Field Trips

My poet penpal Dan, whom I often refer to as my accidental mentor, gifts me sometimes with quotes and snippets of wisdom so fitting to my state of mind, I wonder how he knew how much I needed them. A few days ago, he reminded me in an email that we have the choice of looking at the flowers or the weeds. Then he quoted French author, essayist, and man of letters André Gide (1869-1951):

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness.  Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

It’s true: sadness and worry are readily available. Inescapable, in fact. So it’s appealing to think that the experience of joy is more than self-indulgence, and possibly even a moral duty. I’m running with this.

And speaking of flowers and weeds, we looked at both of them this week during a wander on a backcountry ridge with our botanist friend Steve. He knew the names and powers and secret habits of every flower and leaf, the mysteries of trees, the characteristics of the grasses that were trembling in the wind. We nibbled on wild strawberries, wood mint, and bits of miner’s lettuce, and we smelled the fragrance of cherry pie in the crushed leaf of a hollyleaf cherry tree. Steve was a walking repository of scientific facts and Latin names–-and I do appreciate geeks––but I was a distracted student. What lingers in my mind are the common names: tidy tips, Chinese houses, monkey flowers, milk maids, pearly everlasting, farewell-to-spring, fairy lanterns, owl's clover, shooting star, Indian paintbrush, larkspur, lupines, golden yarrow, cream cups, chia, blue-eyed grass, wooly blue curl…a poetry of delight.

The next day, Monte and I walked with two friends (young people) out in the mountains of Las Padres National Forest. It was quite rigorous and technical at times, with some uphills, bushwhacking, and a few sketchy sections, and the weather was surprisingly warm. I came home exhausted, but with my soul renewed. Our destination was a certain cave in the backcountry, part of a beautifully sculpted sandstone ridge with long views into the expanse beyond. I had been there eight years earlier, shortly before I underwent that tricky bit of brain surgery that tripped me into insomnia and depression, but I promised myself that someday I would go to that cave again, and now I have.

These backcountry places are an unfailing antidote. William Stafford understood and expressed it well in his poem, “How to Regain Your Soul”, which concludes with these words:

Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way
when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being built,
when campfires lighted caves. The white butterflies dance
by the thousands in the still sunshine. Suddenly, anything
could happen to you. Your soul pulls toward the canyon
and then shines back through the white wings to be you
again.

Soul intact, I said yes to another extraordinary opportunity, a trip to the Point Conception light house, a place I had last visited thirty years earlier. It was functional and gleaming then, its lens still revolving in the tower, though soon to be replaced. (The 18-foot tall First Order Fresnel lens is now on exhibit in the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum.) Although there is something poignant about the lighthouse in its deteriorated condition today, it still possesses a certain grandeur. It seemed to me a magnificent ruin, the winding staircase within leading to a circular space filled with daylight, its walls streaked with rust stains, a portion of the ceiling studded with prisms. Elsewhere the walls were rosewood panels, and we could see where vats of oil had once been stored—a progression from whale oil, lard, and kerosene. The exterior of the building, ravaged by wind and weather and the passage of time, evoked the palette of ancient Pompeii.

We entered the keeper’s house as well, tentatively stepping on shaky floorboards. It was in a startling state of neglect and disrepair, plaster falling from peeling walls, precarious wooden stairs. But among our small group was the man who had lived there for a year as keeper in 1972. It was special to wander through with him and his wife and listen to their reminiscences. Oh, it was a desolate place! But they were young, and they would look out the window and watch the whales migrating, and that made up for a lot of inconvenience.

Point Conception, the storied coast, remains one of the last wild places of California, and it was in its full glory that day…the dance of fog and sunshine, the roar of the ocean, the sky and the land in all directions, heartbreaking in its beauty. I felt wonder, love, and gratitude. My soul shone back through those white wings to be me again, and I embraced my joy.