Adjusting to Summer Cold

It's really summer now.  Wherever you are, the weather is wrapping itself around you in its own special way. Here, where the  western edge of the Northern Hemisphere is also called California, nothing unusual is going on. No tornadoes, no blazing fires borne on high-speed winds, and no humidity. The nothingness of our summer has settled in.  Come here. Take a break from all that extreme stuff and cool off for a while. We love visitors, especially ones with red sweaty faces and puffy ankles who live in inland areas where it's so darned hot.  I think I remember heat.  And sunshine.  Round bright thing in the sky, right?

I try to explain why we get this gray fog all summer on the coast. Sometimes I make some sense as I try to explain low pressure and high pressure, cold ocean and inland heat. There's no denying that we wear sweaters in the summer and that only ten miles away (6 k for my readers outside the US), the heat is much more noticeable and the summer much more, um, summery.  I have to go there for a summer-weather fix because it sure doesn't come here.

When I was a small child growing up in Carmel Valley - 12 miles inland from Carmel - I was content to remain right where I was. When I looked west in the afternoons, I could see a hideous gray wall of engulfing fog, a misery that made no sense to go near. I spent my summers shoeless and in the pool, chlorinated and tan. The fog bank caused, and of course still causes, an afternoon wind to pick up in inland valleys, but we were protected from it by a weather ceiling that lifted about 6 miles from Carmel in the area called Farm Center (a local's name for a small shopping center).

"Do you kids want to go with me to Carmel today?" my mother would ask entreatingly.

"NO!!!!" would come the instant yell from five throats.  No way, too awful, cold and gray.  I'd always end up shivering and having to wear two layers of clothes at the beach.  Beaches were for idiots as far as I knew, idiots who liked sand fleas, kelp and 50 degree water. I did not buy into the idea that girls wore bikinis to beaches anywhere. It was a lie.

So, here I am living in a place like Carmel, but not as precious as it is or self-indulgent, and I am wrapped in a cold gray expanse of featureless weather all summer long.  Sometimes I can't wait for the summer to pass; it's never short enough now.

So the real question is:  Why do I live here if the summers are so miserable?  I'm making a list of pros and cons, and the cons are starting to make more sense - at least in the summer.  The rest of the year?  That's a different story.

In Jail With Pill Bugs

I was in fifth grade in a small elementary school with kids I'd grown up with.  I had confidence and felt as secure as a kid can be who knows nothing about the world at large but believes they do.  While we were learning times tables or history or something one hot day, Anna picked her nose two aisles over, I watched dust motes turning like thin little fish in midair, and Mr. Sinclair sat at his desk while we sat at ours.  The dust motes were high overhead, and my head lolled to the left to see them. I thought of outer space where the motes surely came from.  The light fixtures looked like space ships, and a limp flag hung at the front of the class that we saluted every morning.  There were holes made in the ceiling tiles that were meant to absorb sounds, and I had an idea that if the sounds could be retrieved and played on a phonograph, they would reveal all sorts of jumbled and mixed messages, that no words were ever lost at school.

The fifth graders at work in the class bent to their work, the little drudges.  I, on the other hand, could not get my head in the game and looked about for something to entertain myself.  I looked left and right, peeked up at the teacher who sat grading papers at his desk in the front right corner of the class.  High up on the wall over his head, arrayed in a long row of panes, was an open window. A kid got picked every day to be the window monitor and pull them open with a long pole equipped with a hook at its tip.  It was hot and the windows were tilted open into the class.  The dust motes danced in slow motion.  I glanced at Anna, a skinny blonde girl with plastic headband raked through her hair. I was feeling a little sour and irritable. I sighed heavily.  Mr. Sinclair looked up and then down again at the papers.  Erasers scrubbed at papers and feet scuffled the floor.  The clock on the wall ticked its hands mechanically into the next minute position.  2:21 it said tediously.

I noticed Anna again and felt disgusted with the finger mining the interior reaches of her nasal passages.  I wondered if there were boogers on my own desk from whoever had sat there the period before.  I wanted to get out of there, leave a trailing swirl of dust motes behind me like a cluster of reporters asking after the escapee.  Don, a plump and usually good-natured boy with a bristling buzz of hair on his round head was at the desk in front of me.  He wore a thin cotton plaid shirt that stretched across his wide back.  Idly, I picked up my pencil and twirled it.  The tip was nicely pointed and I felt its taper in my fingertip.  I reached forward and poked Don in the back almost as if my hand had decided all on its own to take the stab, without malice, without forethought.  I could have been poking a board for all the interest I had in the action.

Don screamed instantly and whirled wildly around to face me.  He swept my books off the top of my desk to the floor where they landed with a crash.  The teacher jumped up and moved swiftly to Don, grabbing him as if he had suddenly become insane without provocation and needed restraint.

"Stop that! Go outside and don't make a sound!"

"She stabbed me!" Don looked crazed, and I was thrilled, amazed at what had just happened.  I started giggling at the absurd sound of a boy screaming exactly like a girl and the sight of my books strewn on the floor.

"You go outside, too!  I don't want any noise out there from either of you or you're going to the office."

We went out to stand in the heat and doldrums of midday.  Don, whom I'd actually considered to be a friend of a sort up to now, said his back was fine and why did I stab him with my pencil.  I shrugged.  We stood looking at one another and started kicking pebbles, both of us now in jail, hoping for a shiv or a way to be freed for good.  Don said he was glad he didn't have to be in the classroom anymore and that his back was okay.  Me too, I said, and we were friends again.

I looked down at the cement walkway.  We were in an outdoor space covered by a wide overhang of the roof.  Pill bugs that we called rolley pollies - surely invented by God to amuse kids - were moving around down by my feet, so I picked some up and made them roll up.  I saw the open window up at the top of the wall and motioned to Don to aim for it.  We started lobbing pill bugs in through the window, with the only concern being that we make the shot each time.  It was the best fun of the day so far and beat times tables by a long shot.  Then the pill bugs were all gone, thrown to their fate through the open window. Next, we found pebbles and tossed them up and in, never hitting the window pane once.  We became very accurate with every pebble arcing up and through the window space, disappearing into the dark interior of the classroom.

Suddenly the door was pushed open and Mr. Sinclair was standing there with a reddened face.  "Do you know what's been landing on my desk?"

"No."  I tried my winning smile, all my charm, certain he would smile back at me.

"Don, come in here," Mr. Sinclair growled.  Don walked to the door and glanced back at me, grinning, then waved adios.

I was left on my own out in the hall, oblivious to the little havoc I was wreaking, submerged in my boredom and aimlessness.

The door opened again, and I was motioned in by the red-faced Mr. Sinclair.

"Sit down."  I sat and looked around.  Anna wasn't picking her nose anymore.  Kids were staring at me. I looked at the floor and saw pill bug carcasses littering it, a few pebbles.  Don had his back to me.

"Apologize to the class for your disruption."

