Bolts, 2005
Monday, November 07, 2005
Yuba Gap Take 3 (Dostoevsky)
Tuesday-Wednesday, September 6-7, 2005
Yuba Gap Take 3 (Dostoevsky)
You can’t see anything from a car… You’ve got to…walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus.
---- Edward Abby
We stood beside our parked cars on the soft, pine needle covered strip of flat ground in front of my little abode otherwise known as the tool shed. “Hey! Have you seen this?” Scott asked pushing a button on his key chain. His Subie sprang to life seemingly on its own volition. The engine purred while, simultaneously, the entire car lurched forward – think Herbie the Love Bug. It abruptly ceased its forward progress after it had settled itself onto the small wooden barrier that separates my parking strip from the downward descent of the tree-strewn slope. In that lengthy moment I believed that our Yuba Gap, Take 3 had concluded there and then on my parking strip. But the car rested, now silently, on the wooden beam instead of hurtling itself into a tree. There was no need to call someone with a big truck and a winch: A good start indeed.
This time we borrowed packs with mesh and drain holes from Tym at Gold Rush. Everything was stuffed inside both packs, including my camera, which was nestled in a real Pelican case this time. We took the time to drive further up the dirt road past Washington to leave my truck parked a few miles up river at Canyon Creek (heeding Matt’s advice). And we brought wetsuits. Oh, yes – life-saving shortie farmer johns from work. (thanks, Dan!) We, I had to admit, were no longer looking so marginal this time.
We parked Scott’s car at Lang Crossing below Spaulding Reservoir. Scott insisted we bypass the ¼ mile from Take 2 and forgo that long, shady canyon. I balked, but in reality had no desire to revisit the location of the failed attempt of the week before. Hiking down a steep trail to a popular jumping spot called the Emerald Pools, we began our trek.
The pool 40 feet below where we stood was deep and green and, from last week, I knew – cold. Scott hucked his pack off the cliff. After a considerable time gap between lob and thud, it landed in the water below. He stood perched on the rocks for a very long time contemplating the jump. I, on the other hand needing no time for contemplation, hucked my pack off the cliff and began to scramble and slide as far down as I could get before needing to jump. I nearly made it all the way to the water. Scott jumped with a graceful quarter turn into the water. And so, we began swimming.
We hiked and climbed as much as possible to keep the cold swimming to a minimum until the sun began to go down and our ears and eyes became infested with gnats. Committing ourselves to one deep canyon after another, surrounded by granite and cold green water, we knew that we needed to find a flat section where the walls opened up before dark. I hesitated less and less before jumping, mostly because my pack would more than likely drift somewhere I didn’t want it to go – meaning I needed to spend more time in the cold water. Traversing the rock wall was a different story. I hesitated plenty when we needed to do that. It’s amazing how much less confidence I have when not attached to a colorful dynamic rope and harness and dropping into frigid water is the consequence of falling.
While it was still light, we found a beautiful beach that happened to be on the other side of the river than where we were standing. Luckily, wading across was easy enough. We peeled our wet clothed off, draped them across the rocks and made a cooking fire. Settling into the sand we ate freeze-dried macaroni and drank a bottle of red wine that we had transferred into water bottles with caps reinforced with duct tape.
Waking up in the clear morning next to Scott, I felt like I wanted to stay there forever. Nobody was anywhere near us. The place was ours alone. Somewhere in the distance – we couldn’t tell exactly from where – we could vaguely hear a train. We lingered under our joined sleeping bags until we started to get hungry and desperately needed to pee. I pulled on my shorts and my shoes and wandered around topless in the morning sun taking photos of algae and water while Scott cooked breakfast. We didn’t make any pretense of rushing to leave.
Our trek started out with more of the same – steep canyon walls, waterfalls and clear cold emerald pools of water. Nearing lunchtime we lobbed our bags off of yet another cliff face into the water, jumped in after them and swam to the other side. But this time the impact broke my camera lens. It would no longer focus.
We needed to keep moving because we didn’t know how much longer we needed to hike that day, nor did we know what time it was. We walked. We swam. We jumped. My knee started to give out.
The rocks began to turn from cliffs into boulders. No longer climbing, we jumped from one to another to another. Scott would stride, seemingly effortlessly to me, from one to the next with his long legs. I jumped, slid on my butt and lowered myself with my arms. This went on for hours, but it seemed as if that’s all we had ever been doing our entire lives. The gnats came and incessantly buzzed in our ears again as the sun began to lower. My knee got worse.
Scott found an old mining road that we hoped would free us from the rock hopping. It did for about 50 feet before it demoralizingly dead-ended into thick overgrown bushes that relentlessly grabbed my hair as I tried to charge through them with the hope that we could forever avoid another boulder hop by staying on the road. But it was not to be so. The only thing we could do was return to the river. I began to slip and fall a lot. My knee wouldn’t support me as I jumped. We both had the same thought – that we were going to spend another night out there, but this time we had no dinner and no wine. I was filled with guilt for having the faulty body that would cause such an unwanted night.
Again, Scott strode ahead as I plodded along, slower and slower. The darkening sky was streaked with orange. I raised my head when I heard Scott yell, triumphantly waving his arms and hollering. He had found a dirt road out. We had finished the crawl. At least that’s what I thought briefly.
Night came and we veered away from the river into the trees, stepping blindly through shadows. We continued slowly, he, with my pack hanging from his shoulders on his chest and his own on his back, supporting me with every protracted step. Time and distance was meaningless with nothing by which to measure either. It was dark time and we were walking. That’s all that was.
We were exhausted by the time we found my truck. Without saying much we peeled off our booties and downed warm cans of Hamm’s. Scott drove us back down the dirt road, through Washington, up to highway 20, and back to his car – away from my bed.
Even though this has been the greatest adventure on my forays on the Yuba, I feel reluctant to write in much detail about specific events or places. The idea of the place held so much mystery for me before experiencing it. I want to uphold that - it still holds much mystery. But for me the real story isn’t about the waterfalls, the jumps, the granite, the cold swims or my bum knee anyway. It’s about an internal shift beginning to occur. My connection to the river is deeper after going in there. I feel proud of it. It called the shots and I was humbled. Now I have a greater appreciation for it as its own entity and being. I belong to it; it doesn’t belong to me. And because of this, I love it. And, in teaching me about itself, it so generously taught me more about myself and about Scott.
We drove separately from the starting point of our trip back to highway 20. He was turning left to go back to Coloma for work the next morning and I was turning right to sleep late into the morning in my bed. I set my parking brake at the stop sign and hobbled from my truck to his car window to tell him what I had learned from the river. I stared at him with so much love, respect and admiration, but all the words got stuck somewhere deep in my chest. I stood there so long, as frozen as I had been a week earlier before my first jump into the water, that it became an awkward and ridiculous gesture. Turning around, frustrated and defeated by my own self, I limped back to my truck. I drove home thinking I once again let Dostoevsky down. In the entrance to my little tool shed abode I have taped a quote written in red marker to the wall, Much unhappiness has come into the world because of things left unsaid… Whether Dostoevsky was thinking most importantly of the unhappiness of the incapable sayer, or if his words benefit the intended recipient of those unsaid things mostly, or are meant only as an endorsement for the simplistic beauty and grace of clarity, I don’t know. But in this case it was I who drove away unhappy because I was too afraid or too incapable to divulge the things that seemed to become so clear to me crawling, on hands and knees on the Yuba, to the person who crawled the entire way with me.
Yuba Gap Take 3 (Dostoevsky)
You can’t see anything from a car… You’ve got to…walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus.
---- Edward Abby
We stood beside our parked cars on the soft, pine needle covered strip of flat ground in front of my little abode otherwise known as the tool shed. “Hey! Have you seen this?” Scott asked pushing a button on his key chain. His Subie sprang to life seemingly on its own volition. The engine purred while, simultaneously, the entire car lurched forward – think Herbie the Love Bug. It abruptly ceased its forward progress after it had settled itself onto the small wooden barrier that separates my parking strip from the downward descent of the tree-strewn slope. In that lengthy moment I believed that our Yuba Gap, Take 3 had concluded there and then on my parking strip. But the car rested, now silently, on the wooden beam instead of hurtling itself into a tree. There was no need to call someone with a big truck and a winch: A good start indeed.
This time we borrowed packs with mesh and drain holes from Tym at Gold Rush. Everything was stuffed inside both packs, including my camera, which was nestled in a real Pelican case this time. We took the time to drive further up the dirt road past Washington to leave my truck parked a few miles up river at Canyon Creek (heeding Matt’s advice). And we brought wetsuits. Oh, yes – life-saving shortie farmer johns from work. (thanks, Dan!) We, I had to admit, were no longer looking so marginal this time.
We parked Scott’s car at Lang Crossing below Spaulding Reservoir. Scott insisted we bypass the ¼ mile from Take 2 and forgo that long, shady canyon. I balked, but in reality had no desire to revisit the location of the failed attempt of the week before. Hiking down a steep trail to a popular jumping spot called the Emerald Pools, we began our trek.
The pool 40 feet below where we stood was deep and green and, from last week, I knew – cold. Scott hucked his pack off the cliff. After a considerable time gap between lob and thud, it landed in the water below. He stood perched on the rocks for a very long time contemplating the jump. I, on the other hand needing no time for contemplation, hucked my pack off the cliff and began to scramble and slide as far down as I could get before needing to jump. I nearly made it all the way to the water. Scott jumped with a graceful quarter turn into the water. And so, we began swimming.
We hiked and climbed as much as possible to keep the cold swimming to a minimum until the sun began to go down and our ears and eyes became infested with gnats. Committing ourselves to one deep canyon after another, surrounded by granite and cold green water, we knew that we needed to find a flat section where the walls opened up before dark. I hesitated less and less before jumping, mostly because my pack would more than likely drift somewhere I didn’t want it to go – meaning I needed to spend more time in the cold water. Traversing the rock wall was a different story. I hesitated plenty when we needed to do that. It’s amazing how much less confidence I have when not attached to a colorful dynamic rope and harness and dropping into frigid water is the consequence of falling.
While it was still light, we found a beautiful beach that happened to be on the other side of the river than where we were standing. Luckily, wading across was easy enough. We peeled our wet clothed off, draped them across the rocks and made a cooking fire. Settling into the sand we ate freeze-dried macaroni and drank a bottle of red wine that we had transferred into water bottles with caps reinforced with duct tape.
Waking up in the clear morning next to Scott, I felt like I wanted to stay there forever. Nobody was anywhere near us. The place was ours alone. Somewhere in the distance – we couldn’t tell exactly from where – we could vaguely hear a train. We lingered under our joined sleeping bags until we started to get hungry and desperately needed to pee. I pulled on my shorts and my shoes and wandered around topless in the morning sun taking photos of algae and water while Scott cooked breakfast. We didn’t make any pretense of rushing to leave.
