A Leaf, A Dawn Swim

Fog dresses the morning, demure behind a soft gray veil. Unusual humidity lingers in the atmosphere. Sounds are amplified and odors linger as if able to become visible.

I am swimming today, as I do nearly every day. My companions and I murmur familiar questions between laps as we rest at the wall, breathing and waiting, eyeing the pace clock at the side of the pool.

"How many more?"

"Three more. We go on the 60."

We gather our strength, coil our legs and push away, moving, stretching, reaching for the far wall. We swim, together and yet alone.

The day is gray on gray, a barely noticed condition of time and space that matters insofar as it is oxygen, the air we take in in a measured rhythm.  Backs, shoulders, hands and arms sense moving water as they flex and turn, grip and pull.

My mind takes in images as my head turns for a breath, my eyes covered with misted goggles. Forms are surreal and distorted, sometimes beautiful in an instant and sometimes a mysteriously confusing blur. My mind plays with all of them as my body goes about its work, its play, my joy. I notice how detached I am sometimes from what I am doing. It's a weird pleasure to be both very tired in this pool and mentally adrift in time and space.

"Go six 200s on a descending interval on the next red top. 3:10, 3:00 and 2:50. Get your legs into it." It's a jot of information that we understand implicitly. We have been programmed and set to work again with these words, know exactly when to begin and how fast to swim, how much to rest. The brevity and simplicity of the instruction is precise, perfectly so. The container of the command allows for release of the mind and spirit, and they fly as if the act of swimming is actually an act of aviation. We are water birds, soaring.

The work intensifies and we are brought to earth. The coach is the designated assassin of our reveries, the remote voice from the dry deck whom we have assigned permission to push us beyond the point we are willing to push ourselves alone. The coach and the clock, with its four colored hands circling silently, demand and expect that we swim, do not paddle and dither about. By complying, we agree. We are keenly involved in effort, movement and flow. The clock is the master, the coach its accomplice. The onset of dawn continues in an almost imperceptible increase of light and visual detail. The clock, lit with a spotlight, is the sun and moon for this hour; we began in darkness and end in light; no one notices the change as it happens.

"Last one. Make it your best."

Why do we obey? Why don't we stop and look at the flock of crows, Escher-esque, above us, silhouetted against the pale sky? We are gradually reduced from autonomous, well-considered mature adults to automatons, slaves of liquid motion, our minds yielding to the simple commands of the coach. It is our desire, each of us, to go beyond what is ordinarily comfortable and gain access to an altered state of being. We are swimmers, horizontal, moving through turbulent water, lost in our experience, enlivened by it.

Then, it all stops. The work has ended. Pounding hearts and heaving breaths gradually calm. Effort has ceased; we are gathered at the wall, blinking at the lightening sky. Now the beauty of the morning is reflected in the stilling waters of the pool. The day has begun. In our minds, the work of swimming has aided the dawn, urged the sun to rise and the stars to recede. But now the coach is simply another person, and we are adults again, minds turning to tasks of the day that lies ahead.

I shower, dress, walk to my car and drive slowly home, noticing how beautiful the drifting mist looks. It's as if a soft hand has blurred white chalk across a painting of Monterey. At home, collected drops of dew bead and shimmer on a variegated leaf, each one like a breath preserved in liquid. Perhaps every breath I took while I swam has been recorded by the formation of dew on this leaf. It is beauty to be savored and understood as fantasy, nourishment for imagination and a salve for my soul.

I swim; I am alive.

Thoughts on History: Columbus Day

It's Columbus Day in the United States. An explorer, Cristoforo Colombo, appropriated land for a Spanish queen, committing foot, flag and European mindset to the shores of Cuba or Florida (depending on who you believe) or some other southeastern land spit, after having bobbed around in a strange ocean for a few months in a tiny boat with a scurvy crew.

I, the much-distant beneficiary of that land claim, drove in my little car on civilized and well-regulated streets this morning. My car was designed in Germany and assembled in Mexico. I had oatmeal from Ireland, almonds from Spain, coffee from Costa Rica, and wore clothes manufactured in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. What a world this has become. I can barely imagine living the way he had to. No phones, electricity, freedoms for every citizen, health, long life. He was a notable and bold change agent, intent on discovery and enrichment, making a leap of imagination most people of his day found very frightening.

It's funny we celebrate only one explorer when so many others also contributed to the comforts of our modern day. We don't have Alexander Graham Bell Day or Thomas Edison Day even though they were equal in bravery and imagination to Columbus, overturning stodgy and ordinary thinking in order to answer nagging questions they could not ignore.  We also don't have Florence Nightingale Day, although my profession owes almost everything to her.

