Commentary: These hills are not boring

I have had a hangover for weeks. Every morning I wake up tired. The devil takes the form of a warm blanket, whispering “Just another five minutes.”

I don’t even have the consolation of having had a rousing time the night before. This has nothing to do with drink.

It’s that hour we added a month ago. Until then my internal clock woke me at about the same time every morning and then, as readers of this column know, I’d go for a hike in the national forest, fresh as a daisy (the daisy is a very ancient flower, I should point out) beginning a little before six o’clock. Absurdly early, many of you must think, but fitting neatly into my working day and always, yes always, satisfying and often exhilarating.

A few weeks ago, six o’clock was daytime. Since then the one-mile drive to the trailhead up Angeles Crest Highway has been a daily hazard: the strings of cars coming from Palmdale, headlights on, three or four car lengths apart, 10, 15 or more at a time are a shock around every blind corner. I’m reminded every morning of what a tough commute that is.

Once on the trail you are conscious of being an intruder since nobody up here read the announcement that it is now 6 a.m., not 5. At the beginning of March the Western Nuthatch and its fellow warblers “chanted melody on every bush” as Shakespeare puts it. Now you sense them rubbing the cobwebs out of their eyes and groaning. “Oh no, here’s that Suburban Nuthatch waking us up again.”

Sometimes the moon is still high in the sky and when it is close to full, you have the uncanny sensation of someone walking alongside you, until you realize it’s your shadow.

I’m not alone in sensing dislocated time. Two days a week a little band of cyclists starts out behind me and I can hear them relentlessly overtaking: I used to call them the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse. Then one dropped out — Famine, I suppose, who couldn’t stand the exercise on an empty stomach — but even the stalwart threesome have been deplorably irregular in recent weeks.

By the time I reach the overlook, a mile and a half on, where I generally turn around, it is light though you can see an unbroken stream of headlights driving west on the 210. Curiously, there seems to be nothing going east, until you realize the taillights are not visible — except at the Berkshire exit where brake lights suddenly flare up. You feel as though you are on an eagle’s perch with even little changes in individual lives clearly visible.

Some days the mist covers everything nearby except for the Verdugo Hills shooting out of the grayness. On other days, far away on the Palos Verdes hills, a single office building will glow like a tower of gold, the only light visible there, then fade into the background as the angle of the sun shifts.

So, I shouldn’t complain. Like all things in the San Gabriel Mountains, every view every day is different and that one-hour change jolts you into a dramatic reminder of it.

La Cañada may be one of the most boring places in America (see Carol Cormaci’s column, March 31) but these hills aren’t.

REG GREEN is a La Cañada Flintridge resident. He invites readers to visit www.nicholasgreen.org.