"Sorry," I said.  I was not sorry.  I wanted to stick Don in the back again and hear him scream.  It was quite a sound he'd made and he'd gone wild in a very exciting way.

"I didn't hear you."  Mr. Sinclair was looking at me, and I looked back at him.  I was pretty sure he was trying not to smile, clenching his teeth, making the ridges of muscle stand out on his jawline.  He was a teacher I generally ignored as best I could, a man with not much imagination but who seemed fair enough.

"I'm sorry," I said, only sorry the bell had not yet rung and set us free.

"Will you ever stab Dod again?" he asked.

"No."

"Don, say you're sorry to her," Mr. Sinclair said.

"She stabbed me with her pencil!" Don shrilled.

"That's enough."

"She did!"

"You threw her books on the floor.  I want an apology or we are all going to be here until I get one."

Don heaved back into his chair, disgusted, "I'm sorry I threw your books onto the floor after you stabbed me with your pencil," he stated, not looking at me.  Mr. Sinclair glared.  The class was silent.  A kid next to me eyed my pencil tip.  I suppose he was looking for blood although I hadn't poked Don hard enough to draw anything more than the reaction.

Inside I was happy with this development, surprised Don had had to apologize, satisfied with the entertainment I'd stirred up, and glad not to see Anna picking her nose anymore.  We scattered at the bell and the day's heat gathered us into it's suffocating arms.  Don gave me a wide berth after that and I found no more opportunities to lob bugs or raise cain.

Playing In The Rain

Rain is descending in splattering waves from the darkness high overhead, and it seems the world is entirely wet.  It reminds me of walking to school the few blocks uphill that we had to go when I was a kid.  When it was as wet as it is right now, gullies and gutters coursed with streams of runoff.  When you have galoshes on - rain boots - and a thick raincoat, being out there in blowing wetness is no concern.  

Actually, being impervious to soaking, we seized the chance to play in the thick of it, to make streaming gutters into diverted flows, dam up waterways and float small rafts of leaves and sticks on the little torrents streaming down the street.  

My brother and I had occasion to find large rocks, ones with some real heft, and drop them resoundingly into giant puddles of standing water when we saw them.  To make a huge splash and make a deep gurgling smacking sound and then shout and yell about the quality of the noise was an unparalleled experience for us on a wet, rain-sodden day.  He was older and stronger and a few times picked up a real whopper of a rock and sent it arching to what he'd estimated was the deepest zone of a large brown muddy puddle and jumped back to avoid the wide wet splat.  It was exciting and challenging stuff to make puddles empty themselves of water when a perfect big rock was launched into its center.  Yes, sir, that was finesse at its best.  

Wearing a yellow raincoat, the thick kind with levered clamps instead of buttons, allowed us to abandon restraint and heave mighty missiles into the drink.  Blam!  "Whoa ho ho!  Did you see THAT?" It was nearly an addiction.  After each one, we'd stand there reveling in the dimensions of depth, heft, sound, and quantity of liquid we'd seen fly.   

Another ultimate high could be achieved when we were driving in our car with mom at the wheel.  All five of us or at least most of us kids would spot a big puddle on the side of road.  Then our requests and pleas for her to drive through the puddle and launch a big sheet of water with the tires began.  "That puddle is HUGE! Drive through it!  Pleeeeeeeeeeeeaase!" We begged and wheedled relentlessly, hoping she would risk all and go for it.  We wanted to send puddle water into geyser-like shooting sprays and hear the water roaring under the tires.  

The point was to keep a running Guinness Book of Puddle Records in mind and to bolster our awe of the unknown, represented by big mean lakes of standing water, which were actually a little bit vertigo inducing if we waded out into the middle of one while out walking on our own.  Puddles held a fascination because they were large bodies of water that had just come into being, resulting from ferociously wet downpours.  They were a sort of indicator that while we had been safe indoors during the worst rain, disaster was near at hand.  You never really knew if a puddle might swallow a car up or if the rain would just come smashing into the windows.  For a kid, anything was possible.  

Sometimes mom did drive through, and then we went into orbit with delight, yelling and screaming when the car's tires plowed through the edge of the puddle.  You had to know how to hit the right speed and angle so the water didn't just hit the bottom of the car, preventing it from spraying out sideways.  She would protest that if she drove too fast into a puddle that was opaque with brown silt, she might hit a big rock and ruin the tires.  We negotiated with her and made arguments in favor of huge splashes and tried to reassure her that her tires would not be ruined.  But, how could we know for sure, we secretly thought.  When the big puddles sprayed in a vast arc of whooshing brown, we kids were subdued in awe, "Ohhhhhhhhh, that's so cool!"  

When we had heard heavy rain on the roof all night, our eyes unable to close, we felt small and the rain powerful. Flowing rivulets rushed down the street and, pooling into big brown lurking collections of water, had the same appeal to us as a sleeping lion does to a gang of monkeys who tease and torment it.  With every heave of rock into the maw of a giant puddle, we regained some sense of invulnerability and power.  It was a matter of respect to whack a puddle with a big rock.  We defined ourselves and the water itself by challenging it, but we didn't know that then.  On gray soggy days wearing our raincoats and boots, calm brown puddles of water were just too tempting to ignore.  Sure beats sitting in front of a computer, you know?  

Frog Songs Silent Now

"Hi, frog."

The small frog waited, blinking slowly, breathing.  It simply existed, with damp and leathery skin, a speckled, curious-looking creature.  I watched it for a long time, waiting for something to happen.  Hey! It sprang away as if a trigger had been released and sent it awkwardly up, out and then splashing down into the swamp water beside its soggy dirt-clod perch.

I heard the frogs all stop creak-croaking, all at once, when my shoes shushed and swished in the grasses and sucking mud at the marsh bank, their silence resounding in contrast to the wide chorus they formed throughout the rushes and soggy grasses.  I set my lunch box down, walked with slow exaggerated steps on tuffets of grass in the seeping drain water, looking for more frogs.  They held their voices and sat stock still, hidden.

The frogs who were not close by, the distant ones in the marshy swamp, continued their creaking frog calls.  Their long strings of eggs were suspended in slimy ropes attached to the mud banks and trailed in the drain water like iridescent bubbled ribbons.  Tadpoles, eggs, frogs, slime, moss, water and mud intermingled, a rich earthy soup of frogs, insects, and microscopic life.  I squatted down and looked for the tadpole gangs wriggling in masses, dark and simple looking with two eyes and a lashing tail.  The trailing sinuous moss swept in the stream's current looked like dark-green, wet hair.  It was repulsive, more so than frogs were.

I uncapped a jelly jar and scooped a good measure of muddy water, tadpoles and some grass and held it up.  Yes, six or eight tadpoles had slithered inside and I was their master now.

I stood still and waited for the chorus to resume, and it did when the frogs had heard no movement for a time.  First one, then two or three frogs who were at scattered distances, one from another, hesitantly began to call.  In a spreading ease, frog voices called to one another, high pitched and droning pleasantly.  These were small frogs mostly, but some had deeper voices that held to a lower register of sound.

