Hands-On Intro to Wild Things and Toddlers

Like a lot of other Southlanders, I was drawn out of the house by this month’s heat wave. The extended rains and cool of January had left me in about as good spirits as a rattlesnake. I needed to view a world not defined by rain, mud or cops in slickers forbidding you to drive home.

The wilderness off Ortega Highway seemed the logical place to go. My last visit had been in the summer, one of those long hazy days in the Ortega when everything seems to happen in hot, slow motion. Summer is a nice enough time in our local hills and mountains, but I’ve always preferred fall and spring. I looked forward to Ortega in winter.

Our group was four adults and three children. The children traveled light--just their bodies and their clothes. The adults were laden with walking sticks, snake sticks and packs filled with binoculars, field guides, notebooks, pens, extra clothes, food and drink, cameras, lenses, batteries, gloves, specimen jars, utility knives, hats, bandannas, cellular phones, sunscreen and more.

“This is the only way to get my kids interested in a hike,” noted my friend, referring to his tonnage of gear. I suspected he was being disingenuous. I had my own mountain of equipment to account for, and I have no children to interest in a hike or anything else.

It took a Chevy Suburban and a Ford Bronco to get us and our belongings within striking distance. We stopped first at the Tree of Life nursery on Ortega Highway, where employee Debra Raeber gave us a little tour.

The Tree of Life grows and sells only plants and trees native to California. Originally they catered to companies forced to replace natural habitat around their projects; Tree of Life was one of the few places in the state where you could purchase enough pots of, say, California lilac to make the ground around a new housing development, mall or street look almost sort of a little bit kind of approximately somewhat nearly like it used to. With the popularity of drought-tolerant landscaping over the past decade, Tree of Life has become an even busier place.

We walked past rows of native plants and trees in pots. Each species was identified by a sign, which gave watering recommendations--usually astonishingly stingy--as well as size at maturity, planting applications and price. It was consoling somehow that California natives are generally not real expensive, especially considering that only a few have been offered commercially for any length of time.

Their beauty--rugged but delicate--was formidable. All around us was the flora of California, reduced to starter size, organized in rows and displayed before us as if we were gods in search of landscape treatments for our new worlds. There they were, some of the best of what California had to offer us: paloverde, oaks of all description, ceonothus, manzanita, Western mountain mahogany, summer holly, Pacific myrtle, flowering currant, California and matilija poppy, evening primrose. I liked their names.

We said our goodbys and hiked off into the wilds. “Wilds” isn’t usually a word synonymous with Orange County, but that is a quirk of perception and language more than a defect in the land. It was easy to forget, as we lumbered down the first embankment with all our junk, that just a short distance from here is a county park that has periodically been closed to human beings because of mountain lion attacks.

It is also easy to forget that the last bear was seen (and shot) in this area as recently as the mid-1950s. (Rumors of bear sightings continue today.) In fact, Ronald Caspers Park is off-limits to anyone under 18 years of age, though park rangers are quick to point out that this is because of the county’s liability for mountain lion attacks, not the attacks themselves. It strikes me as odd that a government has to close off public wilderness not for the physical safety of said public but for the fiscal safety of said government. Caspers is, after all, a “wilderness park.”

The day was warm, low 80s, blue sky, little breeze. The creek was full of rainwater, rushing nicely over the rounded rocks, twisting back up into the hills toward its source. There were islands of wadded brush in the midst of it, testimony to last month’s ferocious downpours.

We watched as a red-shouldered hawk circled low above us and shrieked down our way. Through the binoculars you could see the tail bands, black against white, clear as the pattern on a referee’s jersey. I don’t know why, but he just kept screaming at us.

There are few more precious gifts we can offer the young than an enthusiastically revealed natural world. I and the other grown-ups took it upon ourselves to corner little bits of that world so the children could appreciate it.

After great effort I captured a worm salamander and showed it to 3-year-old Tyler. He poked at it and ran off; we let it go.

After much scrambling after an alligator lizard, we presented it to Tyler. He poked at it and ran off; we let it go.

Toughest to land, by far, was a Western skink which, after a hot pursuit involving four adults, we finally captured and exhaustedly proffered to Tyler. He poked at it and ran off; we let it go.

Same for Jerusalem crickets, millipedes, fence swifts. That we are the kind of adults often enthralled by natural items that hold little interest at all for a toddler pleases us--if nobody else--immensely. And, of course, it allows us to buy tons of gear.

By 4 o’clock I was back home. It was still almost 80 degrees on my porch. The sunlight felt undiluted and fresh. I unloaded stuff from the truck, brooding that we didn’t find any snakes, which in their natural habitat always send a shiver of excitement, respect and quiet awe through me. (Not a single snake on the face of the globe, meanwhile, was brooding about not seeing me.)

At 6 p.m. an epic fog arrived. It came pouring down the canyon, thick as milk. It engulfed Laguna Canyon, my home, the entire world, for all I knew. The temperature had dropped to 50. I finished putting away all the accouterments of a day in the wilderness and realized that if somewhat normal weather prevails, I might not be back outside on an 80-degree day for some months.

It was time to get back to winter.