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?