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.

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.

Wildflowers strike resonant chord

Owl’s clover at sunrise, Round Valley Regional Preserve.

The universe is large, and getting larger. In the time it takes you to finish this sentence, the universe will have expanded in volume by 100 trillion cubic light years. But run the video backward 13.8 billion years and you’ll see the universe shrink to a mere mathematical point. Call it the cosmic seed, inscribed by the most infinitesimal handwriting, like DNA, with instructions for the universe in its totality: galaxies and gadflies, planets and plankton. You and me.

Imagine God as the Great Gardener: creating a seed with the simplicity of the primal elements yet potential for the staggering complexity 13.8 billion years of expansion accrues; planting it in the coldest of soils – the nothingness before time and space; and with one searing command, one blast of incandescent breath, setting it in motion.

Woven into the fabric of our world is the pattern of darkness to light, cold to warmth, death to rebirth, enacted yearly in the reawakening of sterile and shriveled landscapes to color and fragrance. It’s why the image of wildflowers in spring strikes such a resonant chord.

There’s another reason why wildflowers should fill us with awe and gratitude: without them, the human race might never have come into existence.

A hundred million years ago not a single flower adorned our planet. It was a world in slow motion. The reproductive processes of plants required either direct access to water (through swamps, lakes, river systems, dew and raindrops) or wind-borne pollen-like particles. Some plants had developed primitive seeds, but the spread of plant life proceeded at a glacial pace. Then, as the Age of Reptiles was coming to an end, something miraculous happened – as miraculous as creation itself. The first simple flower opened its petals. And the world changed.

California buttercup at sunrise, Round Valley Regional Preserve.

Unlike a spore, the seed of a flower is a fully outfitted embryonic plant, a survivalist’s doomsday bunker stuffed with nutrients capable of sustaining the sprout. And armed with pollen, nectar, and seeds wrapped in a mantle of fruit, the ancient flower began attracting insects for pollination and exploiting birds and mammals for transportation. It developed featherdown for sailing on the wind and hooks for snagging a ride on a passerby’s hide. The angiosperms (“encased seeds”) were off to the races.

The dinosaurs disappeared with stunning abruptness. A special flowering, seed-producing plant we call grass made its debut. Grasslands swept across the continents, providing a nutritious buffet for the great herbivores, the horse and bison, and indirectly for their predators, the dire wolf and saber-toothed tiger.

Peering meekly from the forest at the great game herds was another creature. Like the other mammals his metabolic rate was high, requiring an energy-rich diet to sustain body warmth and efficiency. He was small, and abandoned the trees awkwardly on his hind legs, no match for the bison. But once he learned to heave a rock, swing a flint axe and build a fire, he, like the flower before him, hopped onto the reproductive fast track. And like the predators before which he had once cowered, he began taking ever-greater amounts of energy indirectly from the grass.

Indirectly – until that moment on the waist-high savannah when he conceptualized the grass seed, the ancestor of wheat, as a thing to grow and consume for its own sake. That moment was itself a seed. From it would sprout cities and civilizations in countless succession, to our present time and beyond, rising and falling in ten thousand springs and winters of human history. The gift of the flower.

With acknowledgement to “How Flowers Changed the World” by Loren Eiseley.

Secret winter enshrouds the summit

Clouds wreathe Mt. Diablo’s twin peaks.

The world I knew was gone, obliterated by an ocean of white and wind. Visibility was down to 30 yards. Ice crystals finer than grains of sand, driven by currents swirling from the southwest, struck my face. I lowered the brim of my hat a notch, turned and looked east. Home was 10 miles across the foothills and 3,800 feet down – I assumed. Since my watch read 6:57 a.m., I also assumed sunlight was beginning to flood East Bay with the dawn of Feb. 14, 2009. But that world was gone, no match for the white and wind on Mt. Diablo.

There’s a winter that’s kept secret from most East Bay folk. It’s not the winter we see from afar once or twice a year when our communal mountain gets dusted by snow, metamorphosed for a few days – if we’re lucky – into a vision of alpine splendor. We gaze admiringly at that distant winter and snap our photos till rain and Sun dispel the reverie. But when the mountain is wreathed in another form of white – the cloud factories that engulf Diablo’s Summit and North Peak like a sea surging over volcanic islands – inside those cloudworks is forged a secret winter: pale and severe.

My alarm had gone off at 3 a.m. and I’d taken a look out the window. High in the south, a half Moon was slipping behind scattered swift clouds like a soldier dodging enemy fire, advancing from cover to cover. The hike was on. A hundred minutes later I pushed off from the Donner Canyon trailhead. In the southwest towered the silhouette of Eagle Peak. Bald Ridge rose due south against the backdrop of a crown of mist clarified by moonlight. I traced the mist southeast as it condensed to obscure the upper elevations of the Summit and North Peak. A breeze with a hint of menace funneled down the canyon, inspired me to unscrew my flask and grab a swig of bourbon. Perhaps the wind would gather strength and drive the clouds from the mountaintop.

At the 1,700-foot level of Meridian Ridge the first patches of snow began spattering the trail’s shoulder. The Moon was still with me, drifting in and out of tendrils of vapor that rose and dissolved like steam from a kettle. Only when I made the turn east toward Prospector’s Gap did I begin to lose the Moon behind the wall of Bald Ridge. Vega burned hot white high overhead, nearly bright enough, I fantasized, to navigate by. Northeast, the horizon skirting Olympia Summit betrayed the subtlest paling of blue. I checked my watch. Less than an hour till sunrise.

I came to the final assault of the gap and found snow I could sink my feet into. The trail’s rocky outcrops normally make its long and steep track slow going. But 2 inches of tacky snow smoothed over the bumps, allowed me to sail up through the bottom of the cloudbank to the saddle between Diablo’s twin peaks, 900 feet below the Summit. The wind had gathered strength but wasn’t driving the clouds from the mountaintop as I’d hoped. The mountaintop had seized the wind and was twirling it around its head like a rodeo artist his lariat.