This marshy swamp we called The Polliwog Pong was a bog of runoff water.  I could trace it upstream to a rivulet that bordered our school tennis courts to the northeast and before that from a neighborhood and low hills further east.  The swampy field southwest of our school where the frogs sang was open and free of human intrusion because it was boggy, of uncertain footing most of the time, and consisted of repulsive slime and unwanted creatures, rude and homely little things with no known friends.

At twilight and early evening, crickets and singing frogs croaked, buzzed and buggrummmed.  We always heard them in our rural community, making that combined single-note chirring chorus that is now nearly totally silenced forever.  It was sweet and steady and was the sound dimension of the night world, joined by screech owls, the hesitant soft crunch of deer hooves on crisp leaves in the yard after the moon rose, the needling squeak of bats, and whispering leaves on the night breeze.

I walked home with my jelly jar of tadpoles and intended to watch their back legs grow, then their front legs as their tails shrank down and they became frogs, but, as usual, they eventually died.  I didn't know enough about them to give them good frog food or plenty of frog room to grow or to just simply let them alone.

The bog was so plentiful a frog marsh that it seemed the amphibians' slimy numbers were endless.  Most children disdained them, playing with them like toys, teasing them, shrieking with hilarity, entertained at their expense.  Our ignorance ruined them, all the frogs who science now regard as bellwethers of environmental change.  They were forced out by steady encroachment and appropriation of their marsh so that a park could be built next to the school.

I walk outside in the dark when I have the chance, and I listen for frogs or crickets or bats singing their high wild songs, calling for mates and offspring.  It's rare to hear them.  You only hear people, cars, and a lonesome emptiness ringing far and wide.

The Cats Console Me

"Body of Christ," said the priest up at the altar and held up the Host.  

"What's that?" my sister asked, now five years old, a year younger than I.   

"A little wafer of special bread.  The priest blessed it.  Shhhh," said my mother.

"I have to go to the bathroom.  Really bad," said my other sister, who was four, barely.  

"Now?" my mom looked at her anxious face and saw real urgency.  They gathered themselves up and shuffled out of the pew and left me and my sister sitting on the hard bench.  


"Behave yourselves while I'm gone," my mom whispered and made the shush sign with her finger over her lips.  


"Peas be with you.  I thought he said peas be with you.  Get it?" I looked at my sister, and I snorted as I tried to keep from laughing out loud.  She made a face back at me and tugged at her dress, scratched her hair under her bobby-pinned circlet of lace.  I looked at the backs of all the adults in front of me, pew after pew, dark suit jackets and the edges of the women's skirts.  I thought about my snort and how funny it sounded.  I felt my laughter building up in my chest, and I snorted again.  My sister caught my giggling mood and we started to laugh inside and mess around with our feet on the padded short bench below us where we had knelt.  We were thrashing our ankles clad in anklet socks and our patent-leather Sunday shoes.  


We sisters in a pew in the back of the small church lost track of the mass being said, forgot about keeping up with the kneeling-standing-kneeling-sitting-standing-kneeling that the adults were doing around us.  We rustled, snorted, giggled, mimicked noises we heard.  Everything became hilarious so that we would not be left in boredom by the incomprehensible sermon, and so we could ignore the bloody Christ hanging from a cross beyond the altar, beyond the wan and smiling Mary who looked like she had never been a girl.  


My mother and my younger sister shuffled sideways down the pew until they reached us, my mom scowling at us.  The look said, "You are going to catch it when you get home," but I was just glad to have her with us again.  It was better that way.  I grinned at her.  


"Hi Mom!" I whispered loudly.  She concentrated on scowling some more, but I saw her suppress a smile.  


Finally, I saw the priest between some of the adult elbows in front of me, waving his hands in the cupped upright position that priests always held their hands in during Mass.  He was signaling the Sign of the Cross and the adults were moving around and gathering up their sweaters and purses and hats and beginning to genuflect and leave reverently.  We did that too, as we had been taught, but much more quickly, a token bend of the knee and a swatting motion of the hand around the four corners as we crossed ourselves.  I made my way outside with my family where I inhaled fresh air like it was the last chance to inhale deeply ever again, so grateful was I to take it.  The adults were clotting around in the yard with their voices rumbling and murmuring saying words in their tedious adult language.  I moved away from them, looked for other kids, but saw no friendly ones. 


I spotted the car and dashed for it, fiendishly happy to be moving quickly with my muscles bursting with energy.  I tagged the car, using it to slow myself down and then turned and waited for everyone to join me.  I saw my sister tugging on my mother's arm, as if she were a horse hauling a woman out of a tar pit, with all her might.  


"Come on, mom.  Can we go?  Please?"  My sister was desperate to get away from the slow adult movements and tedious conversations they never seemed to end.  "Pleeeeease?" she whined, an unparalleled nuisance and nag hanging onto the arm over her head.  


Finally, we were all in the Chevy station wagon and rolling away from the church, all of us giggling about how awful that had been.  "I thought we were going to die!" we yelled to each other, making puns and laughing hysterically about almost nothing.  


Suddenly, the car stopped.


"Roll down your window.  There's Father Juan.  He wants to say something.  See?"  my mom said, looking excited.  I rolled down the window and looked up into the Latin face of our parish priest, a Spaniard with an accent and charm that captivated my mother's attention every Sunday.  Because she liked him, I liked him, and because I liked him, I assumed he liked me.  I grinned at him winningly.


Father Juan gripped my arm in a fierce vise of strong fingers and smiled at me but said in a low angry voice, "I have no doubt you fully enjoyed the Mass today.  I am looking forward to your full attention next week."  The fingers released, and his voice wished us a happy Sunday.  My mom waved good-bye and said, "What did he say?  I didn't hear him."  


"I don't know," I said and went silent.  I still felt the pain of the grip.  I was pitched into a dark anger and felt intensely betrayed.  I had not understood his sarcasm and only felt the vicious grip, felt the shock of his anger hitting my stomach.  I hated him now, but there wasn't anything I could do.  He was the priest and we went to that church, and that was it.  


I thought about the fake little wafer Father Juan had held up earlier, pretending it was Christ, about the tepid smile on Mary's face, the way adults looked at each other and laughed together and then complained about each other later.  I didn't trust any of it.  


At home, we scattered to our rooms to play before our midday meal.  I went outside and found a sleeping pile of warm cats and buried my face in their musty fur.  I explained to them how much I hated church, hated the stupid priest and his dumb church and congratulated the cats on the wisdom of not going to church.  They purred and I was consoled by their simplicity and acceptance of my wailing sadness.  Then, healed by this, I went inside to change out of my constricting dress and stiff black shoes whose gloss was now gone.  

Watering A Little Tree

The freestone peaches are sliced, coolly golden with jagged scarlet edges, coated in a drizzle of honey.  I am going to carry the bowl out to our farthest back yard, out in the weeds that are burned dry and prickly crisp.  My feet are bare.  I'm wearing shorts and a shirt.  It will probably be hot again today because it's August now.

