It was more of a little walkabout than a hike. The sort you take when the falling sun is cooling the air and making the hills a shade of gold not available to the jeweler. It was on a little uphill trail in San Clemente which neatly divides that city’s suburban sprawl and the neighboring Rancho Mission Viejo Land Conservancy. I had the dog, a few waters, plus Miles Davis, who, even through the headphones makes me think of polar bears and dolphins sliding around a deep, ancient blue cave.
We have called the dog Plato since he was just over eight weeks old, which I suppose makes him a philosopher in name only. Though I often look at him and think of Emerson:
“For all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life”
Perhaps he meant all creatures. Looking out over the land I missed the tall, yellow tipped weeds that filled the hills in the first flush of spring. Long and thin, whole masses of them would sway in the wind giving the landscape a shifting emerald shimmer. Now it was just chaff. I saw a coyote on this trail once. It was at dawn, foggy, the coyote held my eyes for a long beat until scampering off into the bush. I always look for him here, remembering fondly that unexpected intrusion of the sublime into an otherwise mundane morning. Plato has forgotten the incident, or so it seems. Stink bugs, the scientific name of which escapes me, spotted the dirt every few strides, their bodies giving off a perfect black sheen like the wet fin of an orca. A great oak is stuck nearly horizontally to the hillside that slopes down on my right. To the eye whose day is starved of nature there seems to be a whole forest in its fragrant, gnarled branches.
An irregular beat begins to punctuate the slow strains of jazz trumpet, which swirl around like rings of smoke in my ears. I remove my headphones to hear big booms and staccato machine gun fire in the air. There’s a marine base just south of these hills. They must be conducting exercises with a great range of weaponry, so varied are the sonic traces of explosions, of metal striking metal. With the headphones back on I could only hear the low bass of artillery fire, the thump of which made Plato jerk just slightly on his leash.
The path to the summit, as we amuse ourselves by calling it, winds around a water tower and brings me eye level with the sun. I keep my eyes down, both to protect my retinas and to watch the ground, making sure its dead twigs do not suddenly become animated, for more than a few times I have spotted rattlesnakes on this section. We kick up dust and gravel, tiny components of which hang in wisps and spirals in the amber air, suspended by these last minutes of direct light.
The top of this hill is cold, even in summer; I put my back to suburbia and look out at this small stretch of wilderness, fenced in barb wire. Little yellow signs appear everywhere warning of mountain lions. The setting sun has drained a lot of the detail visible just minutes ago, but still the view is worth a deep sigh, a smiling glance at the dog. I ask him, the dog, if he’s thirsty. He licks his jowls and takes a step towards my backpack, which I have slipped off my shoulder. I uncap a bottle, and hold it just loose enough so that the laps of his tongue can seesaw it up and down, sending little splashes into, and all over, his mouth. I adjust the angle as the bottle grows empty, and he satisfied.
With some alarm I notice the horizon is now empty of its fiery ball; it will be dark before I return to the trailhead. Indeed it is not long before the sky begins to glow a purple blue, like candlelit amethyst. Trees just twenty and thirty yards away, where before I could make out bough-hopping birds, have begun to assume indistinguishable forms in the descending gloom. We quicken our pace. The dog’s fatigue has made his face into a permanent, panting smile. Soon it would grow dark enough to see visible traces of the growing orchestra of detonations beyond these hills. From time to time, I caught the flash of rabbit eyes aside the trail, followed always by their hasty, crunchy retreat through the underbrush.
We were only just a hundred yards or so to the trailhead when I saw the owl silhouetted atop the fencepost. I thought at once that it was a large bird, though it stood frozen as I moved closer, shedding doubt upon this hypothesis. It was backlit by the hidden explosions, which sent irregular pulsations into the dark above, a kind of flickering, militaristic aurora borealis. Time passed and it seemed as though we were looking at a statue, like mice fooled by plastic bird figurines put up by farmers. At last I saw its inimitable clock face swivel and wheel around towards us, the fire of its eyes catching a little light, its body and wings still immobile. I had imagined the great bird and I to be face to face, and yet it had been like us, watching the war games play out against the sky. Man must seem so absurd to the animals, blowing things apart in the deep twilight. The dog and I watched the owl watching us for a long time that night, staying as still as we could until at last he spooked and flew away. Over the clatter of guns in the distance you could just hear the beat of its white feathered wings.
Ross Andersen
outsideallday.com Contributor
