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I am the master of all cows!
I have been unspeakably tired the last few days. I’m getting enough sleep: between six and eight hours of it a night, and I can get six hours’ sleep a night for weeks on end and feel fine. I’m not sick, at least not enough to notice. I’m not sad, despite an abundance of reasons to be sad. Becky and I are doing great, and the animals are a constant source of joy and mess.
But by ten in the morning, I’m ready for a nap.
So I only hiked about seven and a half miles yesterday, with a long loafing break about three miles in as a special indulgence to celebrate my 45th birthday. I was at Sunol Regional Wilderness, a startlingly rugged former ranch east of San Jose, and a favorite spot of Becky’s and Zeke’s.
The ground was thoroughly saturated and dotted with cow pies. I snoozed on a bench hidden among the oaks, in a spot where I’ve camped with Becky and Matthew. The hills were verdant, and their bones poked through in licheny outcrops: greenstone, fossiliferous Briones Formation sandstone, basalt. Moss was thick and flowering.
There’s a steep rocky canyon marked at its base, where it joins Alameda Creek, by a large sycamore in the shape of a “W.” A decade ago Becky and Zeke and I descended the “W Tree Rock Scramble” over the course of a day, losing 600 feet in half a mile, hanging on to flakes of rock as we lowered ourselves down dry falls. One twenty-foot drop about mid-way seemed impassable: we went up and around on a crumbly bank above, holding for dear life onto poison oak branches. Zeke tunneled through the poison oak, and I shoved him into a deep pool at the bottom of the canyon to wash some of it off. I think he might have finally forgiven me for that just last month.
Yesterday, that dry canyon was a chain of roaring waterfalls. I stood at the head of the canyon — after rousing myself from my little nap — and grinned like a fool at the music.
From the bottom of the Alameda Creek canyon, I had looked at the ridgelines, felt that deep bone-level fatigue, and quailed. After an hour or so of patient, weary plodding I was surprised to see that I stood at the highest point I’d seen from down below, high enough to see the Bay glint over the shoulder of Mission Peak. Cows blocked my path, moving only after I warned them that I ate their kind.
Heading downhill toward the truck in Indian Joe Creek canyon, I came to a fallen tree across the path. Half the tree was fallen, I should say: the other half stood tall and healthy, a good hundred feet of canopy above my head. I saw the tree’s whole life play out before my eyes: a deer browses the top bud of a sapling, and two shoots grow from the wound. They are both vertical, and when they widen they press together, forming a weak bond of rotten bark and old dead tissue. Disease takes one shoot, leaving the other to grow a collar of new bark around the wound where its sibling tore away. Eventually the tree stands with an odd flaring at its base, six feet wide and three across. There was a moment halfway through the tree’s life where the dead shoot had just fallen, bridging the creek, and an odd beast in pile clothing slouched up to it, traced a row of yellow shelf fungi with a finger, placed a paw on the healthy section’s bark, and went off to find his truck, stopping along the way to stand in mid-creek to see if his hiking boots were still waterproof.
That beast had just reset his hiking odometer, it being just after the new year. At the end of the day I was up to sixteen miles for the year, a cumulative walking distance — as one commonly-repeated and hard-to-verify statistic would have it — the average American will not reach until mid-March, even including trips between the television and refrigerator.
Then Becky took me out to dinner, where I ate part of one of the cousins of the cows that had blocked my way, and then fell dead asleep in my chair at 8:30. Happy birthday to me.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
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