They stay just outside of view, flickers in the margins of the eye, small glints of consciousness lurking in the leaves. They watch you pass, breath held.
The soul of the mountain they are, the soul of the land, and though we scour the earth and scrape it, burn it clean of anything but the rats and pigeons and starlings, they remain. Around the edges they remain. They wait for us to pass.
Despite our domination of the trails, the mass of volition on the mountain is theirs. Ten thousand minds in an acre, and even more of them without minds but with intent nonetheless, with longing and determination.
I spent almost half my life not seeing them, passing them by unremarked upon. I was not exactly unaware that they existed — most of us do, after a fashion, recognize that there exist things in this world that are not ourselves. But they were abstractions to me, entities described in textbooks, as if I was to know that isosceles triangles or relative minors lurked there in the Baccharis.
And then I saw them one day, and I have seen them consistently since. This sight does not feel as though it is an extraordinary thing. I simply look, and there they are, and if I am with someone else I point out each one and my companion sees them too. Further, this vision is not infallible. Send me up the mountain worried over work, or family, or love, and I will walk by them just like everyone else, at least for a while. I suspect that this vision results from nothing innate in me other than curiosity: I have walked with others who possess it, some of whom see not only figures but names, habits and history.
I think it is just that I made a decision, that day, to see them when I could. I suspect that almost anyone could make the same decision, and my distinction is merely that few people do. Or at least I think it was me that made the decision. The rattlesnake gets some of the credit.
That day’s walk was a jornada, or as close a thing to a jornada as one can find in the suburbs, at any rate. We walked twelve miles, Bob Baird and I, climbing 2500 feet, without water on a triple-digit temperature summer day. At mile 12 there was a tap. Lacking bottles or buckets, we took only the water we could fit in our bellies to carry us up another 1500 feet of elevation in the next two miles. Halfway through that two miles we lay out on the trail gasping on our backs in the dust, and the vultures were on us almost immediately, swooping toward us on thermals. They hung ten or twelve feet above us, eyeing us critically. I moved a hand. We were still too fresh, and they fell back, a little.
There was food on the summit in those days, and we spent the few dollars we had between us: a hot dog and small soda each, and as much water as we could drink without hurting ourselves, and then we were off down the north face, not bothering to look for trail. What is now a ten-foot-high stand of chamise and coyotebrush was then ankle-high shrubs and scree. We filled our shoes with each step, glad to be going down rather than up as the afternoon got hotter.
A fire had taken the summit brush down to the soil a few years earlier. There was still charcoal in the talus and we smudged our hands and faces where we fell. Four hundred feet we descended in a tenth of a mile, hiking off-trail down an eighty percent slope, dodging a few pioneering clumps of poison oak but staying close in case our footing gave way: better to scratch for weeks than break an ankle out here, or worse. We were still in sight of the summit ridge when the thirst started again. I complained more readily than did Bob, or for that matter anyone I knew. “I’m thirsty again, dammit,” I said, my voice cracking. Bob licked his lips, nodded.
We would walk six more miles before we reached water deemed safe for drinking, and I’m not sure whether that fact would have brought us solace or despair had we known it, which we did not. We had no idea how much farther we would be walking, except that we could see our destination far below us, across miles of ridge-and-canyon washboard.
I have since become reacquainted with the trail we eventually reached that day, though I did not hike it again for long enough that a forest grew there in the intervening years. There is another steep drop, one that I cannot now walk without fear of my feet going out from under me. There are miles of meandering and pleasant fire road with spectacular views and no water save a viscid, reeking horse trough. There is another steep climb, a cruel joke inflicted on the naïve and waterless hiker, almost impossible to climb without breaks even for those carrying food and drink and who have hiked only four miles to get there rather than our 16. On the other side of the ridge gained thereby, there is the reciprocal and treacherous descent. Here and there a seep beguiles, but the water is thick and stagnant in the best of times. There were cattle grazing on the mountain in those days, and even with our lips cracking we shuddered at the stench, at the imagined coliform count. A film of thirst had coated our lips, our tongues all afternoon. By the time we walked into Deer Flat that film had spread to our eyes and ears, our minds. Had we seen the horse troughs behind a row of trees we would likely have drunk from them. But we missed them. The trail angled down into a deep canyon, its floor more than a thousand feet below.
