September 13, 2024

Friday the 13th – perfect day for dental work

My dentist asked me to pick a date for repairs on a fractured tooth. I mulled it over and said, “How does Friday the 13th work for you?”

Jerry Seinfeld once remarked that one of his chief pet peeves is the term “pet peeve.” I know the feeling: I’m so unsuperstitious I’ve become positively superstitious about it. Show me a ladder and I’ll duck under it in a heartbeat; point out a black cat and I’ll cross the street, risking bodily harm, to cross the cat’s path. I’ve embraced The Dark Side.

Apophenia, the interpretation of meaningless phenomena in meaningful ways, seems hard-wired into the human brain. On Oct. 10, 2010 – 10/10/10 – more than 39,000 couples in the United States were wed, nearly 10 times the nuptial number of the comparable day the previous year. Elvis impersonators hit the jackpot on 11/11/11, when the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel recorded 200 bookings, four times the norm.

I’m no psychologist, but I’ve seen enough of human behavior to take an educated guess about who’s pushing the easy-to-remember anniversary numbers. It’s the grooms.

Some superstitions that seem numeric are actually sonic. Superstitious people in Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam shun the number four, a homophone for the word for death. This influences the assigning of numbers to cell phones, floors in buildings (skipping four, as we in the West skip 13) and names to streets. If this strikes you as foolish, imagine our Western numbering system containing an exact sonic match for “bloodbath.” How’d you like to live on Bloodbath Blossom Street?

What prompts some superstition isn’t numbers or sounds but wishful thinking, like expecting an inanimate object – say, a writing pen – to remember any fact of significance. Some folks believe that when taking a test, it’s a savvy move to use the pen you used when studying for the test, since the pen is likely to remember the correct answers. These folks’ pens are mightier than their gourds.

If I’m wrong about this, if our superstitions correspond to the way things work, if the number 13 is jinxed, we’re all in deep doo-doo. It means the cosmos is supervised by a malicious prankster, that the slightest slip-up can trigger tragic consequences, as when the groom who drops the wedding band at the ceremony dooms the marriage. Who knows what other innocent acts ignite icky outcomes? We can imagine the cosmic prankster laying a curse on dentists who whistle “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” while performing root canals, the most original sin of the modern era.

If you’re superstitious and want to break the habit, go break a mirror. Thumb your nose at the cosmic prankster and track the consequences. Keep a journal – in the case of the mirror, every day for seven years. That’s right: 2,556.75 straight days of journal entries. A more passive strategy: make a dental appointment for Friday the 13th. Dental work: drilling and chiseling on sensitive nerve endings in your mouth. Hey, it’s Friday the 13th; what could possibly go wrong?

But to the true believer on this inauspicious Friday, September 13, 2024: Relax. Embrace your superstition. Take a deep breath. And never mind that it rhymes with death.

June 14, 2024

Strange sightings from the playpen

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke

We hikers who enjoy hitting the trail between dusk and dawn catch sight of some pretty odd things. Sometimes, those odd things consider us pretty odd, too.

I flowed downhill beneath a canopy of oaks in the shadow of Mt. Diablo. As I swung around a bend I spotted two deer spotting me. The doe, in three majestic leaps, disappeared into the fortress of trees. But the fawn didn’t follow.

I eased back, stopped four paces from the fawn and it bleated like a lamb, accessing its ancestral memory, searching in vain for the identity of the long, smooth and shiny, softly rumbling … thing. I was sitting in my car.

I’d quit the trail a few minutes earlier and was settling in for the steep and hairpin trip down middle-of-nowhere Morgan Territory Road. I’d caught the two creatures’ eyes in my high beams in plenty of time to slow down. The mother bounded away. The child stood there, mesmerized by the sight of an automobile.

I rolled down my window and bleated back at the fawn. It took a step toward me. We were almost nose-to-nose. Its nostrils flared and its head bobbed in excitement. The huge ears were fully alert; a riff of hooves timbrellated off the pavement. Then it dawned on me: I wasn’t doing that lanky toddler any favor by encouraging it to hang out in the middle of the road. I swung open the door and jumped out, shouting and waving my arms like a lunatic. The fawn sprang gawkily off.

Those who claim to have encountered extraterrestrial beings describe spaceships carrying passengers. This we take for granted. This is the way we imagine the human race, far in the future, will explore the stars. But what physical form would humanity have taken by then? Scientist and futurist Arthur C. Clarke believed the next step in human evolution will entail the transfer of consciousness into some synthetic vessel, something less vulnerable than flesh and blood. Extraterrestrials – possibly thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of years ahead of us in their evolutionary journey – might have attained such a state. According to Clarke, if UFOs represent an authentic extraterrestrial visitation, they’re not necessarily vehicular transport for space aliens. The UFOs might be the space aliens.