The sleeping cats hear me step outside onto the patio with my bowl and think they might be fed.  No.  I don't have food for the cats, but I stroke them and murmur to them, tell them they're ugly and have no brains.  They purr and stretch.  When they realize they'll have to wait longer for food, they sit down in their places and look around sweetly with sleep rumpling their fur.

Across the patio to the adobe bricks all worn and then dirt beyond, my feet pick their way along the smoothest path but still get poked and scratched by stiff weed skeletons.  Foxtails and burrs sometimes stick and I have to stop to pull them off my skin.  I'm dragging a hose with me, its end connected to a spigot in the front yard.  It's a long old gray-green hose with banged-up brass threads that cannot connect to anything else.  I drop the hose in the basin of a small bedraggled and stunted peach tree in the far corner of the yard, set my bowl down in the dirt and trot back to the spigot, turn it on, and back to the tree again.  The bowl of peaches and my fork clink when I pick them up.

This is where I come at dawn in the summer.  I am nine.  I have lived here for six years, almost as long as I can remember, and I have not imagined living anywhere else.  I believe we are rich.

The gurgling flow of water begins to slowly fill the basin around the peach tree.  I sit on the lip of the basin and put my feet into the water, dig my toes into the mica-flickering mud, and eat the tangy golden fruit in my bowl.  I water this peach tree because no one else does, because I like to eat peaches, because I have something of my own to take care of.  I water the tree because I love the sound of water and my feet to be in warm mud and see the sun rise up beyond our grapestake fence, backlighting zig-zagging insects and the leaves on the little peach tree.

My legs are browned from the sun and have little golden hairs that hold the light dust of the yard I'd moved across.  It's getting warm already.  I look at the tree and its leaves, small branches, slender trunk with peeling rough texture like old ruined paint curling up.  I don't talk to the tree, but I sense it might know I'm near and might feel encouraged.  I see that it has not died and might live, even make fruit when it grows up.  I pat it.

I reach my hands down into the mud and mold some around the base of the trunk of the tree, reinforce the lip of the basin.  All I know is a tree needs water and dirt, so that's what I make sure it has.  I water the tree and sit with it in the morning and think about things.  I don't want anything to change at all, not even to change to afternoon from morning, don't want to go back to school or people to ask me to do things I'm not sure of or to hear adults yelling.  I breathe quietly and hear the morning's little sounds.

My peaches are eaten now, and the basin is nearly brimming.  I get up to go back and turn off the water and trot back to watch the water sink slowly back into the soft earth, and before I can do anything about it, it's gone, leaving only a dark brown wet circle around the little tree that stands alone in the hot sun.  

Small Kittens Playing In Summer

I woke up feeling rested today, optimistic, and my mood was matched by the sunlight beaming into the bedroom.  Sunlight, which is different than foglight because it includes warmth and throws shadows, filled all the corners of the room.  I thought of the summer mornings when I was small, how the sunlight looked in the cool of the morning before the heat rose, sunny heat that flattened our cats into torpid mats of warm fur, slowly breathing as they dreamed.

We had a few raggedy cats that were fed Friskies Cat Food from cans and caught gophers on our property.  Buzzy was a big gray and white male who strolled his territory like a Mafia don.  He had some rakish scars on his nose and a few nicks in his ears and a surprisingly high weak voice.  He was burly and handsome and roamed far from our house into the neighborhood.  It became evident that our neighbors were taking better care of him then we were.  He'd come back to our yard brushed and fluffed, grateful for pleasantries and snacks when we provided them.  He was a scrapper and ran off other cats, demanded respect from them.  "Buzzy's in a fight!" we'd yell and run to witness a sound thumping by our hero tomcat.  Dust would fly and a few clumps of fur lifted on the breeze when he was done.  It was a simple thing to us; we didn't know any better than to just watch and see what would happen.  He lived a long time, to his credit and not ours.

Tinkerbell was the female we had the longest.  (I shudder to think how little we knew about taking proper care of pets back then.)  She had litters of kittens that were raised in flattened tunnels of golden grasses that grew on our property, a rural and semi-wild area in the early years of my childhood.  Tinkerbell was attentive to her kittens.  I spent hours watching their interplay, listening to her little sounds as she responded to their squeals and cries, tiny mews.  She licked them clean and nursed them to their hearts' content and looked immensely pleased with herself as they suckled.  Those were sweet quiet hours to witness and experience feline instincts and behavior, and I was fascinated.  The kittens looked so small and weak as they pawed and groped for a nipple with tiny pink paws and mouths, and then nursed quietly with their eyes tight shut, ears back and forth with the motion of drinking.  They smelled of dusty fur, half damp from the licking, and staggered under the force of her busy tongue when she raked it across their flanks and heads.  I'd stick my finger into the path of a tongue stroke and feel the coarse surface clean it indiscriminately.  She kept her eyes closed as she did the cleaning and didn't care if she had washed a finger or a kitten.

I imitated the way Tinkerbell would grasp a kitten by the nape of its neck and lift it up so it hung down, a kitten ball, patiently waiting to be deposited somewhere else.  I saw its instinctive curl-up with tail tucked between its legs passively.  I mimicked her voice that called kittens to her, and the kittens came to me.  I pretended I was one of the little ones, calling her as if I were lost and needed help, and she came to me anxiously.  It was like magic, and the cats trusted me; I knew this was an honor and very special.

I most loved to watch the gang of kittens playing wildly on the small back lawn under the willow tree and liquid maple where they scooted around in the leaves and clumps of grass.  There's nothing funnier and more entertaining than the antics of kittens at play.  They were chasing, tackling, dancing on their hind legs in surprise when a sister or brother attacks from behind a small clump or twig.  They worried and chewed each other's bellies and legs, raising squeals of protest and then all would run pell-mell to another area or a few feet up a tree trunk, dropping down on the chaser and squashing them momentarily.

Then, exhausted by all the mania and false terror, they'd call Tinkerbell who had been resting idly in the shade, unconcerned by the feints and attacks of kittens gamboling and tumbling in the yard.  She'd rouse herself and call them to her with a peculiar purring mrrowwww, and they'd trot lightly over to her.  With their fur combed backwards by her rough tongue again and sleep lowering their eyelids, they'd flop down in the shade and flake out flat, unconscious in a twitching sleep very soon after.

The warm sun, like this morning's sun, in the midafternoon hours, burned hot and wrapped the summer days in lazy splendor, a time of perfection and ease.

Mood Shift: A Reminder

Sometimes you feel your mood shift to dark and ugly, and you don't really know what monkey is driving it, who's sitting on your shoulder kicking you, keeping you off balance.  Bad news, foolish behavior and mean spiritedness - even if masked by disdain and indifference in those around you - effect a poverty of attitude that can overtake you.  

