Going to the Mountain
I still feel new to my hilltop after three years here full time. It’s days like today that make me feel that way and stare in wonder at the beauty of the distant views. It forces me to remind myself that views may be one of the secrets to the universe. If you are a believer, like I am, that state of mind drives everything, very few things other than perhaps sunshine, drive state of mind more than distant views. I suspect that has to do with some combination of our natural wanderlust and perhaps with the primordial sense that we can see whatever is coming at us and can gird our loins for whatever defenses we must muster. Of course, that is probably too cautious and pessimistic a sense of life and its deliverance, so I prefer to think that those distant views are about all the positive images of the future that come from squinting out over the horizon.
If you had asked me last month what November brings to the hilltop, I might have said that I recall rain storms and grey weather, but that would have been mistaken. Last year we did have a particularly bad few days of storms, but I think that was more an aberration than not. What November really brings is finally some relief from the 80s and along with the cooler 60s-80s temperatures comes a clearness in the air that is as fresh and invigorating as any time of the year. It is the clearness of the air that particularly inspires me this morning. It started with looking in the mirror while brushing my teeth after a good long uninterrupted night’s sleep. The first thing I noticed was how clearly I could see the blue of the Pacific Ocean over the twelve or so miles of declining hills between here and the water. As I have explained in the past with my earth science nerdiness, my calculations say that I can see 40 miles of ocean from my elevation. That is 53 miles to the horizon from 1,700 foot elevation minus 13 miles to the beach. Today I can see every inch of that 40 miles and the hills of Catalina’s southern bluffs to boot if I look through that particular saddle to the Northwest. The ocean is often covered with a marine layer of clouds, but this November day has all of that cloud cover wiped away, allowing the azure to pop as the cool molecules between me and that ocean are made transparent and probably without any water vapor to shield my view. I can actually see boats of different sizes out there, plying the waters offshore, headed for some unknown ports of call like John Masefield’s cargoes of yore. There may not be any Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, or Stately Spanish Galleons coming from the Ithmus, maybe not even a Dirty British Coaster butting through the Channel, but there are a few container ships heading for Long Beach and a sailboat or two on day trips to Catalina.
But the view that sparks the real passion in me is less about the ocean and the boats that are always sailing off to every destination, and more about the views of the mountains to the North. When most people talk about taking vacations, they usually choose between going to the shore or going to the mountains. It is the normal choice of recreation and has less to do with whether you want to immerse yourself in the primordial waters of our collective evolutionary origin and more about whether you prefer warmth versus cool and perhaps gregariousness versus peaceful solemnity. As much as many people enjoy walks along the beach in the off-season and briskness of winter, people almost always think about mountains when they think of winter holidays since clean white snow set on hillsides of pines and frozen lakes ready for skating are common images of the season, not to mention the more obvious holiday scenes of sleighs and holly. But the real contest between shore and mountains takes place in summer where the lapping waters of the seashore with its calling gulls and its warm sands can lull the strongest among us into a Vitamin D induced nap in the direct sunlight or even the shade of an umbrella as we release our favorite summer reading into a soft landing of micro-particles of silica that sift away the time like the turning of an hourglass. The alternative to that warm coma with all its attendant warnings of later-life melanoma, is the soft cushion of pine needles on a sun-dappled forrest floor with the quiet lapping of fresh lake water awaiting a brisk morning dip or perhaps a nearby babbling brook running over smooth rocks from the basement of time, as Norman Maclean might say.
Perhaps the thing I like most about the location of my hilltop home and the views I prize from this perch, are the distant grandeur of the San Gabriel, San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains. I see them all the best from my desk window that faces due North. It perfectly frames the picture. Directly in front of me is the hillside that is a mile away as the crow flies, or, more appropriately, as the hawk soars. It is randomly littered with homes that are tucked away on their respective hillside perches to perhaps maximize the views back in my direction or maybe to just find some seemingly private spot to enjoy the chaparral. But that hillside is pedestrian compared to what looms in the distance to either side, the mountains that form a part of the grander Sierra Nevada range that gives the spinal strength or weakness (depending on your view of their primordial formation or the inevitability of their fault line demise) to the Californian coastline. While there is plenty of ranch land and verdant bottom land between here and the mountains, they tend to delineate the part of the state that has drawn hordes of immigrants to enjoy the Southern California sunshine from the lonely and dry tracks of desert, Death Valley, Mojave, Anza Borego and Sonoran that spread from the Salton Sea northward and eventually to the Great Basin of Nevada where the salt of life is laid bare and baked in the heat of the midday sun. If you look at a map, it is those three mountain ranges which make Southern California the Mecca that it has become, because without them the desert would stretch to the sea the way it does in the less hospitable climes of Baja California and the Western Coast of Mexico. The mountains are what gives the coast definition and that all-important flow of life that comes from water.
If you think I attribute too much value to the mountains that I see from my desk window, I would ask you to stop and think about Earth in a longer view. It is perhaps one of the great subconscious forces that make this hilltop such a ponderous place for me in my retirement. Yes, I used to go to the mountains to ski in the winter, and that always felt very vital to push back against nature at its most harsh moments of winter. And yes, I have enjoyed the cool mountain air in the warmer times of the year when escaping the heat seems a necessity. But it is the timelessness or perhaps, better said, the timefulness of the mountains that makes me bow to their strength. The inescapable fact is that I will be dead and gone, my children will be dead and gone and my grandchildren will be dead and gone and this view of the mountains with their November snow caps will still be here largely unchanged. God only knows what or who will sit on this hilltop to appreciate this grand view that has me so mesmerized, but I suspect that the lizard on the rock will still be here waiting for a passing insect to snatch from the air and that the hawk will still be zeroing in on that same lizard as it lazes in the warm updrafts caused by the coolness of the sea fighting off the warmth of the not-so-distant desert.
A thousand years from now the Earth’s climate will be vastly different and perhaps man will have adapted or perhaps he shall have perished from the fragility of his own temperate range. The tree will still fall in the forrest whether we are here to hear it or not, and my thoughts as expressed in this story will forever be in the universe, on their way from my little, insignificant hilltop. Those mountains will never come to me, so I will forever be mindfully going to the mountain.