Our trek started out with more of the same – steep canyon walls, waterfalls and clear cold emerald pools of water. Nearing lunchtime we lobbed our bags off of yet another cliff face into the water, jumped in after them and swam to the other side. But this time the impact broke my camera lens. It would no longer focus.
We needed to keep moving because we didn’t know how much longer we needed to hike that day, nor did we know what time it was. We walked. We swam. We jumped. My knee started to give out.
The rocks began to turn from cliffs into boulders. No longer climbing, we jumped from one to another to another. Scott would stride, seemingly effortlessly to me, from one to the next with his long legs. I jumped, slid on my butt and lowered myself with my arms. This went on for hours, but it seemed as if that’s all we had ever been doing our entire lives. The gnats came and incessantly buzzed in our ears again as the sun began to lower. My knee got worse.
Scott found an old mining road that we hoped would free us from the rock hopping. It did for about 50 feet before it demoralizingly dead-ended into thick overgrown bushes that relentlessly grabbed my hair as I tried to charge through them with the hope that we could forever avoid another boulder hop by staying on the road. But it was not to be so. The only thing we could do was return to the river. I began to slip and fall a lot. My knee wouldn’t support me as I jumped. We both had the same thought – that we were going to spend another night out there, but this time we had no dinner and no wine. I was filled with guilt for having the faulty body that would cause such an unwanted night.
Again, Scott strode ahead as I plodded along, slower and slower. The darkening sky was streaked with orange. I raised my head when I heard Scott yell, triumphantly waving his arms and hollering. He had found a dirt road out. We had finished the crawl. At least that’s what I thought briefly.
Night came and we veered away from the river into the trees, stepping blindly through shadows. We continued slowly, he, with my pack hanging from his shoulders on his chest and his own on his back, supporting me with every protracted step. Time and distance was meaningless with nothing by which to measure either. It was dark time and we were walking. That’s all that was.
We were exhausted by the time we found my truck. Without saying much we peeled off our booties and downed warm cans of Hamm’s. Scott drove us back down the dirt road, through Washington, up to highway 20, and back to his car – away from my bed.
Even though this has been the greatest adventure on my forays on the Yuba, I feel reluctant to write in much detail about specific events or places. The idea of the place held so much mystery for me before experiencing it. I want to uphold that - it still holds much mystery. But for me the real story isn’t about the waterfalls, the jumps, the granite, the cold swims or my bum knee anyway. It’s about an internal shift beginning to occur. My connection to the river is deeper after going in there. I feel proud of it. It called the shots and I was humbled. Now I have a greater appreciation for it as its own entity and being. I belong to it; it doesn’t belong to me. And because of this, I love it. And, in teaching me about itself, it so generously taught me more about myself and about Scott.
We drove separately from the starting point of our trip back to highway 20. He was turning left to go back to Coloma for work the next morning and I was turning right to sleep late into the morning in my bed. I set my parking brake at the stop sign and hobbled from my truck to his car window to tell him what I had learned from the river. I stared at him with so much love, respect and admiration, but all the words got stuck somewhere deep in my chest. I stood there so long, as frozen as I had been a week earlier before my first jump into the water, that it became an awkward and ridiculous gesture. Turning around, frustrated and defeated by my own self, I limped back to my truck. I drove home thinking I once again let Dostoevsky down. In the entrance to my little tool shed abode I have taped a quote written in red marker to the wall, Much unhappiness has come into the world because of things left unsaid… Whether Dostoevsky was thinking most importantly of the unhappiness of the incapable sayer, or if his words benefit the intended recipient of those unsaid things mostly, or are meant only as an endorsement for the simplistic beauty and grace of clarity, I don’t know. But in this case it was I who drove away unhappy because I was too afraid or too incapable to divulge the things that seemed to become so clear to me crawling, on hands and knees on the Yuba, to the person who crawled the entire way with me.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Yuba Gap Take 2 (Marginality)
Monday, August 29, 2005
Yuba Gap Take 2 (Marginality)
We woke up early in Coloma for the start of our next attempt at the Yuba Gap. As we drove to my place in Nevada City Scott asks, “Has Matt ever told you about the term ‘marginal’?” No, he hadn’t. The subsequent explanation referred to Team Marginal in Arcata and things such as roof racks holding many kayaks bungied to the top of a car – The set-up worked, but it was marginal. For the record, Matt is not a member of Team Marginal.
By the time we bought food for the two days, dropped my truck off in Washington, packed and called Matt to pick us up it was after 3pm. We lay impatiently on top of my bed waiting for him to arrive. Starting the trip that late in the day was marginal at best. Matt wanted to hike in with us part of the way. To me that was even more marginal. Banging my head against a wall repetitively sounded more appealing than doing anything with Matt and Scott together, as did reading volumes of Clement Greenberg’s theories on Modern Art or being subjected to endless loops of George W. Bush’s speeches.
Scott napped in the back seat and I began to nervously chatter about nothing as Matt drove us to below Spaulding reservoir. He wondered if we knew that going all the way to where we left the truck in Washington was a bad idea. I disagreed emphatically. He watched us unload our gear and stuff things haphazardly into dry bags with a crooked smile of amusement on his face. “Marginal,” he often repeated. Many times this declaration was accompanied by a shake of his head. Water bottles and things dangled from the outside of my bag, which I slung awkwardly across my shoulder. I needed to carry my camera case in one hand. Admittedly, our set-up was a bit more cumbersome than I had anticipated.
Clad in shorts, a light long underwear top, booties, and draped with gear, we headed over the rocks to the river. The first jump was from the rocks above into the water. Matt jumped first. He gasped as he surfaced. Then Scott threw his pack and watched it drift all the way across the river before jumping after it. His reaction was the same. I stood on the rocks, peering below, frozen in place. I had not wanted to admit to myself (or anyone else, for that matter) that my severe dislike of jumping from heights into water could be a serious hindrance to this particular trip. I threw my bag and my camera. I stood, filled with dread. They waited. I stood. The bag drifted across the river to where Scott’s had gone. They waited. Finally I jumped. The shock of the cold water was awful, but the relief of not being dead after jumping buffered the pain a bit.
We swam to the first waterfall, clambered onto the rocks before the lip, cold and dripping. The bags were tossed over. Matt took over the job of launching my bag for me. My water bottle broke off the pack as it hit the water. Each of us jumped in, me last of course, after the bags and pushed them across the pool to the next drop.
This time when we pulled our bodies out of the water we tried to hug all the warmth out of the rock wall. I opened my Otter Box to pull out my camera. The foam inside was drenched and, subsequently, so was the camera. We checked our dry bags holding our dry clothes. Nothing could any longer be considered dry.
We jumped again. We swam. We peered over the next drop into the canyon below – the long, shaded canyon with vertical walls that bent out of view too far away. Matt announced that this was the place of his departure. It was to be our point of no return. Matt was driving the car back to my place. I looked below. I looked at Scott. We both were shivering. I hated to admit defeat, but I agreed to hike out with Matt.
We slowly climbed up the rock wall and back to the car. We perhaps made it ¼ mile through the canyon on Take 2. Perhaps.
Matt drove us to my truck in Washington, welcoming me to Team Marginal. Scott went down a trail to retrieve the Hamm’s he had stashed in the river while Matt and I sat on the cobbled bank. I drank a warm beer, Matt puffed on one of his cornhusk fatty cigarettes spiced up with a little lavender while Scott joined some kids across the river on a rope swing. Matt and I sat in silence for a while. He watched Scott climb, jump and swim. Eventually, turning to me, he asked if I knew that they had lived together for a while in Arcata. Yes, I knew. I sat as still as I could, afraid to move, as he told me how happy he was that Scott and I had found each other. Never before had I felt such tenderness toward Matt than at that moment, sitting next to him as the sun set behind the ridge.
Yuba Gap Take 2 (Marginality)
We woke up early in Coloma for the start of our next attempt at the Yuba Gap. As we drove to my place in Nevada City Scott asks, “Has Matt ever told you about the term ‘marginal’?” No, he hadn’t. The subsequent explanation referred to Team Marginal in Arcata and things such as roof racks holding many kayaks bungied to the top of a car – The set-up worked, but it was marginal. For the record, Matt is not a member of Team Marginal.
By the time we bought food for the two days, dropped my truck off in Washington, packed and called Matt to pick us up it was after 3pm. We lay impatiently on top of my bed waiting for him to arrive. Starting the trip that late in the day was marginal at best. Matt wanted to hike in with us part of the way. To me that was even more marginal. Banging my head against a wall repetitively sounded more appealing than doing anything with Matt and Scott together, as did reading volumes of Clement Greenberg’s theories on Modern Art or being subjected to endless loops of George W. Bush’s speeches.
Scott napped in the back seat and I began to nervously chatter about nothing as Matt drove us to below Spaulding reservoir. He wondered if we knew that going all the way to where we left the truck in Washington was a bad idea. I disagreed emphatically. He watched us unload our gear and stuff things haphazardly into dry bags with a crooked smile of amusement on his face. “Marginal,” he often repeated. Many times this declaration was accompanied by a shake of his head. Water bottles and things dangled from the outside of my bag, which I slung awkwardly across my shoulder. I needed to carry my camera case in one hand. Admittedly, our set-up was a bit more cumbersome than I had anticipated.
Clad in shorts, a light long underwear top, booties, and draped with gear, we headed over the rocks to the river. The first jump was from the rocks above into the water. Matt jumped first. He gasped as he surfaced. Then Scott threw his pack and watched it drift all the way across the river before jumping after it. His reaction was the same. I stood on the rocks, peering below, frozen in place. I had not wanted to admit to myself (or anyone else, for that matter) that my severe dislike of jumping from heights into water could be a serious hindrance to this particular trip. I threw my bag and my camera. I stood, filled with dread. They waited. I stood. The bag drifted across the river to where Scott’s had gone. They waited. Finally I jumped. The shock of the cold water was awful, but the relief of not being dead after jumping buffered the pain a bit.
We swam to the first waterfall, clambered onto the rocks before the lip, cold and dripping. The bags were tossed over. Matt took over the job of launching my bag for me. My water bottle broke off the pack as it hit the water. Each of us jumped in, me last of course, after the bags and pushed them across the pool to the next drop.
This time when we pulled our bodies out of the water we tried to hug all the warmth out of the rock wall. I opened my Otter Box to pull out my camera. The foam inside was drenched and, subsequently, so was the camera. We checked our dry bags holding our dry clothes. Nothing could any longer be considered dry.
We jumped again. We swam. We peered over the next drop into the canyon below – the long, shaded canyon with vertical walls that bent out of view too far away. Matt announced that this was the place of his departure. It was to be our point of no return. Matt was driving the car back to my place. I looked below. I looked at Scott. We both were shivering. I hated to admit defeat, but I agreed to hike out with Matt.
