Sunset Hikes, Tales and Jumping Cactus Perils

The guide explains the perils of jumping cactus, most notably the plant’s ability to sink hooked spikes deep within the skin and then release the branch containing the spikes, leaving the screaming hiker with a succulent Velcro from Hell.

As he talks he passes out as snack food wild oats from plants near the cactus, as if to suggest the good-guy/bad-guy bounty of the cosmos.

But the girl with the big hair grimaces, turning to her mother and saying: “God, I really want a Ding Dong.”

Nature sometimes does this to people, sends them back for familiar comforts, especially when it’s made this intimate--in the face for inspection, touch, smell and taste.

The guide is Peter Rice, a Los Angeles native and Malibu resident who makes it plain: “I am a Native American from these parts. And this is my land to care for and respect.”

Rice, of course, is no American Indian. But his spiritual ancestry is clearly Chumash. And his words on the land betray modern usage; he doesn’t own any, he merely feels responsible for it.

A telephone lineman by day and a born actor by nature, Rice comes to Wildwood Park here on Saturday nights to lead sunset hikes that lead families on two-mile, two-hour loops to experience native plants, animals, foods and history. He instructs, tells stories, entertains, fires off one-liners, even does a glow show in the dark. The intrepid--on this recent trek, 16 adults and eight children--follow him and each decides what’s beautiful and horrifying about nature.

It all makes for a performance hike, if there is such a thing, against a backdrop of Wildwood’s spectacular topography and rich human history. And the set changes--starting at 7 p.m. in light, moving through dusk’s pinks and cobalts and ending at 9 in blackness.

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Wildwood is ripe for such celebration. Deep down, we all know the place.

“Gunsmoke” was filmed here. So was “Wagon Train.” If you were always truly adult, the film “Wuthering Heights” was shot on this high mesa framed by sharp, precipitous mountain faces and gashed by a deep canyon made sweetly fecund by Wildwood Creek, a waterfall and several springs.

Of course, today it is a preserve: a hole in suburbia’s doughnut, 1,700 tract-engulfed acres that were formed by volcano 30 million years ago but got dunked beneath Ice Age water and a lake a short 12,000 years ago.

Rice’s short-form human history of the place and its surroundings is straight Billy Crystal: “Chumash. Spaniards. Norwegians--check all the street signs around here, names like Janss. MGM. Orange County developers. And here we are--hi.”

Wildwood, however, retains its namesake soul. Living here are 60 species of birds, 37 species of mammals, 22 species of reptiles and amphibians, 150 species of plants.

Growing are the rare Conejo buckwheat, Conejo dudleya, Lyon’s pentachaeta and myriad forms of yucca and sage, xeric scrub and California grasslands. Springtime brings chocolate lily, goldfields, tidy tips, Mariposa lilies, wild onion, California poppies, lupine, golden stars, blue-eyed grass, Indian paintbrush, wild hyacinth.

Walking, crawling, or flying through are mule deer, coyote, bobcat, raccoon, ground squirrels, cottontail rabbits, red-tailed hawks, scrub jays, meadowlarks, kingfishers, Anna’s hummingbirds, American kestrals, black phoebes, California quail, raven, road runners, brown towhee, cactus wren, Pacific tree frogs, gopher snakes, fence lizards, western toads, and--in those rare instances when they can’t find supper in the more remote but adjoining Santa Monica Mountains--mountain lions.

Its a bounty that certainly accounts for the permanent villages and seasonal hunting sites occupied by American Indians here about 6,000 years ago.

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Nighttime makes it different. It’s quieter. At sunset, colors are saturated, unbleached by sun. Wind dies down and a delicate mystery descends. Owls hoot. Crickets and frogs fill the canyons with a throbbing white noise.

It’s a special setting too for Rice. His audience on the Moon Ridge Trail is drop-dead silent. And he uses that to personify the surroundings, to emphasize that the Chumash considered animals and other living things and rocks and objects to be their equals worthy of respect.

He stops at a coast live oak. Nobody’s particularly impressed until he notes that it provides shelter to squirrels, turkey vultures, hawks and rodents, and that it supplies one of a variety of acorns, which, when cracked, ground, and hand-washed of tannic acids, made up 60% of the Chumash diet. It’s possible, it becomes clear, to eke out a living in this wild, beautiful place.

Onward to the hoarhound plant, whose leaves are boiled and sugared for the raisin-like nectar that soothes throats. From a canvas bag labeled “One Earth, One Chance,” Rice passes out hoarhound lozenges to favorable reviews. Farther up the trail is the first of numerous “rub ‘n’ sniffs,” this one California sagebrush--with menthol enough to repel insects and overcome body odor. Straight overhead a raven circles: a loner, his wedge-shaped tail his giveaway.

Farther up the trail still is the plant that provides proteinaceous saliva seeds, which Rice, dispensing handfuls, identifies as Chumash peanut butter and Chumash Visine. Everyone eats them as Rice warns: “They expand on the tongue, they expand in the stomach and make you feel full.”

By this time, however, the girl with the big hair has forgotten the Ding Dong and her companion’s suggestion that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups be placed along the trail for all hikers squeamish about Rice’s idea of trail mix. Somehow--perhaps the spell and unrecognized comforts of such a wild setting have set in--the saliva seeds set just right with her.

Nature is like that.