green and blue coastal views

As I mentioned in my last post, we took a short trip down to California's Central Coast - which we were amused to hear referred to as The North Coast, by those evidently oriented not to the whole state, but to Los Angeles...?

While anticipating the getaway, which was all my dear husband's idea, I started thinking about the edges of the oceans, and how they give us a certain perspective. If you sit or stand on the shore and look seaward, you have all those millions of people behind you, and before you a vastness of water and sky to soothe the eyes and mind, and to make you think. Why don't we all constantly gravitate to the coastlands so that we can be philosophers? It must be because we have so many worthy things we are called to DO.
 
Part of me wants to philosophize in this post, about a score of ideas and realities that are connected in a fascinating way. I could even write a short book for me to read about the ramblings of my mind over the last week, stimulated as it was by books and movies and history and theology that all seemed to relate to our trip.

But I will restrain myself, because I had my time sitting by the shore and now that I'm back inland I need to get on with other things. I won't want to take the time to read that book anyway, so I'll just make this a simple chronological report.

It was at Paso Robles on Hwy 101 that we cut over toward the coast, and the hills began to be greener, with even greener fields of newly-sprouted Something scattered here and there. The farms! Of course we have lots of farms in our county, too, but south of us they grow lots of different things and it does my heart good to see it. Thank you, Lord, for sending the rain to green-up the hills that will soon be golden -- and brown -- again.

Our hotel room in Cambria had a lovely view from the balcony, not just of the ocean, but also of the lush gardens on the property, with some of those favorite plants that I only see when away from home, like proteas and our beloved Pride of Madeira.

Pride of Madeira

The latter is one that we enjoyed many times on wedding anniversary trips we've taken, because it blooms in March. This time I told Mr. Glad that we might consider it "Our Flower."

a protea

town of Cambria from the boardwalk

As soon as we brought in our bags we set off on the boardwalk along the long strand of Moonstone Beach, which appears to have a population of thousands of ground squirrels living under it. They popped up on one side or another every few feet to say hello and beg demurely.

Many benches sit along the boardwalk, too, providing places for philosophers to gaze out at the great beyond. Some had extra, very personalized signs and plaques, screwed into them.

Down below we scrambled on the rocks and found crabs and snails and seaweed in the cracks and tidepools.

All the salt water stands in stark contrast to the drought that is especially bad on the California coast. At our very nice restaurant in Cambria they charged us for water with dinner! Just 30 cents for a bottle, but enough to draw attention to the problem and prevent the waste of all those glasses of water that diners might ignore.

When we left Cambria we drove south and stopped near the town of Harmony to try out the Harmony Headlands trail that cuts through a swath of farmland to link up with coastal bluffs. We could smell the sagey-beachy scent that let us know the ocean was just over the hill, but we never seemed to be reaching a place from which to get even a distant view of it, so we eventually gave up and turned back. On the way back to the car this snake slithered off the edge of the trail. When I followed him into the field he froze and posed.

Neither of us had ever been to the town of Cayucos, which was our next stop. We liked this place a lot, with its casual and less touristy flavor. It used to be a shipping hub in the late 1800's, and it's close enough to San Luis Opbispo and the college of "Cal Poly" that there were lots of students in town, and surfers to watch as we relaxed on the sand near the old pier.

Cayucos from the pier

At one end of the beach a woman drew in the sand with her foot, to draw attention to a seal pup that was lying like a lump near the shore. I did think it was a lumpy rock, until I saw her circle.

She was also standing guard against dogs who had been bothering the animal that she said was malnourished and waiting for the marine mammal rescue people to come. When a group of school children approached, the pup lifted its head long enough for me to snap a picture.

blue ceanothus, cistus, and CA poppies

 










Later in the week on our way home I got in more close-up views of some favorite Spring-y color combinations -- at a highway rest area!

My tangible souvenirs were three, two rocks and a piece of sea glass, my material Gifts From the Sea. As to non-material and most valuable things gained....I'll be meditating a long time on that realm of Beauty.

