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.
Damn sand. You want to grip it, but noooo…
Also, happened to look at pics of your stepdaughter’s crazy cool hair colors just today thanks to the magic of tagging on FB. Planning to show ‘em to my wife tonight (she’s thinking of getting some streaks too, although her color preference tends more toward Northern Cardinal than Steller’s jay)
Wow. This piece hit me like a kick in the gut.