Zen masters practice mindfulness and simplicity.  Perhaps I need to meditate.  What I do know is:  I need to be outdoors, moving in open spaces near fresh water.  The sound of any water is as good to me as gold piled up to the ceiling; if it's a running stream, fresh and cool, I know there is a god.

At 7 this morning we were beachcombing at the ocean's edge with the morning light throwing sand, rocks and wind-riffled waves into sharp relief.  It was quiet and still except for small waves breaking lightly, shushing themselves.  It made the ocean sound like it was breathing.

No fog today; blue sky arched from yesterday to tomorrow and the slightest of air moved through everything.  Memorial Day visitors are getting an eyeful of what our region is renowned for:  A beauty that's both soft and rugged, a condition of contrasts and compelling iconic scenery.  Trees grow out of rocks.  Steep cliffs are sprinkled with tiny brilliant flowers.  The soft blue ocean is bitterly cold.

We drove far up Carmel Valley from the coast to say hello to friends at The Cachagua General Store, which cannot be described in usual ways.  Suffice it to say that far up the valley, even amid vineyards and ranches, is a small parallel universe of folks who have eddied out of the mainstream, thumbing their noses at convention and conformity, rambling down life's path to the beat of a roughshod drummer who drinks beer, loves real dogs and keeps guns as a god-given right.  Cachagua is the anti-Carmel, a tattooed and sometimes drug-bedeviled community of rebellious misfits, some with hearts of gold and good intentions, some not so.  Michael Jones is the chef, inveterate soccer fan, ravenous consumer of all things literary and crazy man at the helm of A Moveable Feast, catering events all over the county and beyond. You do not want to offend this man; he plays with fire and knives, and he's Irish.  That should be enough warning for you.

You can get a rich and decadent eggs benedict if the place is open on Sunday for brunch, which we did today.  It was satisfying to be in a place where the owner's dog stopped by for a backrub, Simon and Garfunkel sang on the stereo and the "waitress" wondered if we were there to eat.  People stop by to say hi all the time, so she checks.

The hills were showing signs of early summer drying, but wildflowers were blooming in the shade of oaks and laurel trees on the way to the county reservoir called Los Padres.  It had been years since I'd been there, far too long.  After our meal, we set out to see how Spring was laying on the hills up there.  

There's a walk of about a mile or less to the dam from a dirt parking lot near a gate.  It's very wide and very easy for most people.  Loaded down with food in our bellies, the going was a tad slow.  I thought about how differently we walk when barefooted and with shoes on, how dominant one feels when shod.

The dam water was flowing over its spillway, producing a soothing and lulling steady sound.  When the rains have been heavy, the place thunders and shakes; the entire spillway is a torrent.  The lake behind the dam was very serene with one kayaker off in the distance fishing for trout.  There was a riffling scuff of wind on its dark blue surface.

We poked around and explored, enjoying the experience of being alone in a semi-natural place.  The air was sweet with riparian woods and fresh running water.  I could have sat by the water in the shade down below the spillway for a long time.  I felt like a visitor, a foreigner, out of place only because I do not make time to go to places like that often enough.

I remembered how off balance I had felt yesterday and earlier this morning. I was reminded yet again that foregoing perverse and disturbing aspects of human behavior for long bouts of time in nature is absolutely and undeniably what I need to be stable and healthy.

Innocent

It's Sunday.

My mother is handing me a small circle of lace and a couple of bobby pins.  I am meant to pin it to my hair in preparation for attending mass at our church.  She has already started a roast in the oven which is now cooking slowly, and its embedded garlic cloves are aromatic, devilishly tantalizing.

"Why do I have to wear this thing?"  I ask.  "It will just come off.  See?"  I try to pull it off, but her hand stops mine.  I think about how to get sick really fast so I can stay home from church.  Nothing comes to mind.  I am unhappy for a moment, but I smell the roast cooking.  I think that's what heaven must smell like.    

"It's a sign of reverence," says my mother as she helps me pin on the lace.  She's looking around for her rosary and makes sure I have mine.

My sisters are looking for kittens outside in the backyard even though they have their best Sunday clothes on.  I want to see those kittens, too, I think.  I'm not very sure what reverent really is.  I feel exasperated and impatient.  I am beginning to feel my stomach rumble with appetite.

"Boys don't have to.  Why do I?"  I complain.  Boys get to be altar boys; girls don't.  Boys get to ring the bells and do important work at the altar.  Girls get to do nothing at all.  I feel demoted to second class.

The answers are vague to me, unfathomable:  "Because.  I said so.  They were supposed to teach you that in catechism."

She looks at my lace circlet, pats my head, then turns around and calls my sisters in.  I hear them out in back, excited about the new litter of kittens hidden under a bush at the side of the house.  They seem like a litter, too:  Unruly, curious, not ready for going to mass. They are shooed back into the house, then out the front door and into the car.  My brother, an altar boy, is gone already on his bike to get ready for  mass at the church.  I want to ride a bike to church and wear pants.  I don't want to wear a token lace head covering and be reverent.  

We are off to mass finally.  I begin hoping that Father John will make it quick today so we'll be able to go home again and eat a big Sunday dinner and then play outside.  We have "fasted" the night before, eating fish sticks and salad.  Fish sticks!  The words themselves reek with grease and processed seafood.  I think of cat food and the kittens under the bush, hiding with their mother.  I wonder if they're also Catholic, like we are.

"Mom, are cats Catholic?  Why do we have to eat fish on Friday?  Can't we just give it to the cats?"  I was at an age where magic was just as strong as truth.  I want the kittens to go to heaven with me someday and hope they'll be reverent so they can make it.

"It's penance."

"What's penance?" Is penance a kind of magic, I wonder.  It doesn't seem so because of the way she is saying it.  It seems like punishment.  To get to heaven, I have to be reverent and get penance.  There are a lot of rules, mysteries, obstacles.

Little by little I am learning that not much makes very much sense. Getting to heaven is going to be complicated.  It seems like the rules are not really rules, the stories wild confabulations, the standards different for everyone.  The bible stories are wild and disconnected.  Pillars of salt, water turning into wine, walking on water.  God seems like a mean guy a lot of the time, but Jesus is interesting.  He has special powers and likes children.

But, I am stuck on this penance stuff.

"It means you have to give something up for your sins."  It sounds like subtraction, like a math problem.  Now the baffling idea of what my sins might be stops me again.  I don't think I have committed any sins.  I am pretty sure of it actually.  Sins are things like killing people, coveting your neighbor's wife, stealing, taking God's name in vain.

Seems like I have to add coveting to penance and reverence.   The list of big Catholic ideas that are strange and unwieldy for a girl like me is growing.

"What sins?"  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.  I stole my sister's stuffed animal.  My sister didn't have a stuffed animal that I wanted.   I remembered the dark reaches of the small confessional where the priest pretending to be God needed to hear me say something, so I made up a story.   He tells me to say three Hail Marys and five Our Fathers.