I cut right and let North Peak Trail’s narrow course hoist me across the warp of the Summit’s east face. The snow had deepened and the drop-off to my left into the impenetrable white was sharp. I reined back my pace. At the trail’s first switchback I caught a faceful of ice dust ricocheting off rock and tree. The foliage was straight out of sci-fi. It had rained here as the mercury plunged. With nowhere to run and hide, the wind-whipped moisture had been frozen, like the victims of Pompeii, in mid stride. Spreading sideways from a thousand stems of buckbrush glinted blades of ice like barbers’ razors.

Wind-whipped ice razors on buckbrush decorate Summit Trail.

Farther up, bracketed by the Summit Trail’s sheltering chaparral, I spotted coyote track laced with blood and wondered who was doing the bleeding – the predator or some prey spirited away in the lethal sanctuary of jaws. The prints peeled off into the manzanita just below the summit of the Summit. I turned north toward the home stretch and in two minutes planted my hiking pole, flaglike, in 4 inches of snow at 3,849 feet above sea level. No more up to go.

I stood in a world of limitation: no tourists would be motoring to the Summit today. The only track here would be made by predators and prey, the tire tread of park rangers and cleat pattern of hikers. No sweeping panoramas would be gained – no sight of the Sierra or Farallons or Lassen. No sight of anything more than 30 yards away. I had caught a glimpse of our secret winter, but what secrets it had revealed – beyond its severe indifference to my comings and goings – I can’t say. I pulled my pole from the snow and began my descent toward the world I knew.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rooted in the mystery of mortality

My gnarly friend Oliphaunt.

I arrive in darkness. And when dawn breaks, I remain in darkness – a charcoal-grey fog shrouding Round Valley. As impending sunrise turns the shroud from charcoal to ash, skeletons appear: the bony arms and fingers of trees. Most are dormant, lost in dreams of burgundy buds and emerald leaves.

But some of the skeletons sleep the sleep of death: trees decimated by disease or blasted by lightning. My gnarly friends. Anchored in the landscape like historical markers, Oliphaunt and Samurai wait with wry detachment as I trudge Round Valley’s hills to pay my respects. I go out of my way on Coyote Ridge to check on the progress of Alien’s decomposition. Seven years ago the twisted intimate I call Knight (à la chess piece) lost his snout to the force of gravity.

Dead trees provide more than habitat for lichens, mosses and lizards; they provide companionship amid the solitude of the trail. Make no mistake: the solitude is good. On the trail I escape the noise of communal life and enter, as Thomas Mann put it, the “mental experiences that are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.” Gregariousness can be jarring. Who wants to hear campers and hikers hootin’ and hollerin’ in the placid grandeur of Murphy Meadow, or on Mt. Diablo’s Prospector’s Gap overlooking the mist-flooded hollows of Morgan Territory in the pale violet of dawn? No, the silence of trees – even dead ones – makes good company.

A quartet of gnarly friends, clockwise from upper left: Knight, Alien, E.T. and Pentipede.

My first encounter with a gnarly friend occurred on a creepy moonlit night at Kettle Moraine, Wisconsin in the ’80s. I dubbed the gnarly one Smaug. A 60-foot pin oak, Smaug had toppled parallel to a path snaking through a dark ravine and been smithied by years of wind, ice and rot into a giant reptile. Under the extreme contrast of moonlight and shadow, Smaug’s sunken eye sockets and uncannily symmetric ears – two broken limbs angling off the trunk – stopped me in my tracks.

But whether in darkness or the light of day, the image of a dead tree touches a nerve. It’s a statue on exhibit, yet unlike the statues fashioned by human hands, it was once alive. The trail becomes a graveyard where the bones of the departed aren’t buried but put on display.

A dead tree is disturbing in another way: trees are assumed to represent the gold standard of longevity. From its vista atop the White Mountains of California’s Inyo National Forest, a bristlecone pine named Methuselah has felt the rain lash and the wind scour its branches, has watched impassively as the winter stars inched overhead, for more than 4,000 years. Some trees will go on living into the next Ice Age, long after the human race has abandoned the planet. Or vice versa.

Yet all trees, like the creatures we imagine they mimic, are mortal. Their transfiguration might take a century to complete, but the end is the same for all organic creatures. Today we marvel at the fluky artistry that makes a monster out of dead wood. In a decade the nutrient cycle, aided by weather’s dull chisel, will have sculpted the finely etched carcass into something that reminds us of nothing. In a century even the wood will be gone, digested like flesh into the shrewd economy of Earth. How readily in this voracious universe does food for thought become food for worms.

A blue oak can live up to 400 years. On Round Valley’s topmost hill stands a blue oak I call Old One. Her trunk, bent by centuries of prevailing northwest wind, points toward the winter sunrise. Her canopy forms a perfect umbrella of limbs reducing fractally to twigs. Whenever I arrive at my summit sanctuary I lay my pole and pack on lichen-spattered boulders, walk up to Old One and say hello. I place my palm on her trunk, hoping to sense a pulse measured not in seconds but years.

Old One greets winter sunrise atop Round Valley Regional Preserve.

“A tree says: ‘My strength is trust,’” wrote Herman Hesse. “‘I know nothing of my fathers, I know nothing of the thousand children that every year spring from me. I live out the secret of my seed to the utmost end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.’”

Though located on a remote hill, Old One has doubtless been admired by many hikers. I’ve no proprietary claim on her. But some day, as my ashes are absorbed into her roots and partake of her holy labor, she will care for me in a special way. For now, while she lives, I’m grateful to accept her shelter from the wind as we bend together toward the winter sunrise. Arriving in darkness; departing in light.

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 countless solo night hikes, most 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 85 and 90), 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 that 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 solar eclipse. Eventually the receding Moon will appear smaller than the Sun, and the 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 Saturday, October 28. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the full Moon rises at 6:11 p.m. and the Sun sets at 6:12 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 the Moon, rising in the east, pales from peach to pearl to blinding white. A good way to celebrate the golden age of Luna.