This was the state in which I first arrived in Mitchell Canyon, dropping down into its head from Deer Flat on aching, cramping legs, a red-brown stain seeping through the insole seams of my tennis shoes, which would have caused me concern had I been capable of it.
Even after a day of sauntering and picnicking and examining the undersides of trailside plants the descent into Mitchell Canyon punishes the feet, the knees. After 17 miles of near-waterless, hungry hiking done by a self significantly more reed-thin than is now the case, it was hellish. Tremors had moved into my legs, taken up cohabitation therein with the cramps. Bob spoke his first words in an hour. “I feel like a character in The Inferno.” We descended, legs going out from under us every hundred feet or so.
Another mile past us, and a sound filtered up to us through a few hundred feet of wooded slope, then faded fast. One switchback more and it was there again, unmistakable this time.
Water.
Water five hundred feet below us, and the trail curving away from it again. Each switchback brought us closer, the noise louder and yet its source hidden, a seeming hundreds of feet of cliff between us. “I don’t think Dante wrote Tantalus into The Inferno,” I said, constructively.
But it was only two more switchbacks, and then a few hundred yards of steep, and we were at the canyon floor. Mitchell Creek was there, flowing, shaded, only ten feet from us. A pretty little side trail led to it. “How bad could dysentery be?” Bob smiled wry as he asked. “I’m game if you are,” I said, “or even if you aren’t.”
Bob stepped onto the side trail. I followed close. At the water’s edge, he bent slightly, as if getting ready to drink directly from the creek without using his hands.
I have a peculiarly clear memory, after a quarter century, of the space between his shoulder blades there four inches from my face as he began to stoop. I was beginning the process of wondering whether I should be impatient with him for blocking my way to the water, even if only briefly.
Then came the second very important sound of the day, from the vicinity of my right ankle.
I pushed Bob across the creek, hard. Not that he put up much of a fight. I followed, landing nearly on top of him. Neither of us had heard rattlesnake warning before, at least not live. But neither of us spent a tenth of a second wondering what the sound we heard might be. It was as if the sound was programmed into us, deeper than conditioning, deeper than fear or thought.
It was a pretty snake, and neighborly once it no longer feared being stepped on. We sat on the opposite bank, ten feet away, drinking all we could, admiring it, the hair having ceased to stand up on our necks. After twenty minutes the snake lost interest in company and sped away. We got back on the trail.
It was another two flat and mainly smooth miles out to the trailhead, where there was water and easy hitchhiking to the train, and the creek followed us the whole way in case we got thirsty on the way. It would have been an anticlimactic end to what is still the longest day’s hike I’ve ever made, except for one detail.
That rattlesnake warning had stripped all the layers of hike and dust and thirst film from me. I felt that right away, puzzled at it as we were sitting there drinking, chalked it up to adrenaline and cold water.
But I have come to suspect that there were layers of film obscuring me that day that I had brought to the mountain with me, and that the snake’s rattle stripped a few of those off, too.
The last two miles of trail we walked were alive. There were lizards every twenty feet, poking tips of snouts from beneath live oak leaves or shreds of bark. Caterpillars hung from twigs, the spiders eyeing them. Some of the spiders were three inches end to end and furry. Darkling beetles rummaged in the duff. Little birds I could not identify, which back then was almost all of them, sat quietly in poison oak and grapevine tangles.
This was nervousness over encountering additional snakes, I thought, and perhaps a reflection of an especially diverse canyon fauna. And yet after hitching to the train and riding exhausted back to Berkeley, dragging my aching ass to the apartment I shared with my lover Elissa and showering with a beer in hand and sleeping for ten hours, after I got up the next morning and left in time to be at work at six, it had not stopped.
They were still there, the animals around me.
They are still here, around me.
I claim no expertise nor special skills, excepting perhaps those gained in a quarter century of seeing. Seeing animals and identifying them are related but distinct, and the latter requires a discipline in observing that I struggle, still, to acquire. And I am as distractable, as preocccupiable, as anyone. More so, in fact. The animals are themselves distraction from the dozen or so things the human world declares to be of importance, and for that alone I am grateful to them.