So I'm going to call this day Explorer and Inventor Day. I invite you to fill in a name for the person whom you believe most deserves recognition for advancing the human species.  Hats off to all those free thinkers in the past, the present and the future. They might have been or will be nuts who made us or will make us uncomfortable and frightened, but they were immune to criticism and hesitancy, plowing forward at all costs.

I sit here at my keyboard and try to imagine times past, when difficulties and problems were so much different, or the future that will be all but unrecognizable to me here and now. As much as I like to think I can think outside the box, I often don't. It takes a special breed to do that.  So, explorers and imaginers out there, celebrate the day; we have set it aside to memorialize you and a little wild-eyed explorer from Italy who changed the world as each of you can if you follow your hearts.

The Cars, The Times

Cruisin' cars with crackling tailpipes, thundering engines and glossy paint jobs have returned to Monterey once more, and their voices are calling up memories.  We happened on them while walking around last night, killing time before dinner.

The cars are are sleek, long rides with heavy chassis, and they rumble along Alvarado Street like big beasts waiting for a hunk of meat. Dozens of coats of paint and chrome shone in the evening light. Glorious makes and models, the pride of  men who used to cruise boulevards in Bakersfield and Fresno, Colton and LA when they were teen punks, tough, excitable, young and full of hell. Pachuco hairstyles, two-tone Bel Airs and Firebirds turned heads, just like they did fifty years ago.

The air was thick with testosterone-driven nostalgia and beehive hairdo memories. The air was heavy with a fuel exhaust you don't usually inhale much of these days. As a kid, I heard teen guys in their cars racing each other on local streets in Carmel Valley, complete with screaming rubber and an occasional bashing crunch when a car spun out of control. It terrified me and seemed to be the very sound of violence and anger. How did I know.  It was always in the dark and I could only hear and imagine; little girls hiding under their covers were a world apart from teen angst. It was all about dare, counter dare and twitching muscles, just looking for a chance to show off, make someone else back down.

The idling beasts parked along Alvarado last night were glossy, big, heroic and some even beautiful. Back seats boasting square footage equivalent to a double bed left no doubt about teen sexual behavior; it was easy to imagine. When men hung their left arm out of their open windows, with the right slung on top of the steering wheel, their women riding casually in the seat beside them, both looking around to catch someone's eye as they passed, time melted away to the days when they were all young and full of themselves, ready to race and prove something.

The thing they're proving now is that it was an exciting, confusing, but exhilarating time in their lives, when boredom and long stretches of adulthood yawned before them. They survived their own teen years and these chariots were their proving grounds in many ways.  Now they're really only proving how much they love the cars and the lifestyle they found themselves in the middle of back then. The proof is impressive; unequivocally, the popping, roaring exhaust tones of a tricked-out street-ready ride quickens the pulse. Green vehicles be damned, just this one night. Johnny's gonna go cruisin' and get him a girl.

Rockin' In Big Sur's Arms

The gray, somber, ever-present fog clung to the coast north and south as far as our eyes could see. As we looked down the last stretch of Highway 1 and saw wispy shreds of the fog yielding to blue sky and warm sun, our spirits lifted. Ah, there's Big Sur, I thought, a cup of loveliness sheltered behind a coastal ridge and tucked up next to the shins of very steep mountainsides, all covered in dry chaparral and regal redwoods.

Big Sur looks like Shangri La, the fabled land of perfection in the high mountains, and in a way it is just that. But the perfection lies in its enigmatic ruggedness and inaccessibility that seduces you nevertheless. Warm yet forbidding, it has an allure that bewitches the heart. Even on the worst weather days when the wind is howling cold, the vistas are grand and inspire poetry, art and soul searching.

We four friends locked up the car at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, slung on our daypacks and strode forth, ready for a bit of bugs-in-our-teeth adventure, gnarly personal challenge, ready for transformational experience.  Heck, just a nice walk would do. If we were 30 years younger, we'd have headed up into the Ventana Wilderness whose tawny flanks guard the valley's winding road and river. But, we are not 30 and we really only wanted a good look around, so we chose the Buzzard's Roost Loop that starts by crossing a low-slung footbridge across the Big Sur River, skirts it heading northwest for a short way and then begins zig-zagging upward to the ridge top.

Coastal ridges that face north are furred in redwood trees, whose tall regal bulk in turn hide the ridge tops rather neatly. We had no accurate idea of the climb we were undertaking, could not see the top nor the trail, but it was shady, fragrant and very accessible, so we took it. When you have fond memories of being 30 and have worked out a little bit now and again during the preceding weeks, you find that you are a little overconfident and plow ahead.