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 its 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 Boulevard?

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, October 13, 2023: Relax. Embrace your superstition. Take a deep breath. And never mind that it rhymes with death.

Saving splendor in the nearby middle of nowhere

Cattle crop frosty grass on an autumn morning in Round Valley’s 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; 37 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.

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

Tule fog slithers through oaks in east 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. 

“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.”

Mt. Diablo at sunrise viewed from the crest of Hardy Canyon, Round Valley.

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.

Yosemite space measured in time

Half Dome, rising 4,800 feet above the valley floor, viewed from Mirror Lake.

The same sunlight that awakens the hollows of the Diablo foothills awakens Yosemite Valley. That’s where the comparison ends. There is no ordinary light here; no ordinary marking of time and space. You feel it most acutely at dawn and dusk: granite walls thousands of feet tall rim the east and west. Sunlight strikes the valley floor late and departs early. Get close to those walls and you must look way up to see the sky.

The last morning star had been washed from the east long before Chris and I rolled into Yosemite Valley for our climb to Vernal and Nevada falls. The Sun was up, but something was blocking it from view, something rising 4,800 feet above the valley floor: the stone fortress called Half Dome, its sheer face stained in blue-grey shadow. No wind shredded the morning stillness.

As we approached the bridge spanning the Merced River at Happy Isles, the stillness was dispelled by a slow crescendo of rushing water and chit-chat of the day’s first hikers headed east to Mirror Lake and south to the Mist Trail. The scavenging bears had retreated from parking lots and campsites and were headed for the sanctuary of Tenaya Canyon and the trees below Ribbon Fall, far from the distressing two-legged creatures.

As we hoisted ourselves up the trail skirting the Merced’s perpetual thunder, I was struck by how Yosemite puts large matters into perspective. The scale of this place is measured not only in space – in the loft and mass of its granite and daring plummet of its water. It’s measured not only in the canyon-carving force of the mighty Merced. The scale of this place is measured in time: 15 million years ago the river was a mere creek zigzagging through a shallow valley half its present elevation. As 10 million years passed, the Sierra’s stone backbone drove upward and the river engraved a V-shaped valley. Half Dome rose to 5,000 of its present 8,800-foot mark.

Crepuscular rays shred a rainbow above the Mist Trail.

In the chill of dawn, as the shadow of the valley’s south walls rappelled down the north walls across a mile of space, I tried to visualize the next chapter of Yosemite’s tale. A million and a half years ago, a river of ice filled this valley to the brim. Millennia unfolded and the glacier retreated, scooping a U-shaped valley, sculpting the battleship prow and pilothouse of Washington Column and North Dome, chiseled a slit in Yosemite Point that would become the spout of the tallest waterfall on the continent.

I closed my eyes and fast-forwarded to 12,000 B.C., to a Yosemite I’d still not recognize. Half Dome had grinded skyward to its present level, but the valley was deep underwater. And I was standing on the residue of the silt that filled the bottom of that lake: the valley floor of the 21st century.

My existence had been put in perspective, but so had Yosemite’s. Sure, I’d lived a paltry 66 years of the valley’s 15 million years on Planet Earth. A wisp. But wasn’t Yosemite’s paltry 15 million of Earth’s 4½ billion a wisp? I came to the Vernal Bridge and watched the river, like time, race beneath my feet – like time, inch beneath my feet.

But Earth was rotating beneath Sun; day was in relentless ascent. Pressed for time, we hadn’t the luxury of meditating on the nature of Time. If you target Yosemite’s Mist Trail in May – waterfall prime time – you start early.

We struck upward and eastward where far above, on the fall’s rim, the risen Sun glared through gaps in the silhouette of redwoods. Only a handful of hikers, some bound for Half Dome’s famed perch, joined the ascent.

When we reached the trail’s first granite stair, it was clear that the winter-spring of 2015-16 had unleashed a beast. Heavy snow had become heavy water in these high places of the world. Droplets had converged with trickles; trickles with rivulets; rivulets with streams; streams with creeks; creeks with rivers in a crescendo of mass and momentum. The Merced was set on full boil.

It was my fifth trip up the Mist Trail, a mile and a quarter of tall, steep and slippery steps to Vernal Fall; 2 miles more to Nevada Fall. Now, in 2016, Chris and I watched in awe as the Sierra’s winter melt rocketed down the riverbed, ricocheted off boulders like sparks in a foundry, fumed like steam off a kettle. The Mist Trail had morphed into the Suffocating Torrential Downpour Trail. We donned our ponchos. This climb was idiotic enough to be really appealing.

The Merced River below Vernal Fall.

Like kids in a splash park we giggled and groaned our way to the sun-dried sanctuary of the top. Along the way, rainbows exploded through sheets of wind-whipped spray. Below Vernal’s broad launching ramp the fall was barely visible through the monsoon of moisture; my thoughts barely audible through the barrage of water – tons per second – slamming onto the rocks below.

It wasn’t till later that day atop Glacier Point, as we gazed far down across Illilouette Gorge to the falls we’d climbed, that we came full circle. From stillness to stillness. The voice of the river of time had fallen to a whisper. I sat on the warm granite 3,200 feet above the valley floor and closed my eyes; felt the past and future fall off me like a garment. I existed in the naked now, the now of rock and water and the consciousness to know them.

I opened my eyes and time flooded back into the cosmos. Another world was calling, a world of obligations, deadlines, the tick of clocks. But a world of memories – good ones. We gave the valley, spread beneath us like a banquet table, one last taste.

Poison oak begins leafing out on the shoulder of Middle Trail, Mt. Diablo State Park.

Stay off the shoulder

For us who savor the colors and aromas of spring, the lure of the trail is irresistible. A word about those trails: stay on them. Beneath the genial façade of all this blooming and burgeoning, organisms other than wildflowers are unfurling. Alongside the purple of lupine and the scarlet of paintbrush, something nasty is emerging in crimson: poison oak.

