Chapter last: Delirium

I'm walking in the woods. In an hour I may be walking on the beach. It could be the other way around; it doesn't matter. I'm surrounded by incredible complexity. Perhaps the reasons people call this wilderness are right in front of me. It isn't orderly, as we know order to be. Leaves are everywhere, the fresh ones are sprinkled over countless layers accumulated over countless years. No one is coming along to sweep them up, nor is anyone going to gather up the branches strewn everywhere. The downed trees will remain where they fell, and as they decay, myriad forms of life will live within and under them. Things will ooze and slip and crawl and insinuate up and out and over and around, and no one will tidy it up, put it in order, sort it, or any of the like. It is a wonderful chaos that isn't a chaos. Looking close at any bit of anything here, I see the patterns emerge, the patterns of existence, of life, of art or music, or math. And as the patterns emerge, they dissolve into deeper complexity, until the patterns reoccur, and on and on. It reminds me of those fractals that are so mesmerizing when propagated through a computer. As you go deeper and deeper, they don't resolve into simpler forms, but rather the complexity grows and deepens. But yet they are manifestation of a basic pattern, an equation.

And life and reality are far more complex than a fractal, yet it can all be reduced to simple patterns. Paul Cezanne reduced the complex subjects he painted to the cube, sphere, and triangle. Long before Cezanne, someone reduced all the colors of the palette to three primary colors. Einstein reduced the interrelationship between matter and energy to a simple equation, and genetic research has reduced all the complex instructions that produce a living thing into nucleotides, mainly composed of four bases, stuck on a sugar and a phosphate group, and strung in long molecular chains. Pythagoras defined the exact relationship between the sides of a right triangle, and most of the structures of life are made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in neat little hexagonal and pentagonal molecules.

Some people who are not paying attention will assume that it's all very cut and dried. Yet when they try to mix the primary colors and apply them to a bunch of cubes, spheres, and triangles, they will get a childish drawing rather than a work of art. And when they try to combine those bases. sugars and phosphate groups to invent a new form of life, all they will have is a bunch of chemicals. Someone who isn't paying attention fails to realize all the distillation and analysis that aware minds went through to derive these simple, basic patterns from the infinite complexity they are embedded in.

I'm surrounded by that complexity, and I'm trying very hard to pay attention, to not slip into other more comfortable routine patterns. I'm alone as I most often am. With others, there is too much creation of the known world going on. We converse, creating a semantic sketch of reality, and we color it in with washes of adjectives and adverbs. We remake our known world in endless variations of shades and hues and textures, but it is still our familiar world. Alone, the semantic grinds almost to a standstill, and other patterns emerge from this marvelous complexity. It's just a matter of paying joyful attention.

That I'm here, alone, working at this kind of attention is a happy byproduct of being a naturally solitary person. Perhaps ³naturally"is the wrong term. Like the kitten that is taken from its mother too soon and never becomes a proficient hunter, we all have those times when basic life skills are imparted, and if we miss the moment, we never develop them. By some web of events I ended up part of an emotionally dysfunctional family, made up of products of dysfunctional families. Where there should have been psychological and emotional intimacy, there were walls, where only surface appearances were noted, emotional mirrored rooms. In this J. Alfred Prufrock world, I was at the right time, but in the wrong place with the wrong people, and the ability to create deep intimacy was never imprinted. I suppose there are similarities here to being a good salesman, something I tried but couldn't do. The chatting and the presentation were easy, but the most important thing is the close. There are those of us who can't close the deal, in a sale or in relationships. I could feel sorry for myself, as I have from time to time, but that's absurd. It isn't bad, it isn't good, it isn't anyone's fault or credit. It simply is. But life sprouts ever onward, and when a rose is pruned back, it buds someplace else. So, I may watch others relating so closely and naturally and wonder at the ease of it, and they may wonder and perhaps wish for my ability to relate so intimately to place.

All of these states exist on some continuum, but the continuum isn't a line; it's a circle. Keep moving toward any extreme, and you eventually come full circle back to where you started. It all goes round and round. That creek below me flows to the sea along with its generation of steelhead. The fish will return some day to spawn, and a new generation will begin again in perhaps the same water that has returned as rain.

We move. Round and round: this planet, the galaxy, our lives. The specific moves to the general, and the general to the specific.