I remembered our hike on the Kalalau Trail on Kauai last November.  I measured this trail to that with a yardstick of muddiness and steepness well in mind. This is not so bad, I thought. The surface is well trod and very easy to see. The shade of the redwoods and bay trees kept us cool as we strode up and up, encountering a few other hikers who looked very comfortable as they came down the trail.

I have to say right here that no matter where I hike, virtually all other hikers look better than I do when it comes to breathing rate and volumes of sweat. I win when it comes to sweat. I often appear to have emerged from an epic battle with a fire hose and a dragon somehow. As a point of reference, I sweat just standing watering my garden at home on a warm-ish day. It is rather impressive, I have to say.

There is a branch in the trail that says Buzzard's Roost with arrows pointing left and right.  You get to choose! We had no information about which direction was considered better, so we chose the left-hand direction and continued on. Two of us were in better hiking condition than the remaining two, and one of us was hiking in heeled sandals. It was not me. You can bet that if I were the one hiking in heeled sandals, I would have turned an ankle right off the bat and ended up cartwheeling down the near-vertical steep slope and landed like a javelin in the river. Guaranteed. Loose ankle joints help me swim well, not hike fast.  I am not a billy goat with little tiny firm feet. I have flippers.

I began to sweat. I felt pretty capable of doing the hike, but I don't think I looked very capable with sweat streaming down my face. No one else I saw was sweating. No one was even damp.  This has been a characteristic of mine since I was born. I remember doing trampoline in gym class in middle school and having the other girls look at me with wide eyes and furrowed brows, surely alarmed at my appearance. You cannot look cool as a 12 year old with a tomato-red face and streams of sweat coursing down your face, soaking your gym clothes. After four bounces on the tramp, I was a mess.  My friends would look away, probably praying for me. I tried to ignore it, like my mom taught me.  "Just ignore them, Christine. It doesn't matter what they think."

So I climbed up and up, wiping away streams of sweat, striking nonchalant poses when hikers wanted to pass us.  I could still not see the ridge where the buzzards roost, but I was enjoying the beautiful splendor of Big Sur's nearby mountains, across the valley. A huge fire torched the area in 2008; I saw stands of skeletal tree trunks in the distance, testimony to the intense heat of the fire back then.

My friend in heeled sandals called back, "Hey, it's the top!" (She is undeniably the sunniest person I know.) I called back to my dear husband, "The top!" and rounded yet another hairpin curve in the trail. False alarm.  More trail, but it now included sets of steps set into the trail where erosion had worn it down. On we went, and I a fountain still, drops trickling down my glasses, my nose, my ears, and my eyes. I could be installed as public art somewhere. I felt good though, to be out in nature with friends, looking for adventure, pioneer-ish or something.

Swimming doesn't prepare you for hiking except for the mental perseverance part of it. Only flip turns remotely compare to hiking, and even that's a stretch. My legs were holding up okay, but only just. I'd have to get out and hike more often, I was thinking, willing the end of the uphill to come soon. More sweat splatted onto my shoulders, clung to my eyelashes.

The top!  The view! We had emerged from the blanket of redwoods to the manzanita-covered ridgetop where the temperature was drier, much warmer and very pleasant. The work of hiking uphill was worth it as soon as we saw the distant hills, a diorama of steep mountains plunging to a cool pale ocean in the distance and ridge after ridge of redwood-crested land wrapped gently in drifting fog.  In the sun, I could begin to dry off again.  We milled about looking for a place to settle down for a rest.  There is a radio relay shack at the top and very little space to spread out and enjoy a picnic, so we stood and ate, looking at the views. The food was arrayed by the trail on top of my overshirt. A young boy, gaining the flat ridgetop after emerging from the brush at the side of the trail, eyed our food.  We were just getting to the end of our lunch.  He avoided eye contact with us but said to his older sister, "Did we bring food, too?"  He looked so desperate, being ten years old, skinny and tired, that we handed over some cookies for him. He accepted them like a prize.

Rather than taking a nice warm siesta in the sun or sitting on a rock and basking in the glow after the uphill push, everyone gathered up the remnants of lunch, shouldered the daypacks and began the descent down to the river again.  Oh lordy, my thighs began to feel the extra work immediately.  They held up, bless 'em, but they complained about the abuse and mistreatment.

There is a tradition started by a younger sister:  Be sure to savor a root beer float after a good sweaty hike, so I kept that in the front of my mind as I descended.  We felt good and happy, satisfied and tired at the end of our adventure, and all of us indulged in a huge overestimation of the distance of the hike. 1.8 miles had become 4 and then 15 and finally 24 miles. With tigers.  As in, "Man, that had to be at least 4 miles!"