We slowly climbed up the rock wall and back to the car. We perhaps made it ¼ mile through the canyon on Take 2. Perhaps.
Matt drove us to my truck in Washington, welcoming me to Team Marginal. Scott went down a trail to retrieve the Hamm’s he had stashed in the river while Matt and I sat on the cobbled bank. I drank a warm beer, Matt puffed on one of his cornhusk fatty cigarettes spiced up with a little lavender while Scott joined some kids across the river on a rope swing. Matt and I sat in silence for a while. He watched Scott climb, jump and swim. Eventually, turning to me, he asked if I knew that they had lived together for a while in Arcata. Yes, I knew. I sat as still as I could, afraid to move, as he told me how happy he was that Scott and I had found each other. Never before had I felt such tenderness toward Matt than at that moment, sitting next to him as the sun set behind the ridge.
Yuba Gap Take 1
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Yuba Gap Take 1 (With the Moss and the Worms)
In the middle of the night I woke up with my nose running. Allergies, I hoped. In the morning I made calls to find someone to help us with shuttle for the Yuba Gap. It was convoluted. Shawn was to drive a leg of it, then Karen. Times were ambiguous. Scott needed to sell a car in Coloma.
My nose got worse. My head throbbed and it hurt to open my eyes. I called it off. We went to Nevada City and slept in my bed late into the next morning.
We hiked up the South Yuba trail from Purdon Crossing until we found a narrow, steep trail veering down the hill to the water. It was marked with a small blue lantern hanging from a branch. Long-term camps are set up along the river’s edge. Tibetan peace flags stretch between trees. Cairns dot the banks. Sheets and tapestries become fluttering summer walls. Smoke tendrils wind their way over them through the branches and into the sky, evidence of the people tucked into rock dwellings, although we rarely saw anyone.
I took my shirt off to cross the river in a deep green pool. I kept it off as we walked along the bank and it felt good. I never knew the name of the last rapid between Edwards to Purdon before it turns into busy water. I still don’t, but now the name would have no meaning. We dropped our packs at the bottom of the rapid, spread our wet clothes on the rocks and swam, with the current, against the current and across it, watching the rocks as we glide over them. It’s weightless like flight. We crouched in a warm water-filled granite basin until we found our bodies smattered with small black wriggling worms. We fled back into the current clinging to rocks as the water pulled its way past our bodies to rip away the worms.
We sit in the shade of boulders and eat our deli-bought sandwiches by the river. While paying for them, I had asked a woman who was ordering a sandwich at the other counter to sing a Barry White song. She did. She had a nice voice, although it was nothing like Barry White’s. Scott complained that I smelled like mustard.
Scott stretched out on the rocks and napped. I strode naked aside for my Chacos strapped to my feet through the once-rapid to take photos. Time means nothing. Mosquitoes caught in a web under a rock spread wings of iridescent rainbows. Small beards of green moss in the spaces between rocks are like fluid stalactites. They stop time. He wakes up as I come back. We swim. I take photos. He takes photos. We spread ourselves on warm granite. We curl into each other. The shadows change angles and the canyon swallows the light. I felt as if we were hundreds of miles from anyone instead of only a river bend away. I felt as if we had been there since the beginning of time with the moss and the worms. I felt like we would be there always stuck in the rocks with the fossilized crinoids. I felt perfect.
Yuba Gap Take 1 (With the Moss and the Worms)
In the middle of the night I woke up with my nose running. Allergies, I hoped. In the morning I made calls to find someone to help us with shuttle for the Yuba Gap. It was convoluted. Shawn was to drive a leg of it, then Karen. Times were ambiguous. Scott needed to sell a car in Coloma.
My nose got worse. My head throbbed and it hurt to open my eyes. I called it off. We went to Nevada City and slept in my bed late into the next morning.
We hiked up the South Yuba trail from Purdon Crossing until we found a narrow, steep trail veering down the hill to the water. It was marked with a small blue lantern hanging from a branch. Long-term camps are set up along the river’s edge. Tibetan peace flags stretch between trees. Cairns dot the banks. Sheets and tapestries become fluttering summer walls. Smoke tendrils wind their way over them through the branches and into the sky, evidence of the people tucked into rock dwellings, although we rarely saw anyone.
I took my shirt off to cross the river in a deep green pool. I kept it off as we walked along the bank and it felt good. I never knew the name of the last rapid between Edwards to Purdon before it turns into busy water. I still don’t, but now the name would have no meaning. We dropped our packs at the bottom of the rapid, spread our wet clothes on the rocks and swam, with the current, against the current and across it, watching the rocks as we glide over them. It’s weightless like flight. We crouched in a warm water-filled granite basin until we found our bodies smattered with small black wriggling worms. We fled back into the current clinging to rocks as the water pulled its way past our bodies to rip away the worms.
We sit in the shade of boulders and eat our deli-bought sandwiches by the river. While paying for them, I had asked a woman who was ordering a sandwich at the other counter to sing a Barry White song. She did. She had a nice voice, although it was nothing like Barry White’s. Scott complained that I smelled like mustard.
Scott stretched out on the rocks and napped. I strode naked aside for my Chacos strapped to my feet through the once-rapid to take photos. Time means nothing. Mosquitoes caught in a web under a rock spread wings of iridescent rainbows. Small beards of green moss in the spaces between rocks are like fluid stalactites. They stop time. He wakes up as I come back. We swim. I take photos. He takes photos. We spread ourselves on warm granite. We curl into each other. The shadows change angles and the canyon swallows the light. I felt as if we were hundreds of miles from anyone instead of only a river bend away. I felt as if we had been there since the beginning of time with the moss and the worms. I felt like we would be there always stuck in the rocks with the fossilized crinoids. I felt perfect.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Place III (Trinity)
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Place III (Trinity)
I’ve been home in Nevada City since late Tuesday night. This hasn’t happened since May, I think. I can’t even remember the last time I spent a full 24 hours here. What this means is that my summer life has kicked in and has been in full swing for a few months. I’ve been mostly living in a tent on the South Fork of the American River.
Earlier in the month I visited Scott at his tent at the Gold Rush camp. We scrambled over rocks to find a good perch by the water where we stayed well past dark. It’s been many years since I have sat there. The Gold Rush camp is now half of the old Mother Lode camp where I had first lived as a raft guide thirteen years ago. It’s the same place, but it feels so different now. Buildings and parking areas have popped up over the years. It has gone from the rustic place I once lived to parceled and organized rafting camps.
Coloma is the place that I have been coming back to for thirteen years. Returning there feels like the closest thing to coming back home. The smell is the first thing to hit me as I drop into the canyon. The land and water are so familiar and some of the people I’ve known since the beginning. The American holds memories from when I was a naïve 18 year old getting my first taste of the life of the river. It’s when I first got my feet really wet. But even so, I don’t ever feel compelled to photograph or write about the S. Fork American. Perhaps it’s because I already feel I know it so well.
Today I’m sitting on my computer in Nevada City. I started to edit photos I took weeks ago, but got distracted by sifting through a bunch of Scott’s CDs. I’m waiting for the clouds to clear so I can go to the river. But I don’t think they will. So I started to write. But after a paragraph I needed to pick up the phone to call Dan to see when it is I’m working again – 7 days in a row starting Saturday. Then I resumed writing, but after each paragraph I keep picking up the phone. I haven’t put in a new CD to see if silence would help.
I’m not entirely certain why it’s so hard for me to make art in the summer. It just is. I can’t focus.
I just picked up the phone to call Sarah.
I’ll be house sitting for her this weekend in Coloma.
A few weeks ago several friends and I went to the Tuolumne River to paddle. Beginning with the long bumpy drive down to the river, Noah offered countless facts about the river and land. He talked about it like he was speaking about family. I wanted to paddle near him so I could hear him talk. I don’t remember much of the specifics of what he said, just his tone of voice and the look on his face as he spoke. I wanted to absorb that.
Three days in Nevada City. I didn’t shop for food. It’s not long enough of a stay to justify it. I’m eating the reserves from my shelves and the remainder of the food from the cooler from camping. I’m halfway through the three days here and I’m already feeling restless. It’s strange since Tuesday night Scott and I just returned form the Trinity River. It’s not like I’ve been in any one place for any great length of time.
I picked up the phone to call Britta. Still no answer.
Scott took me to the North Fork of the Trinity River. We sat on the beach where he had slept every night when he was a river ranger. We filled our water bottles with sweet, cold spring water where the water gushed out of the rocks. The sun woke us up as the light crept down the canyon walls to the water. We swam up the river of his green paradise to lie on hot rocks in the sun. When we got hot we jumped into the swift current and were carried below to a big clear green pool. Then we would swim back up the river, ferrying and catching eddies to lie on the hot flat rocks again. It was a perfect day.
Where is my own paradise to share with him?
I’ve been sitting here for a while staring at the screen. But I can’t answer that question.
Place III (Trinity)
I’ve been home in Nevada City since late Tuesday night. This hasn’t happened since May, I think. I can’t even remember the last time I spent a full 24 hours here. What this means is that my summer life has kicked in and has been in full swing for a few months. I’ve been mostly living in a tent on the South Fork of the American River.
Earlier in the month I visited Scott at his tent at the Gold Rush camp. We scrambled over rocks to find a good perch by the water where we stayed well past dark. It’s been many years since I have sat there. The Gold Rush camp is now half of the old Mother Lode camp where I had first lived as a raft guide thirteen years ago. It’s the same place, but it feels so different now. Buildings and parking areas have popped up over the years. It has gone from the rustic place I once lived to parceled and organized rafting camps.
Coloma is the place that I have been coming back to for thirteen years. Returning there feels like the closest thing to coming back home. The smell is the first thing to hit me as I drop into the canyon. The land and water are so familiar and some of the people I’ve known since the beginning. The American holds memories from when I was a naïve 18 year old getting my first taste of the life of the river. It’s when I first got my feet really wet. But even so, I don’t ever feel compelled to photograph or write about the S. Fork American. Perhaps it’s because I already feel I know it so well.
Today I’m sitting on my computer in Nevada City. I started to edit photos I took weeks ago, but got distracted by sifting through a bunch of Scott’s CDs. I’m waiting for the clouds to clear so I can go to the river. But I don’t think they will. So I started to write. But after a paragraph I needed to pick up the phone to call Dan to see when it is I’m working again – 7 days in a row starting Saturday. Then I resumed writing, but after each paragraph I keep picking up the phone. I haven’t put in a new CD to see if silence would help.
I’m not entirely certain why it’s so hard for me to make art in the summer. It just is. I can’t focus.
I just picked up the phone to call Sarah.
I’ll be house sitting for her this weekend in Coloma.
A few weeks ago several friends and I went to the Tuolumne River to paddle. Beginning with the long bumpy drive down to the river, Noah offered countless facts about the river and land. He talked about it like he was speaking about family. I wanted to paddle near him so I could hear him talk. I don’t remember much of the specifics of what he said, just his tone of voice and the look on his face as he spoke. I wanted to absorb that.
