November 2, 2023

Rooted in the mystery of mortality

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 trio of gnarly friends, clockwise from upper left: 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 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 fashions 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.

June 19, 2021

Memories of Dad painted in pastels

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.

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.

January 26, 2021

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.”

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.

July 23, 2020

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 can 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.

July 5, 2016

Constellation Arrowhead – connecting the dots

A fleeting vision in our night sky: the constellation Arrowhead. Graphic by Ger Erickson.

Beneath a night sky of diamonds scattered across the black velvet of space, our earliest ancestors looked up and saw patterns. They connected the dots: a group of stars became the diagram of a lion or bear, a queen or a hunter and his dogs. Those patterns were permanent. From millenium to millenium, the position of the stars never strayed, the diagram was never distorted.

But some heavenly objects did stray. The astronomers of ancient Greece named those objects planetai, wanderers. The planets. The star constellations are set in stone, but the planets wander into formations of their own that, like star patterns, remind us of familiar images. One of these temporary constellations is visible now. Let’s call it Arrowhead.

Step outside at 10 p.m. Pacific Time and look south. Across the horizon hangs the constellation known to the Babylonians as Mul Gir-tab, the creature with the burning sting. We call it Scorpius, the scorpion. Some civilizations have juggled two metaphors: the star pattern reminded the Indonesian Javanese people of both a swan (Banyakangrem) and a leaning coconut tree (Kalapa Doyong).

But in July of 2016, people of all cultures can savor the sight of a new, though fleeting, constellation. The planets Mars and Saturn plus the star Antares trace the pattern of an Arrowhead. The point of the arrow is Mars. The arrow’s lower barb is Antares; its upper barb, Saturn.

Scorpius and its current retinue of planets plus permanent retinue of star clusters. Graphic by Ger Erickson. — Scorpius and its current retinue of planets plus permanent retinue of star clusters. Graphic by Ger Erickson.

Arrowhead or no Arrowhead, the southern night sky of 2016 is rich in delights to the eye and imagination. Mars sweeps past Antares every two years but stargazers have linked the two reddish objects for millenia. “Mars” is the name the Romans gave the red planet, but the ancient Greek word for Mars is “Ares.” The Greeks considered the reddish star in Scorpius to be Ares’ rival: thus the name “Antares” – anti-Ares. The god of war, Ares, and the heart of the scorpion, Antares: a clash of formidable and forbidding powers in the heavens.

Mars “sweeps past Antares” in only a visual sense. The light of Mars that strikes your retina takes 4½ minutes to make its current 50-million-mile journey to Earth. The light of Antares takes 550 years. How can a star so distant shine so brightly? It’s easy – when your radius is 883 times greater than the Sun’s and you shine 12,000 times brighter than the Sun. Were Antares to replace the Sun at the center of our solar system, it would engulf Earth and Mars.

Mars and Antares share a reddish hue, but the hue springs from a radically different source. Stars generate their own light; planets reflect the light of their parent star. Antares’ reddish light is the fire of an enormous thermonuclear furnace burning at a cool 6,500 F. The red of Mars is sunlight bounced off a few million square miles of iron-rich minerals – a big desert.

Got binoculars or a small telescope? Swivel over to Scorpius and you’ll be treated to the vision of some of the finest star clusters in our local cosmos – the M7 cluster and the Northern Jewel Box in particular.

The planet Saturn. Photo by 3quarks/iStock/Getty Images.

And let’s not space out on that golden planet way out in the solar suburbs, the farthest planet visible to the naked eye: Saturn, which completes one orbit of the Sun in 29 Earth years. Saturn is a prime example of the strangeness of the cosmos. The ringed planet is large enough, minus its rings, to fit nine Earths across its diameter like pearls on a string. Yet as a “gas giant,” Saturn is so light it would float on water. And as telescope owners are well aware, Saturn’s ring system is approaching its maximum tilt toward Earth. Late 2016-early 2017 is prime time to view one the wonders of our local universe: the golden rings of the golden globe we call Saturn.