I don't want to miss out on heaven.  I think about jumping around in white billowing clouds and perfection and gold everywhere.  I want the kittens to jump around up there with me and eat the fish sticks so I don't have to anymore.  I want the roast beef with garlic tucked in its sides and mashed potatoes and gravy and dessert.  

"Eat your fish sticks and then you can have dessert," my mom had said to me last Friday night, hoping bribery would quell my consternation and puzzlement.

"I have to eat fish sticks, but I can have dessert?"

"We give up meat on Fridays as a sign of penance.  It's a way of paying for the sins of the world."

The sins of the whole world?  I'm a kid!  It's an impossibility.  Perversely, it makes me want to go do something wrong, bad, mean, so I can feel my own actual guilt instead of taking on the guilt of all the other people in the world, who are mostly grown-ups anyway.

Mass is long and there is a lot of standing, sitting, standing and then kneeling.  I see my brother up there with three other boys doing the rituals at the right time.  He gets to ring the bells that signal when the host is raised up high and when the priest drinks wine and then blesses the little white communion disks.  Everyone shuffles up in a line for their turn to be given a disk on their tongue.  I get one, and it has no flavor.  I try to make it last a long time in my mouth, but it melts quickly away.  Body of Christ.  I try to think of Jesus, and he is tasteless, like Wonder Bread, and it's very disappointing.

Finally, we're free, set loose into the sunshine and I yank the floppy lace doily off my head and hand it over to my mom, who stuffs it into her purse while she's talking with the other moms and ladies of the church, out on the asphalt in the courtyard.  They're talking a lot, and it seems interminable, pointless.  

I just want food, to go home and eat the savory beef and be free to play and live outside and see little cats playing in the yard.  I want nothing to do with penance and guilt and coveting.  My spirit is filled with the sunshine and fresh blowing breeze, and it blows the feelings of demotion far away.  I am eight years old and my soul is all my own, unscathed by life's coming wounds, still years away.

Salve for the Soul

I wondered if the timing belt on my car was going to break or if it was going to rain or if I should go on a diet and worried that the music store I was driving past would go out of business because everyone was buying music online now, including me.  Too much of nothing important.  I was far from a panicked and jibbering mess; more of a low-voltage worrier on a slow static fizzle.

Time to get out on the road, go heal myself.  I needed just what I'd planned for the day:  A wildflower walk way up in Carmel Valley, far from the cold coast and throngs of people.

So, I drove east 12 miles to Carmel Valley Village -- hugged close between two ridges of hills and cut clean by a jostling little river -- and then onward another 15 miles to the gate of Hastings Natural History Reservation where I would join 25 other restive people in need of a good soul-soothing walkabout in nature. 

Hastings is a vast tract of 2,700 acres of hardly-touched land draped in trees and brush where bright, interested, and curious-minded students from UC Berkeley look very carefully for long periods of time at patterns that emerge in nature. Over and over again, since 1970, they've discovered that what nature -- God, if you will -- has been doing routinely, is exquisite in detail and complex beyond imagining.

This was a rare walk led by the caretaker and manager of Hastings, Dr. Mark Stromberg, a guy so well versed in the studies and goings on all over the Reservation that he seems almost weighted down by all of the knowledge. A group of people and I, ready to listen and look closely at whatever would present itself, walked with Stromberg up hills, along trails, under spreading oak.  Nothing was too mundane to notice.   No vista went unseen, unappreciated, and all musings were attended to.

Life felt grounded here. God moved in closer to me with each deeply drawn breath, and I remembered the possibility of angels.  They could have been right amidst the lupine and shooting stars sprinkled in the grasses, bobbing and dancing in the cool waves of spring air.  

Wildflowers were everywhere, mostly very tiny, requiring me to walk slowly and look with my eyes open and my mind swept clean of worry and distraction.  It was a balm and a refreshment.    

I knew long since that a hillside forest of trees is my cathedral, my sanctuary, where communion takes place.  I felt immensely grateful and a little amazed I'd had the good sense to plan ahead and give myself the chance for renewal and respite in a unique natural landscape.  

A quote from Steve McQueen states my feelings and values very succinctly:  "I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth."  Amen.  

Flying a Kite

Ruffling breeze, kite-flying weather, springtime on the coast.

As grade-school kids in Carmel Valley Village, we were free to play on the Tularcitos Elementary School field after we'd gone home, changed into "play clothes," and gathered up our kites and reels.  We walked the quarter mile to get back to the field, chattering about our kites, their tails, the string we had, past kite-flying exploits and legendary disastrous crash landings.

The field itself was a long mowed-weed expanse bounded on the east end by chain-link fence, the south by a nursery and a swampy meadow, the west by school structures and blacktop playground and to the north by a shallowly sloped section of the field.  The prevailing wind blew from west to east steadily, and in spring it was especially dependable.

Our kites were homemade rigs made of balsa wood, string, glue and any kind of sturdy paper we could use.  My brother's kite was made of two colors of transparent cellophane, which gave it a more admirable appearance than the usual shiny thin paper kites were usually made of.  Most of the time, we had bought kits and put them together with glue and dreams.

The finishing touch was the tail of the kite, a thing of beauty and mystery.  Everything about the kite's  ability to handle the wind and varying air depended on the perfection of the tail.  For us, this meant tying a rag onto the kite with knots in it and experimenting with the number of knots and the length of the rag that would trail in the breeze.

Once we had made a decision about the balance and weight of the tail and the kite together, we got a ball of cotton string, put a stick through the ball to use as a handle and sent the kites aloft.  With one hand gripping the kite's leading triangle of string and holding it up and behind us, we ran into the wind and felt the kite lift off.  You'd play the line, tugging on the line to gain more and more lift while you played out the string steadily.  If your kite was noodling around up there and veering side to side drunkenly, you knew either the tail was not doing its job or the string was too slack.  Tensioning the string and then playing it out, eventually you'd get your kite up to a height where it seemed to take the wind in its teeth and run.

Then, you'd play out your line slowly but surely and hope you could get it to stay up and eventually nearly disappear in the distance.  That was the coolest of all.  You'd have to have several big balls of string knotted together, end to end, to begin with, or you'd never have any hope of disappearing your kite.  If the wind was right and you had a zillion miles of string, and if you played the line with skill, the kite would fly steadily away to be a speck in the distance.  Then, the only way to tell you still even had a kite flying was the steady tug in your hands as you held the stick handles.

Kids would stand holding their reels of string, facing east, tug on them once in a while and scan the horizon and sky for birds and signs of slower air or -- worst of all -- the wind to stop blowing.

My brother would say, "I think my kite is about five miles away by now. I can't even see it. It's a goner."  He, being the oldest kid, would have appropriated as much string as possible, developed the best tail for his kite and built the sturdiest one.  I tried to make a kite as good as his, but mostly I just admired his superiority in secret while I tried like mad to beat his kite-flying skills.

