Orange’s Eye of Sauron

Posted on December 20, 2004 in Hikes and Trails The Orange

Even the slightest distance up the Harding Trail brings one into a temple silence. For a short trip, you can go as far as the lone eucalyptus next to the megalithic-looking remnants of a goat shed about a mile and a half in. Then you can return — passing through patches of chamise, mulefat, coastal sagebrush, and the local form of ceanothus which is twisted like a bad dream — enjoying your release from the burnt gases, concrete deserts, and noise of civilization —

Then the telephone rings.

It was the insurance people calling about the replacement microwave. They found me just as I passed the bend overlooking Harding Canyon, where you can gaze up the gut of the Santa Anas over a riverine forest of sycamores and white alders. I was on the north side of the ridge. I answered, thinking “this is impossible” and I told the girl so. How had she reached me here where just seconds ago I had stopped to contemplate a coyote track in the hardened mud?

The view down the canyon — towards where it joins Limestone in the mad run to the ocean — explained everything. On the last tawny summit — beyond the shoulders of the crowded mountains — stood the Orange County communications center. For only a minute or two, I was in its view. Radio waves flowed up the gorge, against winds which could not stop them, could never stop them. The luck of the dial had enabled them to find my travelling Shire using the local Eye of Sauron. I sighed and finished the call, then placed the phone back in my pocket, turning it off.