Green Moment

I came troubled to a troubled land. Drought had closed in on California, and every forecast warned that there was worse to come. This was no ordinary drought; we had driven the rains away. I’d left California four years earlier, brimming with faith and sunlight. Now I was back for a visit, drained by self-doubt and dread. In the past few months, depression had withered my confidence in my own prospects, and the lands I loved seemed to be dying.

But it was March, and circumstances had converged to allow me three days of solitude, my tent pitched in the broadest wild swath of Orange County. Here was a stretch of the sage scrub and woodlands and chaparral I deeply missed—a stretch I’d never walked. For three days, I had just one obligation: to open my eyes to the land that surrounded me.

#

Over those days, I found and found. Found popcorn flowers popping up from the ground. Found a rubber-banded bouquet lying beside a trail, the wild hyacinths already rustling, the paintbrush still spinach-soft. Found honeybees whirring in black sage and wishbone bush and jewelflower with the sound of bicycle spokes sifting wind. Once, I watched a bee wallow a long while deep in the fuzz of a mariposa lily, then stagger into the lily’s steep wall, lift off, and lower herself into the next cup: there were at least a hundred Catalina mariposas on that hill. Once I entered a stand of prickly pear, crunching the hollow loofahs of the oldest pads with my clumsy feet and rasping them with the butt of my pen, and there I found live pads of every age from woody to puckered to warty to plump as a baby’s cheeks. I found one prickly pear blossom already opening, and all its stamens were waving like living legs: cactus flower beetles were swaying the stalks as they jogged through their tasks on the flower floor. I found chamise and sumacs more bare than I’d ever seen them, yes, but also sagebrush after sagebrush that had guzzled shallow rain and now gave supple stems to my stroking hands.

Sun-slow horses clopped past me, their riders’ arms long and brown and clattering with bracelets. Deer swiveled their mule ears to face me, but I just stood staring, and in time, they munched along. Crows gathered above me with the slow swagger of skateboarding teenagers, for once satisfied. A filaree seed landed on my backpack and got to work like an animal, turning over and over in the noon heat ’til its stalk was corkscrewed tight. I snapped a photo for some grateful shirtless fifteen-year-olds and another for a group of pale granddads huffing down a hill. I picked a fallen yucca flower from the spikes below and crunched it like zucchini. I broke a dodder stem and licked the bitter liquid that beaded at its tip. I pinched and ate a glittering lemonadeberry, and it really did taste like lemons, and it dried my tongue and left paste on my fingers.

I pulled mustard. I lost a staring contest with a rattlesnake. I heard my first rufous-crowned sparrow sing. I saw my shadow bump along over lizards and buckwheat—round sunhat, braids lengthened by the evening sun—and the shadow looked healthy. The shadow looked like mine.

#

On my second afternoon, I stopped to gaze across the broad canyon that joined my campground to the ridge beyond and the ridge beyond that. How could my hopes not spread like a smile in sight of so much living land? Above the crowd of live things clinging to the ground, the sky stretched open, and five vultures were gliding. The vultures were no threat. One of them passed low over the sumacs and sagebrush on the slope just beneath me. It slowed almost to a stop in the air, sniffing the land—so close to me, so close. The sun glossed its spreading feathers. With a single whooshing curl of its wings, it slid on around a bend. The others circled above me, tipping left, tipping right, and I took off my hat to see their stretch of sky. I'd been watching them since I arrived, waiting for them to bring their sky-wide wings so close to me, to point their nostrils down at me and find that I was strong. Wheel of the vultures turning, turning, I thought, but they had already streamed into the distance, and eight of them, nine, were gathering half an hour's walk away over a dry creek whose flow of rocks remembered water.

I stayed out that day ’til the air cooled and the light warmed. I knew I should turn back toward camp, but I'd hunched my back and scrunched my shoulders and played it safe for too long. I kept walking. My steps grew louder. I saw the shadow of my ridge on a wooly hill, and I saw the yellowing light above the shadow. This park of mustard lichens and red ground was new to me, but I was at home. As the sun settled behind the land, I felt its loss, but soon, the shadowless air pushed back the earth and sky. The plants exhaled their fragrances as if only night could loosen their pores. I breathed the smokehouse tang of black sage and that moist evening scrub scent I've never tracked to its source. Wrentits called, and a pink arrow of clouds pointed to a spot I'd never visit on a distant mountain. Alive, I walked, watching the arrow darken to smoke. Two doves burst from the path into a cactus, sounding their alarm. I came to a bench, the first I could remember being offered on a ridge of sage scrub. I sat down. Ravens croaked in the dusk.