Like the fawn, we haven’t a clue. Unlike the fawn, we think we do.

The main sticking point of the “little green men” theory of ETs is not that ETs look too weird, but that they look too human. Close-encounter witnesses speak of creatures with eyes, ears, noses and mouths – never mind the number – in more or less familiar locations. If there’s anything eerie about the aliens it’s their lack of eeriness: their head-mounted organs of sense; their bilateral symmetry and bipedal locomotion.

Our tendency to anthropomorphize space aliens is reinforced by the universe portrayed in sci-fi amusements such as “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” a universe in which nearly all intelligent beings in our galaxy speak perfect American English – with a Midwestern accent.

That extra-terrestrials resemble us contradicts our experience of the Nature we find even on Planet Earth, where extravagance is the rule. The Nature we know is Beethoven scribbling several dozen versions of a melody just to get it right, recombining tones of the diatonic scale like DNA molecules. What are the odds that sentient life on another planet would take a biological route identical to ours? Astronomical. “Genuine extra-terrestrials,” wrote Clarke, “would be really alien – as different from us as the praying mantis, the giant squid, the blue whale … We are products of thousands of throws of the genetic dice.”

“Is the human race alone in the cosmos?” is a question for the ages – ages to come, that is. That we can’t produce a single irrefutable shred of proof for alien visitation should be expected. Our radio and TV broadcasts began speeding out of our little corner of the Milky Way’s Orion arm in only the most recent and minuscule fraction of the life of the cosmos. We can’t blame ET for not picking up on hints of our existence. As Clarke put it, “It is not likely that ultimate questions will be settled in such short periods of time, or that we will really know much about the universe while we are still crawling around in the playpen of the Solar System.”

I slipped back into the driver’s seat and pulled slowly away from the site of the close encounter, wishing the fawn luck in its attempt to convey the incident to the herd. “UFO” – however it translates into bleat-speak – is about as helpful an expression as “non-dairy creamer.” Now that you know what the stuff in your decaf is not … what is it?

And how do we classify those smooth, shiny and unidentified objects in our night sky? Since, like the fawn, we’re all infants in this playpen, your guess is as good as mine.

April 15, 2024

Ticked off on the treacherous trail

Public Enemy No. 1: the Western black-legged tick. Photo by Unsplash.

I peeled off my sweaty hiking shirt and shorts, hopped into the stall and indulged in a scalding shower. The air swirling around Sunol’s Maquire Peaks that morning had been chilly; the trail sloppy; the trail shoulder wet and grassy. It’d take a half hour of painstaking scraping to make the mud-caked cleat pattern of my boots reappear.

As I stepped from the stall, a dark speck on my right thigh caught the corner of my eye. I bent over to check it out. There, like a hand caught in a cookie jar, protruded the hind quarters of a tick surrounded by a pale red ring – a perfect bullseye tattooed onto my flesh.

I’d gotten lucky. I’d discovered the little monster in the early stages of its burrowing and I’d discovered it in my bathroom; my medicine cabinet hung three strides away. I snatched a tweezer from the shelf and plucked the tick like a gardener pulls a weed.

Another reason I’d gotten lucky: I’d been targeted by a common tick – not Public Enemy No. 1.

The Western black-legged tick – aka deer tick, bear tick and sheep tick – is a creature that prompts a predictable chain of responses. As Monte Python said of the mosquito, “First you hate him, then you respect him … then you kill him.” Of the nearly 50 varieties of tick that populate California, the black-legged is the only one known to transmit Lyme disease.

In its early stages, Lyme produces flu-like symptoms. If left untreated, the disease can cause arthritis, abnormalities of the nervous system (including Bell’s palsy and meningitis) and irregularities of heart rhythm months or even years after transmission.

To call your tick incident a “bite” dignifies it with an air of elegance. What the tick does is break your skin, burrow into your flesh and drink your blood. And it drinks with the aid of a high-tech chemical weapon. Following a long sip, the tick injects a brand of saliva that prevents your blood from clotting, keeps your capillaries flowing and tricks your immune system’s itch response from detecting the tick’s bloody business.

Hikers in Mt. Diablo’s Donner Canyon are given fair warning.

