Big Sur

Before I make a plan for the day, it has already defeated itself. Loading up the sixteen gauge to go hunt for quail, I develop the notion that for Thanksgiving this year I will eat only what I can hunt or gather from the ranch. But the first thing I consume is ground, tropical beans infused with creek water. Coffee.

Undeterred I walk an old jeep road below the cabin. It has been raining the last few days and the brush and grass are slick. As these things go, whenever I head out to look for them, the quail are invisible. When I walk this road for no reason, they scurry around me like, well, quail. Just to keep it real, I take a detour down a ridge toward the river. By real I mean Santa Lucia real—you're not really hiking here until you're off-trail, surfing through waist high ceanothus, and making out with random madrone saplings. And it helps if things are steep, recently burned, covered in rain, and in view of the ocean. Helps even more if there is poison oak, sharp limestone, the scent of coastal sage.

After an hour or so of this, I conclude that if I am going to consume anything from the ground, other than smoking the yerba santa or gleaning withered tomatoes or kale from the garden, it is time to look for some chanterelles.

So I drop over the other side of the ridge, into where the ground is given to second growth redwoods and tan oak. Many years ago, I helped install the original water line that ran through here. Imagine running pvc pipe for about a mile and a half up a steep gully, along a rocky ridge, and down to the house, all the while looking over your shoulder at the ocean. The whole thing was powered by a ram pump so overtaxed it looked as if it was going to expire with each stroke. Instead of looking carefully for fungus or quail, I walk down the draw remembering the water line project and looking for any unearthed pvc.

I stop for a minute to pull twigs and rocks from my boots, shake the water out of my hat, and there is a clean deer skeleton in a small depression of earth. It had been a four-point buck, at least until a falling branch had cracked a point off and mice had nibbled into the marrow. By now I have broken the strap on the shotgun and so I amble/slide down the rest of the draw with a deer skull in one hand and a gun in the other. That's when I remember that the gully I am headed down most likely exits onto a regional park preserve that did not exist when I first came here. Not a great place to be dawdling along with no hunting permit and a gun that doesn't belong to me. Oh well.

I hit the trail of the preserve and stop to read the interpretive sign. It talks, in very sketchy fashion, of how the Ohlone and the Esselen or maybe just one or the other, or who knows, some brown folk had lived here for thousands of years. And then they were gone, logging and homesteading began—you know the drill. Changing ways of life. Me and my gun and deer head walk back up the ridge to make some brown rice, red curry tuna, drink PBR. I See a few puffballs on the way, but my hands are full.

Postscript: After dinner I hear a Spotted Owl calling at dusk. I return call and it responds, but does not come inspect me for consideration as a mate. It is the winged bird of the day.