Two poorwills on the slope behind me were awake and trading phrases, and two on the slope in front of me were calling, too. I didn't know if they could hear each other through the packed dirt of the ridge, but I could hear them all—four poorwills in a drought year calling for mates. I'd lived in California three years before I heard my first one, but here they were common, each advertising a small territory with the same insistent call: “Cool whip ’em. Cool whip ’em. Cool whip ’em.” The wild notes sounded almost electronic. Close but impossible to reach, those birds, calling from the dark ground between bushes.

A poorwill plopped down, chupping on the path behind me, fluttered up into the air, and settled onto the path again in silence. It looked like a dim rock there in the late twilight. I didn't turn to face it, didn't dig through my bag for a light. Well, I thought, maybe I could just turn my head a little more.

The bird grew dimmer. Another poorwill called out from the slope behind me, and then another. Was I staring at a rock? Had the bird flown off? Crickets sang. Cars washed past on the highway behind. Chupping and squeaking, the bird took to the air and flew the aisle above the path, away.

I was still wearing light pants and a t-shirt, wrapping one leg around the other for warmth. The bench shielded my rump from the night air, but sunscreen was chilling my arms. Back in my camp were a sandwich, warm leggings, a coat. Orion's stars poked close. My belly announced its openness with a clean burp. Some bird or bat sailed past. If I stayed, the poorwill might return. I stood up and looked back at the Santa Ana Mountains, crisp and black against the sky. Then I turned and started toward camp, feeling the water slosh along inside my pack.

There was a blur of fog ahead—how far away, I couldn't tell. I walked along shivering, and it seemed to me that shivering would propel me back to camp, and it seemed to me that shivering would open my head to the stars. Fog was filling the canyons on both sides of the ridge where I was walking, but if it was flowing in from the ocean, I couldn’t tell. A bat wandered by, complaining softly when it found me in its path. Some college kids let out a cheer from the campground—no, those were coyotes holding the note of a howl. The mounded bushes on either side of the path seemed blurrier than before. I looked up and couldn’t pinpoint a single star.

The path rose, and I climbed out of the fog. Fog to my left, fog to my right: I was on a headland above a fog sea, walking along beneath blue stars. The ridge where the sun had vanished was now an island. I passed two long puddles where I'd knelt at noon to touch cracked mud, sloppy mud, watery chocolate milk where an insect was skating. I heard a rustle and pointed my dim red light into the scrub; a toad stared back, and I was sorry.

I walked along thinking of the way the light had caught the toad's body and then released it, thinking of the droplets that had rushed through the beam. I looked up: again, the stars were vague, and only Jupiter shone past them. I had seen the fog’s surface from above, but now I was sinking into the fluid, and I hardly knew it. I thought I smelled moisture. An owl sang out from the campground. I was almost there. The path descended, and I pounded along. I skidded and fell, caught myself hands against grit, felt my way forward more slowly.

Back at camp, the air was clear, but the stars were gone. I groped through my tent for leggings, not ready to blind myself to night with a headlamp. What I found was so soft that I had to run its whole length through my hands to confirm that it was the same old velour I’d been wearing for years. I opened the car and found the extra half-sandwich I’d made that morning. Shaking a little, I ate it in greedy bites: cucumber, cheese, avocado, scratchy bread. I gathered the makings of another sandwich and carried them to a picnic table.

Across the dry creek, great horned owls were duetting. I could see stars between the sparse leaves of their oaks, but their voices seemed to be muffled by layers of shadow. The owls woke a thrasher, who sang out a string of lovely curses. Pebbles and stones scattered from a cliff into the creek. Some animal chirped. Crickets trilled. I felt like a rock radiating sun on a summer evening. My head ached a little, but I didn’t care. I was sitting at a picnic table in the dark, smiling. I could walk. I could write. These wild hills would cradle my tent and rock me to sleep. The sun would come in the morning and offer me canyons to range.

#

A few mornings later, I sat down in a coat and boots in my yard in Seattle to read the notes I’d scrawled in California. Despite its native strength, the park where I’d been camping was in trouble. Bulldozers at its border were scraping away wild land for fourteen thousand new townhomes, apartments, houses, and all the stations and stores a new city would need. Just as bad, maybe worse, was the condition of the sumacs and live oaks inside the park. The sumacs should have been growing dense. With a few more winter rains, their blinds of sheltering leaves would have stayed closed all summer. It was March, and already sun streamed into their thickets of bare sticks. Live oaks had sprouted frizzy ponytails of flowers, but only on live branches; they’d surrendered half the twigs and boughs they’d grown in better years, depriving those who needed their acorns and shade. In a future of deeper drought, how would oak woodlands and their animals survive?                   

I thought of the vultures gliding above my sun-strong body. I could give more to California than a whimper, more than an apology. In the last few years, singers had been gathering. Maybe a chorus a million voices strong could call the rains back. There were only a few years left to try. I looked up at Seattle’s white sky and decided to add one sun-warmed voice to the choir.

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