Midsummer Excursions

Posted on June 29, 2005 in Driving

The midsummer evening stretched until nearly nine and then the darkness fell. I had travelled from my home to Aliso Viejo and then over the San Joaquin Hills to the Costa Mesa Freewa and, by a devious route, into Orange. This staged me nicely for my regular Tuesday night drive along Santiago Canyon Road.

Between Orange and Aliso Viejo, I took a tollway. I have mixed feelings about The Toll Roads: they privatize what should be public. On the other hand, there isn’t that clamor and scrape of the bulldozer blade along their path. When I drive the Foothill Feeder near my home, my eye often catches small shocks of nature such as a copse of sycamores in a close box canyon near the Tomato Springs toll station.

I don’t know what they call the line of bandit boxes which snatched $3.50 from me, but while I waited in line to pay my tribute to private enterprise, I glanced off to my right to see what I could see of the Irvine skyline. Gray boxes of differant sizes rose from the flat valley floor. The roads, the streams, even the trees were gray because we have come to that season of the year: the inversion layer returns what we send to the sky as burnt offerings and makes us breathe our holocaust.

Santiago Canyon Road. Yes, I have to write about that again. Between nine and ten, I climbed Chapman and pushed through to the wildness of Santiago Canyon. The nutty, sour scent of a skunk stretched across the road like a veil or a web to catch my nose as I passed it.

At the twisty parts within the canyon, I jumped when I saw what appeared to be two red eyes in the sky. Then as trees and then the hills blocked the view forever, I realized that what I had seen was the taillights of a car ascending Modjeska Grade on wings of asphalt.

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I must talk about skunks. But another time. I hope that some of my readers will speak about the small animals which live in their areas — the voles, the civets, the mongooses, the badgers, etc.