The Art of Being Ten Now and Then

windy day

m&l

Sometimes it's best to let the day take you where it will, relinquish control or the illusion of it, and just see where you go. On this particular day, we first detoured over to Jeanne's house to see her new chickens. They'd been recently hatched in Iowa, and were now thriving in their California quarters...can you imagine? The future hens of Gaviota.

Then we walked up a steep hill, buffeted about by boisterous winds, leaning up against them laughing sometimes, and descended into a neighboring canyon. We were a motley crew: Lori, Carey, Ryan, Margaret, and myself, not to mention Badger, who maintained his boundless enthusiasm even while he may have been questioning our good sense.

Lori wore a hand-knitted cap in yarns of pink and aqua and stopped often to investigate whatever fennel, sage, or other fragrant natives were growing along the way, knowing which would make good tea and for what ailments. Carey became our fearless navigator, always leading us up new paths, many of which dwindled into branchy brush or precipitous cliffs, but we were not too proud to turn around. Margaret put a scarf around her head, which waved wildly in the wind, and Ryan kept saying that he might still go surfing afterwards, which I suppose says something about being young.

At one point we came to a clearing and sat on a wooden platform eating licorice, which was the only snack anyone had thought to bring. Badger stretched out in the warm sun to snooze, and we talked and sometimes fell silent, sipping the few remaining drops of water we'd carried, enjoying the sunshine, surrounded by springtime...there was something almost mystical about being there. It stoned me, as Van Morrison put it.

In fact, I suddenly felt like I was in a Van Morrison song. Half a mile from the county fair...hands full of fishing rod...saw a man from across the road with the sunshine in his eyes...that song.  And I know it's a song that's full of rain, while we were awash in wind and sunlight, but it was the same feeling...being with friends in the outdoors, having an adventure, the brightness and intensity of everything, feeling uncontained by my usual self. Maybe I was ten years old for a minute. Or no age at all. Time stood still, and the world surprised me...and it stoned me to my soul, as the man said.

I even said it out loud: "I feel like I'm in a Van Morrison song."

And then, the most bizarre thing: we discovered that someone had carved the name "Van Morrison" into the wood. Isn't that weird? And carved alongside Van's name was a hilariously random series of words. I can't remember them all, but they included shitting, penis, and butt. We read them out loud, laughing like the 10-year old boy who I imagined had inscribed them.

But Van Morrison? Who can explain his name in this collection?

We headed home, our route preceded by discussion and enhanced by small detours. There were poppies and Indian paintbrush growing, hummingbird sage and miners' lettuce, grassy paths beneath oak trees, and a couple of creek crossings with peril of poison oak on either side. There were sandstone cliffs and long ascents and further to go than we'd hoped, but it's where the day took us, and it was good.