Monday, September 01, 2003
Philo Style
Written Sunday 6:30 pm:
The neighbors are screaming at each other again. I think she’s thrown him out, and he’s hollering a blue streak at her; she’s shredding the air with her screech of a response. Luckily, they’re jays, hopping from beech tree to laurel to oak, two actual blue streaks, and their cries seem entirely proper and welcome. I’m lying in a hammock strung between two kindly pines, shaded by heavy boughs from the sun as it drops toward the horizon, gently swaying in the early evening breeze that rolls in from the sea twenty or so miles to the northwest. Kel is about forty feet away up on the deck with a fluffy magazine, having tired of her schoolwork; Wes Montgomery is playing on the stereo inside and a note or two occasionally reach me at my idyll looking across the long narrow valley. Cos is wandering the area between us, a goofy smile on his enormous face, sniffing a million unimaginable stinks and scents.
A few snapshots from the trip, developed instantly: on our last visit here it was mid-spring and the dominant theme in the landscape was flowers - an astonishing, eyepopping variety and profusion everywhere and anywhere. Now, in late summer, the theme is fruit - apple orchards not only bent double with ripening fruit but redolent of it too; peach trees hiding ruby bounty, budding prizes even more succulent for being so well concealed (I felt almost perverse when I stooped to enter under the leafy branches and touch the clustered, downy delicacies); brambles of blackberries choking the shoulders of the highway, pressing up against the windows of restaurants, tumbling madly down hillsides, and all spangled with every phase of the berry, from flowers to nubbins to greenfruit to black juicy fantasies, each drupe thick with syrup and glistening in the broiling sun (and set off perfectly by firey poison oakleaves that stayed my hungry fingers); and of course the grapes, everywhere, on steel wires and weathered wood arbors, covering whole hillsides, the leafy greenness of the vines complimenting innumerable heavy dusty bunches of green and purple fruit… though the grass is dry, the earth’s bounty seems even more prolific than it did three months ago.
And, on a related theme, roadkill. So many animals left flattened on the highway - and so strangely many of them skunks, plus one vulture: undoubtedly he stooped to the tarmac to feast on a dead skunk (we could smell it) and, with the passing of a heedless and invincible vehicle, became a victim himself, a huge black wing stretched out across the roadbed… Kel even saw one skunk that had been painted over with a double yellow line when its corpse hadn’t been moved by a road crew. It’s almost funny, but then you remember, it used to be his valley, not ours.
Home from supper last night, up atop our lonely mountain, the moon was a pockmarked crescent resting in a plate of lighter darkness, and the milky way spilled from horizon to horizon with a terrible carelessness that just doesn’t translate down in our home in the city. Mars, at a 60,000 year proximity, shone with a salmon passion, brighter than electricity, a steady spotlight 320,000 miles away.
After breakfast today, without detouring off the road back to our cabin, we stopped at three excellent and very beautiful wineries, tasted 15 or 20 wines, bought three bottles and a cookbook before we regained our self-control (that is, made it back to our little dirt turnoff into the hidden vales of the north side of the valley). Later in the afternoon we drove down to a state park full of redwoods and sorrel and the Navarro River, now a shadow of it’s torrential winterfed aspect, a lazy creek across which I slowly strolled; the water was shallow and calm and very clear, cool and vibrant and life-affirming. I can feel it lapping at my ankles even as I recline here now. And on the way up the hill to the cabin afterwards, we stopped to let some quail cross the road, and then a few minutes later for turkeys who sprinted the oaken slopes with inspiring alacrity. Delicious burritos from the local market for supper and now nothing to do but experience the evening as it slowly envelops the valley. It is a pleasure to be alive.
***
written Monday Night at home:
The drive back home was especially scenic; we went out of our way. I’m really busy this week and I’ll catch up with you all when I can. But I’m going to ride this weekend for every inch I can get out of it.