One day, his kite was so far gone I wasn't even sure he had it anymore, but I didn't say so.  We saw the line played far out east, kind of sagging in the middle, pulled gently down by gravity.  After I'd had my kite up a reasonably long time, I began winding the string back onto the roll again and bringing it back to me.  My brother started rolling, too, but nothing came back.  The string had broken, the kite flown to Mars or crashed down onto someone's tree or rooftop.

Looking dismal and glum, he had to admit his kite-flying days were ended until he could build another.  It would be awhile before he could amass that much string again.  He was a good scrounger; his string reel had been admirably fat.  The kite had been a beauty, strong and true, a legend already, not so easy to replace.

Feeling an esprit de corps, I gave him my kite to carry home, entrusting him with that honor.  He walked quietly, but I had a feeling he was scheming and planning to build the ultimate kite.  My place as best kite handler was perhaps to be short lived, but the title was rightfully mine since my kite had gone the farthest without crashing.  It was a bittersweet thing, winning a title over my big brother by beating him at his game, knowing he had no intention of letting me keep the honor and admiring him all at the same time.

He looked intently at the tail of my kite, "I think if you add an extra knot to your tail, it could fly even farther."

"Okay, but it flew a long way anyway."

"Yeah, just sayin'."

"'kay."

"Race you home!"

He won the race home and I never flew my kite farther than his ever again.

Amber Memory

I had some honey today, right out of the jar, and I thought of summer in Carmel Valley where I was a child.  The honey was the same color as the dried grass and foxtails that I would pick my way through with bare feet. Silty brown dry dirt, hot but soft on my skin.

There is an intoxicating herbal-floral aroma, a heady fragrance that California shrublands exude.  Sage, bay laurel, coyote brush, grasses, oak, redwood, and the dirt itself are oily and the oils evaporate in hot air, perfuming it and penetrating into the deepest core of the people and animals who live in it, residing in their hearts and souls.  It is a fragrance that asks allegiance and devotion, acknowledgment of its ancient and abiding qualities.  I remember it lingering like the fading sounds of laughter past dark and then finally subsiding entirely in full darkness.  It was the very breath of the summer day, pleasant and sweet.

Brittle amber-colored wild grass crackled and stood like small tipis of dry stalks by August, with a litter of crushed and desiccated leaves and seeds lying about the bases on dry cocoa-brown silt.  Mica flecks twinkled like starry sparks in the dust kicked up with our bare toes.  We'd pick our way across lots and exposed small meadows and fields, using tufts of dry grass to rest on when the skin of our feet felt scorched by the dark earth.  We were explorers, wild Indians, children of imagination looking for and finding small mysteries and clues to worlds unknown to adults and their civilization.  All of nature in the region of our home was textured, fragrant, a beckoning world we needed and wanted to be part of.

A child who has lived in a California coastal valley knows the time of day by the amount of moisture in the air and the strength of the breeze.  Morning air is fresh, dewey and cool, wetted by the lifting fog.  Deer out grazing after dawn pick their way back to thickets and shaded glens to sleep until evening.  Then, midday is still and hot; nothing breathes or sings or chirps; only the bees hum in the sagebrush.  Then, at one o'clock the air lifts and stirs, the wind shifts to the distant reaches of more inland valleys and hills, drawn there by the heat.  The grasses and oaks, hot in the flat light of early afternoon, toss and sway in the push of the wind until just before dusk when everything pauses again.  Then, light seems to settle down into the ground, fading very slowly and fragrantly to its resting place.

Day after day, all summer long, some days cloaked in fog at the coast and some more intensely hot than others, the ocean inhales and exhales its wind over the coastal valleys.  Its gusting, rushing sound is a constant presence in the trees and across hillsides, a hushing sound of respiration that rises and falls, swelling and then dying away, only to rise and fall again.

After being outdoors in the morning before the day was hot, the afternoon wind in the treetops was lulling, soothing us to an enervating torpor.  Lost to daydreaming and reading, we dozed and rested.  Then, as we felt cooler and sensed the dampness of the chill evening coming on, and the fog in the distance, we'd begin a game of hide-and-seek, playing on and on to the dimmest light at dusk and beyond.

Playing, running and calling in the twilight on summer days, inhaling the intoxicating promise of amber light and honey gathered from the sage on the hills and willows by the river, we lived and breathed in the same rhythm set by the wind itself.

At the end of the day, our eyes grew accustomed to the gradual dimness of the evening until after dusk we'd run indoors, pushing and laughing, feeling like wild animals coming home again.  Then we peered goggle-eyed back at the dark from the doors and windows, and then listen for the wakening deer and rustle of their movements in the dry oak leaves.  

Hastings Natural History Reservation and Art

After exploring Hastings Natural History Reservation in upper Carmel Valley on Saturday morning and meeting Dr. Mark Stromberg, zoologist, resident director, and man with an endless supply of wacky science stories, an idea has begun to hatch.

Hastings is part of the University of California Nature Reserve system, consisting of about 33 properties in many areas of the Golden State.  In each of them, grad students help scientists conduct studies of everything from geological history of California (now that's a really longitudinal study) to the mating habits of black widow spiders (really big ewww factor).  Hastings alone has generated something on the order of 600 papers over its lifetime as one of the reservations.  It's generally closed to the public in order to preserve the pristine nature of the land and so that studies can be conducted without "contaminated" data.  In other words, if mountain bikers and horseback riders were tromping through regularly, resident species would be trashed, trampled and scared off, not to mention the introduction of further non-native species.  Groups of local K-12 students are welcomed now and again in an outreach effort to connect the kids to science and local native history. 

You get the image as you listen to Dr. Stromberg that the scientists who have taken up residence on the property through the past several decades are a rather quirky lot.  Probing minds have figured out the social structure of acorn woodpeckers, the symbiotic nature of spanish moss and blue oak trees and the effect of gophers on native grasses.  And about a zillion other things that you get curious about if you spend a little time in our coastal wood- and grasslands.  But, the persistence of the scientists over time as they study the minutiae of nearly invisible things has been impressive to a spectacular degree.  Some studies have been ongoing for over 20 years, something the Reservation is famous for being able to provide.  

Now, in the dreary broken days of California's bankrupt economy, the UC system is suffering from an alarming lack of funding.  Thus, Stromberg and his colleagues hope to find other sources of money in order to continue their work, arcane though it may seem to us.  There is benefit to all of humankind, and this one little item is a good example:  One Hastings study found that crickets have little cups inside their "ears" that direct sound to their nearest ear, acting as a funnel of sound in a way.  The idea has been adapted to the newest generation of hearing aids.  The ability of a person who wore hearing aids in the past to differentiate between one sound and another was pretty dismal until the cricket study revealed this tiny mechanical adaptation that the insects have made.  Pretty amazing, huh?

I've begun to think that the science that is revealing amazing things about Hastings and its 1500 species resident there is not the only thing that the beautiful coastal hills and valleys can teach us.  Artists and writers can be equally influenced and productive when allowed to nourish their minds there, too.  With respect and attention to the needs of the land and studies being conducted there, perhaps the artistic community can be welcomed and, in turn, present a different interpretation of the natural world than pure data can.  Through interpretive photography, art and/or writing, Hastings might pique some interest in the local and state-wide community, and consequently - I would hope - more financial support.  Hmmm....I'll keep you posted.

