Weather

When I was a teenager, I used to say that it took seven years to understand the climate here. About seven years is what it takes to experience a good flood, a big drought, a fire. Rainfall averages—about 20 inches a year here, about 40 over the mountains in Big Sur—have a wide set of data to encompass. Twenty might mean a good number of fifteens in a column with a twenty-five here and there and a thirty-five and a ten. Right now it is raining so hard that I left the trailer to use the bushes and now my hair is soaked and my vest is drenched. It has rained about seven inches since late summer and the creek bed below is only starting to form pools. I am waiting for the day there is a current under the Tassajara road bridge so I can write down how many inches it took to get there.

The climate is mild here, on average, usually, most of the time. And then it is not, for a day or a week, maybe a whole season. Other than frost nip on my left thumb—let me check here, yep still kind of dull feeling in that spot—and on my penis—skiing in five degree weather in old army surplus wool pants with missing buttons, I'm not going to go empirical on that—the only serious weather scares I have had were in the Santa Lucias. I have been both hypo and hyperthermic in the very same spot on the Coast Ridge Road.

The latter was during a very hot day in August after two waterless days of hiking. It was not that I was careless but that I depended, after the first day, on a spring that runs 95% of the time. I pushed on through a mid-nineties afternoon, canteens dry, to arrive at the spring and find it a brackish, fly-covered, 5% mud hole. The next morning I collected some of the least disgusting brack and carried it with me, setting out early for the long climb out of Lost Valley. By mid-morning, my throat was dry, my skin was not sweating very much, and I had not peed.

I stopped along the trail and boiled up the brownish, tea-like water on my stove. I choked it down and felt thirstier than before, drier from standing over the stove. By the time I had climbed up to the ridge, I was faint and dizzy. I lay under a tree in what shade I could find, twelve more miles to go to the car, and tried to remember what the signs of heat stroke were. Far down below me, the ocean crashed around the rocks.

The dizziness did not subside, but the walking was along a road now. A dull, magnetic plodding took over. I had not been this far up on the road but knew that somewhere along it there might be a Forest Service truck or cabin. About a mile or so down the road, I rounded a bend and there indeed was a cabin looking out over the ridge, out over the ocean. On the porch, an old guy was drinking beer. He saw me and waved, offered me one when I hailed him. I sucked it down before getting up the nerve to admit I needed some water. I needed a lot of water.

A couple of years later I went back to Lost Valley in the winter and was caught by a storm. The camp there was shaded by big knobcone pines, the knobby cones being of football size and the knobs being more like spikes. As the wind whipped the trees around, a few cones fell from the branches and I had to choose between sleeping under falling cones of death or out in the open with no tent. I chose the open and the next day awoke in a soggy sleeping bag. There was more water than I could use and up on the ridge above me I could see what looked like snow.

I really don't remember why I had no tent or rain gear. Probably because, you know, the climate here is mild and I was about 19. I had been living in the snow in Oregon and thought I knew what I was doing though, come to think of it, my rain gear had been stolen there. Note to self: when your rain gear is stolen, that's no excuse not to get some more.

Trudging out of camp, soaked to the bone, rain falling fast, I could feel my hands getting stiffer and stiffer. My head was getting dull and foggy, as if each thought needed to be shepherded far across the pastures of my mind before it could be understood. One such thought was that I had to pee, but the realization competed with my hands' insistence that they were not going to untie the water clinched knot of webbing holding my pants up. I stopped and pleaded with them, my bladder entering the discussion and before the three of us could come to some compromise, a hot stream of piss gushed down my leg. I stood there, peeing in my pants, trying to decide whether the stink and humiliation was worth the warm leg.

Probably this took place within 100 yards of where I had boiled up brack a few years previously. But when I got to the ridge I found the wind blowing the trees sideways, and the ocean hidden in deep cloud, and patches of snow all over the Coast Ridge Road. I tried to believe that Pete was going to be there again, drinking tea from a thermos on his cabin porch, a warm oak fire going inside. He was not.

I walked the twelve miles (I think) afraid to stop for too long. The air was not horrendously cold, but I felt that if I stopped too long and tired I would not be able to get going again. My mind floated the idea that I could shelter for awhile and make some of my own tea, but my legs resisted, by now knowing enough of the turns in the road to convince the rest of me that I was almost there. No wait, now I'm almost there. Okay now.

Toward the end of the road, when I knew that soon I would be drinking coffee by the Big Sur post office and chuckling at the whole thing, well except for my piss soaked pants, the clouds parted just a bit. Down below I could see Point Sur, the line of surf on its northern beach a maw of white and blowing spray.

The rain here is cozy tonight, but not exactly comforting. The fire burned hills in the backcountry are probably not ready for this kind of drenching. Over on the coast, folks are probably starting to think about landslides.

The last big ones that I experienced as a kid, in 1986, tore out a section of Highway One between Big Sur and town, leaving people on the coast effectively islanded. My dad and stepmother lived in Big Sur then and I remember one day the three of us, cabin-bound, reading an illustrated version of Robin Hood to one another. By the fire, all day long, reading a wonderful book together.

I remember that delicious feeling of knowing that the earth had taken over the day. That kind of surrendering for awhile, staying inside in pajamas and looking outside wondering just how our house was tethered to the ground. Would it float away?

Seasons

The seasons here are impressionistic, washes of hot and cold, dabs of bright light and dusky shade, minutely etched variations of temperature from canyon to canyon. Warm blue skies and frosty mornings, shards of ice in the birdbath, boletus pushing up through the rotting oak duff. Each element blends and rubs against each other, blurs the micro-climates of the hour with the broad stroke of the calendar. Even at the height of a season no one color dominates the picture for long.

Yesterday I drove up Chew's Ridge and there were little bits of snow in the gullies at about 3000 feet. When I got to my friend's house, I was sweating in the hot sun. We sat on the edge of a steep canyon in the afternoon drinking beer and my head went drowsy, my feet ready to be planted in soil for the spring. Later, sanding finish off of rufous hardwood boards down at the Big House, the wind chimes tinkled the way they do in the regular summer heat breeze.

By the late afternoon today, sanding more decking, I had to find olive oil to rub my chapped lips. Honey bees buzzed in the pink-flowered shrubs along the driveway and the chimes rang in gentle cacophony. My hat was pulled down low over my sunglasses and I constantly adjusted my posture to avoid the full sun in my eyes. I forgot to drink water and when I went to the tap and sucked down a glass, the cold cramped my stomache.

Tonight it is cool again and the air around the trailer is oaky from the wood stove. A waxing crescent moon is bright in the sky, almost to the western horizon when I went outside last. I can hear the deer over in the draw between here and the big house. It has grassed up faster than anywhere else around and they gather there. I saw them today at mid-day, sprawled around in the plush green, the way they will do when the real heat comes.

Cachagua creek has not run yet, might not at all. When it is raining, I walk down to the bone yard by the road and listen for a current. On the little path down that way, I usually pick some artemisia, bitter wormwood sagebrush, and chew it as I walk. Past the wormwood, black sage covers the hill. When the air is wet, the smell of the sages is overwhelming on the road.

A mystery: the wild pigeons are in some kind of die off. A big one landed at the bird feeder the other day and waddled around like a drunk. Then I found a dead, unwounded one over on the road to the Big House. I mentioned this to a friend and he said that he had recently seen many dead along the Carmel River, pulled some of them out.

I have no idea if why this is happening or if it is a regular occurrence.