Into the Gap

I often used to leash the dog up for a hike along the front range slope facing the Carquinez Straits. Reaching the mesa, the land stretched out in front of me in a fine California tableau of oatgrass and live oak trees. I knew that in the dark green of windbreak grove about a quarter mile back there was an abandoned ranch house hidden in the valley between two rolling hills, and it was there that I meant to go wandering with my thoughts.

There was always a certain vigilance that would hit with heady sudden intensity back here. There was a family of inbred mountain lions, who left carcasses right on the trail. They'd survived the encroaching urbanity somewhat poorly, their usual 200 mile hunting range now significantly reduced to maybe 40. or 50 at the outside. I was glad of Hero, who was 120 pounds and still full of a little wild wolf energy. I hoped that the combination of us both would send a slightly stupid predator to second guessing the wisdom of considering us as meal worthy.

Up there in the summer months as it was then, the air is dry and hot, the wind steady. The climb up the rockface, a thin steep trail running the back side of the range would set your mind higher in it's 1000 easy steps to endorphin land.

I had been to the ranch house before, and found an odd sense of nostalgia passing through me ghostlike during my walks through. The house was a low ranch style,and had once been very grand. There were large glass panels overlooking a beautiful vista and a swimming pool with a fireplace at one end. The kitchen had an elaborate double range and stove set up, and the whole place felt like what I imagine California in the early 20th century to have been. It was an easy place to visit imaginings of memories.

In order to reach the ranch, there was a dark walk through a deep pine and eucalyptus grove, and it was here that the mood of the place would steal up on you. The cool shade and almost immediate darkness, the white startling ghost swoop deep wing flapping whoosh of the barn owl felt like a warning to be wary of the sound muffling deep pine needles. Hero always went on sharp alert here, not cowering but very finely tuned.

At the risk of sounding trite and overplayed, there was a sense of a womanly presence and long satin dressing gowns here. An elegant scent and little boys running around wearing cowboy get ups and shooting their cap guns in clumsy oversized boots. There was that, and it was charming. There was also other: madness, a great loneliness, grief and emptiness lingering like smoke used to, when such things were allowed indoors. If you yourself lingered overlong in that house, it would begin to lower and thicken, running to the muffled sound of rats in the wiring and the ruin of this place that begged for burning, the sound of roaring flames setting all that deep sighing free.

I would often find myself in a strange abstraction there, staying just slightly overlong.The journey back out of the grove would be whistling past the graveyard spooked and knife edged deliberate steady. If this sounds somewhat masochistic, it was: but stay with me and my neck hairs rising, because the breaking out of the grove into the sun's blessing with it's steady cool wind would set you up on a proud line of painted pony horseback fineness, effortlessly safe. It was as if I could hear with some inner sense heightened by the shifting shadows of adrenaline revisiting the recent past. The sound of placid hooves and the gentle stepping sway of my spine were exactly in sync here as I cleared the ridge top. It very much seemed as if it was not my eyes alone looking out over the unspoiled sparkling water and the mountains of Marin County beyond.

I believe that there was an inner formula at work in myself that called the guardians of my spirit chemically perhaps, reminding me surely of another land, in another time, it's weight of millenia, when everything was finely beaded strong and the earth itself your mother, your father the sky over all that is.