Three days in Nevada City. I didn’t shop for food. It’s not long enough of a stay to justify it. I’m eating the reserves from my shelves and the remainder of the food from the cooler from camping. I’m halfway through the three days here and I’m already feeling restless. It’s strange since Tuesday night Scott and I just returned form the Trinity River. It’s not like I’ve been in any one place for any great length of time.
I picked up the phone to call Britta. Still no answer.
Scott took me to the North Fork of the Trinity River. We sat on the beach where he had slept every night when he was a river ranger. We filled our water bottles with sweet, cold spring water where the water gushed out of the rocks. The sun woke us up as the light crept down the canyon walls to the water. We swam up the river of his green paradise to lie on hot rocks in the sun. When we got hot we jumped into the swift current and were carried below to a big clear green pool. Then we would swim back up the river, ferrying and catching eddies to lie on the hot flat rocks again. It was a perfect day.
Where is my own paradise to share with him?
I’ve been sitting here for a while staring at the screen. But I can’t answer that question.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
I Am Pro Salmon...
Monday, June 27, 2005
Matt and I hadn’t spoken to each other since some time in May. Not that this is anything out of the ordinary for us. It’s been like that since we met last year. We planned to meet at Earth Song for an early lunch. He brought his boat. I brought my dirty laundry. Sometime during munching on ridiculously overpriced turkey pastrami sandwiches he asked if I would be interested in going to the 49 bridge to spend the day at the river. If so, he needed to meet with his paddling partners there so he could tell them that he wasn’t going to paddle. We could hike upstream from there. Spending the day at the river is much more appealing than laundry. So that’s how I arrived at the put-in in a skirt and flip-flops and no boat.
The guys arrived. ‘Where’s your boat?’ they asked. ‘I brought my laundry instead.’ I shuffled around by Matt’s car, conscious of my skirt, thinking of how I must have looked like an archetypal shuttle bunny, the one responsible for Matt not boating with them. This thought did not settle well with me.
Matt and I walked onto the bridge as the guys slid one by one into the water. One sat in an eddy chatting with three bikini–clad girls standing on a rock. We watched them silently follow the current down a few drops, becoming smaller and smaller, until they disappeared around a bend. I wished I were one of them. Then we continued across the bridge to the trail on the other side.
I’ve never known the South Yuba to be runnable at the end of June. The water is a brilliantly clear green. Wildflowers still cling to the hills. And I had no camera.
We hiked upstream for a while, ignoring multitudes of trails branching off to the river. Eventually Matt chose a trail and we descended through thickets of healthy green poison oak to the granite boulders of the river. I cursed my skirt as I awkwardly rock hopped and slid on my butt down to the river.
White granite rose steeply from the riverbed. I glanced at it briefly then turned to tell Matt how beautiful the spot we arrived at was. But the words never drifted past my lips. Instead I said, ‘Damn. You wasted no time!’ His shoes and shorts were already piled on a rock and I watched his naked white butt move as he headed for a large flat rock at the river’s edge. Momentarily his body was spread stomach down on a hot white rock. Unmoving and fully clothed, I stood where I was. Matt looked at me and said, ‘When did you become self conscious?’ ‘Two minutes ago,’ I replied. I didn’t move. ‘Don’t look at me. I’m not stripping for you.’ He turned away. I still wouldn’t move. Then it all seemed ridiculous to me. Who wants to be wearing a skirt at the river anyway?
We both sprawled on the sun-baked rock and watched little fish swim in the eddies. We talked about the hope of salmon coming back to the river some day. Years ago someone gave me a bumper sticker that says ‘I am Pro Salmon and I Vote.’ I thought it was funny like a cynical dig on more serious statements such as ‘I am Pro Choice and I Vote.’ I slapped it diagonally across the lid of my two-burner camp stove as my commentary on the tastiness of fish. But sitting naked on the rock I finally got it. The salmon belong there in the water by the white granite walls. They need to come back. It doesn’t feel right without them just as swimming in the river doesn’t feel right with clothes anymore. It feels empty.
I’m not a biologist. I’m not exactly an exhibitionist either. Hence, I can’t give any tangible support for either the salmon or for the absence of clothes as the way it should be. A few weeks ago I took my friend Colleen down the North Fork of the American River for her first time. At the beginning of the trip she commented that there’s something special about water that’s not dammed. She couldn’t say what it was, only that she could feel something different.
It feels alive.
The South Yuba has the Englebright and Spaulding dams, one above and one below. The river is squashed between walls of concrete and reservoir water. It’s regulated. The walls stop the fish. But this year, with all the rain, the river has been resisting its walls. This last week in June it still flows as a river instead of a series of swimming holes. It still has a voice, but it’s not as clear as undammed water. Perhaps clothes just get in the way of hearing it.
Eventually we relocated to another rock downstream from the first. It was further in the current and offered a better view downstream. As we sat there, three people hiked up the rocks and peered into the water. They looked down, gesticulating toward the water and each other. I wanted them to do something. I waited impatiently for something to happen.
Finally a girl in a bikini jumped. She swam to an eddy, but missed it and was swept over a rock and down a pour over. Her body disappeared, then re-emerged ten feet below. Her eyes were open wide and she was gasping for breath as she was swept past us. Both Matt and I lurched toward her a bit. It was an instinctual reaction. But, how are two naked people on a rock going to help a swimmer in the river? Then she swam strongly into an eddy on river left. With bruised legs, she crawled onto the dry rocks, hiked upstream, then she jumped again. She made it to her eddy the next time. Soon a guy followed her line down the pour over. He was calm as his body disappeared under water. He had obviously done that many times before. Effortlessly, he caught the same eddy, climbed up to the rocks above and jumped again.
Our sun was disappearing over the ridge. Matt and I climbed back over the rocks to our piled clothes. The three jumpers were high on a rock above us. We shouted hellos at each other. They were rafters they told us, and we: kayakers, we replied. So they offered for us to join them on their rock. They handed me their last beer from the cooler – the King of Beers - and a pipe was passed around.
Erin, Julie and Jeff all work for the same rafting company. Jeff grew up in Grass Valley. That’s why he was so comfortable in the river. He was showing the girls his river.
As we talked, Julie realized she knew who I was – the one who dislocated her knee salsa dancing, the kayaker. She admitted to feeling intimidated to meet me from what she had heard of me in Coloma. Oh, Coloma. I can’t escape it even at the South Yuba! Erin wanted to know if I was at the Coloma Club Friday. ‘Oh, please say you were there!’ she pleaded. I was not. I never made it past the River Shack across the street. I’m glad I met the three of them on the South Yuba instead of at the Bermuda Triangle of Marco’s, the River Shack, and the Coloma Club. It made our meeting seem more real and substantial to me. In Coloma they would have only been three more raft guides in the Bacchanalian soup of summer. Plus, it’s impossible to be intimidating to anyone while naked.
The five of us scrambled over rocks together to the trail, me in the back with my skirt pulled all the way up over my hips so I could jump unimpeded, and hiked out chatting amiably. The river was silver with the setting sun. We walked our separate ways to our cars and waved at each other enthusiastically. I’m looking forward to seeing them pushing rubber on the South Fork American as I sit in class II eddies explaining currents to my students. And of course, I’m sure we’ll meet again soon at the Coloma Club.
Matt and I hadn’t spoken to each other since some time in May. Not that this is anything out of the ordinary for us. It’s been like that since we met last year. We planned to meet at Earth Song for an early lunch. He brought his boat. I brought my dirty laundry. Sometime during munching on ridiculously overpriced turkey pastrami sandwiches he asked if I would be interested in going to the 49 bridge to spend the day at the river. If so, he needed to meet with his paddling partners there so he could tell them that he wasn’t going to paddle. We could hike upstream from there. Spending the day at the river is much more appealing than laundry. So that’s how I arrived at the put-in in a skirt and flip-flops and no boat.
The guys arrived. ‘Where’s your boat?’ they asked. ‘I brought my laundry instead.’ I shuffled around by Matt’s car, conscious of my skirt, thinking of how I must have looked like an archetypal shuttle bunny, the one responsible for Matt not boating with them. This thought did not settle well with me.
Matt and I walked onto the bridge as the guys slid one by one into the water. One sat in an eddy chatting with three bikini–clad girls standing on a rock. We watched them silently follow the current down a few drops, becoming smaller and smaller, until they disappeared around a bend. I wished I were one of them. Then we continued across the bridge to the trail on the other side.
I’ve never known the South Yuba to be runnable at the end of June. The water is a brilliantly clear green. Wildflowers still cling to the hills. And I had no camera.
We hiked upstream for a while, ignoring multitudes of trails branching off to the river. Eventually Matt chose a trail and we descended through thickets of healthy green poison oak to the granite boulders of the river. I cursed my skirt as I awkwardly rock hopped and slid on my butt down to the river.
White granite rose steeply from the riverbed. I glanced at it briefly then turned to tell Matt how beautiful the spot we arrived at was. But the words never drifted past my lips. Instead I said, ‘Damn. You wasted no time!’ His shoes and shorts were already piled on a rock and I watched his naked white butt move as he headed for a large flat rock at the river’s edge. Momentarily his body was spread stomach down on a hot white rock. Unmoving and fully clothed, I stood where I was. Matt looked at me and said, ‘When did you become self conscious?’ ‘Two minutes ago,’ I replied. I didn’t move. ‘Don’t look at me. I’m not stripping for you.’ He turned away. I still wouldn’t move. Then it all seemed ridiculous to me. Who wants to be wearing a skirt at the river anyway?
We both sprawled on the sun-baked rock and watched little fish swim in the eddies. We talked about the hope of salmon coming back to the river some day. Years ago someone gave me a bumper sticker that says ‘I am Pro Salmon and I Vote.’ I thought it was funny like a cynical dig on more serious statements such as ‘I am Pro Choice and I Vote.’ I slapped it diagonally across the lid of my two-burner camp stove as my commentary on the tastiness of fish. But sitting naked on the rock I finally got it. The salmon belong there in the water by the white granite walls. They need to come back. It doesn’t feel right without them just as swimming in the river doesn’t feel right with clothes anymore. It feels empty.
I’m not a biologist. I’m not exactly an exhibitionist either. Hence, I can’t give any tangible support for either the salmon or for the absence of clothes as the way it should be. A few weeks ago I took my friend Colleen down the North Fork of the American River for her first time. At the beginning of the trip she commented that there’s something special about water that’s not dammed. She couldn’t say what it was, only that she could feel something different.
It feels alive.
The South Yuba has the Englebright and Spaulding dams, one above and one below. The river is squashed between walls of concrete and reservoir water. It’s regulated. The walls stop the fish. But this year, with all the rain, the river has been resisting its walls. This last week in June it still flows as a river instead of a series of swimming holes. It still has a voice, but it’s not as clear as undammed water. Perhaps clothes just get in the way of hearing it.
