Tales of slerks and soul mates
A shopping cart disfigures the intimate imagery of Marsh Creek in Brentwood.
It was a bright and warm autumn afternoon in tarantula mating season – time for male tarantulas to cruise for chicks. I was on one knee along the dirt shoulder of Round Valley’s Murphy Meadow Trail, my camera at ground level trained on a tarantula about 4 inches away. The spider, having Googled “Burrow Bars/Murphy Meadow,” was halfway down a burrow in hopes of hitting on some long-legged, eight-legged brunette.
Suddenly Miguel went whirring past on his mountain bike, followed by Matt. At the time, I didn’t know their names were Miguel and Matt – but I soon found out. Matt slowed to see what the photo-op was about.
“Hey, Miguel!” he yelled. “We got a tarantula here!”
Miguel raised a zephyr of dust as he braked and spun back our way. When he pulled into the paparazzi zone, Matt was already bagging spider shots on his iPhone.
“Wow,” said Miguel. “Never seen a live tarantula. Cool.”
The three of us shot more than photos; we shot the breeze for nearly an hour, following the spider’s progress, sharing tales of the trail – instantly forming that bond peculiar to lovers of the outdoors. Scenic soul mates.
Miguel is a Tracy resident; Matt hails from Oakland. Since they were getting their first exposure to Round Valley, I appointed myself Docent du Jour and fired off a fusillade of tarantula lore, trail directions, distances and elevations. They were patient. I learned that Matt is a former U.S. Navy security guy recovering from PTSD. “This,” he said, gesturing to the gently undulating gold of the valley and its maternally enfolding hills, “is a healing place to be.”
Crossing paths with Miguel and Matt was healing for me, too. A few minutes earlier, I’d crossed paths with an empty beef jerky package discarded smack in the middle of the trail. “Well,” I thought, “the ‘jerk’ part certainly applies.”
Out on the trail, after hours of silent solo hiking, the simple sound of a human voice can be comforting, no matter what’s spoken; the simple image of a human can be reassuring. But “the more, the merrier” isn’t in my trail vocabulary. I need to know if the “more” includes litterers and vandals. Let’s call them, for purposes of verbal shorthand, “slerks” – slobs and jerks.
In my long experience as a trail tramp, I’m happy to report: the beef-jerky slerk is the exception, not the rule. Miguel and Matt are the rule. But as an objective journalist, I’m sad to report: the more popular our regional parks become, the more I see the handiwork of slerks. I smile when I see so many soul mates enjoying the scenery. And I cross my fingers. Statistical probability dictates that a few of them are slerks.
Nothing breaks the spell of enchantment in the wild like the handiwork of the slerk. When gazing on the grandeur of Mt. Diablo framed by oak limbs and lichen-spattered boulders, it’s distracting and disheartening to spot a slerk’s initials carved on the oak, a power-bar wrapper nestled among the boulders. When we’re lucky enough to catch the silhouette of a black-tailed deer, as still as a statue on the crest of a sandstone escarpment, the sight of a discarded Gatorade bottle breaks the spell, symbolizes what we came to the wilderness to escape. We come to the wilderness to hear the screech of a golden eagle, the wind in the trees, not some slerk’s favorite tune blasted on a boom box.
Slerks assume that a place of natural beauty is just another sports stadium or street festival, where noise is encouraged, where littering and defacement are so rampant that crews are hired to clean up the aftermath. The annual Marsh Creek Cleanup event drags from our communal waters an average of more than 6 tons of trash, including tires and shopping carts.
Hey, slerks: knock it off. You know those trigger-happy space aliens toting planetary-bombardment weapons? You’re giving them second thoughts about sparing humanity.
Wallace Stegner wrote that “culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.” At the crest of Round Valley’s Hardy Canyon, elevation 1,100 feet, a cluster of randomly scattered rocks recently served as building blocks for a hiker-architect’s rock towers. Most of the towers stood on multiple foundations and incorporated about three dozen ingeniously balanced rocks – East Contra Costa’s Stonehenge.
The handiwork of a hiker/architect on the crest of Round Valley’s Hardy Canyon.
In a week the towers were gone, knocked down by some slerk who couldn’t resist the temptation to wreck the painstaking work of a genius. Like the Vandals who sacked Rome in A.D. 455, the Round Valley vandal saw the towers as an opportunity to destroy, not create; to subtract rather than add a stone of his own.
Oddly enough, the creator of the towers was in technical violation of park district Ordinance 38, which prohibits the moving of rocks from their original locations. But it’s hard to tar the builder and the destroyer with the same brush. Every time the park district chisels out a trail or builds a bridge, it disrupts an ecosystem – and absolves itself of violating Ordinance 38. I hike these hills and valleys for the awe they inspire. The rock towers, though a work of human hands, inspired awe. My unauthorized verdict: the builder, though breaking a rule, was no slerk.
The worse angels of my nature hope I catch a slerk in the act – witness someone tossing aside a bottle or wrapper; carving initials on a tree – and give him a verbal thrashing. The better angels hope I can find the words to discourage and encourage; castigate but not alienate. After all, we’re both out there for the awe. We should be soul mates.