I know that if I fight the tendencies deeply imprinted on my life, if I swim against the flow, I'll go nowhere. Perhaps if I go willingly, it will take me round again to the place where intimacy is natural and easy. Or maybe the circle is to wide and long for one incarnation -- or incarceration. I tend to confuse the two terms. Maybe I'll start all over again, sans the baggage, and the patterns of life will take on a slightly different color or shape, an equation with a slightly different constant, a molecule with one hydrogen more or less. The patterns will be the same, but in the slight variations new worlds and new lives are created.

I'm standing here in a forest, taking in the light, the subtle shifts in color, the movement of the living things, the moods and shadows; and I'm thinking, ³what would I do if this were my last day on Earth in this incarnation?" What if I were about to be struck by lightning, have a tree fall on me, be run over by a truck, or be in the wrong place when a madman opens up with an automatic weapon? If this were it, my last images of the planet, this life; what would I do, where would I go? I might head for the deep flowering grasses and sweeping vistas, or perhaps the superbly rich redwood forest depths. I might push my kayak out on the slough, where the long legged birds of morning tread softly on mirrored water. Perhaps I'd watch egrets push through marshy reeds or sit on a high bluff over a sunset ocean. I could lie naked in pungent mildflowers; I could paddle out for one final wave, or I could just stay right here, taking in a scene that could contain a thousand universes, a scene so rich in complexity that I must focus to see the endless variations of the basic patterns.

It's all right here, wherever here is. It's all photons, all just primary colors, all a few geometric shapes, all repeating bases on a string of DNA, all a short equation in some cosmic computer, all some undiscovered universal field theory. Everything around me, be it huge or microscopic, is so specific, each with its own shape, its own existence, perhaps its own consciousness. And yet, everything around me is so general, a field of energy, patterns of color, just a long string of overlays of a few basic patterns.

And someone who isn't paying attention will assume that, since we know the basic patterns, we pretty much know what the hell is going on. Yet that someone would probably not recognize the majestic whale in the broken twig or the rings of Saturn in the veins of a dry leaf. They might miss the breath of eternity in a gust of wind or the voice of the divine in a tiny brook. Yes, the patterns are there, just as they are neatly drawn in the text books or painted on an abstract canvas. But the patterns are slippery, elusive, dynamic, magic. They won't stay still. They insist on running themselves through the number crunching computer of reality, and in doing so, they compound themselves geometrically, infinitely, endlessly. At every instant the universe is multiplying the patterns, superimposing them, making a billion little variations, creating universes that create universes within universes. Nothing stays still for even an instant. The specific is moving toward the general, and the general is moving toward the specific. Everything is becoming; everything is both creation and entropy. I look at the scene around me, and before my mind can recognize it, it changes ever so slightly into something else.

Everything I've ever seen or known or been is right here before me, around me, within me: my first realizations of the patterns at mile 66 in Big Sur, recognizing those patterns in the winter orchard in Dunville, and seeing the same patterns in an undulating flock of birds above the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz. Pay attention to it all, and it resolves into familiar patterns. Continue paying attention, and it dissolves again into endless complexity. And around and around it goes, without beginning or ending or reason or explanation. I start wherever I am, and I go on forever, and then I come back to where I am, and it all begins again. And as I consider it, it seems to speed up, and I'm dizzy, but it's a wild, wonderful, ecstatic dizziness. It is epiphany and hysteria. it is madness and absolute clarity.

In this pulsating sea of wonder, a few aware minds that had been paying very close attention noticed a pure form of the patterns in some moment of cosmic disarray. In great scientific or artistic excitement, they committed these patterns--wiggling and kicking all the way-- to the canvas or to paper, as drawings, as formulas, as neat theories. It was finally there. Now things wouldn't keep changing, keep eluding us. We had it pinned down. So the book was closed, the canvas covered, the file saved. The light was turned out, and the door locked. But then some curious mind opened the door, turned on the light, opened or uncovered and looked at the pattern, and then it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle, and it all begins again in a big, blinding bang. Gasses erupt, condensing into galaxies. Elements resolve out, the lighter ones first. Things cool, planets form and produce atmospheres and oceans, and the little molecules bump and jiggle, predicting the life which will take the infinite forms that cannot be predicted. Complexity will multiply, form upon form, until some living thing will happen along with the ability to be self aware, and, while paying attention, that being will notice the patterns that underlie everything, those patterns will be wrestled to the ground and committed to canvas or paper, to be saved for all time, to end the wondering for all time. But another being will come along and see the pattern, and it all begins again.