Eventually we relocated to another rock downstream from the first. It was further in the current and offered a better view downstream. As we sat there, three people hiked up the rocks and peered into the water. They looked down, gesticulating toward the water and each other. I wanted them to do something. I waited impatiently for something to happen.
Finally a girl in a bikini jumped. She swam to an eddy, but missed it and was swept over a rock and down a pour over. Her body disappeared, then re-emerged ten feet below. Her eyes were open wide and she was gasping for breath as she was swept past us. Both Matt and I lurched toward her a bit. It was an instinctual reaction. But, how are two naked people on a rock going to help a swimmer in the river? Then she swam strongly into an eddy on river left. With bruised legs, she crawled onto the dry rocks, hiked upstream, then she jumped again. She made it to her eddy the next time. Soon a guy followed her line down the pour over. He was calm as his body disappeared under water. He had obviously done that many times before. Effortlessly, he caught the same eddy, climbed up to the rocks above and jumped again.
Our sun was disappearing over the ridge. Matt and I climbed back over the rocks to our piled clothes. The three jumpers were high on a rock above us. We shouted hellos at each other. They were rafters they told us, and we: kayakers, we replied. So they offered for us to join them on their rock. They handed me their last beer from the cooler – the King of Beers - and a pipe was passed around.
Erin, Julie and Jeff all work for the same rafting company. Jeff grew up in Grass Valley. That’s why he was so comfortable in the river. He was showing the girls his river.
As we talked, Julie realized she knew who I was – the one who dislocated her knee salsa dancing, the kayaker. She admitted to feeling intimidated to meet me from what she had heard of me in Coloma. Oh, Coloma. I can’t escape it even at the South Yuba! Erin wanted to know if I was at the Coloma Club Friday. ‘Oh, please say you were there!’ she pleaded. I was not. I never made it past the River Shack across the street. I’m glad I met the three of them on the South Yuba instead of at the Bermuda Triangle of Marco’s, the River Shack, and the Coloma Club. It made our meeting seem more real and substantial to me. In Coloma they would have only been three more raft guides in the Bacchanalian soup of summer. Plus, it’s impossible to be intimidating to anyone while naked.
The five of us scrambled over rocks together to the trail, me in the back with my skirt pulled all the way up over my hips so I could jump unimpeded, and hiked out chatting amiably. The river was silver with the setting sun. We walked our separate ways to our cars and waved at each other enthusiastically. I’m looking forward to seeing them pushing rubber on the South Fork American as I sit in class II eddies explaining currents to my students. And of course, I’m sure we’ll meet again soon at the Coloma Club.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Friday, June 03, 2005
Place II
Place II (To Chris J. and Christopher (and Chris T. for being the first))
Friday, June 03, 2005
What happens when that wanderlust really does set in? The restlessness is here. The bitterness has begun. And I don’t know what to do about it.
For six months I have stayed. I have committed. I have loved this place.
After six months with one day’s notice to a friend I barely knew, I packed my bag, loaded my boats and drove north with a sense of urgency that was almost uncontainable. I needed to remind myself to not step so hard on the pedal as the pine trees of Nevada City abruptly changed to dry scrub down Highway 20. I glided, I flew; it was not driving – it was escaping silently with the wind.
For months it had been raining. The rivers in California were showing off in earnest. Perfect flows. And all I wanted to do was leave them all behind. I drove alone with the window down and my arm out the window to a place I hadn’t been to in over a decade to meet with people who would take me to a different place that I had never been – to a place where the water was running low; to a place I where I felt an apprehensive unease in visiting. I had the strong sense that I was trespassing where I was not quite wanted.
Hood River, Oregon has been on my mind for a while. The scenario was too similar to my first introduction to Nevada City for me to ignore it. Over the past few years I have been told by countless people that I should go to Hood River because I would love it. And like Nevada City, it took several years for me to follow those instructions. For this reason, I was apprehensive to go. I didn’t want the potential confusion of falling in love with it. I’m supposed to be in love with Nevada City.
In a whirlwind, week-long episode of recent extended phone conversations (now abruptly ended without warning – the voice I began to anticipate hearing has now been replaced by constant ingratiating busy signals), I had listened to detailed descriptions of the disdained 75 cent toll bridge spanning the Columbia River from Hood River to White Salmon, Washington; of the open landscape desired over closed ones such as Nevada City’s; of the White Salmon, Little White and Wind Rivers and their named rapids and runs; of the influx of water lovers – the kite boarders, wind surfers and kayakers – arriving for the summer; of a new sushi restaurant still being built that will probably have some real wasabi behind the counter at least for a little while. I listened carefully to the place being lovingly recreated for me over garbled wireless connections sometimes with yearning to see it myself and sometimes with irritated frustration because I, myself, do not have the desire to share something like the details of the bridge layout of Nevada County with someone over the phone. I realized I was jealous.
As I drove north I did not know if I would see the owner of the voice on the phone. I hadn’t informed him of my imminent arrival. Busy signals were, and still are, the only form of communication I receive. In Bend I learned he would not be there, producing simultaneous feelings of relief and disappointment. The voice would not be there in person to further shape my new experience of the place.
To my surprise, as soon as I saw that huge dam stifling the Columbia River at The Dalles, a different voice parked itself in my brain. This voice had named his second daughter after Celilo Falls, now silenced by the dams on the river. The owner of this voice had been compelled to swim the entire length of the Columbia to get to know it as intimately as possible. That dam made my jaw drop. The water behind it made me sputter unintelligibly. I am in awe of what you have done, Christopher.
The first voice was soon joined by a happier chattering voice that piped up every time we drove over the toll bridge – you’re right, it is a ridiculous bridge: it’s not paved, you can’t walk or ride a bike on it and you have to pay 75 cents every time you cross it. That voice kayaked the rivers draining into the Columbia with me, walked through town lodged in my brain, and had dinner in my head accompanied by an honest-to-god real jug band playing in a café where the Where the Wild Things Are monsters and Max dance on the wall above the booths.
Now I have caught a glimpse of the importance of this place to my resident voices in my head. It’s not something that I can describe with words. It’s one of those things that just is. I left with reluctance. This evening I returned to Nevada City craving both of those voices to some day step out of my head and return to me again in the real world. I miss hearing them. As I let the same CD replay over and over three or four times, barely being conscious of it, I thought about both of you. I now have a greater appreciation and understanding of the thoughts you have shared with me. This place has moved me too. Thank you both for drawing me there.
Next time I will bring my camera. And perhaps my bed and kitchen table…
Special thanks to Courtney and Orion for physically bringing me to this special place that I now have a HUGE crush on.
Friday, June 03, 2005
What happens when that wanderlust really does set in? The restlessness is here. The bitterness has begun. And I don’t know what to do about it.
For six months I have stayed. I have committed. I have loved this place.
After six months with one day’s notice to a friend I barely knew, I packed my bag, loaded my boats and drove north with a sense of urgency that was almost uncontainable. I needed to remind myself to not step so hard on the pedal as the pine trees of Nevada City abruptly changed to dry scrub down Highway 20. I glided, I flew; it was not driving – it was escaping silently with the wind.
For months it had been raining. The rivers in California were showing off in earnest. Perfect flows. And all I wanted to do was leave them all behind. I drove alone with the window down and my arm out the window to a place I hadn’t been to in over a decade to meet with people who would take me to a different place that I had never been – to a place where the water was running low; to a place I where I felt an apprehensive unease in visiting. I had the strong sense that I was trespassing where I was not quite wanted.
Hood River, Oregon has been on my mind for a while. The scenario was too similar to my first introduction to Nevada City for me to ignore it. Over the past few years I have been told by countless people that I should go to Hood River because I would love it. And like Nevada City, it took several years for me to follow those instructions. For this reason, I was apprehensive to go. I didn’t want the potential confusion of falling in love with it. I’m supposed to be in love with Nevada City.
In a whirlwind, week-long episode of recent extended phone conversations (now abruptly ended without warning – the voice I began to anticipate hearing has now been replaced by constant ingratiating busy signals), I had listened to detailed descriptions of the disdained 75 cent toll bridge spanning the Columbia River from Hood River to White Salmon, Washington; of the open landscape desired over closed ones such as Nevada City’s; of the White Salmon, Little White and Wind Rivers and their named rapids and runs; of the influx of water lovers – the kite boarders, wind surfers and kayakers – arriving for the summer; of a new sushi restaurant still being built that will probably have some real wasabi behind the counter at least for a little while. I listened carefully to the place being lovingly recreated for me over garbled wireless connections sometimes with yearning to see it myself and sometimes with irritated frustration because I, myself, do not have the desire to share something like the details of the bridge layout of Nevada County with someone over the phone. I realized I was jealous.
As I drove north I did not know if I would see the owner of the voice on the phone. I hadn’t informed him of my imminent arrival. Busy signals were, and still are, the only form of communication I receive. In Bend I learned he would not be there, producing simultaneous feelings of relief and disappointment. The voice would not be there in person to further shape my new experience of the place.
To my surprise, as soon as I saw that huge dam stifling the Columbia River at The Dalles, a different voice parked itself in my brain. This voice had named his second daughter after Celilo Falls, now silenced by the dams on the river. The owner of this voice had been compelled to swim the entire length of the Columbia to get to know it as intimately as possible. That dam made my jaw drop. The water behind it made me sputter unintelligibly. I am in awe of what you have done, Christopher.
The first voice was soon joined by a happier chattering voice that piped up every time we drove over the toll bridge – you’re right, it is a ridiculous bridge: it’s not paved, you can’t walk or ride a bike on it and you have to pay 75 cents every time you cross it. That voice kayaked the rivers draining into the Columbia with me, walked through town lodged in my brain, and had dinner in my head accompanied by an honest-to-god real jug band playing in a café where the Where the Wild Things Are monsters and Max dance on the wall above the booths.
Now I have caught a glimpse of the importance of this place to my resident voices in my head. It’s not something that I can describe with words. It’s one of those things that just is. I left with reluctance. This evening I returned to Nevada City craving both of those voices to some day step out of my head and return to me again in the real world. I miss hearing them. As I let the same CD replay over and over three or four times, barely being conscious of it, I thought about both of you. I now have a greater appreciation and understanding of the thoughts you have shared with me. This place has moved me too. Thank you both for drawing me there.
Next time I will bring my camera. And perhaps my bed and kitchen table…
Special thanks to Courtney and Orion for physically bringing me to this special place that I now have a HUGE crush on.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Leave Your Clothes Behind
Friday, May 20, 2005 Edwards Crossing After High Water
The last big storm that came through brought over 3.5 inches of rain. This caused the highest river flows of the year and the South Yuba peaked at 14,000 cubic feet per second (CFS) Wednesday night. That is a lot of water.
