Double grace on miraculous mountain

Fog blankets San Pablo Bay at sunrise, viewed from Mt. Tamalpais’ East Peak.

The sun would rise in less than an hour. I was six miles from the coast, motoring through fog so dense that oncoming headlamps burst into view only 30 yards ahead. The saving grace: not much traffic – oncoming or otherwise. Only a foolhardy day tripper would venture to navigate the acute angles of the Panoramic Highway in thick fog at 5:15, plowing through the marine layer smothering Mt. Tamalpais.

I was headed for the one unsmothered spot – the top. My goal: the 2,571-foot spike of East Peak thrust above the marine layer like a volcanic island above the surface of the sea. I’d hoped to gaze from that perch down to San Francisco, to the ribbon of the Bay Bridge and sawtooth spire of the Trans Am building and its retinue glinting in the gold of sunrise. But I’d checked the fog forecast and figured that vista would be a longshot. The fog wouldn’t dissolve till noon at best.

“The coldest winter I ever saw,” wrote Mark Twain, “was the summer I spent in San Francisco.” It’s a fair bet Twain meant more than the mercury level; he also meant moisture. But it was precisely low Fahrenheit and high water vapor that I was stalking that morning. Home lay 45 miles east in Contra Costa County, baking in the driest January-through-May stretch since 1920. Marin County, on the contrary, was a marvel of mist – just what my system craved.

Behind me a veil of pale violet would soon glide upward from the east: first light. But not for my eyes. Fog devoured my headlamp beams as I groped my way down the road to where it splits at Pantoll Station, elevation 1,500 feet. The left fork falls to Stinson Beach; the right rises to the mountain’s pinnacle. I hooked right, and that’s where the trip came to a screech.  The gate to East Peak was shut. A sign announced that it wouldn’t swing open till 7 a.m. The clock read 5:45.

I parked in the Pantoll lot, strapped on my pack and made a beeline for the trailhead. I wouldn’t chalk up the 6 trail miles and 1,000 feet of elevation to East Peak by sunrise, but I was in no mood to abort the mission. I’d rolled out of bed in Brentwood at 3 a.m. to do Mt. Tam at sunrise, and whatever my elevation when the Sun did rise, I’d be somewhere on the mountain to witness it.

But before I stomped out of earshot of the area, something miraculous happened. Somewhere in the opaque grey a vehicle rolled to a stop, a door slammed shut, a padlock rattled and a gate creaked. I hustled back to the trailhead.

Fog drifts through the ravines surrounding Alpine and Bon Tempe lakes.

A park ranger had opened the road to the peak. Seems the 7 a.m. opening time was more a ballpark figure than a policy. I thanked the ranger, unhitched my pack and hopped into my car. One road mile and 300 vertical feet later I sailed through the fog’s ceiling. Far ahead on distant ridges in the east, the silhouettes of Douglas firs were etched against a crystalline sky. In the space of seconds I’d been delivered from the blear of night to sharp-edged dawn.

The ranger’s arrival was only half the miracle; the other half was my departure 105 minutes earlier. I’d planned to leave at 4 a.m. I left at 4:06. Had I left on time, I’d have been long gone on the trail and out of earshot of the gate creaking open.

When plotting an adventure requiring a 3 a.m. rising time, you’d best set a worthy goal. My goal had been sunrise on the top of Mt. Tam. Goal achieved. The strange and miraculous thing is this: no matter what particular thrill I seek on a particular outing, I’m nearly always given something else. Something greater. East Peak would be only half the gift.

A northwest wind stiffened as I sat on the ancient serpentine rocks of the summit and watched the sun crest the horizon. Mission accomplished. Behind me, toward the wind’s teeth, tendrils of mist slithered down ravines spilling into Alpine and Bon Tempe lakes. I took shelter from the wind farther down the peak’s southeast face. Thirty-seven miles across the marine layer rippling above San Pablo Bay rose the twin peaks of another mountain – Diablo, deep purple against a sky burnished in red and gold.

Crepuscular rays radiate from a coast live oak on Mt. Tam.