And I'm holding on to a tree or some manifestation of energy or some geometric shape or some representation of a formula. It's all moving faster, round and round, and it's dizzying. I'm not this specific being any longer. I feel the consciousness of everything around me. I'm becoming one with the trees and the creek and the flowers. I'm feeling the awareness of the earth and everything upon it. I'm expanding like a mist to fill the universe. I'm a part of it all, the general, the universal. And then in an instant, a timeless point on the wheel of time, I'm at the top, the center. I'm in the god consciousness, and I'm everywhere at every time, and I could change anything. But in that instant I realize that the god consciousness isn't a position of power, but one of appreciation. Everything is perfect, has always been perfect, and will always be perfect.

And in that instant, that timeless point outside of time, another realization comes. Once I become the most general and universal, I also become the most specific. God is singular, alone, the only awareness in the universe, and the instant that that is known, it shatters the god-face into pieces beyond number, the great, diverse, expanding complexity of life.

And I'm one of those pieces again, looking down into a pool in the stream. Looking back at me is an unremarkable, middle-aged man with gray, thinning hair and weathered skin. He doesn't look too familiar, but I suppose he is me to some degree. But when I look closer, look into his eyes, I see all the stages of his life from embryo to the grave. Looking even closer, I see the basic pattern of humanity, along with the watchful vulture on that Sonoma County beach, along with the lizard on the small rock on a half forgotten trail, along with all the music and art, along with a million waves on a million beaches, along with the fragrances of Spring, along with all the stars in the desert sky.

The universe is all around me, and I surround it. The universe is wild and unpredictable, strange and mischievous, giddy and profound. The universe is delirium and ecstasy and intoxication, and the universe is mine.

And it all begins again.

You are a creator, as am I. We create everything from sentences to ideas, to art, to reality. We created our gods because we couldnıt handle the disquieting notion that we have created all the wonders and terrors around us.

Weıd just as soon not take the responsibility that goes with all this creation, but when our noses are rubbed in it, we have to grudgingly mumble, ³Yeah, we did that.²

We have a choice of what we create, or we can fail to choose and simply create by accident or whim. We can create pain, mistrust, poverty, ghettos, congested dirty cities, stressful jobs, useless junk, polluted air and water, overcrowded neighborhoods; or we can create blue skies, clear, sweet water, and wilderness.

Iım in the process of creating wilderness, and it feels better than you can possibly imagine. It isnıt that hard: take a walk in beautiful, unspoiled country, take some pictures and some notes, draw some lines on a map, spread out your arms, and shout, ³let there be wilderness.²

There is something called the Wilderness 2000 program. The California Wilderness Coalition is working on this, and our little group in Monterey County, the Ventana Wilderness Alliance is concentrating our efforts in the Santa Lucias. There is Federal land designated as wilderness and afforded the best protection possible. There is also Federal land known as National Forest or BLM land, with far less protection. Often the latter looks exactly like the former; it just has a different name. So, we show that this other land is exactly like the wilderness and abuts the wilderness; therefore, it should also be called wilderness. We put all these lovely pieces of land into a big bill and send it to congress. Then with a bit of luck and lots of lobbying, new wilderness is created. So, with a map in one pocket, a notebook in another, and a camera around my neck, I get to play God and create new gardens of Eden.

My notes read, ³Dec. 28, 1998.² One must be precise when preparing for a congressional song and dance. It seemed more a summer day as I climbed the Coast Ridge road out of the Ventana Resort in Big Sur. The Coast Ridge Road is a steep, dirt road thatıs used by the Forest Service and the local land owners. You canıt drive or bike it, but you are free to hike it for fifteen or sixteen miles along the ridge. About four miles up the road is a unspoiled piece of forest called ³Outlaw.²

The walk up to Outlaw passes through a cool, second growth redwood forest before it comes out into the open grassland hills, vertical rolling hills. The ground undulates away to forested canyons, to the highway, to the sparkling, silver ocean in the distance. Each stop creates a new panorama, a new subtlety in this complex coast. Each digression from the road leads to knee-high grasses.

Outlaw is located between the Coast Ridge Road and the Ventana Wilderness. The Terrace Creek Trail descends into Outlaw from the Coast Ridge Road and drops two impressive miles to the Pine Ridge trail, which is in the Ventana Wilderness. Along this trail are thick redwood groves and cascading waterfalls. There are private holdings and dwellings bordering Outlaw along the Coast Ridge Road. One of these, at the end of a mile-long road, sits atop a hill and has a 360 degree view of paradise.