Toxicodendron diversilobum, the poison oak shrub, is scattered throughout California’s most attractive scenery. The pesky plant isn’t unattractive in its own right, especially in spring, when its leaves burst forth in glossy gradations of crimson, and in autumn, when they acquire a rusty hue. But its beauty – and menace – is skin deep.

Poison oak isn’t a member of the oak family, but its lobed leaves resemble those of the oak tree. Its stems put out leaves in clusters of three, and in summer and autumn, the female plants sprout tiny ivory-colored fruits. The time-honored jingle is worth remembering: “Leaves of three, let it be; berries white, poisonous sight.”

What makes poison oak so hazardous to our health is the toxic oil coursing through the resin canals of its roots, stems, leaves and flowers. It’s called urushiol, and it’s strictly weapons grade. An amount covering the head of a pin is all that’s needed to cause a skin rash on 500 people. A mere quarter ounce of it could raise a rash on every person on the planet. And like nuclear waste, urushiol preserves its punch. Specimens of it several centuries old have produced rashes on sensitive people.

The allergic reaction caused by poison oak’s industrial-strength resin is a “cell-mediated immune response.” Does your immune system fire on all cylinders? Then you definitely want to stay out of poison oak’s way. When the urushiol residue on your skin penetrates the epidermal layer and attaches to proteins of deeper skin cell membranes, the attachment triggers an alarm that alerts your T-cells. Look out.

T-cells are the security guards of your circulatory system. They check membrane surfaces for unauthorized personnel, such as viruses, with utmost proficiency. Problem is, when they identify an intruder, those mild-mannered security guards become an army of Terminators. The T-cells go berserk, blasting the urushiol attached to the cell membrane – and everything in the vicinity. This collateral damage produces the blistering rash we know and loathe. Worse yet, the “peak misery” (yes, a technical term) of the response might not appear for days or weeks.

Should you accidentally sideswipe a poison oak plant, the first thing to do is wash the contaminated area thoroughly, some experts say within the first 10 minutes. (Urushiol can’t be rubbed off. Rubbing might work it only deeper into your skin.) Problem is, no trail I’ve ever hiked is equipped with resin-removing soap stations every half mile. If the poison oak allergen has penetrated your epidermal layer, washing won’t help. But if you want to take a shot at washing, consider using an organic solvent such as rubbing alcohol or the cleanser called Tecnu.

Tantalizing but toxic, poison oak flaunts its glossy glory on Canyon View Trail, Sunol Regional Wilderness.

Your skin isn’t the only thing that’ll need washing. Shoes, socks, backpack, all your clothing – wash them thoroughly or throw them away. They’ll recontaminate you if you don’t. But be consoled: the poison oak allergen can’t be spread through blister fluids. After thorough washing, you won’t be contaminating anyone else.

After those rashes and blisters develop, a product called Zanfel might be called for. It claims to attack the urushiol at any stage of development. I’ve found Zanfel helpful in dealing with my own outbreaks. As proactive measures, products such as StokoGard Outdoor Cream can be applied before the hike.

Should you run afoul of poison oak, be prepared to ride out the storm. Outbreaks ranging from mild to moderate can last 16 to 18 days. If you feel your case might be severe, get your rash to a doctor. Poison oak is no joke.

The temptation to wander into off-trail wonders can be strong. If you’re wise, you’ll resist scratching that itch. Succumb to the temptation and another itch awaits, one you’ll be scratching for a long time.

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. Welcome to Point Lobos.

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 State Reserve 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.

Dune buckwheat, South Shore Trail.

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.

Memories of Dad painted in pastels

Victor R. Erickson in Norway, c. 1936.

On my desk stands a photograph of my father sketching a snowbound farmhouse in Trondheim, Norway. It was 1938, and Victor R. Erickson was a 19-year-old art apprentice.

Thirty-seven years later Dad led me and brother Randy through the fjords, where we craned our necks at thousand-foot waterfalls rushing off mountains vaulting straight out of the sea; absorbed the sonic shellacking of tons of winter melt thundering through boulder-strewn creeks. We were never out of earshot of the whoosh of water, never out of eyeshot of terrain hewn by the axes of stone giants. It was clear Dad was thrilled by our thrill.

Our fathers. How can we be objective about men so powerfully ingrained in our psyche? What tribute to them can run the gauntlet of emotion accrued over years of affection and resentment, submission and defiance? That godlike sheen they cast on our infancy gets tarnished in no time. In toddlerhood we have no choice but to submit to the king; by adolescence we have no choice but to mount an insurrection.

By adulthood we attain, if we’re lucky, a balanced view: our father is human, the equal of every righteous and flawed human in the history of our race. He’s an icon, but he’s us. In the cosmic scheme: just another guy. In our private scheme: something between a retired dictator and favorite teacher. He no longer calls the shots but his impact resonates in our bones like the toll of a bell.

The view west from Eagle Peak, Mt. Diablo. January 19, 2011.

We can’t be blamed for harboring illusions about our father, for mistaking the honeyed or bitter taste of memory for insight. Once in a while, however, we’re blessed with a vision that puts the memory in perspective.

It was 2011, eight years after Dad’s death. The month was January but the air mimicked April. The mercury had climbed to the upper 60s and I had climbed to the 2,370-foot apex of Mt. Diablo’s Eagle Peak. Far below, stretching west 40 miles to the coast, fog had settled into the hollows, painted the landscape in the violet pastels of evening. A lariat of lenticular cloud spiraled above the Berkeley hills. Far below, the undulations of Clayton, Concord and Walnut Creek slithered through the mist like a squadron of sea serpents.

Something in the human spirit leaps in response to art that imitates nature. “Wow. That painting of sunset makes me feel like I’m right there.” We value representational art – especially when the subject represented inspires awe. But sometimes the awe-inspiring subject turns the tables and represents art. I stood on Eagle Peak snapping shots of a scene swept by the watercolor brush of fog and setting sun. My camera was documenting a painting. And my thoughts turned to Dad and that photo.

