Coyote Crossing

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It was somewhere around Mendota that I saw the hawks, a dozen of them, in a mixed flight of ravens around a stand of eucalyptus. The hills to the west were glowing, their sculpted structure plain in the slanted light. The Raven asked why the hills looked the way they did. “It rains here,” I said. “Softens the edges.”

She knows the way the mountains look in Southern California. Here they are brash and abrupt, scraped out of the depths by the grind of crustal plates along the San Andreas Fault only last week, it would seem, just long enough to have grown a stubble of resinous pines and absurd houses.

That same process builds the Coast Ranges, it’s true. And yet the Coast Ranges are softer somehow. Even where they rise to relatively prodigious heights, in the Yolla Bollys or around Clear Lake, they still seem cuddlier than the mountains in Southern California, as if you might hike into them and lose yourself in comfortable folds of fabric.

A few days ago I sat on the Oakland Waterfront, watching a drunk fool ineptly hit on The Raven and her daughter at once, and thinking about the mountains a few miles east. Longing for them. I lost myself in the little side canyons up there, a lifetime ago, when I was younger than The Raven’s daughter is now and before she was born. I had lost everything except the redwoods in those side canyons, themselves an echo of an echo of the forests that once grew there. The ancestral trunks were torn down to build cities, then their stump sprouts were cut and milled after the cities burned. They had lost everything but the place they lived in.

I thought we’d shared that, back then, when I thought I was weathering the worst blow imaginable. I was a fool. I had no idea how much a person could lose and still keep breathing.

It is a sweet and accidental family in which we find ourselves, The Raven and The Raven’s Daughter and I, and we laughed to ourselves at each person who presumed me The Raven’s Daughter’s Father. We did not worry about correcting them. She is a creative and an eccentric, Coyote with hair the color of a Steller’s jay, with a fascination for bird skeletons and Peru and sun-bleached wood, and so the presumptions made a kind of sense as she clearly got all that from me.

Leaving Oakland was thus a bit more wrenching than it might have been: one more thing there to miss from afar.

How odd a feeling. How unusual and unfamiliar. I have been on my guard, with the missing the place I lived for so long. And of course the place I lived is fading, dissolving with each day spent and each bit of wildland plowed under, paved over. The Bay Area I left last year mixes in my mind with the Bay Area of 1982, and more of that Bay Area is gone than remains. Even that that remains has changed. “There,” I told myself driving south, “is the Pleasanton Ridge. I always meant to climb that.”  I could still, but it would be different, no longer a newly explored aspect of home, now fraught with wistfulness about lives left behind and self-deprecation about what I wasted my time doing instead of hiking there. A quarter century and I only stood on Diablo’s summit thirty times or so?

Traffic slowed at Livermore. I repeated the process with Morgan Territory, though I had to amend my lament from “never got around to it” to “didn’t get there often enough.” “There’s a cliff there,” I told The Raven, “where you can stand and peer down at vultures soaring a hundred feet below.”

“Mm-hm,” she said, preoccupied by the influenza she was in the process of contracting.

“I have a photo from that cliff,” I continued, “of Zeke gazing out into the distance, with Mount Diablo sitting prettily on the horizon.”

“We need to go,” she said, sensibly enough despite my privately laying down my sodden freight upon the prospect.

We need to go is good advice. A year I’ve been here meaning to take a few hours, to drive Route 2 from where it passes our house two blocks south of here and up into the sharp, unsoftened mountains. Twice the altitude of anywhere I hiked in the Coast Ranges, pines and false firs and granite an hour from home. I needed to go! And two days ago we drove home past it as it burned, an image for which “hellish” is the only apt descriptor and not nearly strong enough, angry orange spread across two dozen miles of mountain range front. I needed to go there and I did not, and now what was there is changed forever.

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I told Grrlscientist that I’d have a post up today encouraging you all to go vote for her so that she can get a free trip to Antarctica. This isn’t the post I’d hoped to write about that, but it’s been a hell of a day. So let me just say this: If you go through the admittedly byzantine process of registering with a valid email address* and vote for Devorah, and she wins, we’ll get some damned good blogging as a result. And it costs you nothing. NOTHING!

*arguably intended to make this a fair contest, with none of the ballot stuffing and multiple voting that characterizes certain other Science Bloggers’ participation in online polling.

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I can has cheesebush?

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It came to me on the scent of creosote, cloying and resinous, and wet dust driven before a summer desert storm. A sudden gust out of the glowering east sent the little car skittering across the lane, and as I tightened my hands on the wheel the scent hit me at once, and for a moment I wasn’t sure which had preceded which. Did a burst of wind off the front of the storm bring the tang of monsoon to me? Did the scent hit me with such force I would have staggered without the wind?

Either way I was jubilant, greedy. In the desert, walking too long out into the mountains and dry washes, thirst can build almost imperceptibly. Though you may ration your water well enough that you never actually feel parched, the film still builds on your tongue, and then on your eyes, and then on your mind. Only when you find enough to drink your fill do you at last realize just how heavy a weight that drought had been.

It was like that Saturday. I felt, all of a sudden, lighter. I felt, all of a sudden, as though a hundred thin increments of dull had fallen off me, each laid down with each successive day outside the desert.

I felt eyes on me. It was The Raven, riding shotgun. “You just came out of something,” she said. “You’re giddy.”

“You felt that too?” I asked.

“Felt it? You just started laughing out of nowhere.”

We took a break in Barstow, picked up a few copies of a newspaper that had just printed some of my writing. Outside a little museum we stood on a gravel rise, looked out across the eastern half of town. It was an odd feeling washed across me then, strong affection for a town I have scorned all these years. It felt… like home. It felt like home.

At Harper Lake we walked out onto a boardwalk that could have been a dock, had there been any water beneath it. An alkali crust upon the soil stretched out some dozens of yards. The sun scutted behind one storm cloud after another to the west. One storm cloud after another traced light wet fingers across the West Mojave. We laid on our backs on the boardwalk for a time.

I went away for a time. It was not sleep. I merely ceased to exist for a time, only a thin consciousness left behind, of breeze and rustling dried grass, the labored wingbeats of doves across the lake, stormcloud edges dappling the deepening blue above.

“Your eyes aren’t usually this deep a blue,” said The Raven.

“I don’t belong in Los Angeles,” I replied, a truth I’d thought I had hidden from her. She is worth Los Angeles, if anything is, and yet each day there calcifies my heart, compelling a choice that I had thought fraught with potential heartache.

But storms traced the creosote flats and the slanted light cast stark the ridges across the lake, and the words came before my caution did.

“I don’t belong in Los Angeles,” I said.

“Derr,” said The Raven.

Drive slower than fifty across the West Mojave on a rain-washed night, with the top down, and the black and pin-pricked sky will nestle down around your shoulders. The breeze becomes a roar even at modest speeds, but the silence out there is loud enough that you can hear it over the rush. The hulks of rusted train cars and old water tanks are voids against the gauze of stars. They block the light where your heart cannot.

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