Ashes in the Spring

Among the words I dislike being awakened by in the middle of the night are, in no special order of distress, “My water broke,” “What’s that noise?” and “Let’s go for a hike today.”

The first two phrases are hissed in whispered urgency, leaving no doubt as to the consequences if I fail to respond.

Either a baby will be born in the back seat of my Pontiac, or a burglar prowling around downstairs will haul away everything we own--including us.

I have not, thank God, been awakened by either of those phrases in recent years, though the third brought me out of a pleasant sleep just last Sunday.

My wife is an early riser, given to bouncing out of bed to read, rearrange the furniture or plow the south portion of our yard in preparation for the spring planting.

I, on the other hand, am content to lie there until I rot, untroubled by the necessity to stay active. If my limbs freeze in place, I will have a martini later and uncoil in the languorous manner God intended for a man in his cruel middle years.

But she is not to be dissuaded when she wants to hike, urging and cajoling and finally reminding me what Kathleen Turner did to Michael Douglas in “War of the Roses.”

I realize what she is saying in the nick of time and move my head just as her fist smashes into my pillow, leaving me to wonder whether she actually would have smashed me had I not moved.

She only smiles and says, “Who knows?”

So there we were trudging among the pearlies everlasting in the mountains above Malibu, on a day laced with silver. Spring was in the air all right, but winter had edged it with the slightest chill. Strands of fog drifted in from the ocean.

It wasn’t long after we started that a man, his wife and three kids strode past us singing lustily. They were wearing lederhosen, which is what Austrians wear to tromp through the Alps.

“My God,” I said, “it’s the Trapp family. The poor fools are still fleeing the Nazis. The war’s over!” I called after them. “Germany lost! I think.”

“It’s just people having fun,” my wife said, “a situation with which you are only vaguely familiar.”

“I know the Von Trapps when I see them. We’ll find their nanny on a hilltop up ahead, her arms outflung, singing, ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music. . . .’ ”

“Don’t talk, Martinez. Just hike. Be at peace with the popcorn flowers and the sticky monkey plants.”

It was a day full of walkers. A cross-section of Angelenos hiked on a Sunday beguiling enough to raise the dead. This is a part of L.A. they cannot imagine in Omaha.

A man in his 80s, all muscle and bone, who had never touched a cigar or a martini in his life, bounced up the trail with the vitality of a bobcat. He even looked like a bobcat. It wasn’t natural. Old bobcats shouldn’t bounce uphill.

“There’s something for an old columnist,” my wife said, gesturing.

Two young women came down the trail. They were wearing bikinis that barely covered their primary erogenous zones. The universe reeled.

“If staring were a felony,” she said, “you’d be doing life plus 99.”

“It beats looking at the sticky monkey plants,” I said.

We reached the top of a knoll.

A field of wild flowers stretched below us, clustered among the chaparral like brush strokes of glowing pastels. Pinks, whites, lavenders, golden yellows and deep reds, sloping in carpets of color toward the gleaming Pacific.

“Look familiar?” my wife asked.

“Ashes in the Rain,” I said.

It was the title I had given a column and later a book of collected essays. This was the place that had inspired both, a hillside once scorched by fire then reborn in the vibrant colors of spring a year later.

“The purple phacelias,” I said, touching a flower and remembering the brilliant purple that had pushed up through the ashes.

“Close but no cigar,” she said. “Those are fiesta flowers.”

“They sure look like phacelias.”

“They look like fiesta flowers,” she said.

It didn’t matter. We discovered the wonders of spring at every turn. Shooting stars. Hummingbird sage. Wild morning glorys. They were colors no painter could ever re-create.

“Aren’t you glad you came?” my wife said.

I shrugged. Never admit happiness.

On the way back, we came upon the old bobcat lying on his back, smiling at the sky. He must have seen the girls in the bikinis bounce by.

Requiescat in pace, old bobcat. There among the phacelias.