The Tide in the River

A short verse stuck in my mind over 20 years ago, and has been playing there off and on out of a proper context. I'm pretty sure it came to me in a book of poems for children, and somewhere along the way I incorrectly connected it with Longfellow; when recently I searched around online for a while I found that the author is Eleanor Farjeon.

Only once that I can remember did the meaning fit with the situation, when I was with my dear husband on a short getaway to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We were staying in the company town of Scotia in way-northern California, where the sawmill is built near the Eel River.

After dinner we walked in the dark around the village of Rio Dell close by, and on our way back to the hotel stopped on the bridge to lean over the rail; we listened to the quiet flowing noise and could barely make out the stream down below. Here was the right time and place, and the verse very nimbly popped into my mind, and I recited:

The tide in the river,
The tide in the river,
The tide in the river runs deep.
I saw a shiver
Pass over the river
As the tide turned in its sleep.

         --Eleanor Farejon

Now we're celebrating that blessed day once more, but we're driving to California's Central Coast this time for our little vacation, to the town of Cambria where we spent part of our honeymoon and which we haven't visited since. Maybe we'll go to the beach this time. Let me see, do I know any beach-y verse I could get ready?

Things that might - and did - happen in March.

1 - My sister might send us a box of mandarins from California's Central Valley. She and her husband grow these very fancy Dekopons, as they are known in Japan, under the label Sumo. You aren't likely to see many of them in our U.S. stores for a while, but I just read that in Japan they already have Dekopon chewing gum.

They are awfully good, large and seedless and easy to peel, with a taste that reminds me of the fruits that we children gorged on from our father's trees many decades ago, and which I still will savor if I get down there at the right time of year.

2 - I might decide to make a giant pot of vegetable and bean soup to last us through Lent and beyond. This is the Bean Soup Mix after soaking all night. The small brown beans are Tepary beans I bought at a farmers' market years ago; I found them in the pantry and threw them into the lot.


3 - My CSA box might contain a pale green and spikey cauliflower, which they call Romanesco. I chopped it up put it into the soup, so I don't know if it tastes any different from the usual cauliflower. But it looks interesting.

4 - The osmanthus might bloom, so that when I come up the sidewalk to the front door I swoon over its sweetness, and decide to cut some branches to bring inside.

It's warm enough now that I felt safe sticking two of my old orchids out on the patio; the only one that bloomed I put in the garage. I've gotten so used to them, I might buy a blooming plant to have in the house if Costco is still selling them.

All these things DID happen. I'm loving Lent and Spring.

I praise Modoc, and question Jefferson.

Surprise Valley, California

It looks to me like some cowboy lost a piece of his shirt on this barbed wire. I took the picture when we were poking around in Modoc County, "where the West still lives."

Ten years ago our family met a cowboy who looked like The Marlboro Man himself, as we stood on a hillside watching him lead a string of horses through the sagebrush and across a creek, with pastel layers of aspens and mountains behind him.


This remote and rugged land is one of the areas that has perpetually been found within the proposed boundaries of The State of Jefferson, a longed-for 51st state that would include several counties in northern California and southern Oregon.

The modern Jefferson includes more counties.

Just last month the supervisors of Modoc and also those of its neighboring Siskiyou County voted to secede from the State of California, as the historic movement revs up again.


The Sacramento Bee reported:

[Mark Baird, one of the prominent activists] insists the State of Jefferson is the answer to revive logging, protect ranching and lure new businesses. He bristles at suggestions that these counties need to subsist on social services.

“It’s absolutely infuriating to people up here, this idea that we’re little children and we must have our hands held out,” Baird said. “Well, we would make our own way. We are intelligent, creative, hardworking people, and without the morass of failed social engineering experiments here, we would do fine.”

Barn in Yreka, in Siskiyou County, California

The Modoc county seat is Alturas, a word that means "valley on top of a mountain." Much of this country is considered High Sage Plateau, with evidently enough water for many cattle ranches and hay fields.

If I hadn't had a traveling companion to restrict my stoppings, I'd never have made it home for trying and trying again to get the perfect picture of black steers grazing on varying shades of green and yellow-green, with dark mountains behind them.