The day was clear in the way peculiar to a sunny day in winter. The smallest details from miles up the coast jumped out as if they were only yards away. The air was as soft as spring. I walked a way with a visitor who was staying at the Ventana Inn, and hadnıt been up the ridge before. We talked of the weather and the wonders hidden behind every bend in the road. We passed the gate of many locks, the one in which the prohibition against bicycle riding had been scratched off and scratched back on again. It was quite clear that the road was open to residents, forest service employees, and hikers. Anything else invited an expensive ticket. This road that climbs and drops along the crest of the ridge for something like 30 miles would be a mecca for mountain bikers were it not for the very high cost.

Once the other fellow turned back, I was alone. It didnıt seem that anyone was in any of the houses along the road, and there were no more hikers. I stopped and took pictures past the dwellings, and down toward the Big Sur Gorge below and beyond. Then I walked most of the way down the Terrace Creek Trail, almost to the camp ground and the official wilderness.

The Terrace Creek Trail was badly in need of work. a couple of trees were downed over the trail, requiring some climbing and scrambling. As the trail dropped into the thick forest, the leaves made the trail slippery. Once deep in the canyon and surrounded by redwoods, the terraces in the creek became visible. They were actually a series of long cascading waterfalls, frothy white, that worked their way down to their union with the Big Sur hundreds of feet below.

Stopping for a bite to eat back at the top of the trail, I wondered at our penchant for naming. Outlaw was indistinguishable from the thousands of acres east of it, but those thousands of acres were called ³wilderness,² and Outlaw was called ³National Forest.² We are a bunch of arrogant bastards. Even when we donıt rip up the land, trash the flora and fauna, and build monstrosities on it, we still feel we have to give it names that reflect the level of our interest in it. We feel that it is ours to fuck up or to leave alone, but I have a feeling that mom nature will have the last word, and we will be rightfully humbled.

Outlaw wasnıt the only parcel Iıd agreed to survey. Another, much larger parcel, called ³Logwood² was just a bit further up the Coast Ridge Road. It also extended down toward the Big Sur Gorge from the road, and it also had all the qualities of a good wilderness.

Rather than take that long walk up the road, I decided to hike up from the highway to the middle of Logwood, via Borranda ridge, a few miles south of the Ventana Resort. I had decided on the day before Easter Sunday, and with plans made, I wasnıt going to let really strange weather mess me up.

I stood at the trailhead in the rain and wind and almost changed my mind. I didn't have rain gear, and there might not be enough visibility at the top to survey and photograph Logwood. But, the rain was stopping; I'd driven all that way, and I figured I could always turn back if things got uncomfortable.

A short way up the trail the sun started to break through for a few moments at a time. Before reaching the power lines, I was so warm I had to pull off the sweater.

The ridge line was covered in lush, brilliant green from the recent rains, and along the trail were tiny violet flowers. Too small and delicate to compete very well in the higher meadow grass, they had made a niche for themselves along the old roadway. The trail occasionally abandoned the exposed ridge for small stands of oaks and a few moments of shelter from the wind.

An hour up the trail, I walked out on to a rocky outcropping. The wind had whipped the ocean surface like a huge silver-gray meringue. A couple of hundred feet below me two deer paused, looked up and watched me until I moved away.

An hour and forty minutes from the highway to Timber Top. Had it not been for the driving wind, it would have taken much longer. Even though I was sweating on the long, steep climb, the gusting wind kept me from getting overheated. Feeling constantly cool, the only stops I needed were to admire the unrestricted, panoramic view. At times I stumbled forward directly into the wind, and at times it pushed me along so hard that I felt I was bounding along on the moon.

The Coast Ridge Road was deserted. I walked north, always looking over toward Logwood Creek, usually through a curtain of beautiful old madrones. At one point I found an abandoned road going east and down toward the creek. I walked it for a few hundred yards until I was convinced it was totally impassable. The large fallen tree across the road, plus young madrones growing up in the roadway convinced me. Still, I can't help wondering how far the road leads, perhaps down to the creek and beyond. I won't be satisfied until I follow that old road to its end.