Stargazing is more than an aesthetic pleasure. From the beginning of our species’ days on Earth, the ability to make the connection between patterns in the physical world and the world of the imagination has helped us survive and flourish. When we gaze into the night sky of A.D. 2016 and see a scorpion – or an arrowhead – we’re re-enacting an ancient and impactful feat. May you enjoy keeping that tradition alive this special summer by stepping out beneath the stars and connecting the dots.

January 18, 2016

Make the pilgrimage with Annie

When winter rains turn hiking trails into rivers of mud, we trekkers get our revenge by taking it inside: we grab a steaming beverage and nestle into our favorite chair with a good book. When we need a ride out of Cabin Fever City, there’s no better form of transport than our very own author-ignited imagination.

What to read? If you’ve ever felt the sun on your face in spring and been engulfed by a wave of awe and gratitude, or if you’ve ever witnessed up close the suffering of a loved one and shuddered at the hideous side of our existence; if you’ve ever been overwhelmed by the world’s beauty or suffocated by its horror and wanted to put a name to it, pick up a copy of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard.

“Pilgrim” is a book about the world of water and sky, trees and insects; broad in scope and painstaking in detail. It’s a book about the author’s inner landscape, an intimate and confessional diary. And it’s a book about the Why of the world’s joy and misery, an attempt not only to describe, but understand.

After a nearly fatal bout with pneumonia in 1971, Dillard retreated to the solitude of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and banks of Tinker Creek, where she found healing and inspiration. The result, in addition to her recuperation, was the book for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1975.

What makes the reading of “Pilgrim” so rewarding is Dillard’s dilated point of view. Her senses, her mind and her heart are fully open to the world’s phenomena – and their implications. She sees profundity in the simple and splendor in the ordinary. “It is dire poverty indeed,” she writes, “when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.”

“Pilgrim” is charged with an ecstatic tone but Dillard’s portrayal of the natural world is unsentimental. She not only concedes that nature is red in tooth and claw; she gives us the gory details. Her account of a frog’s skull being collapsed by a water bug sucking it dry from beneath the creek’s surface is a tour de force of ghastly description. Later, Dillard expresses bewilderment at the fact that 10 percent of the world’s species are parasitic insects, which suggests a disturbing possibility about the Creator: “What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harassing, disfiguring or totally destroying the other ninety percent?”

Dillard is a Christian, yet she draws from the wisdom of traditions as diverse as Buddism, Sufism, Eskimo lore and Hasidic Judaism. She embraces the paradox that existence is a blessing and a curse; that in our universe, creation and destruction are mysteriously intertwined. And yet she doesn’t let God off the hook for bringing it all into being. What Dillard concludes about the nature of God is consoling and disturbing, blatant and subtle.

“Pilgrim” urges us to step out and experience the moment. In a twist on the standard meaning of a familiar phrase, Dillard exhorts us to spend the afternoon: “You can’t take it with you.” For her, God’s grace imparted through the world of Tinker Creek is available at any moment. The least we can do is be present when the moment arrives. “The secret of seeing,” she writes, “is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the nearest puff.”

As a form of transport, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” is more like soaring than slogging. It’s a pilgrimage worth making.

January 5, 2016

Moss Beach – low tide, high visibility

Moss Beach marvels, clockwise from upper left: a purple-colored ochre star lounges in a tide pool; a visitor follows a squadron of pelicans above Seal Cove; giant green anemones flaunt their tentacles; and stalked barnacles cling to a rock face.

Sun and moon tug on our ocean and its waters recede. Earth twirls on its axis and the blue sky dissolves to black. These eternal rhythms do more than inspire awe – they unmask marvels. When the sun sets, we see stars. When the tide rolls out, we see starfish.

And we see them in full glory at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Moss Beach. When winter rains make a mudfest of conventional hiking trails, what better venue for an adventure than a sandy beach?

