Two People Framing an Excursion

Posted on December 5, 2003 in Biomes Encounters Neighborhood

As I set out on my walk, a teenaged girl who had kinky black hair and pale coffee skin approached me from the parking lot of a private neighborhood recreation center. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” I replied. “What can I do for you?”

“Shake my hand?” she asked. So I did and I smiled. Without breaking my stride I went on and she went back to join her friends in the parking lot. I assumed she was doing some kind of social psychology experiment. I suspected that I was a exception to the usual rule of suburban paranoia.

Fifty steps down into Whiting Wilderness, I saw a tiny monogamous or perhaps unmarried California Mouse crossing the trail. It was no longer than the length of my thumb above the knuckle, walnut brown, intensely holding it life close to it as it made a sudden imitation of a rock right there on naked pale earth which had been scraped down to mineral soil. I walked around it, tapped my walking stick six inches away from it. The rodent didn’t move until I got about twenty feet away from where it crouched.

Inside the arroyo at the foot of the hill, I saw a couple of rabbits and squirrels scrambling along the gnarled branches of the oaks. Tracks left by trail bikers, walkers, horses, deer, rabbits, and either a small bobcat or a lost domestic cat spotted the sandy bottom at the foot of the access trail. In a glade where I often saw mule deer — just before the place where the Line Shack, the Whiting, and Serrano Cow Trails smashed into each other — I saw a buck with six or eight points and a doe. They munched on the lush green shoots beneath the oak branch vault. I tried to get a good picture of the buck with my digital camera, but the antlers disappeared in the final images.

Once I jumped when I heard a hard pounding coming up behind me. The runner who frightened me was apologetic. “It’s OK,” I said. “It’s just that I saw a mountain lion a few weeks back. He ran, but this time the sound was coming up behind me.” “Sorry!” he said again. “Don’t worry about it, ” I said.

I climbed to the top of the Line Shack Road and combed the mesa for toyons and prickly pear cactus bearing ripe fruit for our Christmas card photo. The chamise blooms looked like snowy peaks and canyons.

When I returned the same way I came, I ran into a man outside the recreational center who asked me “how it was” “down there”. I told him about the buck and the doe. “It’s getting to be that season,” he said. He wanted to go down. I told him about the mountain lion that I’d seen. “Really?” he asked. “Down there?” “Yes,” I said. “Down there.”

When I got home, I cooked brown rice.