Nothing close to the perfect shot was to be mine. Either I was not high enough above the grassland to get the sweeping view, or the steers clumped up close to see if I were bringing their dinner, or, in the case of those next to our our motel in Alturas, they ran away when I was still 50 yards from the fence.
 
Many of these fine scenes were in Surprise Valley, which is even farther east than Alturas, east of Hwy 395, on the other side of the Warner Mountains. This valley's elevation, if you drive up and down Surprise Valley Road as we did, is above 4,000 feet.

The photo below looks still farther east, toward a band of tan that might be an alkali lake, and up into the Hays Canyon range of mountains that lie mostly in Nevada.

Looking east from Surprise Valley to the Hays Range in Nevada

 

 

 

 

 

 

Besides your typical mountains, you can find the Glass Mountain Lava Flow on the western edge of Modoc County, though it lies mostly in Siskiyou County. On our previous visit we climbed on parts of that "mountain" and brought home huge pieces of obsidian and pumice. Everyone's shoes no doubt suffered a month's worth of wear on that terrain.

Glad kids scramble on Glass Mountain.

Murals on several buildings in downtown Alturas express aspects of the region that the residents appreciate. Modoc County has mule deer, herds of wild horses, Rocky Mountain elk, pronghorn, and birds galore. We didn't make it up to Goose Lake, but the bird mural makes me think of Goose Lake Valley, rich in all kinds of bird life. The painted fowl look as though they could fly right off into the real sky.

At the bottom of the mural you can see landscape such as we also noticed on our way up to Alturas, when the rich farmland gives way in places to slopes on which the soil is evidently too rocky and poor to support anything more than the occasional juniper tree. But the existence of fencing makes me think that in the springtime they might run livestock on the greened-up grass.

juniper trees

Fisherman

Pronghorn

    more murals

We ate breakfast at the Hotel Niles in Alturas.

I don't know about the Jefferson thing. It's a nice idea....can you believe we have a lot of family who reside in Jefferson counties both in Oregon and California? Probably none of our kin would be found at either of the cultural extremes within the succession movement, but at least one sports a license plate frame on her car declaring "State of Jefferson."
 
Nowadays there is a public radio station that claims the name, and people can attend the Jefferson State Hemp Expo, "...founded on the belief that through awareness, education, and the cooperation and coordination of citizens and public officials, many complex social issues can be solved." Note the emphasis on cooperation, not separation. Separation was formerly the goal of all Jefferson adherents, and a big part of the content of Jefferson as in its nickname "State of Mind." Currently it does seem that many of the people who use the name don't really expect anything to come of it. To at least a few it is probably just a brand they use to sell something.

another Surprise Valley view

At the other end of the spectrum, perhaps, are the hunters and most of the ranchers, and the politically conservative. This segment of the populace might include the woman who was noted in the police report column in the Alturas newspaper, which I perused while sitting on the bed in our motel room. She called the sheriff and said that if someone didn't speedily do something about the dog that was threatening her alpacas, she herself would "dispatch" the dog. I doubt that was the word she used.

Maybe the serious secessionists would include the people who shoot at Belding Squirrels during the Annual Squirrel Roundup. These are a type of ground squirrel that looks like a prairie dog, and their large populations damage the cultivated fields (I'm guessing it's by their holes and tunnels?), so once a year the residents hold a big fundraiser/pest-control event.

The giggling squirrel-shooter in this video I ran across is embarrassing, but you could turn off the sound, try to ignore the squirrels flying into the air, and see some nice footage of Surprise Valley in the background. The Roundup is held in March, so you will see less yellow and brown than in my pictures. If you make it to the very end you'll be rewarded with a view of Mount Shasta, something that would not be possible from down in Surprise Valley. The moviemaker must have driven back over the pass to the west at the close of day.

The likelihood of all these diverse Jefferson people agreeing to secede seems slight to begin with, and that's not the only challenging aspect of the project. Perhaps the nickname The Mythical State of Jefferson is the most appropriate. Whatever you call it, I do love this country.

On Cedar Pass, between Alturas and Surprise Valley

We return to the secret Warners.

