Becky and I discussed a hike today. We’d enjoyed a ride we took together yesterday, slipping through wind-raked eucalyptus above the Bay, and we wondered if we should repeat it. We don’t get enough time to spend with each other. And yet it became clear that I needed more moving today than she could keep up with, and I set off on my own. It was no real sacrifice for either of us: I would come back.
Only 13 miles, and only about 3,000 feet climbed. It felt like cheating, a hike without a mountain underneath. I walked around the Briones Reservoir, its water a mosaic of turquoise and lapis driven by a constant west wind. Any day in the East Bay hills that involves a bald eagle sighting is a good one, and this was. A turkey vulture dead in a grassy swale, gone entirely but the wings, laid out as if it had laid down on its back to watch the sky as it died. The wings symmetrical, feathers splayed. The view of water, a broad valley, a range of hills below. “Good spot,” I told the long-dead vulture. “Good spot.” Farther on live vultures swung low over me. I promised them they could have me someday: just not yet. It was a deer that drew them, accordion-pleated ribs and folded back upon itself, a puma’s kill or a bad accident.
I chased bluebirds for miles. I did not intend to. They rousted themselves on my approach and flitted to the next strand of barbed wire. They gorged on star thistle seed, I think, and the damnable feral artichoke cardoon. A wall of fog athwart the Berkeley Hills shed great draughts of cool wind: I drank them.
Hike long enough and your notion of comfort is changed. Two small blisters on each foot is a tribvial nuisance. A stoneless stretch of hard-packed dust an inviting rest. I lay in that dust, head on my pack, eating a little, my hat brim low over my eyes. The whole world is home, it felt, and when I remembered the cautions against flinging onesself onto the ground haphazard, an invitation for pumas to harvest you, I looked up at the tawn hill that bore down on me and saw nothing, nothing but fine-combed tan oat straw swaying in wind.
