Old Woman Riding Home

It is my habit at night to walk the six miles to Pacific Grove and back. Something I have done in sporadic bursts for twenty six years, whenever I am in Monterey. It is a kind of going home, over and over again. 

I have been walking the bike path over to Lover’s Point for most of this winter. The weather has been good for it, at least since the early season rains blew themselves out. It is a steady routine, perhaps my steadiest. When I start out the door of my mother’s house, I know I will not turn around until I am under the cypress trees and the fluorescent lights at the trail’s end, just past where the harbor seals have given birth to their pups.

Not long after I started this winter, I noticed the same older lady would pass me on her bicycle at about the same time. I could see her slightly weaving progress from afar, her yellow wind jacket and blinking reflectors when she neared. Shortly after, she began to say, “Good night!” when she passed, without looking up.

It startled me at first. And then it made perfect sense. We two people often occupied the same place and we ought to greet each other. But I thought too long and gave a muffled you too! to her distant back.

I began to look forward to this little salutation. Sometimes she would not see me, or I would wear unusual clothes, and she would be silent. I would feel neglected but it would not occur to me to say good night first. I got better at preparing for her somewhere between Pacific Grove and Cannery Row, so that I could wish her well before she was out of earshot. You too old woman riding home!

It is spring now. The nights are foggy and warm, a breeze blows in from the ocean. The tourists are here, the flowers are up. And I find myself thinking that soon this habit, like all of my good habits, will come to an end. As soon as possible, I need to be somewhere else, doing something else. The reasons change. I pay less attention to the cypress trees and the sea lions barking on the pier. 

I was walking along in the gravel tonight, counting the reasons I am a shithead, nearly to the mural which turns sepia under the sulfur streetlights. I heard the sound of tires behind me and knew without thinking it was the old woman riding home. I turned to greet her, it was in my reflex to say, “Good night!” first this time. But before I could, she called out softly and smiled as she passed. All I could do was wish her along, her bike bobbing from side to side, the red light flashing on the back of her wind jacket. “You too!” I said with as much feeling as I could muster. Maybe too much feeling, maybe I sounded like I was mocking her. 

I invented a story for her as she pedaled away. That she is a docent at the aquarium on Cannery Row. After closing time, she walks among the tanks of undulating kelp and sardines flashing in the dark, on the way to her bicycle. She checks on all of her familiar creatures before saying good night, gets on her bike, and says it one last time. To me, her jellyfish drifting along beside the way home. 

Whales Big as Submarines

When I got to Strawberry Valley, the only water was a green algae filled puddle in the creek bed. Flies buzzed around. All the water I was carrying in my pack was gone, and it was very hot. I had screwed up.

There were several thousand feet to climb and maybe ten miles to go before a big spring on the coast ridge. I scooped a bottle full of the green muck. Then I soaked my tee shirt in the water and rung it out over my head, started up the trail.

I passed through the pine and sandstone of Indian Valley, but didn’t pay much attention. Every few minutes I stopped, closed my eyes, and stood still until the spinning in my head died down. Switchback after switchback, but not sweating much. I stopped to pee but couldn’t. Somewhere I had heard it was bad not to be able to pee every hour. So I pulled out my stove and set the green muck to boil.

It smelled like tea, even strained. It was so hot it burned my tongue. But it didn’t make the spinning stop. The hot water ran right through me and wafted away as sweat. I began to stop at each switchback, the dizziness making me panic which sped me up then made me dizzy again. No thirst anymore, and the spring ahead was abstract, an idea of water. I picked flecks of algae off my shirt with my fingernail. 

At the top of the ridge, the Pacific Ocean breeze blew into my face. I sat beneath a conifer drinking in the feel of it on my eyebrows. But my head would not stop spinning. The water below beckoned, impossible. I tried and failed to get up and put my pack on several times before succeeding. It was still a ways to the spring.

After a bend or two, I came upon a man sitting on the porch of a cabin. The cabin peaked out above the road, its windows facing south toward the sun and the water. He looked at me for a moment then asked, “You want a beer?”

I didn’t but it felt rude to ask for water first. So I sat upon his deck drinking a beer and looking down on the ocean with him. His name was Pete and he was short and his hair was black. He wore sunglasses, metal rimmed with dark lenses. He said, “Down there, sometimes I see whales as big as submarines. All the way down there.”

I told him where I had been and he asked about Indian Valley. 

“I remember,” he said, “riding through there in the forties on a mule. The pines and the cedars were everywhere on the ridges. But now.” He waved his left hand toward the backcountry.

He had been here when the Marble Cone fire, the biggest in California history to that point, had started nearby. He had seen the lightning striking and knew what it meant. And then watched what he believed was the Forest Service’s neglect as it expanded. 

He believed they had wanted to burn him and others off of the road, to let the fire get into the wilderness where it would expand and their hands would be tied. He feared the Forest Service encroaching upon him in various ways. He told me these things without malice, without persuasion. They did not seem to inhibit his ablution, his sitting on the porch with the ocean at his feet. 

“My kids don’t like this place. So it’s just me.” He opened another beer and stood up. “I remember all those pines, and the Santa Lucia firs too. We were on mules.” He chuckled about it.

Pete stood there with his nose jutting into the wind and his eyes on the ocean. He was not just looking at the scenery, he was looking into it. Like a bird. 

The beer had gone straight to my head but I felt ashamed to have empty bottles on such a day. And I didn’t want to interrupt the sitting there, smell of the porch wood in the sun. But finally I managed, “Say, could I trouble you for some water for the walk to Cold Spring?”

He poured it for me, right into my mucky water bottle. I didn’t care. I sipped it slowly at first, then faster. Finally in big gulps.