Guest Column: An adventure only possible here
Did you know that our very own San Gabriel Mountains are as rugged a terrain as any in America? Or that they have had some of the most concentrated rainfall in the history of the U.S.?
I didn’t, until a friend lent me John McPhee’s book, “The Control of Nature.” I knew they were rugged, of course, and that at times the rainfall is breathtakingly heavy. Who, going into them almost every day, as I do, could think otherwise? But the superlatives take them to a new level.
When I wrote recently in this column that the San Gabriels were not boring, it was this element of melodrama I had in mind. And, though humans are sparse on the trails — Robinson Crusoe’s island was a social whirl by comparison — when they do appear they are not boring either.
My most frequent companions are what used to be the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse, now down generally to three — Famine dropped out, as I reported before, and now prefers to stay in bed with a tray of bacon and eggs. I see them twice a week — or perhaps I should say hear them — as their voices ascend from below.
Somehow they lack the menace of the traditional Four Horsemen as they gradually approach, never ceasing in conversation. “I did this…” pant, pant. “Yes, the same thing happened to me…” pant, pant. And that continues after they pass and the voices, instead of rising from hell, descend from heaven.
On the way down, however, all this decorum is thrown to the winds. Did you ever see the Disney cartoon, “Motor Mania” in which Mr. Walker becomes Mr. Wheeler? It’s about a kindly, neighborly man, so gentle that he won’t step on an ant, but once in his car turns into a monster, cutting off other drivers, yelling at pedestrians.
There is a transformation in cyclists on mountain roads too — all cyclists not just these — as they hurtle down, brakes screeching, cutting corners, years younger than when they went up. Instead of observing the slow, stately approach of fate — as they seem coming up — I now shrink out of the way and remember an alternative view of fate, Andrew Marvell’s urgent warning of the brevity of life:
“But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”
Then, a few weeks ago at around 8 o’clock on a Sunday morning, some other humans appeared in my solitary world. I had walked up to the tepee that is built, astonishingly, a couple of miles up the fire road from the Angeles Forest fire station in the middle of nowhere. Only the framework is there now but next to it were a backpack, two shot glasses and a bottle of bourbon.
Before I could help myself to this gift from the gods, two guys — early 20s — appeared and invited me to join the birthday party they were celebrating. They even produced a third shot glass. Evidently the generous-hearted pair were well prepared to succor any of the world’s thirsty they came across.
The bourbon itself was not quite of this world either. It was a brand that, its whimsical distillers explain, had been put into barrels when young and carried round the globe on the deck of a ship, touching four continents, rocking and rolling incessantly, to produce a briny taste and a drink “beyond its years.” I supped gratefully and, yes, detected in the satisfying mix a strain of the Gulf of Mexico.
I’m tempted to say, “Only in America,” but standing there under the warm morning sun, next to that wholly improbable tepee, faraway to the right the Sespe wilderness, home to a condor sanctuary; far to the left the huge mountains above Palm Springs; to the front the Hollywood hills, Catalina Island and the Jet Propulsion Lab; and behind, mile after mile of terrain as rough as any in America, it seems more appropriate to say, “Only in the San Gabriels.”
REG GREEN’s website is www.nicholasgreen.org.