When Mountains Speak

I started my day with a walk down to the main road and up Coyote Canyon. From there, I would do my usual loop, walking all the way up, past our friends’ house, and downhill back to Sacate Canyon.  On an impulse, though, I decided to detour, climbing up a steep hillside to a ridge from which I would drop directly back down to my house. It would be a little cross-country shortcut.  

It didn’t take long to realize the error of my judgement. The ground was uneven, hard, and pockmarked with holes, good territory to trip in. Tall dry stalks of mustard scratched and poked me, and the grassy parts were slippery. I kept thinking that if I could just get up to the top, I would see my house and find the easiest way down, but it was a long, tedious, and meandering climb to a point with a clear view.  I briefly considered turning around and going back down into Coyote Canyon, but after a while, you’re basically committed to the plan you made, and by this time I was more than halfway up. I’d made an error in judgement, but I told myself that this was a good challenge for me, and I’d be proud when I finally got home. All I had to do was not fall down: stick with the plan, but don’t fall down.

Even while implementing a flawed plan, though, there is room for wonder. I was close to my house but more involved with the landscape at the moment, noticing how the grass where it lay down flat looked frosty, bedazzled by the morning light, surprised by the separateness of this world, despite its proximity to home. I walked my clumsy gait, steadied by my walking stick, seeking the narrow passages left by cattle and other animals. I saw a bleached piece of cow bone, and an orange oil drum on its side with a post sticking out, left as a marker of some sort, now hidden by tall grass, and I wondered what vestiges of our human intrusion would eventually remain.

And I looked around with a new perspective at the familiar forms of the hills, thinking about time, a continuation of a conversation I’d had the day before with my friend Donna, a geologist and fellow teacher at the middle school years ago. (A quick backstory about Donna: when she was sixteen years old, she was in a horrific car crash and told she would never walk again. Somehow, she defied that prediction, but every step she has taken for the last fifty years involves conscious, deliberate, and painstaking resolve, accompanied by pain and gratitude.)

I’m honored to be working with Donna again, this time as part of a plan to educate and inspire local kids about the environment, with Donna as geology instructor. Some of the ideas she had shared with me the day before were still floating in my head as I made my way up the hill. “Our human stories are so small,” she said. “Our time frames are so narrow. To understand earth, we must be willing to expand our sense of time.”

The ground upon which I was walking was once part of the 74,000-acre Rancho Nuestra Señora del Refugio Spanish land grant awarded to José Francisco Ortega in 1794. Donna told me that during approximately the same historical period, a physician and chemist named James Hutton was running a lowland family farm in Scotland. Now known as the Father of Modern Geology, Hutton began to observe evidence that the land had been uplifted, tilted, eroded away, and then covered by an ocean, from which sandstone was then deposited. He came to believe that the earth was perpetually being formed, and that its history could be read by understanding how processes such as erosion and sedimentation work.

The same principles apply to this Gaviota land, Donna said, and it’s not finished or static. I began to understand that the story of earth is a story in motion, still shifting and shaping, and our human story, while perhaps huge in its impacts, is but a tiny piece in an ongoing epic that preceded and will follow.

Donna and I brainstormed about ways to convey the knowledge and the wonder to the kids, and I started to feel recharged with that old spark of enthusiasm and inspiration. We acknowledged the dystopian nightmare looming…how could we not?... but we also recognized that this is the very thing we need to be doing, i.e., being of service to our community, teaching kids, giving whatever gifts we can give. As part of this, Donna is working on an essay about geology that she is calling  “When Mountains Speak.”

So it was with this mindset that I made my way up the hill, wondering what forces, across a span of ages too vast for me to comprehend, had shaped the landscape, and were shaping it still. I thought of my friend Donna pushing herself forward with each impossible step, and decided I could override my own little wobbles and aches. I moved slowly, and the slowness afforded new opportunities to notice things. Sunlight struck and blanched the sandstone perimeter, the sea was a sequined mirage, and the ground did not feel steady, but I was connected to it. The day was called Tuesday, and people were busy doing Tuesday things, a few of which probably mattered in their brief human tales.

When mountains speak, I now understand, we must be willing to listen, to be in a place where human noise is least disruptive and listen with patience and intent. Everything was changing, even in its stillness, and heartrendingly beautiful, and I had made an error in judgement, but I was glad to be there. From the crest of the hill, I saw the water tank, the roof of my house, the sudden green of the orchard below. I stuck to the plan. I didn’t fall down.