Well past the gate and into the area of private inholdings, homes, etc, it was time to turn around. As I walked back south towards Cold Springs Camp, the wind howling through the trees was so loud that I turned around often, thinking a truck was coming up the road. The ponderosa pines were leaning over so far, I was concerned about falling branches or whole trees. The emptiness of the road and the wild howling of the wind gave an eerie, surreal quality to the five mile walk to Cold Springs.

I was going to break for lunch at Cold Springs Camp, but since the wind was coming out of the south, the camp was totally exposed and so cold I couldn't leave my gloves off long enough to eat. So, I refilled my water bottle from the green tank and started back.

I hadn't managed to spot the DeAnguelo trail on the way south, but I was watching for it heading back. I was anxious to start down. The wind was getting stronger, and the temperature was dropping. It the trend continued, hypothermia could have become a problem.

I managed to spot the southern branch off the DeAnguelo trail, the one that follows the old fire break. It was a treacherous decent, bordering on hideous, very steep with a trail bed of loose rock and gravel. Safe footing required concentration. Even below the gravel and rock section, the trail required care. The piles of leaves, now freshly wet from the rain, made the trail slippery, and in places the trail had broken away leaving it scarcely the width of a single boot. In spite of poor footing, the dark stillness of the woods was a welcome change.

The thick cloud cover moving south had been breaking up over the Big Sur ridge line during the course of the day, creating intermittent patches of sunlight and much needed warmth. When the sunny patched arrived at a view point, I stopped at took advantage, scanning the deep wooded canyons plunging to the sea.

The trail alternated between deep woods and open hillside meadows. At one point, just before the trail turned back into the woods, I stopped to enjoy the view. The cloud cover was now big cumulus piles rushing by. I watched the shadows of the clouds on the ocean, like lines of ghostly, gray, giant amoeba marching southward across a silver mirror sea. Sunlight streamed through the clouds in fan-like rays, alternating light and shadow. I might have stood there the rest of the afternoon, but the moments of sunshine coupled with lulls in the wind ended suddenly with gusts that almost knocked me off my feet.

The trail was not always clear, and at times I took a wrong turn, once descending what looked like a trail down a steep canyon, ending at a tiny waterfall and requiring a climb back that often required hand holds.

Further down in a steep, wooded section, fallen trees blocked the trail, necessitating some scrambling. A bit further along, the trail was overgrown with tall stringy bushes covered in yellow flowers. At times the trail was all but invisible under the foliage. Had it not been for the blue tape tied in trees along the way, I'm sure I would have wandered around until sunset, perhaps descending through someone's property or down the middle of a creek.

I was almost seven and a half hours into the hike before I saw other humans, a young couple coming up the trail, just a short ways above the intersection with the dirt road.

On the last two miles of the way down, I experienced hail, rain and even snow. And that was about where I ran into two dogs, who walked up as if they knew me and took it upon themselves to escort me the rest of the way, almost to the highway. It was almost as if I were somehow expected.

Alone on the ridge for an entire day with the sights and sounds of that incredible wind, with those huge, ghostly shapes in the sky and on the water, with an entire season of weather compressed into a single day, I had the definite feeling that it was all staged somehow for me alone. This may seem like the delusions of a megalomaniac, but when you think about the paradoxical nature of life, being at once an individual and a single strand in the great web of life, it is reasonable. In this great planetary unity the individual is both an insignificant player and the play's sole audience.

These moments when the universe presents the individual with some panoramic message, some great inner and outer truth, are not all that rare. They happen every day, but down the mountain, in our daily lives, we are too busy answering the phone, fixing a meal, watching TV, going to work, or debating with our peers to notice. The universe may be screaming its wisdom at us, but we seldom have the time to stop and listen. Alone on a stormy Big Sur ridge line, there are no buffers, no filters to keep the wonder out. The writings of John Muir, who spent his share of hours alone on the mountain, are full of these allusions, and they are there, simply waiting, for any of us.

What did my experience mean. It may not even need to have a meaning. Perhaps it only serves to fill me with the joy of life and the certainty that I'm intimately connected to a benign, beautiful and boundless unity, a great sea of living awareness. In itself, that is enough.

When, weeks later, I transferred my data to the topo map, labeled my photos, and typed up all my observations, I felt the same kind of satisfaction I got from receiving my college degree or the completion of my first book. I had done something worth while, something to take pride in. I had paid a bit of my rent on this wonderful world, and I had deepened my intimacy with Big Sur.

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