i have no strong reaction really /
even if august is my least favorite month /
though september is my third least favorite /
(after july) /
(i’m not fond of summer) /
walking nonetheless /
peaceful morning /
birds are chattering but not in the foreground /
pleasant background but maybe a bit too quiet /
like they’re a bit shy perhaps //
the smoke is there, unmistakable by nose and eye to the sky /
bathed in too-orange morning light /
but at least as yet i don’t detect that familiar ache in my occipital lobe /
and for that give thanks /
and i guess i’m reassured /
the year’s rhythms carry on /
summer is cresting /
it may yet be hot again, it’s not too late for that /
but this weather today is what people imagine when they dream of moving to the golden promised land /
smoke notwithstanding /
nothing good comes free though /
the weather you dream of comes hand in hand with clockwork dry spells /
after all a sunny day is one generally without rain /
especially out west /
freak summer thunderstorms notwithstanding //
i like things a little damper and darker /
thus full of life /
but i don’t mind this place either /
its gnarled oaks and bay-scented tangles, /
its hills and marshes and of course, /
the coast with perching cypresses and rock-strewn “beaches” /
and its silent standing mountain watchers living off fog and sea spray /
and most of all, their ancient towering guardians /
now turned sentinels /
burning as they are /
spreading soot across the bay to valley, mountains, and high plains /
and i miss them /
they are the best part of coming home /
(other than the people) //
my day driving up made all the difference for my sanity /
wandering through the canyons carved through mountains rising straight from the world ocean /
my eyes up like a tourist in the city /
my lungs soothed by cool humid air /
my mind by scraggly dropping branches and meadows studded with familiar jewels, /
the golden monkeyflowers and purplish morning glories twining up whatever they find before them, /
giant pendulous pink something-flowers strung between trees a hundred feet up in the air /
like how did they even get there? /
and of course, the main attraction, those vines’ and flowers’ pole-straight monarchs /
the mist-damp redwoods /
though maybe less an attraction than a chance to stand among wizened elders /
or maybe it’s just that my particular celebrity fandom is arboreal in nature /
or i’m obsessed with imaginings of an ancient forested before-time /
that probably never was //
in any case i come not just for them and solitude on winding coastal highways /
i also revere the friends of the redwood /
which never seem to come along when suburban homeowners plant them in their yards /
the tanoak, fern, and trillium /
sycamore and bay /
white-berried lily-of-the-valley /
old walnuts with deeply darkly furrowed bark /
madrones and manzanitas with peeling skin more delicate than any old world birch /
redwood-sorrel like lawns of giant clovers beside canyon-bottom creeks /
and the most beautiful poison-oak /
nets of three-leaved lianas encircling old trunks /
“why not pick me, take me home” they asked /
leaves painted with crimson and gold as much as with oily pain /
“you’ve never felt that stinging rash before, who knows maybe you’re immune” /
caveat temptor /
(yes i know that doesn’t quite work in latin) //
i needed to see them all again /
nine months after that most recent late-morning hike through second-growth giants dwarfing all but the occasional douglas-fir /
though still probably mere neophytes compared to their enormous forebears /
clear-cut to build the cities that would soon crumble and burn in the wake of violently shifting tectonic plates /
but it’s been a long time since all that /
and newly sacred groves reliably returned after that genocide of all but a handful of hidden ancients //
that was a good day, that walk in january /
posing for photos with one parent standing on a curiously curved hillside doug-fir trunk, /
with the other inside the huge dome of roots of a tipped-over bay tree /
i was glad to be back on similar trails along similarly lovely ravines /
where the redwoods are a little smaller, a little scragglier, living as they do a hundred miles south, where there is a little less rain //
all that is bittersweet now /
well it was at the time too, because i knew i’d have for only a day what i want for weeks, for months /
for every day honestly /
but now moreso /
that day, three weeks and two days ago, coming as it did only days before punishing hundred-degree heat (sans air conditioning), /
then deafening thunder setting off car alarms across the city /
which i somehow managed to sleep through, /
attendant burning plasma arcing down from the sky, /
the purple-white roots of a hidden tree in the heavens appearing for only an instant at a time /
and then flames for endless thousands of acres /
chasing people off their homes with minimal warning, /
their principal sin being that they wanted to live close to the trees //
“mother nature is angry” some say /
but i think she does not get angry /
it is we who are angry /
is it reassuring to project one’s feelings onto gods? /
maybe i’ll try it sometime /
i’m not angry /
not about this at least /
i just miss my soggy five-finger ferns and incense-cedars bearing lime-green drooping sprays tipped with tiny cones //
soon enough i’ll be back with my cliff-clinging cacti /
avoiding yoga moms and burned-out surfers on my walks instead of tech assholes and people i didn’t like and/or don’t remember from high school /
farther from my parents and oldest friends /
closer to my stressors, and my independence /
farther from the burning redwoods /
closer to the crumbling cliffs home to beloved pines contorted by the wind and aridity into giant bonsai, /
still locked behind chained fences and unintentionally-angry signs /
posted to assuage fears of unlikely (but not completely unreasonable) imagined tragedies of viral transmission among the careless tourists /
doffing their masks to pose for the same insta shot as a thousand others have posted that day /
scrunching up their faces, jutting hips and flexing muscles just so //
and probably i’ll have left the redwood smoke just in time for the searing breath of santa ana to whip up flames in more southerly mountains, /
and fill the air with poisonous particulates only slightly different from the ones filling my lungs right now /
fewer notes of primeval forest, /
perhaps more of oily chaparral and dusty inland deserts //
i hate the summer as only a californian can ///