The organisms that roam the coast are as bizarre as the monsters of sci-fi. The hermit crab wears a snail shell like an oversized turban while scavenging for decayed plant and animal matter. The starfish known as the sea bat feeds by projecting its stomach through its mouth into its victim’s shell opening, discharging digestive enzymes, sucking its liquefied prey like some ghastly slurpee and retracting its stomach back into its body.

South of San Francisco and north of Half Moon Bay, the Fitzgerald reserve’s 3-mile stretch of shoreline and rocky reefs displays an impressive quantity and diversity of marine life, from delicate coralline alga to giant green anemones, from stalked barnacles to gray whales. Bird lovers can trace the graceful glide of pelicans low over the sea or watch herons wade in the shallows looking for lunch while harbor seals cool their heels on the sand.

For the record, you’ll find scant moss at Moss Beach. In the late 1800s, a German immigrant named Jürgen Wienke bought the seaside property and, according to legend, dubbed an odd form of alga growing there “moss.” Wienke’s misnomer eventually spread to include the entire beach. The moss you will find here is well above the beach – delicate tendrils flowing from a throng of Monterey cypresses standing sentinel on the reserve’s tall bluffs. The Bluff Trail affords not only a bird’s-eye view of the beach; from it you can commandeer a vista both intimate and breathtaking. Sunset on the Pacific doesn’t get any finer.

Harbor seals enjoy a snooze on a blustery afternoon.

Head south on the cliff trail and in a few minutes you’ll pop out onto a street leading to the historic Moss Beach Distillery, founded in the rum-running Prohibition era. You can mosey over to a patio anchored on bluffs overlooking the ocean and, libation in hand, sit down to an excellent seafood dinner. The distillery even boasts a resident ghost, the Blue Lady, responsible for weird cameo appearances on premises.

To catch the optimal exposure of Fitzgerald’s reserve’s reefs and terraces, visit at low tide. Log on to www.fitzgeraldreserve.org/newffmrsite/lowtides. The site gives you a detailed table of tides for a given date and time of day. You’ll find that this Saturday and Sunday, January 9 and 10, low tides in the afternoon will unveil the wonders beneath the water.

Surf’s down!

November 23, 2015

Epic effort? Hey, no problem

Photo by Chris Ryan/OJO Images/Getty Images

The host led Leia and me to our table. We took our seats. I said “thanks.” The host said “no problem.” I was tempted to tell the host “I’m mighty relieved to hear that leading us to our table was no problem” but I knew Leia would shoot me a glance that could melt iridium.

Leia ordered wine; I ordered beer. The server delivered them. Leia said “thanks.” The server said “no problem.” I was tempted to tell the server “that’s fascinating; it never occurred to me that delivering our beverages would be a problem” but I knew my reply would be interrupted by an eyeball-rattling pain to my shin delivered by the point of Leia’s shoe.

By the time dinner was done and we breezed through the restaurant’s exit, we’d been treated to an unofficial count of nine “no problem”s. I imagined thanking a Good Samaritan for yanking my car out of the ditch in a sub-zero blizzard. For my sake he missed his once-in-lifetime job interview, subluxated every vertebra in his spine and probably needed several fingers amputated due to frostbite. And I wanted him to know I appreciated it.

“No problem,” he replied.

It’s official: to paraphrase Nietzsche, “you’re welcome” is dead.

Is it unreasonable to demand that everyone be aware of the literal meaning of the words they use? Probably. I knew a guy who always greeted me with “hey, baby, what are you doing?!” I’ll never forget his facial expression when, after weeks of replying with “hi,” I gave him a play-by-play account of what I was doing. He looked at me as if I were radioactive.

It’s tempting as customers to view service providers’ “no problem” as dismissive and self-centered. “No problem” directs attention to the thanked person, the service person. “You’re welcome” directs it to the thanker, the customer. My personal preference, “my pleasure,” also directs attention to the thankee, but in a genial way: “I take pleasure in doing this for you” (that a problem might be involved is irrelevant and off the table).

