The gentle arms of Eden
Jan. 28th, 2007 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanWell, I went to the Minn-Stf pool party, so I guess I can do an LJ entry.
I spent the week of January 14-22 in California with Eric. We had not seen one another in five and a half months. I don't propose to do a monumental trip report at the moment, since I am supposed to be getting on with this intensely irritating TALKY MEANDERING COMPLICATED book, but I thought I would list a few of the many good moments.
We got to do two things this trip that we have been talking about for years. On Monday, which was a fairly clear day, we went from our funny cheap hotel in Hayward to Mount Diablo. There was a keen north wind blowing and it was extremely cold for California. Driving up the mountain was intermittently scary, and Eric deserves great heaps of praise for driving our larger-than-reserved rental car around those curves. I did my best to appreciate the views, since he had to keep a firm eye on the road so that it wouldn't wriggle away from us. We parked in the lower lot and walked up to the summit along the dirt path rather than the asphalt, stopping for tantalizing glimpses through the brush. There's a building on the summit, with a piece of the actual rock surrounded by a plaque, and windows all around. We also spent a lot of time in the outside railed area. We could see everywhere I had been in California up to then, and almost everywhere that Eric has lived. Eric always says that Mount Diablo is like Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, and this quality was much more evident from atop it than from anywhere else. We recalled the various angles we had seen it from, and things we had done in the various places that we could see. I have photographs, but I haven't uploaded them yet.
There's a little museum below the summit, with a three-dimensional relief map that delighted Eric to the bone. I was pretty pleased with it too. There was a lot of good geological information. We got some aspects of what we had been looking at nearby sorted out. Then we took the Fire Interpretive Trail, which goes all around the mountain a little below the summit. There were fewer people on that, and the view was almost as good. We talked a lot about how different this mountain was from Mount Tamalpais, which is crammed with plants, while Mount Diablo is much sparser and dryer. It was very cold on the north side of the mountain and almost hot on the south side.
Words are not coming just now. This was a sublime experience, not unWordsworthian, that ranks with the time I went with Raphael to the Sonora Desert Museum, driving up and up and with the saguaros conversing around us; or the time that David drove Pat and Caroline and me to Wastwater, up and up through beech forests; or Eric's and my earlier drive up Mount Tamalpais with ravens circling below us. But the words are all flat.
The other long-discussed dream was to drive to Humboldt County and see the redwoods. Eric had been before, but he wanted to go back, and he wanted me to see them. This was a birthday present to Eric, though not a perfect one, since he had to do the driving. Both drives are tales in themselves, as we explored countryside and towns that Eric had been curious about for a long time. But those tales will have to wait for later. We went to two groves, the Founder's Grove and the Mahan Plaque Grove. It was a sunny day, but even though we had gotten an early start, it was mostly shadowy among the redwoods. I spent a significant part of the drive along the Avenue of the Giants trying to express precisely how the light was different in the redwoods than anywhere else. It seemed to partake of evening even at the peak of noon.
It was hard to remember the scale of things while driving. Unless a great enormous tree was right up against the road, with its personal reflector to prevent hypnotized drivers from crashing into it, one simply felt that they all must be further away than they seemed. The Founder's Tree, with all its statistics, was useful in dissipating this strange mental fog.
We walked into goose-pen trees and looked at the forest outside, which took on the aspect of some alien world that one walks into at one's peril. We walked around huge trees. We stared straight up. The lowest branch on the Founder's Tree is 190 feet above the ground. The rest of the tree goes on up to 346 feet, but the eye just refuses at some point. The sky seemed much further away than it does on a prairie. We were most impressed, I think, by the fallen trees. I had felt, reading the little brochure that tells how they nourish whole communities of plants and animals after falling, that they were all tragic vignettes, with their plants and animals and fungi just poor Horatios, lingering on to tell their story. But it was not so. They seemed larger in their fallen state than the living trees, adorned with moss and ornamented with whole currant and huckleberry bushes, studded with lichen and toadstools and bracket fungus, trailing the long ropes of their detaching bark like robes. You could not often see, from the huge rootball and the excavation in the ground, all the way to the top of the tree.