One of his retirement ambitions was to paint in earnest. As a commercial artist dogged by deadlines, as a father of four labor-intensive children and as a resident of the flatlands of Chicago – far from the monumentality of Norway – he dreamed of the day he could set up an easel along Sognefjord and capture the mystery of light and shadow shifting through the furrowed face of a mountain beneath the slow rotation of sky.

Victor R. Erickson in Norway, c. 1934.

But his choice of media was curious. I remember hearing, way back in the ’70s, of his desire to concentrate on watercolors. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the watercolor aesthetic was an odd fit. Here was a man of sharp edges and boldly outlined borders. No grey areas clouded his outlook; no pastel ambiguities. If you’d heard him preach on the state of the world, you’d have pegged him for a practitioner of the black-and-white philosophy of pen and ink on Bristol board.

But before Dad found time to break free of the grind and set up his easel, something happened. Misery with a twist of irony. His eyesight began failing, and his superhumanly steady hand began trembling – macular degeneration plus a symptom of onset Parkinson’s. The penmanship of his handwritten letters, once silky perfection, became increasingly contorted.

Though he never complained, the loss must have hit him hard. His watercolor dream would never be fulfilled; he’d never get to pass along in subtle washes of color his love of the natural world. What he passed along he passed in genes and words and adventures outdoors: the urge to stalk and share the wonder.

Why do we so tightly embrace the vision of an afterlife? Is it to see our loved ones in the future? I can think of another reason: so that I can see right now, can picture right now, the artist known on Earth as Victor R. Erickson – with steady hand and penetrating eye – expressing in images the mystery of searing light and inscrutable shadow shifting through the landscapes of eternity.

Ella Irene Erickson

March 6, 1920-January 21, 2021

I feel her embrace as I walk the fog-wreathed hollows of the Vaqueros Hills in January; catch a whiff of her fragrance in buckbrush blossoms on Murchio Gap in April. The pitch of her laughter is on my mind in May, when the air in Mitchell Canyon timbrellates with a thousand bird calls. And as I roam the exposed hilltops of Highland Ridge in June, I imagine the southwest breeze as her breath reigniting the embers of my spirit.

It’s fitting that Mom died in winter, when the natural world sleeps, and dreams of reawakening. As metaphors, the seasons help bridge the gap between memory and the present moment. But as I attempt to describe Mom’s impact on me, I find that metaphors fall short. If metaphors are comparisons, what Mom means to me is beyond compare.

No fog-wreathed hollow could have nursed me back to health as Mom did when as a kid I suffered from rheumatic fever. No bird calls could have stimulated my interest in astronomy by giving me binoculars for my 12th birthday. It’s correct to describe Mt. Diablo as “unwavering.” But unlike Mom, no mountain could show me unwavering loyalty and encouragement all these years, despite my deserving less. The mountain is indifferent to my well being; Mom could never be that.

Ella Erickson grew up on a farm in Klevenville, Wisconsin, and her love for the natural world – the open sky, the unnamed creek she loved to explore – influenced my desire to connect with nature. From her 10th-floor view of Lake Morton in Florida, she reverted to farm-girl lingo when describing the floating swans and pelicans as “critters.”    

Ella Erickson in 1938.

As a kid raised in the city and suburbs I never brushed a cow or plucked a chicken. I was never required to collect eggs or shove a hay bale down a hole in a ceiling. As a teen I never rode a horse bareback. As an adult I never served in the military. But Mom did, and as a sergeant in the Women’s Marine Corps, served in Washington, D.C. during World War II while waiting for the man who would be my father to return from the campaign in Italy.

Mom was a working woman. She raised four kids while holding demanding jobs at Wheaton College and Central DuPage Hospital in Illinois. But she carved out time to pursue her passion for reading, which inspired me to crack open books that lured me into realms of wonder. The aroma of Wheaton’s Adams Memorial Library – a musty mélange of wood, leather and old paper – is etched deeply in memory. Take a wild guess who chauffeured me, for years, to the library.

Mom stood beside me in our front yard the night of my 12th birthday as I trained my brand-new binoculars on the Milky Way: stars behind stars resolving into a haze of farther stars. I later learned that as a kid, Mom would step outside at night, lie against an incline near her house and gaze at the heavens. Nine decades later, in her east-facing apartment she’d be up before dawn, savoring those same lights. In our conversations she’d ask about the celestial wonders she observed. My ability to provide answers was her accomplishment, too.

On her final day her voice was frail. But in it I heard the voice I’d known from the beginning, a voice for which metaphors struggle to bridge the gap: a voice warm as the wind that swirls through Murphy Meadow in May, gentle as the water that flows down High Creek in March, uplifting as the ruby bursts of clarkia blossoms adorning Castle Ridge in June. A voice – and a woman behind the voice – like spring.

Lux aeterna. Let light perpetual shine on her, O Lord, as her light shined on me.

Neowise – flight of the cosmic moth

Comet NEOWISE C/2020 F3 in the skies above northern Saskatchewan. Photo by Tero Patana/iStock/Getty Images

The night sky was a dance floor, polished lapis lazuli scuffed by the soles of three pairs: in the west, Saturn and Jupiter had come to the party as a couple but were practicing prudent social distancing. Eastward, Venus and Aldebaran were dancing cheek-to-cheek. South, the odd couple of Mars and Moon were about to split up: Luna heading east, leaving the god of war in the dust of her glow.  

But the main attraction was Comet NEOWISE C/2020 F3, a spray of mist low in the northeast, intruding on constellation Auriga’s locals like a tinhorn in a boondock saloon. A shallow dome of burnt gold stained the sky above the Sierra Nevada Range; the comet would soon disappear behind the swell of solar glare.

It was July 11, 2020. I stood on Round Valley’s topmost hill after a 1-mile, 1,000-foot climb through the shadows of blue oaks, the trail clarified sporadically by lunar light. The climb was dark but I deserved no sympathy. Those who find themselves alone in the dark should take consolation in the lives of comets.