My senses sufficiently shellacked by a sunrise of utmost beauty – and a vicious wind – I drove down from the peak. Just before plunging back into the murk, reluctant to bid the sky farewell, I veered left into a small gravel parking lot swept by wisps of the fog’s ceiling. A path led south from the gravel to a tall coast live oak standing sentinel on a knoll. I was halfway up the path when a wave of fog rolled in; the tree disappeared.

When a moment later the fog’s core cleared, I found myself enveloped in an aura so alien and angelic it took my breath away. The knoll had exploded in shafts of light radiating from a spectral corona behind the tree. As the breeze drove tufts of fog through the tree, the shafts fluctuated in intensity. I was surrounded by a kaleidoscopic pageant of god rays.

For a moment I was caught in a riptide of bliss and fear. Not having penciled “otherworldly ambush” onto the agenda, I tried to keep my composure, blindsided as I was by what Whitman felt striking out from Paumanok: “Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me ... Vistas of glory, incessant and branching.”

I’m not suggesting the phenomenon can’t be explained in physical terms. The Sun supplied the light. Gaps between leaves and branches conspired with light and moist air to form crepuscular rays that appeared to emanate from the tree. The spectral orb crowning the Sun was produced by the diffraction of sunlight through the fog’s tiny water droplets. The rays were no supernatural event. But my presence in that place at that precise moment? That was miraculous: a collusion of the chance and providence hardwired into our universe.

If a tree radiates rays and no one sees them, do they produce a vision of glory? “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them,” wrote Annie Dillard. “The least we can do is try to be there.” So I stood there – not having tried to be there – savoring the convergence of light, mist and tree: my unexpected gift from the world.

Much later – for the spectacle lasted graciously long – I descended the knoll, took a final look back, and drove down through the grey to the world I called my other home.

Beneath the surface of surf

At Pescadero Beach, a plunging breaker crashes against the rocks.

Californians are notorious for making waves. From flaunting alternative lifestyles on Castro Street to enthroning stars of the silver screen in Sacramento, we love to soak the unsuspecting body politic in the spray of our cultural cannonballs.

Maybe we’re taking the cue from the ultimate wave maker, a certain large body of water to our west. Year-round, along 840 miles of coastline, we get to see and smell the swell and scent of the mighty Pacific Ocean; get to hear waves, like breath, exhale onto the shore and inhale back to the dark lungs of the deep. And once in a while, tide and wind conspire to create that paragon of fluid physics: the plunging breaker. 

But what exactly is going on there? Why does a wave plunge? What physical forces produce the aesthetic event? And as a bonus puzzler: why do waves always roll in parallel to the shoreline?

To understand the inner workings of a wave, hold your breath; we’re taking it underwater. A wave isn’t primarily the movement of the surface of the water but the collective motion of water beneath the surface. If you’ve ever thrown a small piece of driftwood – or uncooperative Frisbee – onto a gentle incoming wave, you’ve seen this principle in action. The floating object rides up the wave crest’s leading edge and down its trailing edge with a slight forward, then backward motion. For its part, the wave rambles on toward the shore, leaving the object to bob atop the next incoming wave. In short, the wave moves toward the shore while the water on the surface moves up and down.

Boogie boarders test their mettle at Stinson Beach.

So what’s going on beneath the surface? Circular motion, that’s what. Once a wave gets organized out at sea, it resembles a long cylinder, like a roll of carpet in a warehouse. (The wave is actually a series of many rolls stacked on top of each other, decreasing in size the deeper they go.) A surfboarder knows this better than anyone. A breaking wave’s topmost roll forms the large tunnel along which the lucky surfer skims. When we say that waves “roll in” we’re speaking more than figuratively.

At a certain point in its tumble toward the shore, the deep water wave runs up against the ocean bottom, which causes two things to happen. First, as the wave brushes the bottom it’s pushed upward and its crest steepens. This causes the water at the crest to speed up. When the speed of the crest outruns the speed of the overall wave that supports it, the crest collapses as a plunging breaker. Imagine a slapstick comedian leaning nonchalantly on a cane. Someone sneaks up behind him and kicks away the cane, making him crash to the ground.

Parallel waves march in at sunset along the California coast.

The ocean bottom is also the culprit in our second cause of a wave’s collapse. When the water through which the wave spins becomes too shallow to allow the wave to complete a full rotation (that is, to get filled in with supporting water), the cane again gets kicked away and the wave falls on its face. But what a fall. If you’ve ever seen that translucent curved curtain strike a rocky cliff at the optimal gathering of energy, you’ll never forget it.

