Deaf to the World

Posted on June 7, 2004 in Hikes and Trails Nature

Last week, I started out late in the day, so I went up the Edison Trail in Whiting Ranch Wilderness. A man came down from the ridgeline. I was surprised to see him. The trail was well-overgrown with tall grass, thistles, and poison oak. No one came up here, I thought, except for me, because it wiggled up the mountain and then down to a dead end overlooking a cliff face overgrown with liveforevers. To connect with the Serrano Cow Trail, you’d have to jump fifteen or twenty feet into shallow sand. So most people looked at the map and didn’t bother with this one. I could come here for solitude and sugar bush berries.

The figure approached. An older Persian man grinned at me from a nose worthy of Darius the Great. He pulled out his earphones when he saw my lips moving in greeting. “There are some deer at the end of the path,” he said excitedly.

“Yes,” I said. “They’re common there. Last October I saw a mountain lion here, too.”

“Oh yes,” he smirked, “they’re around.” And he put his earpieces back in their holes.

I shook my head. The warning hadn’t sunk in. He needed his full senses out in this country, but he preferred to blind the most important one with Mozart turned up full. Why weren’t the allegros of the sparrows and the largo of the wind good enough for him?