moments, as he claims for himself, “not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them”?

I answer only for myself: No. I don’t go to the edge for the danger. I go for the view. I’ve cracked my skull on Yosemite granite to gain a special view of Nevada Fall; blistered my skin with Sunol poison oak to gain a special view of Alameda Creek; shredded my shins on daggers of manzanita to gain a special view of Morgan Territory. Some views are hard won; some lessons should be learned. Icarus’ wings and my collarbone learned the hard way: fly too near the sun and you get melted; wander too near the breakers and you get busted.

But the edge shouldn’t be dismissed. Only on the edge can we be both here and out there: clinging to the faithful grasp of earth while floating like a hawk on the updrafts of epiphany. Ask any cliff diver, hang glider or rock climber. At the world’s extremities – say, a thumbnail – are extreme experiences found.

I’ve returned to The Slot several times; returned to witness up close the terrible beauty of the out-there of ocean battering the here of earth. I’ve gone to the edge and looked down, looked up and – yes, my wife, my boss, my bones, my lung, my cuff, my guardian angel – looked out.