Into the Wild
No, this story is not going to be about Chris McCandless sitting on top of an old bus at the base of Denali waiting to die of hunger. Emile Hirsch played that role well in 2007 and Sean Penn directed it like he himself saw that there was no tomorrow. That story was about a privileged kid who wanted to test himself to the limit and took a journey of enlightenment that burned bright and then flamed out with a bright flash, ending with a literal whimper. I could not and cannot relate to that story in the least. It feels so self-absorbed and irresponsible and shows an abject devalued view of the value of human life. I have seen that sentiment up close and personal too many times in my life in the most challenging places on earth, not to simply reject it as craziness. We are all seeing it on the news this week in Kabul at the airport as Afghans are thrusting their bodies at, on and even into transport planes at the Hamad Karzai International Airport in scenes that rival the clinging to helicopters at the top of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975. This may seem like a desperate attempt to preserve life, but what it really represents is the devalued state of life in such devastatingly and repeatedly war-torn areas like Afghanistan and Vietnam (at least, in the old days). I’ve seen it on the open-sewage streets of Lagos, Nigeria, the favellas hanging on the hills over Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, and the backward villages in Punjab, Pakistan and West Bengal, India. I’ve seen enough to know how hopeless and raw it all feels. One must almost suspend belief in the grace of God when one is in it up to one’s neck.
I too find myself stepping back into the wild on this hilltop every day, but it is a very different kind of wild. The harsh realities of nature are the dark side of that moon, but I get to live in the brighter side that seems always to face the sun. That is the beauty of San Diego and this hilltop in particular. Just five feet outside my office window is a ten-foot high boulder that I overlook. That boulder is from the dawn of time on this earth (no, I cannot date it specifically, but the geologic history of the area suggests that it is somewhere from a young 200 million years ago to 1.8 billion years old). It will look no different when man has left this earth after his allotted additional 250,000 years, which should be 5,000 or so generations forward. I work on the assumption that many of the critters that share this hilltop with me will still be here long after man exits stage left.
The critters are all around me and as I spend more and more time out of doors, I interact with them more and need to consider how to best do so. This week I am putting in a few pathways down the back hillside. Up until now there has been one circumnavigating path next to the house and under the deck. That path is a river stone path with variegated sized Arizona multi-colored pebbles, which I supplemented a few months ago. This is largely an edged path that crunches as you walk on it and looks quite neat and tidy if I regularly keep the odd weed from growing up through it. I’m undecided if weed barriers do anything but show their slips regularly in my efforts to abate weeds. The new paths are planned for decomposed and stabilized granite, which is currently sitting in a superbag on the top of the driveway, awaiting hauling, spreading and tamping where I indicate. I have scoped out my intended paths and started raking them out to make them apparent to the workmen that will lay the DG down on Saturday. It looks like I have been artistic in choosing a winding path, when in reality I followed the logical contours of the hillside and purposely tried to disrupt as little of the natural order as I could. There is one small patch of pleasant ground cover that I went around because I liked the natural feel of it all.
In the process of carving out the northern path along a small ridgeline, bounded to the north by randomly spread boulders of varying size, I noticed something interesting. Tucked away under a spot formed by the leaning-in of two medium-sized boulders is a den. Something, most likely a coyote, based on the size of the den, had burrowed out a warm and dry spot for themselves. I carefully looked inside since it was daylight and the nocturnal habits of coyotes led me to believe that it might be asleep in there just then. But the freshly dug den was empty, probably because I had been playing in the dirt of the opposing southern hillside and probably roused the beast. I am always on the lookout for rattlesnakes, but I don’t really expect to encounter bigger game in the yard even though I have been too close for comfort to a bobcat at times. Coyotes are wiley things (hence, Wile E. Coyote of Looney Tunes fame), and they are shrewd enough to stay out of people’s way. Whoever owned this den had slipped out the northern entry and gone off downhill without a trace or sound. The den impressed me. It had a nice ventilation hole and/or peep hole on the higher southern side so he could keep an eye out for human passers-by. It was well shielded from view unless you stood right in front of it. And it favored the side of the hill where there would likely be much less commotion or need to go unless you were Joventino going to throw brush over the cliff once every few months.
I had a hose with me and I could have drenched that den rendering it far less accommodative and useful to the resident and perhaps driving it further away into the ravine. But I decided to let it live and let live. This coyote (or whatever) had every right to his or her space and I had no reason to bother it since it had gone to the trouble to orient itself away from my craziness in the rock garden. It just felt right to ignore it and go about my business, leaving that northern side to his business of survival. After all, isn’t that all that any of us is doing on any day on this earth?
After finishing my sweaty morning labor on the rock garden, I wandered up to the patio to take a break. I keep sodas in the mini fridge, so I got a cool one and sat at my mosaic table with the hummingbirds all over it. As I sat there I heard a rustling sound over my right shoulder on the small knoll above the patio (A spot I had previously used to create another rock garden complete with several bonsai trees and a Japanese pagoda). I often hear little critter sounds in the brush and other than listening for a telltale hiss and rattle of a rattlesnake (none seen on the property since May), I was inclined to ignore it. Then it occurred to me that I had once seen from my office, a coyote standing on that knoll surveying the landscape. While the thought struck me to turn around, I chose not to on the theory that a coyote would not bother me and would certainly not pounce on me without warning.
Just then I heard an explosion of sound and a skyrocketing chubby quail lit out from the knoll straight at my head, through the palapa, over the spa and downhill to one of the regular quail feeding spots in the cactus garden. I ducked, but felt that was too close for comfort. Then, before I knew it, another propelled itself on the same trajectory (quail are specialists at follow-the-leader from what I have observed), and then another and another. I finally decided that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and needed to get the hell of the patio before some clumsy quail (they really aren’t so very bright) impaled me in his desperate attempt for glory and his next seed meal.
So, while my coyote friend quietly went about his business over the hill, my excitable quail turned out to be my real danger. I find every day another definition for my voyage into the wild.