Six truths from the wild before packing it in

MAYBE YOU’VE KNOWN FOR years what the beach sand in Fort Bragg is made of, and what they call Kareem Abdul Jabbar on the shooting range. (“Sir” is a good answer, but incorrect.)

Maybe you’ve long had a good idea what a speleologist means when he says “moon milk,” and what Mars Bonfire, composer of “Born to Be Wild,” does over and over in his spare time. (“Cash royalty checks” may be a correct answer, but it’s not the one I’m looking for.)

Maybe you had all this in your memory banks, but until the last 17 months, I knew none of it. All these discoveries have come in the course of feeding the weekly thousand-word beast that is this column. The job has meant inspecting the raw and semi-raw West up close, and listening to some of those who live closest to the dirt, stones, waters and myths of California and environs: the career lifeguards, the desert squatters, the compulsive rowers and indefatigable duners, the guys who work all night to carpet Big Bear with fake snow when Mother Nature withholds the real thing.

Sure, it’s a letdown to descend upon some obscure spot, then find that Mark Twain and Huell Howser have both been there ahead of me -- yet again -- but I’ve come to consider them forces of nature in themselves. A sane man can’t complain about this job. It’s put me in the forest at midnight, on a Death Valley dune at dawn, in the Sonoran Desert under wet thunder. The other day, up here in the Sierra, it put me in a meadow amid a potent snowstorm: a billion flakes thickening the air, flocking the pines and junipers, obscuring my fresh footprints. How do they tell the difference up here between epic events and everyday winter weather?

Anyway, I wouldn’t be giving this gig up, except that you’re probably ready to hear some new voices on this page (that, for the record, was the fifth time I’ve used the word “epic” in 17 months), and I’m ready to stay a little closer to home, my home, where the population is expected to rise significantly soon. So this will be my last Wild West -- I’ll be sidling over to report for the Calendar pages in coming weeks -- and this is what I’ve learned:

I am apparently overpaid. The seasonal rangers who spend their summers chasing and macing wayward bears in Sequoia National Park, occasionally trailing 200-pound bruisers into the woods at midnight -- they make $13 or $14 an hour.

Sometimes litter glitters. Those shiny pebbles on the shore at Fort Bragg are sea-smoothed bits of broken glass, left over from the ‘50s and ‘60s, when the local folk used the beach as their city dump. Now the territory is a state park, and the philosophers in Sacramento will have to decide whether it’s forbidden, or just good hygiene, to carry home a few gleaming bits.

People, placed in Western settings, will surprise you. When Jabbar shows up for gatherings of the Single-Action Shooting Society, where 19th century attire is preferred, his handle is Trinidad Slim. Meanwhile, since 1997, Bonfire, 61, has climbed each of the 276 Southern California mountains over 5,000 feet -- not once, not twice, but eight times.

For catchy phrases, you can’t beat a geology textbook. For instance, if you go looking for the steepest sand dune in Death Valley, you’ll find that it’s right around 34 degrees, the “angle of repose” at which sand slips downslope and finds a new equilibrium. And that calcified, whitish-looking stone found on the walls of many caves -- that’s moon milk. Drinking it is not recommended.

There’s less real West out there than you think. In 70 or so years of casting this territory into movie myth, film crews have abandoned props left and right. That gorgeous old log cabin near the entrance to Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico? Left over from a “City Slickers” shoot. That handsome old Indian rock art near Barker Dam in Joshua Tree National Park? Rangers say it’s fake, put there more than 40 years ago by Disney TV crew members who didn’t think the original markings showed up well enough. If we’re not careful, our imagined history is going to blot out the genuine article.

Washington needs reminding that This Land Is Our Land. If citizens’ groups don’t rise up, the federal government is going to push ahead with plans to make us pay more and more for access to land we already own. Under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that was signed into law last year, the Forest Service and a handful of other agencies have a 10-year authorization to bill us for stepping into all sorts of priceless landscapes that used to be free.

And speaking of priceless landscapes: Forty-four years a Californian, and I never found my way to Lake Tahoe until now. I guess it’s not as clear as it used to be, and those cheesy hotels near the south shore don’t exactly make a perfect gem setting, but I can’t stop looking at that blue water under those white slopes. In fact, I’m packing up my lately learned lessons right now and finding a path to the water’s icy edge. I hear there’s a beautiful spot down there where Huell Howser once quoted Mark Twain.

Editor’s note: After 70 columns, Christopher Reynolds is moving on to another assignment. Next week, the column continues with new writers who will forge ahead in the outdoors.