But whether due to skill or nature or inclination I see them. I mainly cannot avoid seeing them. As often as not I am the person in the group who sees the marten in full profile, my companions having to content themselves with a glimpse of tail-end disappearing into the grass. A half block down the street from where you and I sit drinking coffee there will be a eucalyptus, a male Anna’s hummingbird sitting on its top branch, and I will lose half of your last sentence and half of your next one in the seeing of it, and I will try to cover up my gaffe. Those who know me well expect that I will interrupt my own sentences with zoological non-sequitur. Actually, I think we should fill the tank before — owl. Sorry.
There are worse flaws to possess, I am thinking. They outnumber us. If the laboratories ever find a way to measure the mass of a thought the total of theirs would far outweigh the total of ours, and this despite our own minds’ vaunted leaden complexity. Ten thousand kinds of sentience in an acre, no time alone ever truly solitary, and if I do nothing else with this one mind among billions but see them, it is a life well spent.
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
7 comments on "Seen and not seen"(o)
I work two jobs now, which involves weekend travel, usually for overnight shifts, or my favorite, the shift that ends at 3:15A. My preferred route back from Austin involves the country roads that go over and through the hills, rather than the longer, busier highway that goes around.
At 3:15A, the balance has changed, they are all mostly at work, hunting and eating, they don’t care as much about me seeing them. Coyote,off to the side of the road, neck deep in little bluestem, ringtails and foxes scuttling across the limestone ridges, and possum looking up over her shoulder, mostly just pissed, looking back over her shoulder, as I creep by in my machine.
That was exquisite, Chris. I share this sentiment, heartfelt and divine in its simplicity: notice. Reveling in the magic of the universe can be just that easy.
Really does lend a um special TVkind of TOWNSEND’Ssyncopation to the SHARPIEaverage conversationBUTTERBUTT,doesn’t it?
This is very beautiful and profound, Chris. I’ve had similar experiences and revelations with the idea of SEEING, often just noticing fascinating details in what is around us everyday, even in the mundane - the interesting patterns of cracks in the pavement underfoot, as just one example. It’s an important part of me as a visual artist, of course, but there are times, like you’ve described so eloquently, when this understanding or comprehending comes into sharper focus, with an almost spiritual feeling of AHA! Like you, I’ve been quilty of interrupting conversations to point out some fascinating observation that reveals that I’ve not been listening as intently as I should have :-). Thankfully good friends do forgive me.
Long ago, when I spent time outdoors, I would have been one who failed to see the creatures even when you’d pointed them out, Chris. I don’t process visual information quickly or retain it well and unlike nearsightedness, for which I have glasses, there are no aids for slow-sightedness. But now that my view of the world is mostly reduced to one window and the internet, I am in some ways able to see what I would not have before. One of the reasons I read this site is for the pictures your remarkably vivid and sensitive writing creates for me of things I will never see.
I can also more readily distinguish living creatures in this one tiny landscape that I now know so well. This building is right beside the Interstate, and Caltrans has conveniently placed a light pole not far from my window, which attracts the occasional hawk. I don’t think I’d ever seen a hawk perched (if that’s the word), rather than flying, before I lived here. There is a row of evergreens, meant as a soundbreak, between us and the highway and while I admit to a degree of squeamishness about the rather large rats which have made them home, there is also a resident hummingbird, who considers the feeder hanging outside my window his personal property. He is the one living thing my eyes have been trained to, so that now when I look to the tree where the hummingbird perches between forays, keeping an eye on his feeder, I easily distinguish him, where once I would have been unlikely to detect him despite much searching.
Seeing sometimes requires the consent of the seen, however. When he comes to the feeder, I’m only permitted to watch indirectly. He doesn’t mind presence or movement near this window, and he’ll hover and try to look menacing, at least briefly, if someone comes to the door near the feeder, but he’ll take off if I cast my gaze directly on him. We both seem to have learned the same thing at a young age - if people are paying attention to you, you’re in trouble.