360guy.org

Last night Ronnie and I hiked Ventana close to sunset.  The memories flooded back.  30 years ago Sonja would have spent most of Saturday in the kitchen making homeade truffles, broiled asperagus and mesquite smoked salmon; Charlie and Ronnie would have loaded their North Faces with champagne, cold packs and obscure Sicilian reds.  All of us would be lost in conversation on our trek to our special sunset picnic spot above the falls, 3 miles in.

The land is timeless. High desert of creosote, mormon tea, prickly pear, ocotillo and saguaro as familiar as a cropped lawn to a midwesterner. We had the path to ourselves last night at sunset, save for two athletic girls, jogging back down from the falls to their car before nightfall.  We pushed on, recalling our times here, our dead friends, the scarred ones, the lost ones too.

Sacamano lives in Italy, Ronnie in Santa Barbara, our kids are pushing 30.  The water trickles, the sinking sun finds an angle and glows neon orange on the stream surface and the cliff faces, just as it always has.

After NYC, SF is the most densely populated city in the US.  About 750,000 are packed into approximately 47 square miles. The weather is chilly—drizzly if you are lucky— and the sea rules the land. Walking down wide Market Street the plane trees, archictectural details on the street lamps and the green lacquered kiosks will remind you of Paris. The mahogany Golden Gate Bridge squats over the narrow neck of the bay and running over to Sausalito on the GG is earsplitting with the speeding trucks and buses.  Returning to the SF side and jogging back down to Crissy Park and along the Embarcadero, the ears recover. Pier 23 (name of restaurant—there is no actual Pier 23)  is empty of people but warm and dry— cold local beer and fish tacos reward a 7 mile run. Some places are tough to leave like Istanbul and Paris but the left brain of logic and practicality gurantees we make it to the airport and return home.  But here  something mysterious and substantial anethetizes reason.  The right part of my brain—the part that loves unicorns and dreams—- overides the left, and I miss my flight back.  Twice.

  Things don’t have to change the world to be important.  So you didn’t write the screenplay for “Eraserhead,” or “Fight Club,” or “Being John Malkovich.” There was a little boy tagging along the beach behind his dad, who was barefoot. The man was pulling a steel oxygen bottle mounted on two wheels.  He was pasty white, ill looking, even without the canula draped around his ears and up each nostril.  The boy and his dad were together,  early on a crisp beautiful day before the world was awake enough to start with the usual demands, the inevitable criticisms, the nonsense that causes our worries to blot out our joy of being alive.  Just tan sand, neon blue sky and cool salt air.  And two folks living their lives— one brand new, the other not.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.