If the orbit of planet Earth resembles a wedding band, the orbit of Comet Neowise resembles a rubber band stretched to the snapping point; the comet’s current orbit will extend 66 trillion miles into the hinterlands of our solar system. The astronomers of ancient Greece named the satellites of our Sun planetai, wanderers. Had their science been more advanced, they’d have applied the metaphor to comets. Neptune, the remotest of the wanderers, traces its ellipse around our Sun once every 165 years. Comet Neowise won’t return till A.D. 8700.

I stood on the hilltop, gaze fixed low on the northeast. No voice of bird or mammal broke the silence. I was alone in a dark and remote place but compared to the long loneliness of Neowise, my isolation was trivial. Like a moth from myth, the comet had flown from a desolation beyond fathoming toward a flame of gold, condemned to careen around that flame, be flung back into the frozen night, wander there for thousands of years and repeat the ordeal for thousands more.

The comet flaunts its blue ion tail and golden dust tail. Photo from Getty Images.

On July 3 Neowise, having cut inside Mercury’s orbit, made its closest pass by the Sun at a distance of 27 million miles, boomeranging around our star at 48 miles per second. Eight days later, as I watched it recede like a ship on the horizon, its sails billowing in the gale of solar wind, I strained to grasp what I was looking at. A mere 80 million miles away, a 3-mile-wide chunk of ice and dirt was escaping Sol’s gravity well like a cutter escaping a maelstrom. Neowise makes its closest pass by Earth today, July 23 at a distance of 64 million miles, having slowed to a mere 27 miles per second.

Weeks earlier, as the Sun’s heat caused Neowise to begin its transformation from chrysalis to adult, tails began to form. After tumbling unseen through the void for thousands of years, the latent light of Neowise was finally kindled. The first tail, tinged blue and streaming straight back, was made of ions and gas. The second, the dust tail, estimated at more than 10 million miles long, was golden and diffuse. On July 13, a rare sodium tail – exuding the yellowish hue we see in sodium vapor streetlamps – was detected. As Neowise flew off, the Sun’s coronal mass ejections and plasma waves caused the comet’s dust tail to develop synchronized bands not seen since Comet McNaught in 2006. Neowise had become a rockstar.

For millennia, comets have been construed as portents of disaster: the death of monarchs and fall of empires. Comets are unnervingly unlike most celestial phenomena. The routes of planets in the night sky have long been plotted. The gloom of a solar eclipse or flamboyance of a meteor shower – those spectacles occur at consistent intervals; their comings and goings can be predicted. But comets come out of nowhere, emerging wraithlike in the hovering darkness. Despite our astronomical savvy, no one can predict which iceball in the Oort Cloud’s rubble will get sideswiped into our Sun’s gravity well and intersect humanity’s 21st century. No one saw Neowise coming.

Evening of July 21 – time to say goodbye. I reached my sanctuary atop Round Valley’s northern hills in time for the setting of Sun and Moon, and rising of a fierce southwest wind. I tightened the drawstring of my hat.

Moonset over North Peak, Mt. Diablo State Park. July 21, 2020.

As night fell I trained my gaze on the sky below the Big Dipper – on a spot slightly west of a line from Megrez through Merak – and strained to resolve the comet through air dense with wildfire particulates and light pollution. Around 9:30 Neowise appeared, in the exact spot it was meant to be, like a wisp of fog, moth soft, drifting through a streetlamp’s gauzy glow. 

When Neowise returns in A.D. 8700, who will see it? What manner of Earth civilization will turn its gaze skyward? Will Homo sapiens have abandoned the planet, or vice versa? Or does the comet herald a doom more imminent: the self-extinction of entities – though 7 billion souls strong – as infinitesimal in the scale and story of the cosmos as their infinitesimal blue world.

I turned my gaze away, west past the amassed black of Mt. Diablo, then southeast, where a light glared from a puncture in the sheet metal of night as if heaven were blazing behind it – the planet Jupiter. From behind the Vaqueros Hills rose a faint glow, the melded radiance of street lamps and homes in distant Livermore; sign of a species that has fought darkness from the beginning; illuminated caves and continents, resisted night as it resists mortality. I cinched my pack tight and took one last look at Comet Neowise fluttering away. I knew I wouldn’t see it again.

But on the way down, back in the shadows of oaks, just before the silhouette of foreground hills obliterated the heavens, I came on a clearing and looked up. The sky had darkened and the comet brightened. There we were – lone wanderers in the dark – in the exact spot we were meant to be.

Earth’s oceans thrive in lucky Lane 3

Sunset at Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii.

[Updated March 21, 2022]

Does an 718-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bath condo going for $675,000 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 1,344-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath home for a mere $229,000.

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 water. 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 consisted not of 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.

Only in 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 March 21, 2022 the NASA Exoplanet Archive recorded its 5,000th confirmed exoplanet. Their sheer number, plus the fact that many of them reside in their star’s HZ, has led some enthusiasts to believe that Earthlike exoplanets 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.

Photo by NASA.

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 with 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.

Coyote and the black box

A nightmare

Coyote in Murphy Meadow, Round Valley Regional Preserve.

There was nothing ominous about that morning. No warning signs. It began like most of my adventures at Round Valley: I stretched out at the trailhead – Achilles, hip flexor, lunge – and fired up my GPS. In two hours, 6½ miles and 1,760 feet of elevation gain I’d be standing on Wek-wek Ledge off Morgan Territory’s Prairie Falcon Trail, gazing at Mt. Diablo veiled in the hot haze of distance.

The Miwok Trail westbound ushered me beneath the shadows of blue oaks anchoring the lower lobes of spurs rippling toward the valley. The shade was welcome; the forecast called for the mercury to hit 98 F. I crammed my pack with all the water the pack’s finite cubic space would allow.

Water would be the least of my concerns.