So what’s the problem with “no problem? Are those who use the phrase being deliberately dismissive and self-centered? No, the problem is: they’re not being anything – but using words that convey meaning anyhow. The possibility that their effort on your behalf might have been a problem is not a thought that fires in their synapses. To them, “no problem” isn’t an attempt at precise communication; it’s an attempt to fill the moment with a social noise. “No problem” could mean “you’re welcome,” “my pleasure,” “no worries,” “whatevs” or “indubitably.” Its true meaning, I suspect, is far less genial. It means “I heard you thank me.” Nothing more.

And that’s the problem: We talk like we think. Unexamined language exposes unexamined thought. How many folks who use the phrase “I could care less” (instead of the original and correct “I couldn’t care less”) realize they’re expressing the exact opposite of their intended meaning? How many who use “it’s all downhill from here” as a negative term realize they’re flip-flopping the meaning of the original and correct metaphor (“after a hard slog uphill we get to coast downhill; it’s all good from here”)? Again: the exact opposite of their intended meaning.

In a world in which we’re bombarded from every point of the compass by those bent on persuading us to do their bidding – from politicians to advertisers – it’s never unwise to examine the meaning of words.

Some social critiques are attempts at promoting change. My riff on “no problem” has no such ambition. Let’s not fool ourselves: the situation’s hopeless. I’m not offended by “no problem” – just disappointed. But it’s only a matter of time before I lose patience and chasten a bewildered restaurant employee with my “no problem” tirade. How to avoid the unavoidable?

I should quit dining out.

October 19, 2015

East Bay park pros: stars behind the scenery

Eddie Willis explains Native American cosmology at Vasco Caves Regional Park.

It was late August but I wasn't late for dawn. By 6:35 the Round Valley summit was flooded by the light of a burnt-red sun flaring through a gap in the sawtooth silhouette of the Sierra. Atop that highest hill in the park – my treasured sanctuary – stood a blue oak I call Old One – my treasured tree.

As I approached Old One to pay my respects a strange object came into focus – dozens of strange objects. Throughout the tree's mesh of twigs and leaves hung tiny red … thingys … as if a swarm of miniature sea urchins had blown through and latched on.

I snapped photos of the little buggers, hurried home and knocked off an e-note to Denise Defreese, who at the time supervised Round Valley for the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD). The gist of the note: what the heck are these red thingys? Are they hazardous to the tree's health?

I hit “send” and moseyed downstairs to brew a cup of coffee and get down to the serious business of writer's procrastination.

When I returned to my inbox 30 minutes later I found that 10 minutes earlier Denise had written back, explaining that the thingys in question were “urchin galls” laid by gall wasps. No danger to the tree. She dialed me in to Ron Russo's excellent “Call of the Galls, The Lively Universe of an Ancient Oak,” published on Bay Nature's website.

Who says you can't get good service nowadays?

In 2014 the EBRPD, the largest urban park district in the nation, celebrated its 80th birthday, replete with art, harvest and wildflower festivals, concerts, a health program, outdoor movies, a gala dinner at the Claremont – you name it. But amid the well-deserved hoopla, the district did what it does year in and year out: provided access to the world of nature that lies just outside our doorstep; access to the awe that world inspires, the healing it offers.

I've been blessed. I've traced with my fingertip a bobcat's track embossed on the caked mud; felt the spring wind sifted through a thousand Coulter pine needles; heard the crazy chorus of a coyote pack assembling for the evening hunt.

Roger Epperson Ridge, Morgan Territory Regional Preserve. The inscription 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.”

Mike Moran leads a Raptor Baseline expedition at Big Break Regional Shoreline.

I've been blessed. So I bless the rangers and docents and supervisors who help me understand what I'm touching and feeling and hearing. I bless those who negotiate with landowners and buy the properties; those who design the trails, build the bridges – heck, maintain the outhouses – at those havens of natural beauty. I bless those who do the dirty work of ripping out poison oak and yellow star thistle, and those who do the clean but hard work that takes place in offices and meeting rooms.

