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.