Bluing and the Talking Mountain

Posted on July 1, 2003 in Neighborhood Weather Writing in Orange

This is the first meme in a series tied to Writing in Orange: write about what you can see from your window.

It’s been hot enough to bake the meat off the bone today. I’m in the living room, cooling off, glancing out into the bluing dark. As temperatures drop, lights come on the porches and through slits in curtains. The skeletons hidden inside Closetland come out, reflesh, and talk to the neighbors in low voices that sound like hitting a long, skinny pipe. Sometimes a car purrs by.

Now I look: Well beyond the purple Spanish tile rooflines across the street, three tightly spaced lights gleam atop navy blue Mount Santiago. The “talking mountain” is how the trail brochure for Holy Jim Canyon describes it, the place where sounds translated into electromagnetic gibbons swing from radio tower to radio tower and then brachiate over to our televisions, radios, and cell phones. My ears are always open, but I have never heard the talking mountain say anything. It speaks radioactively: I have no sense organ except that of touch to detect its microwaves and then only when I get too much, when they mutate cells and the subsequent growth riot presses hard against my nerves.

Between me and the mountain are our cactus-cluttered deck; an asphalt street named Canyon something or other; a pair of condo buildings; a planted gap through which I can see the two summits that make the Saddleback; and a trench — Trabuco Canyon (Valley of the Lost Blunderbuss) — which falls off past a line of tame European hedges. I cannot see most of the sides or its bottom from my red retro chair.

The door’s open. Boadicea stares out and points her ears at the noise. I can hear voices and the meshed hum of air conditioners. It’s been a hot day. The bright light etiolated everything until the whiteness thrown off of every object stung the eyes. Now the colors are blue, navy, purple, black, and the brown of a dried orange where the light hits the stucco condo walls. The temperature falls too slowly — by the tenth of a degree every few minutes.

It’s stupid, trite, to sum this up by saying that summer is here, burning us, but there you have it.