“What is it about the people in the district – in our DNA – that makes us responsive?” said EBRPD GM Robert Doyle. “We were small. We're big now, but we were small. It's still a family of caring. All our park supervisors care about their parks. They know it's pretty special to work out in this stuff – and that the public's who they work for. They're professional and very committed to their mission. And that's personal – as much as anything in the institution. I'm extremely proud of the staff here.”

The EBRPD heroes who over the years have graced me with their time and assistance are too numerous to recount, but include Carol Alderdice, Rex Caufield, Jim Cooper, Defreese, Doyle, Emily Hopkins, Carol Johnson, Isa Polt-Jones, John McKana, Patrick McIntyre, Mike Moran, Traci Parent and Eddie Willis.

Navigating this juggernaut through the turbulent waters of national and regional economics is no small task. For those unfamiliar with the scale of this enterprise, the EBRPD manages 65 parks (including shorelines, preserves, wildernesses, recreation areas, inter-park trails and land-bank areas) comprising more than 1,250 miles of trails laid out on more than 119,000 acres. And let's not overlook the 235 family campsites plus 42 youth camping areas; 10 interpretive and education centers; 11 freshwater swimming areas, boating and/or stocked fishing lakes and lagoons plus a disabled-accessible swimming pool; 40 fishing docks and three bay fishing piers. And when when 5,000 state park employees lost their jobs during the recent recession, not a single EBRPD person was laid off.

Where the district goes from here will be watched with interest by its constituency: the campers, cyclists and runners; the chirpy families, solo hikers and cyclist convoys who pay these facilities around 25 million annual visits.

One way the district must go is to adapt to the constituency's changing face. “Everybody knows that when you go hiking, you're enjoying it but you're also doing it for your health,” said Doyle. “It's part of your stress release and exercise. But the park agencies were never overt about it. It was, 'Go enjoy the beautiful scenery and the wildlife and the environment.' And we're trying to be more direct. We have a national crisis of obesity with kids, and heart attack with seniors.”

To that end, the district has become a partner in Healthy Parks, Healthy People, a worldwide effort to promote fitness by getting folks off their duffs and into the world of nature. Among the slew of activities offered by the EBRPD are bike rides, kayaking, birdwatching, wildflower discovery, a host of programs tailored to kids, and the Trails Challenge, the district's longstanding self-guided hiking program.

The district must also contend with one of the culprits in our current health crisis: the popularity of social media and its power to keep kids indoors and indolent. Doyle's generation “would be out climbing trees, getting dirty, looking under rocks,” he said. “Now kids go 'Eewww. I'd rather get on my social network.' And for us, the environment was social. We were always with a gang of friends – with our girlfriends, with friend-friends, in groups camping out. It was very social. But social now is 'social media.' So how do we build the next generation of park supporters?

“The generation who raised me are all gone now. They were all environmentalists. They were the people who established Save Mt. Diablo, Save the Bay, the state park system. They're gone. The people I got connected with in high school are in their 50s. Where's that next group of kids who wants to come charging up the road?"

That road is more than metaphorical. “We shouldn't say, 'Don't go off the road; this is a fragile environment,'" said Doyle. "This is a tough-as-nails environment. What ruins an environment is dozing off the hilltop and putting a building on top of it. If a bicycle or a horse or a group of kids get off trail, yes, they can cause some damage. So does a big pond-filler of a storm. My biggest worry isn't the economy or public support for the park district in general. It's: where do we get the next generation of men, women, Hispanics, Asians interested in representing the state and taking care of the parks?”

How we answer that question will cast a glaring light on the priorities of our heart. As Terry Tempest Williams put it in “Testimony,” “If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.”

Next time you cross paths with a park service worker, the star of the show – from whichever generation – grooming a trail or cleaning an outhouse, don't forget to thank that person. For us all.