Unfortunately I had to work Thursday so I couldn’t go to the Yuba to see what was going on for myself. Instead I walked along the banks of the Lower American looking for suitable places to teach at 14,000 CFS. The Lower American, a typically slow river becomes wider and faster at that flow, but not particularly impressive. What was impressive, however, was the confluence of the north and middle forks of the American River in Auburn.
The North Fork, a café au lait color, stomped through trees usually quite high on the banks. The Middle Fork had nothing of its usual deep green color. Instead it was black coffee crashing around a bend to form quite a formidable looking rapid leading right into a thicket of drowning trees. People were milling around on the roads and trails, cameras in hand, trying to capture the incredible force of water on film. The two rivers met like a diagram – black coffee running full force into café au lait. The two colors remained distinct for several hundred yards after they met before mingling together in turbulent waves and writhing boiling eddies. I must admit that I was severely disappointed to not be able to join the throngs of camera-toters on the road. It was a fascinating display of hydrology.
Saturday the South Yuba was still high, but it only reached about 5,000 CFS while I was there. I returned to the steep crinoid trail. The sluice box was no longer leaning against the tree where I last seen it. From the top of the trail high up on the road I could hear the river below. I began my descent, but soon my attention was caught by a tire firmly planted in Kenebec Creek below the trail. I veered off the trail and down the hill to check it out, then continued down to the river via the creek.
Quite suddenly the creek disappeared. There had been ample amounts of water collecting in small pools and pouring over rocks and then there was none. I couldn’t figure out where the water went. It was just suddenly gone. I walked further down the waterless creek and suddenly the water reappeared to the right of where the creek should have been. I followed that flow back up. All of the water was pouring out of a cave. Then I realized what must have happened to the water in the creek. That cave was the end of a hydraulic mining flume blasted through the hill in the 1800’s. The creek must have been flowing right over it and seeped through the roof of the tunnel.
Down at the river most of my access to the water was thwarted by brown water that had risen into the thickets of berry bushes and poison oak. I didn’t find much that interested me except for some old canning jars of peanut butter and jelly with rusted lids, a broken robin’s egg and piles of grasses and leaves suspended in tree branches high above the water – evidence of the river’s previous height. I collected empty Gatorade bottles and beer cans and shoved them in my backpack to take out.
Nearing the top of the trail on my way out I saw some movement further up on the side of the trail. As I got closer I saw that it was the same guy who had lugged the sluice box out of the canyon a week earlier. ‘Better weather today, eh?’ he offered. ‘Yup,’ I replied. ‘Lots of water.’ Then he resumed picking up garbage on the steep hillside and stuffing it into a bag. He’s not much of a talker. I felt better for having more than just an empty Splenda packet in my pocket this time.
I drove down to Edwards Crossing to see if I could get better river access there. The dirt road had a few cars parked off to the side, the owners presumably, on the bridge with camera in hand and cigarette in mouth, trying to capture the unusual amount of water in the river.
At the water large thickets of branches stripped of leaves scattered the banks like poorly formed tumbleweeds. It took me a while to realize that some of the tangles were poison oak, the bane of my river existence. I can’t find a good reason for the stuff to exist. It irritated me that the bushes hadn’t been completely eradicated by the river. Instead it was just made harder to identify.
I had expected to see more detritus stuffed in weird places by the high water. Much to my dismay, I found very little. Yet in several places, ribbons of different materials were woven into the leafless brambles like tinsel on discarded Christmas trees lying prone on suburban curbsides waiting to be picked up and hauled away.
Disappointed by the lack of displaced trash, I wandered to the rocks by the bridge to soak up the afternoon sun. Soon after I found a perfect spot by the roaring rapid I looked upstream where I had been. A small beach, previously empty, was occupied by a nude yoga practitioner - this one female - and a clothed observer. This, to me, is starting to represent Nevada City. Come to the South Yuba. Bring your yoga mat and leave your clothes behind.
The last big storm that came through brought over 3.5 inches of rain. This caused the highest river flows of the year and the South Yuba peaked at 14,000 cubic feet per second (CFS) Wednesday night. That is a lot of water.
Unfortunately I had to work Thursday so I couldn’t go to the Yuba to see what was going on for myself. Instead I walked along the banks of the Lower American looking for suitable places to teach at 14,000 CFS. The Lower American, a typically slow river becomes wider and faster at that flow, but not particularly impressive. What was impressive, however, was the confluence of the north and middle forks of the American River in Auburn.
The North Fork, a café au lait color, stomped through trees usually quite high on the banks. The Middle Fork had nothing of its usual deep green color. Instead it was black coffee crashing around a bend to form quite a formidable looking rapid leading right into a thicket of drowning trees. People were milling around on the roads and trails, cameras in hand, trying to capture the incredible force of water on film. The two rivers met like a diagram – black coffee running full force into café au lait. The two colors remained distinct for several hundred yards after they met before mingling together in turbulent waves and writhing boiling eddies. I must admit that I was severely disappointed to not be able to join the throngs of camera-toters on the road. It was a fascinating display of hydrology.
Saturday the South Yuba was still high, but it only reached about 5,000 CFS while I was there. I returned to the steep crinoid trail. The sluice box was no longer leaning against the tree where I last seen it. From the top of the trail high up on the road I could hear the river below. I began my descent, but soon my attention was caught by a tire firmly planted in Kenebec Creek below the trail. I veered off the trail and down the hill to check it out, then continued down to the river via the creek.
Quite suddenly the creek disappeared. There had been ample amounts of water collecting in small pools and pouring over rocks and then there was none. I couldn’t figure out where the water went. It was just suddenly gone. I walked further down the waterless creek and suddenly the water reappeared to the right of where the creek should have been. I followed that flow back up. All of the water was pouring out of a cave. Then I realized what must have happened to the water in the creek. That cave was the end of a hydraulic mining flume blasted through the hill in the 1800’s. The creek must have been flowing right over it and seeped through the roof of the tunnel.
Down at the river most of my access to the water was thwarted by brown water that had risen into the thickets of berry bushes and poison oak. I didn’t find much that interested me except for some old canning jars of peanut butter and jelly with rusted lids, a broken robin’s egg and piles of grasses and leaves suspended in tree branches high above the water – evidence of the river’s previous height. I collected empty Gatorade bottles and beer cans and shoved them in my backpack to take out.
Nearing the top of the trail on my way out I saw some movement further up on the side of the trail. As I got closer I saw that it was the same guy who had lugged the sluice box out of the canyon a week earlier. ‘Better weather today, eh?’ he offered. ‘Yup,’ I replied. ‘Lots of water.’ Then he resumed picking up garbage on the steep hillside and stuffing it into a bag. He’s not much of a talker. I felt better for having more than just an empty Splenda packet in my pocket this time.
I drove down to Edwards Crossing to see if I could get better river access there. The dirt road had a few cars parked off to the side, the owners presumably, on the bridge with camera in hand and cigarette in mouth, trying to capture the unusual amount of water in the river.
At the water large thickets of branches stripped of leaves scattered the banks like poorly formed tumbleweeds. It took me a while to realize that some of the tangles were poison oak, the bane of my river existence. I can’t find a good reason for the stuff to exist. It irritated me that the bushes hadn’t been completely eradicated by the river. Instead it was just made harder to identify.
I had expected to see more detritus stuffed in weird places by the high water. Much to my dismay, I found very little. Yet in several places, ribbons of different materials were woven into the leafless brambles like tinsel on discarded Christmas trees lying prone on suburban curbsides waiting to be picked up and hauled away.
Disappointed by the lack of displaced trash, I wandered to the rocks by the bridge to soak up the afternoon sun. Soon after I found a perfect spot by the roaring rapid I looked upstream where I had been. A small beach, previously empty, was occupied by a nude yoga practitioner - this one female - and a clothed observer. This, to me, is starting to represent Nevada City. Come to the South Yuba. Bring your yoga mat and leave your clothes behind.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Splenda
Saturday, May 14, 2005
May 14. It’s finally warm in Northern California. The water is up in the rivers. It’s a great day to paddle. But my knee is still concerning me and I decided to take yet another day off. My dad is pleased that I am (finally?) showing signs of good judgment. However I am not pleased with the weather and the water and the state of my uncooperative joints and how all that means that I am not paddling.
To compensate for my good discretion I picked the steepest trail I know – the one that leads to the crinoids – to mollify my anxious being. I need to prove to myself every now and then these days that I am not a cripple at age 31. I picked my way down the trail with more trepidation than when I had come with Sterling. Perhaps I should invest in a sunflower brace too.
One reason I picked the crinoid spot was because I knew I wouldn’t see any boaters – or probably anybody for that matter. When I got to the water is was only me and the river. Every time I come to the river with my camera I fear that I won’t find anything new to shoot. Every time the river shows me how incredibly naïve that fear is.
Today was the day of debris. I soon forgot about not paddling when my leg bumped against a submerged rusty metal screen. The thing looked fascinating through my camera lens. Bent over spread legs, I was completely absorbed with finding all the angles of light and distortion the thing had to offer. When I heard the scuffle of feet behind me, my body involuntarily jolted with surprise. A man came walking from upstream, white bucket in hand and. He was wearing Carhartt work pants and stout boots. As I regained my composure he faintly acknowledged my presence without breaking stride and rambled on in a steady yet slow pace downstream. Standing in knee deep cold water I watched him crouch underneath a low branch and drop down a steep step of rocks where my backpack lay, then up and over further rocks until he disappeared around a bend and out of sight. Then I became captivated by a spider web stretched in a hole in a rock that potted a single spindly tree.
Simple things absorbed me throughout the afternoon: a submerged red branch with dead grasses looped around it in the current, a piece of egg crate foam suspended in a small thicket of trees one quarter of the way across the river, an empty Splenda package floating in a puddle, a plastic orange ribbon tied to a branch, a minuscule pink flower, a spider, a discarded sluice box and, once again, that metal screen in the water.
After taking excessive amounts of photos of the Splenda package and the like, I sat on a rock next to the sluice box that I had dragged out of the water to write. The Carhart-wearing, bucket-carrying man retraced his earlier steps. ‘Is this yours?’ he asked, pointing to the box. ‘No,’ I answered. Once again without breaking stride, he swooped the thing up in his free hand and continued back upstream the way he had come.
I returned to my writing. Movement caught my eye in the water. I looked up in time to watch two mergansers bob down the middle of the wave train. They were just rubbing in the fact that I wasn’t doing the same myself. Or at least that’s how it felt. So I packed up my bag and started back up the trail.
Fifty yards or so from the road at the top, the man sat in a bend in the trail panting. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘Yup. It’s pretty steep,’ I told him and asked him if he wanted help carrying the thing out. He declined my offer and said he was going to leave it there and come back later. I thought that was curious since he was so close to the end, but said nothing. I have no doubt that it will be gone the next time that I go there. His bucket, I learned, was full with trash he had picked up on the riverbank as he ambled across the rocks. I thought then how very very small the empty Splenda packet was that I had stuffed in my pants pocket to carry out with me.