The understory was very sparse, except where a tree had fallen, and became itself hypnotic. At some point we struck a path up a very steep slope. Eric had told me that the amazing thing about these redwood forests, in addition to the age and size of the trees, was that they were in the river bottom, in flatlands, which gave a completely different effect from the ones further south, which climbed very steep slopes. He was a little spooked by this effect after an hour or two, so we climbed the switchbacking slope. It was pretty dry, but hugely steep, and I felt rather vertiginous, but Eric looked after me, and we made it up to a ridge. The whole character of the understory changed almost at once, with California bay laurel, tan oak, and huckleberry reminding us of the Huckleberry Botanic Preserve. The path ran along a flat ridge full of wet grass, and we saw a single meadowhawk, though it was edgy and would not alight anywhere. We got a good view of the South Fork of the Eel River, which we had been driving along. It was as green as poison. Eric surmised that this was caused by blue-green algae (Dawkins's "green bacteria") and I wondered if it was minerals. Eric was right, but since the algae was packed full of toxins and there were warnings about swimming in the water, I got to be right too.
We came back down, went on along our loop trail, and found a huge gap in the canopy where an immense tree had fallen. There were half a dozen unfamiliar plants that we had not seen elsewhere; they must just have been waiting for the light.
When I went to sleep that night I saw redwood sorrel, tan oak, the huge upraised root systems, the long disappearing perspective of the fallen trees, the red warm light, the brilliant moss, and Eric's face, looking at it all.
P.
I spent the week of January 14-22 in California with Eric. We had not seen one another in five and a half months. I don't propose to do a monumental trip report at the moment, since I am supposed to be getting on with this intensely irritating TALKY MEANDERING COMPLICATED book, but I thought I would list a few of the many good moments.
We got to do two things this trip that we have been talking about for years. On Monday, which was a fairly clear day, we went from our funny cheap hotel in Hayward to Mount Diablo. There was a keen north wind blowing and it was extremely cold for California. Driving up the mountain was intermittently scary, and Eric deserves great heaps of praise for driving our larger-than-reserved rental car around those curves. I did my best to appreciate the views, since he had to keep a firm eye on the road so that it wouldn't wriggle away from us. We parked in the lower lot and walked up to the summit along the dirt path rather than the asphalt, stopping for tantalizing glimpses through the brush. There's a building on the summit, with a piece of the actual rock surrounded by a plaque, and windows all around. We also spent a lot of time in the outside railed area. We could see everywhere I had been in California up to then, and almost everywhere that Eric has lived. Eric always says that Mount Diablo is like Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, and this quality was much more evident from atop it than from anywhere else. We recalled the various angles we had seen it from, and things we had done in the various places that we could see. I have photographs, but I haven't uploaded them yet.
There's a little museum below the summit, with a three-dimensional relief map that delighted Eric to the bone. I was pretty pleased with it too. There was a lot of good geological information. We got some aspects of what we had been looking at nearby sorted out. Then we took the Fire Interpretive Trail, which goes all around the mountain a little below the summit. There were fewer people on that, and the view was almost as good. We talked a lot about how different this mountain was from Mount Tamalpais, which is crammed with plants, while Mount Diablo is much sparser and dryer. It was very cold on the north side of the mountain and almost hot on the south side.
Words are not coming just now. This was a sublime experience, not unWordsworthian, that ranks with the time I went with Raphael to the Sonora Desert Museum, driving up and up and with the saguaros conversing around us; or the time that David drove Pat and Caroline and me to Wastwater, up and up through beech forests; or Eric's and my earlier drive up Mount Tamalpais with ravens circling below us. But the words are all flat.
The other long-discussed dream was to drive to Humboldt County and see the redwoods. Eric had been before, but he wanted to go back, and he wanted me to see them. This was a birthday present to Eric, though not a perfect one, since he had to do the driving. Both drives are tales in themselves, as we explored countryside and towns that Eric had been curious about for a long time. But those tales will have to wait for later. We went to two groves, the Founder's Grove and the Mahan Plaque Grove. It was a sunny day, but even though we had gotten an early start, it was mostly shadowy among the redwoods. I spent a significant part of the drive along the Avenue of the Giants trying to express precisely how the light was different in the redwoods than anywhere else. It seemed to partake of evening even at the peak of noon.
