Scorched Earth Walkabout

Being an adult means no one can tell you to take the hiking poles off the kitchen table at dinner time. Or the glue gun. The stack of “to-do” lists on the back of envelopes from insurance companies and non-profit agencies get classified as self-help journaling. And all four food groups can be legitimized among black bean corn chips and a Lagunitas IPA.

 Adults usually have a car; one per. Sometimes gas money. Toss in the freedom to act on an impulse, like driving 60 miles in the pre-dawn dark, hustling uphill through humid summer air to hike a 10-miles stretch of scorched earth: dodging charcoal limbs of chaparral truncated and protruding from a foreboding blanket of soot, just to watch the sunrise.

Is it madness, obsession, passion, dedication or gluttony, to want to do it again? A few days later, driving 120 from Oceanside during rush hour, I’m headed for my same trailhead ½ mile from the Pacific Crest Trail, dodging poison oak, headed to the scarred swath of forest for sunset. 

Once again I am alone out here. Everyone steps on the PCT to be alone in some way, to find their walkabout on some part of this 3,000-mile meditation zone. But now it is different than it was. The scrub oak, manzanita, pine and oak groves are ash beneath my feet. They are a memory. The new reality is step-puff, step-puff, as each footstep on this perfect Zone System landscape generates tiny mushroom clouds of ash around my ankles, suspending my boots on a quilt of bones.

Lured off trail towards the jagged Mojave yucca: bleached white against black rock, I follow the alluvial rivers created by CDF helicopter water drops, hoping to not sink deeper than my calves. Nearly 2,000 firefighters battled this quixotic blaze that began in the desert below, sweeping up steep mountainous slopes on easterly winds to eventually render 7,055 acres to ash.

Stumps mark my bare legs like sidewalk chalk. Congratulating myself for watching my steps, having not one but two headlamps, plenty of water, and… wait, my first aid kit is in the other backpack. Darn. I’ll just head back to the trail and be careful. It’s almost dark.

Sneaking up on a skeletal tree with pine cones melted onto its outer extremities, I hit the shutter. It’s the only sound, and it echoes like a snapping twig, angering a sleeping adult Southwestern Rattlesnake three feet to my left snoozing under a prong of charcoal branches. I turn to see him coil back to strike. In less than another second I've gauged its length and therefore the distance I need to be away from him. I am a gazelle on a steeple chase leaping over dark arms and legs reaching for me, not even making contact with the soft moon dust as I fly through the forest at warp speed. I am the cartoon character of a hiker who outruns their backpack, only to have it slingshot in eventual pursuit of its rightful place on the hiker’s body once she has come to a dignified stop. A quarter mile later, the burn of my shoulder straps strangling my circulation eases up and I can hear through the thump of my heart.

I found my spot for sunset, and wished I had a glass of cold pinot grigio. Or a Lagunitas IPA. The smell of fire was everywhere, and I waited.

  What is the color of burned manzanita flesh at twilight? It carries a strange silvery sheen until the sun goes below the horizon and the red resurfaces for a moment; and then its gone. The stalks united in a stark army march into the twilight. This is a forest of ghosts; dead trees walking.

Fire changes everything. The incremental evolution of every species adapting to its environment and sources of sustenance is wiped away. What this forest has generated in its living petri dish on a stark ridge beneath Mt. Laguna, seeking preservation against the ghastly pine beetle, the insatiable spotted oak-boarer beetle, perpetual drought, is rendered moot. Enter the careless smoker, the negligent BLM worker filling up on donuts when his jeep catches fire, migrants fleeing a campsite before fully smothering a cooking fire. But we refuse to learn. Our hubris is impermeable.

A half moon casts just enough light as I wind my way back 3 miles to my trailhead, scoffing at the idea of using either headlamp. Stepping to the acapella lullaby of cicadas, I am hoping for gentle winter rains, lush fields of spring wildflowers.