The Heart of San Juan Bautista

Mission San Juan Bautista State Historic Park is beautiful and so is its little town.  It's simple, old and lovely in a way that authentic old towns are.  If you look very closely; if you jab, poke and look look for flaws, you'll see lots of them.  But, the flaws, when you step back and look at the whole of it, become the exact thing you hope to find when you travel:  Authenticity.  

I don't want to see manufactured happiness or hear recorded messages.  I don't want to be what corporations have calculated I should be or see what they want me to see.  I want to see places like San Juan Bautista that have survived and endured all that its citizens and weather have conspired upon it, and I want to see the streaks of its tears, the laugh lines, the sagging roof lines or the gnarled old trees whose roots bend the sidewalks.  I want to see places that were built out of human necessity, not a corporate calculation to maximize profits and homogenize and neutralize my perceptions.  

San Juan Bautista is old and lumpy and sags at the corners.  Its slip is showing and its shoes are worn, but it is lovely and sweet and more than a little proud.  It surrounds on three sides an old Spanish mission built more than 200 years ago, and the little town moves to and from the mission grounds like the tide flows to and from our shore here in Pacific Grove.  They fill it with joy and sadness, anger and indignation.  As they should, the emotions and ideas of its people appear in its storefronts and along its streets in colors, textures and signs.  

What is most remarkable about this littlest of small old towns in busy, roaring, overpopulated California, is that it retains its charm and authentic character year after year.  Get to know it, and go with an open heart.  Be ready to meet it and sit with it awhile.  Give it time to slow you down to its pace and style.  You'll be the richer for it.  

Summer Rhythm

Sunlight is darting through shreds of fog that trail about like visible dreams.  The drifting vapors make shifting shapes overhead, now thickening densely and then thinning into transparency again.  The fog seems bound straight for inland valleys but then pulls back again, as if breathing heavily, in and out, over the course of the day.  

The dance moves mysteriously and silently without end all summer long, tempo quickened by northern or southern breezes in the afternoon, quieting after the sun sails over the western horizon.

You see a grey smudge heaving over the hilltops in the distance as if the hills themselves were pulling a gray blanket up to their chins and curling up for a nap.  But, the stern draping blanket cools the hills down and they lie shivering and damp in the cold gray light.

It's the summer rhythm of our coast, the respiration of an ecosystem, visible as moving moist air and the rise and fall of varying breezes.  If the sun glances back at a certain time of afternoon and finds thin spots in the fog, the tawny grasses that flank rolling hills are set alight and glow.

Summer Hike - Part 1

At the end of the paved road, we stop the car and notice the sound of everything else in the world that the car's roar was drowning out.  And some unseen part of the hot part of the engine is ticking.  It feels like molecules are settling into a different order when you stop driving.

We shuffle around inside the car, prepare to stand up on our stiff legs and take stock of the area.

We've been driving for hours, stopping to use rest stops and stretch, find water to drink.  It's been a long haul, but we're there -- here now -- at long last.

Moving across pavement in a car doing 80 is no way to know a landscape really; it's the way to get through it, to the other side of it, without it touching you.  Now that we're standing on dry ground in the open air with no one around, our senses are awakening.  Nose is telling us about dry grass, hot pitch on pine bark, melting tar patches on the road.  Eyes are telling us about midday sun bleaching color out of everything, asking for dark glasses.  Ears are telling us about Stellar jays, cicadas and grasshoppers whose dry legs' rubbing is rhythmic, a strange harsh soothing zshinn, zshinn, zshinnn.

The trunk is opened up and we grunt into our backpacks, lace our boots on and check for other gear.  Not much needs to be said.  It's a transition time when bodies and minds are preparing for the next task:  Hiking, living outdoors, relying on our wits instead of electronic gadgetry and manufactured sounds.  We find ourselves taking deep breaths and checking internal sensations for readiness.  Then we both feel the little adrenaline buzz of excitement, happy to be embarking on a journey, literally leaving the usual road behind.  We lock up the car and give it a grateful pat on the hood as we walk past it.

"Let's go!"

It's hot and dry in the Sierra pines.  We walk through a small gate with our backpacks clanking and rattling until we adjust them, cinching down straps and rearranging gear.  Dust puffs up around our ankles with each step, a soft mouse gray, fine as a lady's face powder.  Our boots, socks and legs are like chameleons, turning the same color as the dust and trailside plants and we blend in as if invisible from the knees down.

I have a bandanna around my neck that I've soaked in water, and it's feeling like a cool kiss on my neck; I like it very much.  My legs are settling into the natural movement of walking.  Energy is flowing in them and my whole body is up and running.  I imagine an inner hum.

We are bound for a river, setting out into wilderness, loose in the world of nature where our hearts can be light and life is lived simply.  I am not much for hiking up high with legs that more enjoy long flat stretches, but I appreciate the rewards of a long effort of climbing if I must do it.  A ridgetop will have to be crossed before we can begin our descent to the river valley where we can camp.  In my fresh optimism and good mood, it all seems easy and satisfying.

Five miles to the ridgetop.  Five miles through sun-dappled glens, winding stretches of old fire road, out into open meadows rustling with breeze-blown oat grass and foxtails.  Like much of California, the area has been ranched and fenced for 150 years or more.  We see old faded signs posted on tree trunks, dry termite-riddled posts undermined through the years by flash floods and erosion; they look more like exclamation points than fenceposts with barbed wire nailed to them in three places - top, midway and bottom.  They are coated in the same mouse brown dust we are.

It's very dry this year, the third year of drought.  This trail is mostly shaded and relatively cool, but it's evident plants are stressed by the lack of water.