I came to the familiar Miwok/Hardy Canyon split. Not the least bit unnerving. A mile and a half south towered the hunter-green oak and maroon chaparral of Bob Walker Ridge: my staircase to splendor at higher altitudes. I lowered my gaze and heard the valley’s tall, dry grasses seethe in a southeast breeze like retreating surf hissing through shale.

A mile later, just short of the Los Vaqueros gate, and still oblivious, I saw him: a solo coyote loping toward steeply cut Arroyo Grande, which skirted my trail on the right. He was about 200 yards southeast and moving with a purpose, probably to trade the withering light for the darkness beneath valley oaks and California buckeye. It was clear the coyote hadn’t seen me: he kept coming. I’d also gotten lucky – the southeast breeze kept me downwind of his nose and ears.

The moment he disappeared behind the trees, now about a hundred yards distant, I bounded off the trail toward a massive valley oak on the arroyo’s east bank and set up my shooting zone. Out came the camera. On. Exposure: minus two clicks. White balance: shade. Mode: scenery. Zoom: full. I trained the lens on the only open area across the arroyo: a rock spattered with white lichen and dormant brown mosses. Then I scanned the scene for my quarry.

Animals are infuriatingly uncooperative photo subjects. My dog and cats, for cryin’ out loud, rarely hold a pose. Out in the wild, I’m lucky to get close enough to a coyote, bobcat or golden eagle – and be quick enough with my equipment – to bag a single respectable snapshot.

But lo and behold, this Round Valley coyote trotted out from behind the bramble, hopped onto the rock and into a photogenically optimal dappling of sunlight and shade and stood there while my shutter went ka-CHEE, ka-CHEE, ka-CHEE.

As if he knew the last shot was as good as it was gonna get, and the photo-op was over, the creature hopped off the rock and disappeared behind the cape of an arroyo willow. Still leaning against the valley oak, I reviewed my shots and shook my head at the colossal blindness of my luck.

Time to go. I turned on my heel to high-step it through the thistle back to the trail – and jumped straight back. “Yow!” The shock lasted only a moment, but it was a moment of heightened electrification, a single synaptic flash short of panic. The next moment, crouched in a defensive pose, I heard myself laughing at myself.

Some guy was standing right behind me. Arm’s-length behind me.

“God Almighty! You scared the crap out of me!”

“‘God Almighty?’ Ha.” He raised his right eyebrow, lips pursed, suppressing a smile.

He was tall and spindly, as if he’d skipped a few meals. The ravines in his face were chiseled deep. A scraggly, rust-brown mustache flared across his cheeks. His long face was leather. But the eyes: the eyes were narrow and grey – and something else, something that sent a thin shiver up my neck. I took a step back. In all my wanderings I’d never seen anything as terrible as those gaunt and hungry eyes. They were not human.

“Nice scenery,” I said with a forced nonchalance.

“I believe I did a pretty good job,” he said in a voice softly growled from the back of the throat. A canine voice. So fixated was I on the eyes that it took a moment to register another disturbing fact: the hills behind him were undulating like a desert background blurred by heat ripples. The effect formed an oval just behind his head, like the halo of an Eastern Orthodox icon.

He must have registered my disorientation. “I have that effect on people,” he said.

I resolved that this encounter was not happening. The procedure was simple: I’d keep the conversation mundane and dispel this bad dream through sheer tedium.

“Did you see the coyote?” I asked.

“Did I see him? Hm. I would not put it that way.”

Geez, this guy is hard to distract. “Ger Erickson,” I said, extending my hand.

I stood there, arm obstinately outstretched in empty space. Hey, this is my dream. I get to choose the vignette that makes me look least undignified.

The guy looked at my hand as if it were radioactive, raised his arm and pinched the wide brim of his hat, the crown of which was tapered upward to form two pointed … wings, leaves, ears? Definitely not a Stetson.

“Olétte,” he replied, returning the introduction. “You stole my image with that black box,” he said, his eyes boring a hole through my camera. “Now give it back.”

Uh-oh. Olétte: Coyote deity of the Native American Miwok. Creator of the world. Trickster. I am so screwed.

“You know why we are here,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.

Hey, this is my fevered fantasy and I’m gonna get my entertainment-dollar’s worth. “Let me guess,” I said. “I committed a cosmic offense: last night I paired Dover sole with cabernet.” I took a sideways glance at his malnourished eyes and decided to get off the subject of things digestible.

“You recognize my name,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. You recognize your transgression, you recognize the reparation. Fine. But that device slung around your neck – it holds more than a portion of my spirit. Give it to me and I will tell you what it is trying to tell you.”

Before I could prevent it, my hand was peeling the camera strap off my neck. Wait a minute – I bagged some nice shots. Why should I surrender my camera without a fight? “What makes you think I stole a piece of your spirit?” I asked, stalling for time.

“If you understood that,” said Olétte smoothly, “you would never have taken that black box out here in the first place. That is why you are here: to learn what the box is telling you.” And he locked eyes with me for what seemed about a decade. “Ah, but I believe you do understand. That image of me adds to the sum of the world. It takes something that is and makes from it something that has never been, as when I shook the tules and the land rose from the water. You also are a creator – of sorts. The question is: to whom does the image belong? You or me? I say me.” And he stretched his arm, palm up.

I felt like a ground squirrel stalked by a … well, a coyote. If I couldn’t outrun his single-minded pursuit of my camera, I’d dive into the nearest ground-squirrel hole. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t be out here taking pictures, stealing the world’s spirit? Why shouldn’t I steal that spirit and share it with others?”

He stifled a chuckle, recognizing my ruse but willing to play along. Then he knelt, scooped a handful of dirt and let it run through his fingers. “The people who once walked this valley had a word: ‘wachichu’: ‘to take the fat.’ Here is the fat of the matter,” he said. “That you stole my image merely offends me; it threatens nothing. That thing that hangs from your neck like a talisman: it is a greater danger to you than me.”

Coyote pictograph by CampPhoto/iStock/Getty Images.