May 14. It’s finally warm in Northern California. The water is up in the rivers. It’s a great day to paddle. But my knee is still concerning me and I decided to take yet another day off. My dad is pleased that I am (finally?) showing signs of good judgment. However I am not pleased with the weather and the water and the state of my uncooperative joints and how all that means that I am not paddling.
To compensate for my good discretion I picked the steepest trail I know – the one that leads to the crinoids – to mollify my anxious being. I need to prove to myself every now and then these days that I am not a cripple at age 31. I picked my way down the trail with more trepidation than when I had come with Sterling. Perhaps I should invest in a sunflower brace too.
One reason I picked the crinoid spot was because I knew I wouldn’t see any boaters – or probably anybody for that matter. When I got to the water is was only me and the river. Every time I come to the river with my camera I fear that I won’t find anything new to shoot. Every time the river shows me how incredibly naïve that fear is.
Today was the day of debris. I soon forgot about not paddling when my leg bumped against a submerged rusty metal screen. The thing looked fascinating through my camera lens. Bent over spread legs, I was completely absorbed with finding all the angles of light and distortion the thing had to offer. When I heard the scuffle of feet behind me, my body involuntarily jolted with surprise. A man came walking from upstream, white bucket in hand and. He was wearing Carhartt work pants and stout boots. As I regained my composure he faintly acknowledged my presence without breaking stride and rambled on in a steady yet slow pace downstream. Standing in knee deep cold water I watched him crouch underneath a low branch and drop down a steep step of rocks where my backpack lay, then up and over further rocks until he disappeared around a bend and out of sight. Then I became captivated by a spider web stretched in a hole in a rock that potted a single spindly tree.
Simple things absorbed me throughout the afternoon: a submerged red branch with dead grasses looped around it in the current, a piece of egg crate foam suspended in a small thicket of trees one quarter of the way across the river, an empty Splenda package floating in a puddle, a plastic orange ribbon tied to a branch, a minuscule pink flower, a spider, a discarded sluice box and, once again, that metal screen in the water.
After taking excessive amounts of photos of the Splenda package and the like, I sat on a rock next to the sluice box that I had dragged out of the water to write. The Carhart-wearing, bucket-carrying man retraced his earlier steps. ‘Is this yours?’ he asked, pointing to the box. ‘No,’ I answered. Once again without breaking stride, he swooped the thing up in his free hand and continued back upstream the way he had come.
I returned to my writing. Movement caught my eye in the water. I looked up in time to watch two mergansers bob down the middle of the wave train. They were just rubbing in the fact that I wasn’t doing the same myself. Or at least that’s how it felt. So I packed up my bag and started back up the trail.
Fifty yards or so from the road at the top, the man sat in a bend in the trail panting. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘Yup. It’s pretty steep,’ I told him and asked him if he wanted help carrying the thing out. He declined my offer and said he was going to leave it there and come back later. I thought that was curious since he was so close to the end, but said nothing. I have no doubt that it will be gone the next time that I go there. His bucket, I learned, was full with trash he had picked up on the riverbank as he ambled across the rocks. I thought then how very very small the empty Splenda packet was that I had stuffed in my pants pocket to carry out with me.
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Tobacco at Spring Creek
You think I’m going to write about your tobacco? Maybe I will, but it really doesn’t interest me as much as you may think. Well, at least it doesn’t in the way that you think it does. Oddly enough it triggered something of the last time we were at the river together last summer. Watching you pull out that bag and carefully place those dried leaves on your hemp rolling paper did it. The way you rolled it and licked the seam brought back sitting next to you on the rock in the middle of the river. I looked over at you and my eyes settled on the mole sitting on the edge of your bottom eyelid at your eyelashes. The last time I looked so intently at that mole I remember your lashes clumped with tears – a wetness that took me by surprise when I last looked at that mole under your eye last summer. You had taken my finger and held it up to your wet eyes as if you sensed that I couldn’t believe they were that way unless I actually felt it with my own hand.
This morning started out with blue skies and a scattering of clouds. The computer said that thunderstorms were expected, but who’s to believe the computer? So I left my sweatshirt on the kitchen table when we left. I haven’t been to the river lately. When you brought up going there this morning, I was grateful. I couldn’t have gotten there without your shoulder to lean on or your outstretched hand that was always reaching toward me when I needed it. The pain of my knee isn’t as hard to take as the lack of freedom it causes. I’ve missed the water and it makes me fear my knee because of feeling what it can take away from me with hampered mobility.
I was grateful for your eye for the minutiae down the trail to Spring Creek (yes, it is called Spring Creek – you were right). Your pace as you found: a grub, pieces of fungus, tiny flowers, a cheese spread red plastic stick - was slower than my unsteady hobble. By the creek, past the twisted madrone, on the flat rock above the river, you spread out your blanket with the little giraffes woven through it: Monika. I still don’t like stinky cheese with blue veins running through it. And your tobacco bag came out.
It was getting colder as the clouds sped through the sky in no determined direction. Lying low and huddled against you was the only way to stop the shaking. A hummingbird hovered at the top of a tall pine in the distance twice. A bear head gathered and dissipated in the clouds above. A moth clumsily transferred trees and I still don’t know why. For what purpose did the swallows play in the currents so high up? Soft rain fell on us as our faces were tilted toward the sky.
What was written on those cigarettes of mine from back in San Francisco? Those words were conversations from smoke breaks I took with Mike. I consumed the cigarettes with words. Smoking talk. Tobacco is a ritual. It has been for centuries. The rolling papers, the cigarette breaks, the packing of dried leaves with the whack of the box against a hand – the ceremony, culture and community of it is fascinating. Does the smoke make you feel connected with your new-found community you are now separated from? Is it a shared activity that brings you back to it in your mind and heart? How can I fault you for that? Your participation of the smoking ritual brought me back to my own past and a community now years gone from me – the past that you unknowingly triggered in me as we sat in the summer sun on the rock last year as I cried. Today, once again at the river, it was unexpected to be brought back there by you. But today, unlike last summer, it was accepted. I meant it when I said it doesn’t matter. It is only like coffee…. Is it the river or is it you that does this thing to me?
Your tobacco is related to the sweat lodges and chanting, to the peyote and the integration with nature and the harmony of things. You are striving for an understanding of the interdependence of it all. I hope you can see that my camera, my paintbrush and my words are my attempt at finding and grasping the same things you are. My seemingly ceaseless questions weren’t posed from skepticism or criticism. They were asked in a desire to understand the path you have chosen in trying to reach the same place I am.
Unlike the last time at the river with you, today I felt comfortable. I shivered, my knee protested with small spasms, but as I laid next to you on the hard rock I was comfortable. Next time we should build a fire so we can stay longer.
So, you were right after all: the tobacco did make it in writing.
This morning started out with blue skies and a scattering of clouds. The computer said that thunderstorms were expected, but who’s to believe the computer? So I left my sweatshirt on the kitchen table when we left. I haven’t been to the river lately. When you brought up going there this morning, I was grateful. I couldn’t have gotten there without your shoulder to lean on or your outstretched hand that was always reaching toward me when I needed it. The pain of my knee isn’t as hard to take as the lack of freedom it causes. I’ve missed the water and it makes me fear my knee because of feeling what it can take away from me with hampered mobility.
I was grateful for your eye for the minutiae down the trail to Spring Creek (yes, it is called Spring Creek – you were right). Your pace as you found: a grub, pieces of fungus, tiny flowers, a cheese spread red plastic stick - was slower than my unsteady hobble. By the creek, past the twisted madrone, on the flat rock above the river, you spread out your blanket with the little giraffes woven through it: Monika. I still don’t like stinky cheese with blue veins running through it. And your tobacco bag came out.
It was getting colder as the clouds sped through the sky in no determined direction. Lying low and huddled against you was the only way to stop the shaking. A hummingbird hovered at the top of a tall pine in the distance twice. A bear head gathered and dissipated in the clouds above. A moth clumsily transferred trees and I still don’t know why. For what purpose did the swallows play in the currents so high up? Soft rain fell on us as our faces were tilted toward the sky.
What was written on those cigarettes of mine from back in San Francisco? Those words were conversations from smoke breaks I took with Mike. I consumed the cigarettes with words. Smoking talk. Tobacco is a ritual. It has been for centuries. The rolling papers, the cigarette breaks, the packing of dried leaves with the whack of the box against a hand – the ceremony, culture and community of it is fascinating. Does the smoke make you feel connected with your new-found community you are now separated from? Is it a shared activity that brings you back to it in your mind and heart? How can I fault you for that? Your participation of the smoking ritual brought me back to my own past and a community now years gone from me – the past that you unknowingly triggered in me as we sat in the summer sun on the rock last year as I cried. Today, once again at the river, it was unexpected to be brought back there by you. But today, unlike last summer, it was accepted. I meant it when I said it doesn’t matter. It is only like coffee…. Is it the river or is it you that does this thing to me?
Your tobacco is related to the sweat lodges and chanting, to the peyote and the integration with nature and the harmony of things. You are striving for an understanding of the interdependence of it all. I hope you can see that my camera, my paintbrush and my words are my attempt at finding and grasping the same things you are. My seemingly ceaseless questions weren’t posed from skepticism or criticism. They were asked in a desire to understand the path you have chosen in trying to reach the same place I am.
Unlike the last time at the river with you, today I felt comfortable. I shivered, my knee protested with small spasms, but as I laid next to you on the hard rock I was comfortable. Next time we should build a fire so we can stay longer.
So, you were right after all: the tobacco did make it in writing.
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Friday, April 08, 2005
Sterling
He was standing over the middle of the Yuba on the bridge at Edwards Crossing looking over the railing when I met him. We had been playing phone tag for a few weeks and I finally had a chance to talk to Sterling in person at the river. Sterling is a geologist. I showed him some photos of my work to give him an idea of what I’m doing. He asked me if I wanted him to show me some places on the river. ‘Of course,’ I replied.
We walked back across the bridge the way we had come to his truck so he could get his knee brace and walking stick. He pulled out a hard plastic and metal knee brace with little sunflowers all over it, pulled his pant leg up and strapped the contraption to his leg. A construction accident over thirty years ago gave him a bum knee. I figured I was in for a slow, leisurely day with on old man wearing a sunflower brace and clutching a walking stick. Sterling shut the door, put on a hat with ‘Older Than Dirt’ written on the face, and we were off.
Back on the bridge he asked me where I wanted to go. I didn’t really have any particular destination in mind. I figured we would just go wherever he thought was interesting. We settled on the fossils first. Backtracking for a second time across the bridge, we returned to the truck to drive to the trailhead.
