Places Lost...

There are places I don't go anymore, places that were special to me once but have now become different kinds of places.

One of those places is where I grew up, the West San Fernando Valley on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

When we moved there from Santa Monica in 1949, I was four, and the West Valley was a rural agricultural area, sheep pasture, row crops and orchards as far as the eye could see, broken only by dirt roads, small farmettes & chicken ranches. Old barns and tractor sheds dotted the landscape and the Los Angeles River, running through the middle of it all, was a meandering creek teeming with wildlife. My dad had a small backyard chicken ranch and an egg route he delivered out of the trunk of his '41 Chevy.

That's all gone now, replaced with a sickening smoggy sprawl of freeways, parking lots, apartment houses, strip malls and big box discount stores, the rich living earth buried beneath concrete, asphalt & crapboard slums, while the magic river of my childhood, home of dragonflies, pollywogs, frogs, butterflies, snakes and birdsong is now a cement box flood control channel.

I try not to go there anymore.

Long ago I moved to the mountains, first the Santa Monica's, until the 1970s Yuppie boom priced me out, then on to Big Bear in the San Bernardino's, which I then called "The place that time forgot".

But somewhere during the past 25 years time caught up with Big Bear which, now of course, is just another ski resort boomtown well into its own ruination.

This is still a very special place though, in that we're surrounded by hundreds of square miles of National Forest, where the beautiful solitude of nature is only a short walk in any direction.

Yet there are places here that I don't go to anymore either, places like Crystal Mountain.

Crystal Mountain is no more than a knob of shattered, decomposing quartz debris overlooking the Mojave Desert from a 7,000 foot vantage point.

A few yards off the Pacific Crest Trail, at the east end of Bear Valley, Crystal Mountain languished for decades in close proximity to a ramshackle little paradise once called Shadow Ranch.

I don't know what they call the place now and don't care.

Shadow Ranch consisted of what looked to be an old bunkhouse, situated all by itself on several acres, at the end of a dirt road in a small secluded valley. There was a dog that barked from the porch whenever someone hiked past on the trail, and a chicken coop that housed a few hens & a rooster.

Behind the house & chicken coop was a large outcropping of granite, covered in bright shades of yellow, orange, green and purplish lichen, and atop this pile of painted rock, facing the desert, sat a rickety aluminum lawnchair with a beer can holder.

I never saw anyone sitting in it.

I dreamed of owning Shadow Ranch, of living there and taking in tired hikers on their way from Mexico to Canada or vice-versa...
...and of kicking back in that lawnchair drinking craft beer & losing myself to the immense vista of the Mojave and the mountains beyond.

But all that's gone now, replaced by a 5,000+ square foot McMansion, a paved road, mercury vapor lights and a stable of SUVs.

I haven't seen it because I won't go there, but my fiddle-playing wildlife biologist friend MaryAnne described it all to me in excruciatingly painful detail.

Eleven years ago, when I still owned four wheels with an infernal combustion engine, I drove to the PCT trailhead at Highway 18 and took my last hike to Crystal Mountain.

I wrote more in those days, and what's written below is my journal entry from that morning.

I don't know why I'm sharing this today, except that it's another Fall and I was thinking about the place.

Crystal Mountain Sunrise

Has it been half an hour since I parked the truck in fading darkness and wandered onto the gainly curves of the Pacific Crest Trail?

The minutes have been lost between here and the highway, evaporated into a perfume of damp sage and pinyon.

Nonetheless, I remain involved in the friction back where distant radials slap steel belts to asphalt, broadcasting their hyperactive drone through the stillness of dawn to this crag where I wait for the sun.

An airbus churns a curdling howl from the atmosphere above, its vapor trail narrowing to a needle of cold aluminum splashed in a bath of golden firelight. People sit up there in the morning glow, peering from microscopic windows into a wild blue haystack, as I look down to the brass sun-pendant strung by rawhide from my neck. Cast by the hands of my stepfather the pendants pointed rays frame the finely carved features of a womans face, and I’m drawn into the blank stare of her ball bearing eyes transfixed eastward in metallic meditation.

With equal contempt for all that is sacred, the racket of man’s machinery intensifies its assault, blaring from the west, from Bear Valley’s roadways, runways and subdivisions, through horse-trail, footpath and beyond to find each secret quiet place where man has never been. The roar rises, then fades, leaving only the breath of the wind raking toward the desert, ever cleansing our smoky stench from the air.

Sipping hot coffee amidst the quartz debris known as Crystal Mountain I contemplate the crumbling rubble.

Slowly the disintegration continues, glittering in endless shades of white, pink and beige until rock again becomes fine particles of soil for nurturing lacey webs of textured flora.

In this shallow crystalline graveyard of impossible hues, a closer look reveals tiny fungal lives clinging to stone, clothed in fuzzy earthy ochres, olives, grays and rusts and harmonizing perfectly their combined energy to create a living aura of great complexity.

Joshua Trees and Pinyon stand from their beds of stone defiant of the coming winter as if they were statues eternally bronzed in the shock of sunlight now squeezing through low cracks in a horizon of fleeting clouds.

A light rain fell here yesterday and the musty fragrance still flows around all who care to notice.

Sailing dark and proud the remnants of the storm hang about bending rainbow light through myriad spectral prisms, and closely huddled, they seem to mull the option of one last shower as the second day of September is born.

The droning, the friction, and the wind accompany me to a precipice.

From my seven thousand foot perch I gaze to the northeast, across the Mojave, where a pastel haze softly mixes desert with mountain and moving sky to paint a terrestrial landscape of planetary dimension. In the east, the sun finding another hole, sends a fan of luminous rays to kiss the rock good morning while a clump of drying sage tries for resurrection and chartreuse splotches of lichen look on hopefully.

A gentle breeze moves through it all, smoothing the edges of dead wood, of stone and the hard noise of man.

And now, a dog barks to the crowing rooster over at Shadow Ranch.

September 2, 1994