COMMENTARY : The Hills Are Still Pristine After 28 Years

Driving into Glendora after being gone for 28 years, I was pleased to see the South Hills still standing unspoiled, a tiny, self-contained wilderness thrusting up defiantly in the middle of San Gabriel Valley suburban sprawl.

Sitting off by themselves a good mile south of the San Gabriel Mountains, the hills appear to turn inward on their own peculiar spirit, like nothing else in California.

The hot afternoon smog didn’t dim the emerald luster of the tall grass, didn’t obscure at all the riot of gold and violet wildflowers twisting up the slopes and disappearing into the coulees. I knew from my one year’s experience here long ago that in the heat of summer one’s eyes would be drawn to the dark groves of white oak and butternut that lined the little canyons. The hills were dry like that first time I laid eyes on them, as a 14-year-old in 1963.

My family only stayed a year in Glendora, but in that year the hills touched me with their cranky, defiant energy, and I am a different sort of person today because of it.

The freeway to Pomona, built across the valley at the end of the ‘60s, presses hard for a mile against the south side of the hills. Traffic shoots across what once was a huge meadow with a big white oak in the middle of it.

My buddy John Zenyuk and I would lay under that tree at dusk, blowing on wooden crow calls until we were blue in the face. By the time it got dark we’d usually have a dozen or so squawking crows hopping mad in the top of the oak. We did this for months. It never ceased to thrill us, calling down those crows from the sky.

At twilight every day a great migration of crows flew in a long black line from somewhere in the San Gabriel Mountains, down over the South Hills and on to the San Jose Hills south of Covina. There were tens of thousands of crows, an endless inky column three and four birds across, back to tail, swinging out like a great rope across the sky for almost an hour every evening, unreeling from somewhere in the mountains and spooling up somewhere over the hills on the southern horizon.

John and I would be in position under the big oak when the line started across the sky. Five or six crows at a time would drop down to investigate our calls.

Usually we would pull two or three groups down from the sky before we hyperventilated ourselves silly. One group at a time, the big birds would fly back up and rejoin the line, just like cars merging onto a freeway.

Once, I snuck out of my house an hour before dawn. I walked the silent streets, avoiding the dogs I knew. Taking my place under the big oak in the meadow, I looked anxiously to the south as the first light of dawn began to crack. As the sky turned from slate to flannel gray I could make out the great column of crows coming out of the south like a flying snake.

I don’t know why the crows moved back and forth across the valley every day like this. My guess would be it had something to do with water.

The path I used to scramble up on the west side of the hills, just a few blocks from the house I used to live in on Washington Avenue, is fenced in now. A kid today in my old neighborhood needs a bike to get over to the fine park and trail access the city of Glendora has set up on the north side of the hills. Hiking the fire trails I saw two fresh sets of horse tracks. I was hiking on a weekday afternoon; for three hours I didn’t see another person.

On my way down about 3:30, I passed three boys about 14 who were on their way up the trail. Each of them carried his own Day-Glo backpack and they were kidding each other, as junior high boys will do. This is going to sound like some dumb public service announcement but, hey, I have to tell you that in actual fact one boy was white, one was Vietnamese and the other was Hispanic.

Something in me wanted to stop and talk with these boys, stop and tell them about all of the afternoons I had started up into these hills when I was their age, by myself or with my friend John.

I wanted to explain to them how what they found in the hills would spend someday for them at moments when money seemed meaningless, but I decided that the last thing they needed was to hear something like that from me. I didn’t want to preempt even a few minutes of their time together in the hills.