Coyotes, Keepers of the Keys

Yesterday I walked down to the Pacific Grove Natural History Museum; I was going to listen to an expert talk about coyotes. 

The lecture was to be free (donations welcomed of course), it was at 2 PM, the middle of a glorious sunny day, a Saturday.  The room filled fast, but all the attendees were middle-aged folk, some even elderly; none were younger than, say, 40 or so.  Granted, Pacific Grove is a town of citizens who are mostly enjoying their Golden Years, but I still wondered why they were the only attendees in evidence.  I had heard about it by reading the local daily.  Nonreaders would have missed the notice if they were foregoing the morning paper and simply relying on Tweeting or Facebook.  I began to think of hikes, walks, camping trips, rides and river trips - occasions when I was in the middle of natural wilderness areas for extended periods of time.  It looked like the audience had, in their day, been held willing captive in the same sorts of areas as I had - wildnerness - and looked deep into the eyes of creatures there.  Creatures like coyotes. 

It was abundantly clear that the room was filled with animal-adoring, passionate, heart-warmed people who were committed to heroic rescue of any and all species.  I overheard conversations about Animal Friends Rescue Project, SPCA, Marine Sanctuary rescue programs and more.  They looked wizened and unconcerned with the likes of Brittney Spears or any other tragicomic starlet fed upon by consumers of "media."  Mostly, they appeared to be there to recapture memories of wilderness encounters with wild things. 

My mind wandered off to a trail I'd been walking along when I was in my 20s.  It was early morning, and there was still dew on the meadow grasses.  Red-winged blackbirds were waking up as the sun began its arch overhead from the distant horizon; they made a dry "shhhhharrrr-ick" back and forth.  It was summer and I was at Garland Regional Park in Carmel Valley, a few miles west of the village.  The Carmel River that runs along its northeastern boundary was at a trickle, but the willows and riparian brush smelled very fragrant and sweet, soaked in sage and sycamore. 

My eye caught a little movement off to my right in the distance, but when making a determined scan of the scene, I missed the thing that had moved.  So, I stood still and waited for awhile.  Then, seeing what had been there all along in the trail ahead of me, I felt a smile creep across my face, and what I always experience as a shock of recognition of something familiar but distant and exotic.  A coyote was standing at a three-quarter angle to the trail, looking at me intently, its large ears cocked like twin peaked cups.  The eyes of the animal were tan and clear, intelligent, and its fur was brushy, tinged with black, free flowing, thick with finely shaded tans and browns. 

The coyote trotted away, slipping into the thicket of brush that darkened the river bank with a graceful lift of its tail.  But before it turned and disappeared, away from me and my human-ness, it gave me a steady look, sizing me up and judging me unsafe, cause for alarm.  What I saw in its eyes and then felt in my being as I watched it watching me was its nearness to its origin, its mysterious wild life.  It conveyed a lightness of being to me in its gaze, its carriage, its assumption of power in the moment.  Truly unfettered by the constructs of regulated society, this small dog-like animal seemed both to beckon to me and dismiss me as unworthy of its presence.  "Wait!" was all I could think. 

I felt separated from the coyote world and dulled by the disconnection from it, frustrated to be so.  The coyote, in all its rufous furryness, its trotting solitude, ear-perked keen alertness, was looking at me from the distant edge of a wide chasm, across which we have stepped and not returned.  Choosing frozen dinners and plastic wrap, we reek of them.  We have, to our detriment, given up the keys to the kingdom that the coyote still holds, and now - except for the devoted few who strive to reclaim those keys - we plod clumsily and with near blindness across the landscape.  Occasionally we blunder into an encounter with a song-dog coyote and a glimmer of recognition of what we used to be - alive on the earth.  Now we are agnostic; we have no knowledge anymore as people; we are not wild; we are not free. 

Look for coyotes, bobcats, deer, and watch them watching us, but keep them wild because they are far more important when they are wild, not human, untamed and free.  We once were as they are still; if they are ensnared and brought to ruin, we will be more so than ever before. 

Fall clouds, old memories

I live in a small quiet town where most people are very comfortable, sedate and generally unchallenged by the vicissitudes of nature or politics.  Killers do not stalk our town and gangs don't bother with us.  Well, the raccoons do, but they don't usually carry guns.  The wind blows every afternoon after 1 o'clock.  There is no summer and no winter.  Nothing changes.  It's ironic as hell that I live here.

When I was small and lived in Carmel Valley, I would come to Pacific Grove with my brother and sisters, all five of us stuffed into a green Chevy station wagon with fins and a punch-button radio, and visit my cousins here.  It's a 20-mile drive from there to here but it could have been a different planet, and we voyaged across some unseen chasm, a transmutation of life as I thought I knew it.  PG was as boring and dull a place to live as any kid could hope to avoid, even then.  They had sidewalks!  I could hardly imagine that and yet I saw it:  A life lived without hills, a river, trees; nowhere to run, sing out loud and hear the wind answer.  It was horrible.  Cement and a contained, restricted existence faced me, confined me.  I felt I was in a foolish place when I stepped out of the car.  Houses were suspiciously close together, claustrophobic.  Life seemed hidden, more uncertain; curtains were drawn; it was cold.

The feelings I had derived from a free-range childhood lived outdoors for the most part.  Carmel Valley -- in the village, as it's called -- is inland and much warmer than coastal towns are.  Seasons, moderate by mountain standards, are discernible by more intense temperature variations, and trees turn colors in time to them.  A river, beleaguered as it is, flows there and has shaped and formed the valley.  It roared, gurgled, whispered and shushed in turn, and I listened.   

 The warm fuzzy glow of a happy reminiscence is not what I am about here.  I developed a taste for knowing what grows wild because it was powerful and alluring.  I felt the weather changes and seasons. I explored everything out there, beyond the door, by pulling things up, tearing them apart, watching things live and die.  I learned, like kids do when they have been shoved out the door with no money, that what grows does just fine on its own.  All that I could get my hands on or watch day after day fascinated me and made an impression on me.  As far as I could grasp it, God was there in the dirt, up in the trees and flying around in the sky and I was running around in the middle of it all.  It was glorious and amazing and intoxicating.

When I returned to the valley after a visit in town, I was happy and knew I was home where I belonged.  I was very fortunate and am now grateful beyond measure to have a deep well of wild memories to draw on. 

Here in the Groove, we are a quiet, dull bunch.  The raccoons chittering and screeching at night remind me I need to stick my hands into dirt, turn rocks over, listen to rivers.  I growl about seagulls strafing my car outside, but they, too, remind me of what is real, and it ain't cars. 

I saw an unusual sky this morning.  Clouds looking like the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth were charging in from the north and the wind was gusting leaves across the roadway.  It's wild out there, thank you God, and I want to stay that way.