Jess Valley in the Fall

I was sitting on a log with my husband, in the middle of a tall forest. We were on our way back to the trailhead and not in a hurry to leave. "It's so quiet," I said. "You can't hear a clock ticking, or a car on a road..."



"But you can hear pine needles falling on the ground," said my companion.

That deep quiet is one of the things we love about the Warner Mountains and this whole corner of the state, Modoc County and much of Siskiyou County. You might go for several hours, as we did, and not see another soul.

"The Warner Range is not part of the Sierra Nevada range or the Cascade Range, but part of the Great Basin Ranges," you will learn if you read the very short Wikipedia article on them. The Warners extend into Oregon, as you can see from the map at right.

This area is like a secret treasure. The forest and blue sky (we were hiking at over 6,000 feet elevation) seemed to belong to us alone. And it is true that few Californians have been here or even know anything about this hinterland.

Warner view 2003

Ten years ago we came here for the first time, with some of our children, and camped in the summertime. We hiked on the same Slide Creek Trail, out of Soup Springs Campground. I'm posting some pictures of that visit, when the main difference in the scenery was the source of yellow highlights in the views. Earlier in the year it was fields of mule's ears (Wyethia) that made the bright splashes, but now it is aspen trees turning color.

Mule's Ears Summer 2003

The mule's ears have thick leaves when they are green, and after they are dried up, before they lie down on the ground, they clatter sharply in the wind. The aspens make a more whispery noise.

Jess Valley 2003

In 2003 we had stopped in Jess Valley at the corner of Road 64, because the setting of the farms between mountain ranges was perfect for taking pictures. I recognized the spot when we went by and we stopped again for more.

The air is so clean up there, it makes you want to breathe deeply and refresh every cell in your body before you have to go down to the valley again.

by Mill Creek

What the mule's ears look like now

Our hike wasn't the only thing worth remembering of last week's trip, so I will try to write again soon on the culture and events of this out-of-the-way part of our fair state.

Two Glad girls by Mill Creek - 2003

Mountain Air - smoke and writing

GJ in the Tuolumne River

I returned this week from a solitary trip to the mountains, where I stayed in a cabin off the grid for four nights. I could easily write a book about my five days of journeying and lodging, probably a philosophical novel. Or would it be a how-to treatise with packing lists and suggested activities and prayers?

I'm always saying, "I could write a book about ____." And it just occurred to me that I am always writing, as I endlessly analyze events as to their significance, and organize my thoughts, composing and reworking the lines in my mind. If I have a pencil or keyboard handy and hands free I might scribble down some of it, often in a notebook or in the margin of the book I'm reading. But the process has begun long before that.

It wouldn't be a lie exactly, when people ask me what I do, to say, "I write." Because I'm a process-oriented type, I can't see a book ever resulting from my work, but no pressure -- no one is clamoring for a discussion of the things in my pocket or the interrelatedness of the last ten books I read.

I thought I might do some sort of scribbling during my getaway, but I didn't make much visible progress on my "books." Many things that are fascinating to my self-centered self consumed my hours and my thoughts, and I do want to reflect on some of that here, hopefully without rambling on and on.

Evening with brown haze in north

Today I just want to mention one sad thing about my experience: Smoke. The brown cinders from that horrid Rim Fire, the largest wildfire on record in the Sierra Nevada, had drifted south and made the air murky around Our Lake. One day was so bad that my eyes and throat and head hurt from the pollution. But I didn't have to come home early, because it cleared up a little by the next morning.

Another bad air day

I can't imagine what the landscape will look like, the next time we visit our beloved Yosemite and drive through the scorched forests. One thing I know: On August 25th the fire destroyed the Berkeley City Camp Tuolumne where my sisters and I as children vacationed with our grandparents.

It has been many decades since I did water ballet in that swimming hole in the Tuolumne River, or even visited the camp, and it won't change my life that it is wiped out. But what a heartache for the people who spent dozens of formative summers in the context of that special place, and those for whom the rustic cabin life in an idyllic setting was a very recent tradition and expectation. I'm very thankful it was only smoke that invaded our family's lake and village.

Camp Tuolumne in the old days