Trail is a loose term. It was a path, definitely, but trails usually are more user-friendly than this. It basically went straight down the hill to the river, turning when things got a bit too steep to be able to stand without pitching headlong down the hillside. The sunflower brace didn’t appear to slow Sterling down at even a little. In fact, walking stick and all, he was proving to be much more adept at negotiating the pseudo trail than I. Sterling told me he began backpacking in the Sierra in the 1940’s. He must have been phenomenally fast in hi pre-knee brace days.
When we reached the riverbed, he found a stick and drew figures of Crinoids in the sand to show me what we were looking for. These ancient critters were weird. They inhabited the ocean floor about 200 million years ago. The most sturdy part of their body(?) was the stem. It was something like a vertebral column consisting of stacked rings like a roll of Lifesaver candies. That’s what we’d be finding in the rocks. Attached to the stem on the bottom were roots – they were stationary creatures. On top of the stem were petals and from the petals sprouted tentacles. They used the tentacles to catch their prey. As much as they sound like plants with their roots, stems and petals, Crinoids were actually animals.
Unbeknownst to me before I met with Sterling, the riverbed above Edwards Crossing was once the bottom of the ocean. The ocean floor is now at 2,000 ft. elevation and has been shoved vertically. Much of the rock in the area where we were is slate and limestone from the sediments of an ancient ocean. The Crinoids are housed in limestone.
There were a ton of these creatures in the rocks. Their stems and roots had drifted away after they died, leaving only their ringed stems behind in the mud. When me eye grew accustomed to the Crinoid shape, I found evidence of animals, that before I would have never have registered as existing, all over the place.
Around the Crinoid rocks, little limestone caves burrowed into the earth. All of the bigger stalagmite and stalagtite formations had been broken off, but little ones were still forming. Limestone isn’t common on the S. Yuba. Most of the rock on the river is volcanic or slate. The land here was covered in what Sterling referred to as a ‘thin veneer’ of magma about 1 billion years ago. A lot of this rock is reddish. I had figured it was red from some horrible byproduct of hydraulic mining, but instead it’s just naturally occurring iron oxide in the rock. The rocks are rusting.
We tinkered around the limestone for a while. Then Sterling decided he wanted to show me somewhere else. He was no slower navigating up the steep hillside as he was going down. Both of us were hot and a little winded by the time we got back to the truck. Sterling took off his jacket to reveal his long-sleeved t-shirt with the menu of the Roadkill Café on the back.
As he drove up the dirt road toward the old mining towns of North Columbia and Bloomfield, I noticed that one of his fingers was about half-size - probably the result of another construction accident. We passed an old mine shaft that didn’t go very deep with an accompanying initial dig nearby where the miners dug away a small part of the earth to see if a vein was worth following. Apparently, there it was not.
Driving further, Sterling pointed out that the rocks had changed considerably. We were halfway up the ridge from the river. They had gone from large and rounded or vertically stacked to small and rounded. Small and rounded rocks get that way from being worn away from water in rivers. We were in an ancient riverbed that meandered through rolling hills 50 million years ago. The old river flowed from north to south. The path it took bisects the east/west flowing S. Yuba, but hundreds of feet above.
Up further through the trees we were able to see bare reddish rock and soil where the entire hillside had been blasted into a canyon by hydraulic mining in the late 1800’s. Sterling asked me if I was into getting kicked off some land. ‘Certainly!’ I told him. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I want to get you closer to that.’ He veered off the road down a small dirt drive. He asked if I saw any no trespassing signs. Nope. I saw nothing, nothing at all. Neither did he.
I could see the scars in the hill peaking through the trees. But before we were able to get very far, the road was blocked by two large barking dogs marking the beginning of the ‘getting kicked of the property’ process. Sterling began making a 9-point turn on the narrow road at our canine barrier. Not following very far behind the dogs sauntered a flannel-clad man with a foot long beard dripping like moss from his chin. I stuck my arm and head out the window and yelled that we had only taken a wrong turn and that we would be backtracking momentarily. He said nothing, but only stopped his slow forward crawl and stood firmly where he was, staring.
That idea being thwarted, Sterling decided to take me to the outskirts of North Bloomfield, a ghost town where, Sterling said, some living ghosts still live. It’s a park now, but the government allowed the remaining residents to live out their lives there as they had been doing. It also has huge hydraulic mining scars, but now trees are beginning to grow back, so the damage isn’t as much of an eyesore. Along the way we passed the old stagecoach road from Nevada City to North Columbia and Bloomfield. The road forded the river without using the aid of bridges. I can’t understand why, if they were able to build intricate mining structures and systems capable of taking out entire hills, they didn’t just build a bridge.
Many of the old shacks still stand, but barely. Gnarled fruit trees were blooming in remnants of orchards. Not wanting to pay the fee to enter the park, we stopped at a sign before then entrance marking a trail to the beginning of a hydraulic mining tunnel. The miners wanted to blast water to the river smashing rocks to pieces to free gold. But, a few hills were in the way between there and the river. Who were they to let nature get in their way? It took them about 30 months, but they blasted a tunnel from North Bloomfield all the way to the South Yuba. They could do that, but they couldn’t build a bridge over the Yuba for the stagecoach. Amazing.
We walked back across the bridge the way we had come to his truck so he could get his knee brace and walking stick. He pulled out a hard plastic and metal knee brace with little sunflowers all over it, pulled his pant leg up and strapped the contraption to his leg. A construction accident over thirty years ago gave him a bum knee. I figured I was in for a slow, leisurely day with on old man wearing a sunflower brace and clutching a walking stick. Sterling shut the door, put on a hat with ‘Older Than Dirt’ written on the face, and we were off.
Back on the bridge he asked me where I wanted to go. I didn’t really have any particular destination in mind. I figured we would just go wherever he thought was interesting. We settled on the fossils first. Backtracking for a second time across the bridge, we returned to the truck to drive to the trailhead.
Trail is a loose term. It was a path, definitely, but trails usually are more user-friendly than this. It basically went straight down the hill to the river, turning when things got a bit too steep to be able to stand without pitching headlong down the hillside. The sunflower brace didn’t appear to slow Sterling down at even a little. In fact, walking stick and all, he was proving to be much more adept at negotiating the pseudo trail than I. Sterling told me he began backpacking in the Sierra in the 1940’s. He must have been phenomenally fast in hi pre-knee brace days.
When we reached the riverbed, he found a stick and drew figures of Crinoids in the sand to show me what we were looking for. These ancient critters were weird. They inhabited the ocean floor about 200 million years ago. The most sturdy part of their body(?) was the stem. It was something like a vertebral column consisting of stacked rings like a roll of Lifesaver candies. That’s what we’d be finding in the rocks. Attached to the stem on the bottom were roots – they were stationary creatures. On top of the stem were petals and from the petals sprouted tentacles. They used the tentacles to catch their prey. As much as they sound like plants with their roots, stems and petals, Crinoids were actually animals.
Unbeknownst to me before I met with Sterling, the riverbed above Edwards Crossing was once the bottom of the ocean. The ocean floor is now at 2,000 ft. elevation and has been shoved vertically. Much of the rock in the area where we were is slate and limestone from the sediments of an ancient ocean. The Crinoids are housed in limestone.
There were a ton of these creatures in the rocks. Their stems and roots had drifted away after they died, leaving only their ringed stems behind in the mud. When me eye grew accustomed to the Crinoid shape, I found evidence of animals, that before I would have never have registered as existing, all over the place.
Around the Crinoid rocks, little limestone caves burrowed into the earth. All of the bigger stalagmite and stalagtite formations had been broken off, but little ones were still forming. Limestone isn’t common on the S. Yuba. Most of the rock on the river is volcanic or slate. The land here was covered in what Sterling referred to as a ‘thin veneer’ of magma about 1 billion years ago. A lot of this rock is reddish. I had figured it was red from some horrible byproduct of hydraulic mining, but instead it’s just naturally occurring iron oxide in the rock. The rocks are rusting.
We tinkered around the limestone for a while. Then Sterling decided he wanted to show me somewhere else. He was no slower navigating up the steep hillside as he was going down. Both of us were hot and a little winded by the time we got back to the truck. Sterling took off his jacket to reveal his long-sleeved t-shirt with the menu of the Roadkill Café on the back.
As he drove up the dirt road toward the old mining towns of North Columbia and Bloomfield, I noticed that one of his fingers was about half-size - probably the result of another construction accident. We passed an old mine shaft that didn’t go very deep with an accompanying initial dig nearby where the miners dug away a small part of the earth to see if a vein was worth following. Apparently, there it was not.
Driving further, Sterling pointed out that the rocks had changed considerably. We were halfway up the ridge from the river. They had gone from large and rounded or vertically stacked to small and rounded. Small and rounded rocks get that way from being worn away from water in rivers. We were in an ancient riverbed that meandered through rolling hills 50 million years ago. The old river flowed from north to south. The path it took bisects the east/west flowing S. Yuba, but hundreds of feet above.
Up further through the trees we were able to see bare reddish rock and soil where the entire hillside had been blasted into a canyon by hydraulic mining in the late 1800’s. Sterling asked me if I was into getting kicked off some land. ‘Certainly!’ I told him. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I want to get you closer to that.’ He veered off the road down a small dirt drive. He asked if I saw any no trespassing signs. Nope. I saw nothing, nothing at all. Neither did he.
I could see the scars in the hill peaking through the trees. But before we were able to get very far, the road was blocked by two large barking dogs marking the beginning of the ‘getting kicked of the property’ process. Sterling began making a 9-point turn on the narrow road at our canine barrier. Not following very far behind the dogs sauntered a flannel-clad man with a foot long beard dripping like moss from his chin. I stuck my arm and head out the window and yelled that we had only taken a wrong turn and that we would be backtracking momentarily. He said nothing, but only stopped his slow forward crawl and stood firmly where he was, staring.
That idea being thwarted, Sterling decided to take me to the outskirts of North Bloomfield, a ghost town where, Sterling said, some living ghosts still live. It’s a park now, but the government allowed the remaining residents to live out their lives there as they had been doing. It also has huge hydraulic mining scars, but now trees are beginning to grow back, so the damage isn’t as much of an eyesore. Along the way we passed the old stagecoach road from Nevada City to North Columbia and Bloomfield. The road forded the river without using the aid of bridges. I can’t understand why, if they were able to build intricate mining structures and systems capable of taking out entire hills, they didn’t just build a bridge.
Many of the old shacks still stand, but barely. Gnarled fruit trees were blooming in remnants of orchards. Not wanting to pay the fee to enter the park, we stopped at a sign before then entrance marking a trail to the beginning of a hydraulic mining tunnel. The miners wanted to blast water to the river smashing rocks to pieces to free gold. But, a few hills were in the way between there and the river. Who were they to let nature get in their way? It took them about 30 months, but they blasted a tunnel from North Bloomfield all the way to the South Yuba. They could do that, but they couldn’t build a bridge over the Yuba for the stagecoach. Amazing.
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