Tuttle

Posted on October 10, 2004 in Geocaching Neighborhood

“Let me guess,” said the man opening the gate to Black Star Canyon Road. “You’re Tuttle’s brother.” I had my hand in a crevice. The worry of the moment, as I reached for the olive drab-painted Altoids can, was whether a Black Widow spider or a scorpion made its nest in the crack. Then there was the fear that every geocacher gets: what if this fellow is a muggle, a thief who takes the cache after you leave. I decided to play it out as if I was just sitting on the rock trying to get a photograph of the piece of Red Rock across the wash.

“I have no idea who Tuttle is,” I said, honestly.

The fellow laughed. “It’s the beard. You’ve got the beard.”

“He might make a better brother than the one he has,” said Lynn.

The stranger chuckled. “You’re a lot cleaner than Tuttle is.”

He got in his van and drove it through the open gate. Then got out, closed the gate, waved goodbye, and drove up the residents-only road. Lynn and I followed him on foot, seeking two more caches.

We found them. From the first, Lynn extracted “a purple pet” — a euphemism for a Barney pendant hanging on a colored string — and from the second we expropriated a green frog and a teddy bear ornament bound for anywhere. We left gifts at each spot, then walked back down the canyon. For some reason, more than a dozen SUVs came down the highway, in a long, disconnected line — two to five cars at a time. I noticed a sequence of large white letters smack in the middle of the asphalt near the first geocache. I tried to spell them out backwards D A O R E T A V I R P. Then it occured to me to read them as a driver approaching from the gate would.

The man at the gate passed us again, honked, and waved. At the gate, a man on a motorcycle just sat looking at the first minutes of the hour long sunset over Limestone Canyon. We got in the car and I decided to drive up Modjeska Canyon to scout for a spot for a new geocache.

Outside the Modjeska Canyon Community Store, a man with a white beard that flowed off his face like Niagara Falls sat at a picnic table talking to a friend. He wore a red plaid shirt and blue jeans. Gestures circled his head as he talked. He might have been describing a cathedral or a big cave. He peered at the friend through a pair of black rimmed glasses.

I decided in my mind that this had to be Tuttle. The man’s being exuded caricature. He had a memorable beard. I didn’t stop to ask him his name. The identification satisfied me. We drove up narrow Modjeska Canyon, going slow as grandparents and parents walked their children wearing Halloween clothes a few weeks early along the narrow lane. Here and there a sycamore or an oak encroached on the pavement. A sign marked a “Chicken and Peacock Crossing”. This time I drove to the very end where the County of Orange maintained a wilderness preserve that no one could enter without a permit. I turned around on the bridge and went home via a route that hopped a ridge, that did not take me past the store and the man with the white beard who had to be Tuttle.

On Sunday, as we drove around Dana Point — an alien world of the haughty rich and wealthy — I reflected about the man sitting beneath the live oak tree and the man who believed that I was brother to him. Living as I did in Portola Hills, I stood between two worlds. For a moment, a member of the old world — the Inner Orange of the Canyons where hippies and bikers hid in deep canyons — mistook me for one of his own. As we drove around, Lynn admitted that if we ever got the money together for a house, Modjeska Canyon would be a nice place to live. I, too, wanted to live there, where people braked for peacocks, children wore their costumes throughout October, and a man in a white beard drew vaults in the air. I wanted to live there instead of among those who sold their homes every two years to move on, the neighbors who had no faith in the land or feeling of permanence. Until we could arrange it, we would remain on the edge, in the borderlands, between the magical Forest of Arden and the place where the New Orange slopped up the hillsides but stopped at the sight of the mountains and the wild, wild canyons.