Finally, what explains the tendency of waves to approach the shoreline in parallel formation, like a well-disciplined marching band? Well, consider the marching band. That long, rolling cylinder zeroes in on the shoreline at, say, a 45-degree angle. One side of the cylinder’s length will feel the bottom first. Friction slows down that side, while the side out in deep water spirals along at its original clip. Like a marching band executing a wheel, the faster deep-water side rotates around the hinge of the slower shallow-water side till voilà! The wave marches home perfectly perpendicular to the shoreline.

Here’s wishing you a memorable escape at the coast, where breakers plunge and waves wheel – and your knowledge of the inner workings of these marvels makes them more dramatic.

Winter – gnawing the marrow

Devil's Peak, Royal Gorge, elevation 7,074'.

Winter couldn’t wait. A week short of the solstice, a snowstorm swept through the granite spine of the Sierra Nevada Range. Bear Valley registered 30 inches in the last 48 hours. The calendar belies it; the imagery clarifies it: black bears and big-leaf oaks lie dormant. Fangs of ice hang from the lips of cliffs and carpets of white weigh precariously on windward mountainsides. Winter is here.

For us west of Central Valley, the fee exacted for eight months of dry skies is four months of rain. No sub-zero temperatures crack our water pipes, no blizzards send our cars careening into ditches. Winter in the Bay Area: If this is as bad as it gets, we’ve got it good.

We Bay Area folk might wish our winters were more severe. According to Garrison Keillor, chronicler of Minnesota’s imaginary Lake Wobegon, harsh winters produce virtuous people. At the least, communal shivering discourages the vice of self-pity. “Winter is not a personal experience,” writes Keillor. “Everyone else is as cold as you are; so don’t complain about it too much.” And the physical challenges of winter – shoveling sidewalks, jump-starting dead batteries, pushing cars out of snowdrifts – provide ample opportunities for neighborly acts.

The naturalist Barry Lopez echoes Keillor’s take on winter. In his travels with Eskimo hunters, who live “in a world where swift and fatal violence, like ivu, the suddenly leaping shore ice, is inherent in the land,” Lopez was struck by the Eskimos’ acceptance of Nature’s hard knocks. “They have a quality of taking extravagant pleasure in being alive; and delight in finding it in other people.”

In the crucible of winter, our molten frailty hardens into a Promethean shape: resourceful and defiant. We bring down fire from heaven. Fire, in fact, has always been the chief weapon in our war on winter. Harnessing fire allowed us to emerge from the last Ice Age and pursue the woolly mammoth across the Arctic Circle into America. Tens of thousands of years later, the sparks thrown by those modest campfires have set the forest of our civilization ablaze, jumped the fire line and changed the face of the planet.

But there’s a catch. In the words of archaeologist and anthropologist Loren Eiseley, “The sorcerer’s gift of fire in a dark cave has brought us more than a simple kingdom. Like so many magical gifts it has conjured up that which cannot be subdued but henceforth demands unceasing attention lest it destroy us.” This applies not only to the fire of nuclear self-annihilation. Our modern version of primitive tinder and flint – coal, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear fission – might shield us from the ravages of this or that winter. But they cannot prevent the next Ice Age or global warming. They might, of course, bring them on sooner.

Wind-whipped ice razors on the Mt. Diablo summit.

If winter makes us tougher, it can also make us more thoughtful. Thoreau believed that winter promotes a more inward life. Standing on the banks of a frozen river, he imagined the human brain as “the kernel which winter itself matures.” Winter clears the mind’s clutter as it clears leaves from forest branches, giving our intellectual landscape a transparency that allows us to see through things. “The winter,” wrote Thoreau, “is thrown to us like a bone to a famished dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it.”

No matter how compassionately winter treats us in 2015-16, it’s clear that Nature has required us to submit to its terms. Be grateful for the challenge. If it’s a pass/fail test, we’ll surely pass. The greater achievement will be to embrace the cold rain and long nights, let them sweep into and through us, and find on the other side of the season a place where the first wildflowers grasp for the growing light, a place that without winter would be far less sweet.