Wednesday, December 28, 2005

The Long View: A New Year’s Meditation

I’m heading out of town for New Year’s tomorrow morning at an hour that significantly precedes the asscrack of dawn.  We’re going to Maryland to party with the inlaws and introduce Zach to the rest of the family.  It’s a great scene every year, with raucous laughter and good food and drink at all hours of the day and night.  You’d never think such revelry was going on from the looks of the restrained georgian facade of the quiet suburban home where we’ll be staying.  It’s one of those tricks of perception and perspective - where you think you know what you’re getting but you get there and get so much more than you expected.  And with this principle in mind, here’s a few words about the low mountain and the long view:

It’s the highest peak in Contra Costa County, but that isn’t enough all on its own to make it very famous. It’s just 3850 feet tall, after all – barely 1000 meters: still a substantial piece of rock jutting up from the San Ramon plains, but hardly awe-inspiring. It curls its double hump over a comfortable little region, scaled nicely for the suburbs. The air doesn’t really get thin up there at the peak; though it is home to a herd of tarantulas and can still be snowy in the late spring, it’s really just a mini-mount for the bedroom communities that fill the frisco offices each day. Devil Mountain: it’s on the horizon pretty much everywhere around here, but never dominates the view. It’s a shoulder of dust-colored stone that unobtrusively surveys the whole bay, and a fleeting glimpse of it on the horizon is all most of us ever see of it.

It’s certainly not the kind of landmark that stands out, in this area full of world-renowned landmarks. The GG bridge, Coit tower, the pyramid building, Alcatraz – all these easily beat out Mt Diablo in terms of recognizability and attractiveness to locals and tourists alike. And all those places are well and truly worth a visit; they’re beautiful, imposing, impressive and famous. Each one offers stunning surroundings and panoramic views. But those views, that panorama – they are parochial, constrained, deceptively restrictive. Even from the tallest building in town, what you get is, basically, the town. The wide wild world hardly impresses itself upon you as you look across the City’s steep hills and crowded blocks. It’s city, city, city when you survey your domain – and, up across the bay to the east, above and beyond the urban accretions and agglomerations, that familiar double-nub of Mt Diablo serenely overlooks it all, so constant and understated as to escape our notice most of the time.

It’s harder to ignore Mt Diablo’s true power when you mount its summit on a clear day, though. All mountains impart some things – a sense of triumph, a superhuman potency, earthbound flight. You look down over birds and clouds and the world shrinks under your godlike feet. All mountains, I say, can make this claim – even the little ones like Diablo.  What most mountains – all but one, actually, in the entire world – cannot claim, is actually to bring the world to you, to bring a truly significant swath of the planet’s surface within your mortal compass. Mountains will give you a nice view, even views of distant places, but almost always something blocks you out in one direction or another and most of the earth still hides from you.

Not so on Diablo. It’s the highest peak that’s northerly enough to have an unaided view of 10,000-foot Lassen, 181 miles to the north, while still far enough south so you can see Halfdome in Yosemite 150 miles to the south-east, and all the way down to Red Kaweh Mountain 210 miles to the south, while at the same time sufficiently to the west that you can see the Farallons Islands, 25 miles off the coast.  A 19th century geologist estimated that the view atop Diablo encompassed 80,000 square miles, 40,000 “in tolerably plain view – over 300 miles from north to south, and 260 to 280 miles from east to west”. The view includes 60% of California, comprising 35 counties and an area equal to the six New England states.  All told, if you want to see more of the earth’s surface while still standing on the ground, you have to travel halfway around the world to Tanzania and ascent the 19,300 feet of Kilamanjaro.  Other than that, no mountain peak on earth reveals more than Diablo’s does. 

Locally, Diablo is overshadowed - romantically, by Mt Tamalpais, with its legendary megalithic sleeping princess stiff-nippled in the sea breezes; quantitatively, by Mt Hamilton in Santa Clara County, with its 4200-foot peak and its antiquated observatory.  Even when you’re facing it head-on off the 680 freeway, Diablo seems sizeable, but not really massive.  By contrast, the coastal Farallons, when they can be seen on the horizon from the beach, seem huge, unsinkable, like fists jutting from the ocean.  Halfdome is a giant among giants, soaring sheerly from Yosemite’s valley floor with dramatic flair.  And Lassen is just massive, despite having blown off its own pinnacle about 150 years ago, still erupting from the earth’s crust with breathtaking majesty, a whole world unto itself.  But none of these magnificent, inspirational places has the view that Diablo has. 

You wouldn’t know it to look at it, though.  And I guess that’s the curious thing about perspective.  When you don’t have it, you have no idea what you’re missing; once you’ve got it, it can show you things you never expected to see.  It’s not a matter of what the viewpoint looks like, but what it looks over - and Diablo looks out over quite a lot.  You could bust your ass to climb higher, but its damned unlikely you’ll ever see more than you will high atop Diablo. 

So here’s to a year of short travels, easy ascents, temperate climes and wide horizons.  May it bring the world to your doorstep, and may you choose to go outside and take a lingering look at it.  This year, let it not be about the journey - let it be about the view. 

(In the spirit of brief travels, I hit wikipedia while pulling some numbers for this essay and they say there that the “world’s second-most expansive view” claim is bogus.  They recommend taking a peak at Denali or Pike’s, or any other of several mind-numbing views. I say, sure, go ahead. The view of Maui from atop Mauna Kea is pretty fine too, and that’s the dullest lump of a mountain you can imagine.  Hell, you should just climb on your roof and see how far you can see that way.  It’s about what you can see, not where you see it from, after all.)