"I think it was 10 for sure."

"Did you see that snake?"

"Yeah, it was this long (hands indicating a 12-inch span)."

"Nah, it was this long (hands held much wider)."

"I heard a tiger roaring."

"Me too."

Once we reached the level again, we took the trail to the Big Sur Lodge and bought some cool treats. There are big rustic sofas in the lounge area, which is where I sucked down my RBF, truly a hiker's ultimate gourmet food.

Still feeling held in the mellow arms of Big Sur, we drove south to Nepenthe to show our friends the view as well as the gift shop and gardens. The decks were crammed with visitors, probably the most crowded day of the year to be there. Finally, we drove back north to The River Inn and brought out blankets from the car to the back lawn to enjoy the remainder of our food and listen to live Brazilian jazz. The Inn has great music every Sunday afternoon, and the food served in the restaurant is very tasty. If you're really lucky, you can sit in Adirondack chairs in the river as it flows gently by down behind the Inn.  Once the blankets were spread out, we all fell asleep, surrounded by music, dancing babies and all kinds of happy humanity.  While lying on my back with the blue sky arching overhead, I took pictures of tree tops and the band while my companions snored on softly. It seemed the images were more of sound than subjects, now that I look at them.

My sweat and effort were already remembered proudly, even fondly, as I recalled the hike and listened to the samba rhythm.  Isn't that the way it always is? In Big Sur, no matter what happens, how hard the hike or crowded the road, once you're there it rocks you peacefully in its big natural embrace.

Greek Food and Irish Movie in Monterey

Flocks of tourists have landed on the Monterey Peninsula for the Labor Day holiday, two of the flock our special friends.  When anticipating visitors for the weekend we scouted around for things to do ahead of their arrival. This weekend, it's the Greek Festival and the Monterey County Fair.  Those will be drawing the highest density crowds. The Monterey Aquarium is a steady draw, especially now that a young Great White shark has just been added to the big Deep Sea tank, which holds a million gallons. In truth, the entire region is of interest to visitors. The Aquarium's steady efforts to educate the public about the Marine Sanctuary have resulted in many improvements in educational plaques and signs along the shoreline and coast. With the curving roads and trails so easy to access on foot and by bike, most tourists are out in the fresh air from the time they get out in the morning until well past dark, even though it is quite a bit cooler here than most of the country. Almost everyone sees harbor seals, otters, birdlife and even whales pretty easily on any given day.

This afternoon, we and our friends walked down to the Recreation Trail, a converted railroad track that's absolutely flat and scenic along every inch of its length, and walked the mile and change to the Custom House Plaza where the Greek Festival was in full swing. Slowly circling dancers with arms on each other's shoulders sidestepped and cross-stepped to the live music playing. We ate lamb kabobs and gyros and watched everyone become Greek, one tune and one bite at a time.  One man said, "You look good sitting next to me!" to his neighbor. The crowd was friendly and relaxed, easy to feel comfortable in. The lamb was tender, the music lively and the breeze adrift with aromas and sounds. It was like being in a big Greek travel brochure, with booths of art and jewelry lining the plaza, photographs of Santorini and the azure Adriatic sea beautiful and exotic.  

We walked over to the Osio Cinema to watch a movie. It's Monterey's independent theater on Alvarado Street that competes head to head with a multiplex at the shopping center two miles away. We saw The Guard, a darkly humorous movie set in Western Ireland. I'd recommend it with a caution that you 1, pay attention to the dialogue because the Irish accents are thick and 2, realize there is intensity and violence in it as well as a heavy dose of profanity. So what else is new, though, with most movies just as peppered with vulgarity. Yet, it was good and the hero unusual. Definitely memorable.

After the movie, we were on foot again and this time ramblin' over to Henry's Barbecue on Lighthouse Avenue in New Monterey. Henry serves up a nice blend of Hawaiian-style BBQ and traditional dishes. "The tri-tip is the bomb," said the waitress after she took our order. Clam chowder hit the spot for two of us and the tri-tip really was tasty, as were the barbecued beans. I had to take half my dinner home, the portions were so big.

It was another mile or so home again, so off we went, peeking into restaurant windows along Lighthouse Avenue. Crystal Fish (sushi) and Hula's ("Island-style grill") were rockin', as usual. As soon as we hit the border and began our walk along streets in Pacific Grove, though, it became much quieter.  This has been the traditional cultural contrast in the two cities' atmosphere since the early days. Pacific Grove was a dry town (no liquor sold within its boundaries) up until the mid 60s, I believe, and it is still a much grayer and more sedate place than Monterey has ever been.

Tomorrow:  Big Sur.