Before I could digest his thought, he stood and said, “It is not only what you see but what you fail to see that creates your world. You are like Wek-wek the falcon – always darting around; always in a rush. Your black box makes you hurry to crest a ridge so you can steal an image before the light fails; hurry home to tell the story. You spend too much time marking the passage of time. You look at and seldom into what you see. It is your own spirit that is trapped in the black box.”

I looked away, to where the landscape wasn’t a wavering halo behind Olétte’s head. I knew he was right – right about the camera and me. “You’re saying the picture is an instrument of falsehood, not truth?” I said, pressing my disadvantage. “Hey, you’re The Trickster. Which am I supposed to believe: you or the picture?”

Olétte licked his thin lips. A terrible intelligence and hunger crouched behind those eyes. I knew I was playing a dangerous game. I also knew from mythology that the gods aren’t omniscient. They can be deceived by other gods – even humans. But tricking The Trickster? Is that possible? And if possible, is it such a bright idea?

I took the plunge: “If I tell you a story, a story that pleases you, will you let me keep the black box?”

He raised an eyebrow. I’d struck a resonant chord. “I’ll make it a story of cosmic significance,” I said. In keeping with my previous remarks, I had no idea what I was talking about. But I had a plan: something about removing the memory stick from my camera while The Trickster was distracted. You can keep the camera.

Olétte stretched out his arms and raised his head. “A story of cosmic significance, eh? When Silver Fox and I danced the world into being,” he said, and lowered his eyes at mine, “that was of cosmic significance. When I stole the Sun from the Mountain People, that was of cosmic significance. I have heard many stories, and told many more. My standards are high.” He smiled, and I caught the glint of saliva on one of his fangs. “Tell me your story. And make it – how do you say? – a humdinger. I might even spare your life.”

Olétte strode over to a hollow log and sat down, grasped his knees and bent slightly forward as if to say, “You’re on.”

My camera was resting against my chest. I slipped my left arm through the loop of the strap, shifted the camera to where it hung a few inches below my left armpit, and crossed my arms, grasping the camera with my right hand, shielding it from view. Olétte’s narrow grey eyes followed the whole operation.

I widened my stance and cleared my throat as prelude to a pronouncement weighty and wise. “Many are the tales of the world’s beginning; few of its ending. Hearken, Olétte, and I will tell you how the world ends,” I declaimed while opening the memory stick hatch with my right thumbnail and feeling for the stick with my index finger.

Now for the real trick: the tale. Assuming Olétte had heard it all, I needed to maneuver him into unfamiliar territory. I needed a story so outlandish, he wouldn’t know whether to devour me or deify me.

With a nod of my head, I gestured to a nearby hill. “You see the large oak on that hilltop?” I said, ever so gently pressing the memory stick against its spring-lock release, feeling it come loose and pinching it out while Olétte’s gaze was diverted to the hill.

“When evening falls, a star will rise above that oak. We call the star Bingle-Dworp 677. Around it circles a world called Whygo. On it dwell the Whygons.”

Olétte was looking at me now with an expression not overly favorable. I tiptoed farther out toward the precipice: “Whygons have been monitoring humanity from Earth orbit for 1,500 years, waiting for a positive trend,” I said with a scientific solemnity. “To a Whygon, 1,500 years is practically a lifetime.” Uh-oh. Where do I go from here? And how do I get this memory stick from my hand to my pocket? It’s too small to palm.

“Now, the Whygons are divided,” I said as my fingertips perspired onto the stick. “Factions A and B want to destroy Earth right now; Faction C wants to spare us for another century or two.”

Olétte cocked his head and lifted an eyebrow. I could almost hear him forming the thought “don’t screw with me.”

“And how, you must be wondering, would the Whygons destroy Earth? Well, I’ll tell you how,” I said, padding the narrative for all it was worth. “Faction A wants to see Earth explode in a messy though expressionistically pleasing fwoof but Faction B claims that would leave a debris cloud in solar orbit ‘in clear contravention of the Space Littering Act of 200913.’ Faction B would rather plant a small black hole in Earth’s core and watch the planet get sucked right out of the space-time continuum.” (Need I mention I had no idea what I meant by “the space-time continuum”?) “Faction B calls Faction A ‘contrarian barbarians’ while Faction A calls Faction B ‘a bunch of neat freaks.’”

I felt my tether running out fast. Time to drive this train wreck home. “Faction C, comprising an overwhelming minority of Whygo, wants to watch humanity self-destruct a bit longer before the plug gets pulled. Factions A and B call Faction C ‘disgusting voyeurs.’ Oh, and then there’s Faction D, which –”

“Enough!” cried Olétte. He leaped from the log, I uncrossed my arms reflexively and found that the memory stick was poised smack above my pant pocket. I let go of the stick and it obeyed the law of gravity. I’d done it.

What else I’d done came as a shock. “I have not granted the Whygons permission to destroy Earth!” Olétte howled. “I shall journey to Bingle-Dworp 677 with Kélok the North Giant and slay the Whygons utterly. Molluk the Condor shall feast on their rotting flesh.”

Holy crap. He’s taken my story for fact, not fiction. And so, standing on the hangman’s drop, I said gratuitously, “Better not tangle with the Whygons; they’re pretty nasty hombres. Let Whygons be Whygons.”

Under normal circumstances I’d be miffed to see a perfectly serviceable quip go zinging over the head of its intended victim. In this case, I was counting on Olétte’s unfamiliarity with modern English – despite his earlier use of “humdinger” – to prevent something truly icky from happening to me.

“Your tale was … sufficient; your life is spared,” he said to my surprise. “But I require your black box.” No surprise there. I surrendered the camera and he turned to leave.

I couldn’t believe my stupid luck. I was home free. A dozen prime jpegs of the Miwok god Olétte were etched on my memory stick, safe in my pant pocket. Life was good. Then the god stopped in mid stride and made a half turn.

“One more thing,” he said, and for the first time I saw a gleam in his grey eyes. “As your medicine men are accustomed to saying: ‘Take off your pants.’”