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.