It was hard to remember the scale of things while driving. Unless a great enormous tree was right up against the road, with its personal reflector to prevent hypnotized drivers from crashing into it, one simply felt that they all must be further away than they seemed. The Founder's Tree, with all its statistics, was useful in dissipating this strange mental fog.
We walked into goose-pen trees and looked at the forest outside, which took on the aspect of some alien world that one walks into at one's peril. We walked around huge trees. We stared straight up. The lowest branch on the Founder's Tree is 190 feet above the ground. The rest of the tree goes on up to 346 feet, but the eye just refuses at some point. The sky seemed much further away than it does on a prairie. We were most impressed, I think, by the fallen trees. I had felt, reading the little brochure that tells how they nourish whole communities of plants and animals after falling, that they were all tragic vignettes, with their plants and animals and fungi just poor Horatios, lingering on to tell their story. But it was not so. They seemed larger in their fallen state than the living trees, adorned with moss and ornamented with whole currant and huckleberry bushes, studded with lichen and toadstools and bracket fungus, trailing the long ropes of their detaching bark like robes. You could not often see, from the huge rootball and the excavation in the ground, all the way to the top of the tree.
The understory was very sparse, except where a tree had fallen, and became itself hypnotic. At some point we struck a path up a very steep slope. Eric had told me that the amazing thing about these redwood forests, in addition to the age and size of the trees, was that they were in the river bottom, in flatlands, which gave a completely different effect from the ones further south, which climbed very steep slopes. He was a little spooked by this effect after an hour or two, so we climbed the switchbacking slope. It was pretty dry, but hugely steep, and I felt rather vertiginous, but Eric looked after me, and we made it up to a ridge. The whole character of the understory changed almost at once, with California bay laurel, tan oak, and huckleberry reminding us of the Huckleberry Botanic Preserve. The path ran along a flat ridge full of wet grass, and we saw a single meadowhawk, though it was edgy and would not alight anywhere. We got a good view of the South Fork of the Eel River, which we had been driving along. It was as green as poison. Eric surmised that this was caused by blue-green algae (Dawkins's "green bacteria") and I wondered if it was minerals. Eric was right, but since the algae was packed full of toxins and there were warnings about swimming in the water, I got to be right too.
We came back down, went on along our loop trail, and found a huge gap in the canopy where an immense tree had fallen. There were half a dozen unfamiliar plants that we had not seen elsewhere; they must just have been waiting for the light.
When I went to sleep that night I saw redwood sorrel, tan oak, the huge upraised root systems, the long disappearing perspective of the fallen trees, the red warm light, the brilliant moss, and Eric's face, looking at it all.
P.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-28 07:40 pm (UTC)I know you feel the words are flat, but there's enough there to touch my memories of some of those places (Mount Diablo, and the different redwood groves I saw at Muir Woods).
Reconnecting with someone you love, and doing these things with them, is good: one of the joys of my relationship with
no subject
Date: 2007-01-28 07:55 pm (UTC)Thank you. And I'm glad you had the chance to experience it with Eric.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-28 08:31 pm (UTC)Now I want to go.
Date: 2007-01-29 01:29 am (UTC)Well! It was so worth the wait! You gave an enthralling visualization. I'd love to use parts of it for a meditation. I'm glad you got to reconnect and it will be so much more meaningful later for you since you had all that novelty to associate with it. (I learned in a class recently that we remember new events more clearly when emotion is tied to them and vice versa.)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-29 01:41 am (UTC)MKK
no subject
Date: 2007-01-29 03:34 am (UTC)I've been to Muir Woods (a carsick-making route, be warned) and to Sequoia National Park, where you can have a square dance on a stump. I haven't been in years, though. I ought to plan a trip.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 10:46 pm (UTC)i have been to muir woods and up mount tamalpais (boy, there's a fun trip in a car if you have motion sickness and are afraid of heights!) but now i have things to add to my list.
thank you.