The tick’s mouthparts are equipped with harpoonlike barbs. Contrary to legend, ticks don’t screw themselves into you. To remove a tick, first beg, borrow or steal a tweezer. If you pull out the tick with your fingers and its mouthparts break off stuck in your skin, you’ll need to see a doctor.

Grab the tick’s mouth as close to your skin as possible and tweeze it straight out. Don’t crush the tick with the tweezer until it’s clear of your skin. Your goal is to prevent the tick’s body fluids from coming in contact with yours.

You say tweezers aren’t a staple of your hiking paraphernalia? No problem. You can wait till you get back home to evict the varmint. A Western black-legged tick must be attached for 24 to 72 hours before the Lyme spirochete gets transmitted.

How do you know that the tick pitching its tent on your epidermis is the Western black-legged? The adult female is teardrop shaped and about ⅛ inch long. Its body is reddish-brown and its legs black. The male is brownish-black all over and slightly smaller than the female.

East Contra Costa County trails aren’t exactly Tick Central; ticks prefer moister climes. To our west, however, in the hiking havens of coastal California, the marine layer soaks the foliage. To our east, the Sierra Nevada range retains moisture from its snow cap. In those bastions of natural beauty, ticks in fearsome numbers wait to ambush unsuspecting passers-by. From Point Reyes to Big Sur, from Shasta to Whitney – and closer to home, from Briones to Sunol – hikers should heed the familiar traffic warning: stay off the shoulder.

Sounds easy enough, but in spring that shoulder can look mighty attractive. Why slog down a sludgy trail when you can glide along the tall grass? Why? Because in that grass, someone’s waiting for you.

The tick doesn’t hop, fly or drop from trees. It lies in wait at the tip of grass and other vegetation along trails, hoping its host will brush against its bus stop. Tick terminologists call this charming behavior “questing” – and the tick’s Holy Grail is your blood.

The trail’s fringe isn’t the only danger zone in Tickville. Ticks also thumb rides off logs. After cooling your heels on one of those inviting objects, submit yourself and your hiking companions to a thorough inspection.

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is supposed to be a romantic tune, not a hiker’s gripe. There’s nothing warm and intimate about the act of tweezing a tick from your hide. But don’t let the threat of the tick scrap an adventure in the wonders of the natural world. Remember: hate him, respect him, then … well, you know.

December 8, 2023

Epperson – footprints of precision and passion

Roger Epperson in May of 2006, standing where his ashes would be scattered, on the Ridge that would be given his name. Photo by Scott Hein.

I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love; if you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles. – Walt Whitman

Mt. Diablo was a mere silhouette, a tower of ragged black beneath a charcoal sky. Diamond Sirius glinted low in the west, but against the shore of the eastern horizon washed a thin wave of dawn – a ripple of blue above pale bronze. The sun would rise in an hour.

I was sitting on a stone monument anchored in Morgan Territory’s Roger Epperson Ridge. The inscription chiseled into the rock reads “In memory of Roger Epperson (1954-2008) in recognition of his significant and lasting contributions to the East Bay Regional Park District and the landscapes he loved.”

I never met Epperson, a deficiency that shielded me from the pain of his passing. He died on December 8, 15 years ago, in a kayak accident in Hawaii, leaving behind wife Carol Alderdice plus friends and admirers beyond count.

I never met Epperson – but I’ve seen his footprints all over the place. As supervisor of EBRPD’s Round Valley, Morgan Territory and Black Diamond Mines preserves, he bequeathed a body of work that I and thousands of Bay Area hikers, runners, cyclists, equestrians and campers enjoy on a regular basis.

Have you crossed the bridge that spans the deep arroyo in Round Valley? Have you pitched a tent in the maternal enfolding of Morgan Territory’s campground? Ever notice, after a drenching downpour, how fast the trails in Black Diamond shed water and firm up? If so, you’ve also spotted the track of Roger Epperson.

Epperson earned a reputation for devoting an artist’s eye and a bricklayer’s muscle to our access to splendor. “Roger would go out with the fire trail grader or the culvert excavator,” said Alderdice, who served for three years as one of Epperson’s rangers. “You had to let him tell you how he wanted the culvert headwall to look, or grade around a tree or down a slope.

“And while a pond was being built or rehabbed, Roger was on site. ‘I want a swale here; I don’t want too much of a lip there,’ he’d say. It was meant to look like wilderness – not like a machine had pushed dirt up against a tree. He wasn’t a park supervisor who’d say, ‘Go do it and tell me when you’re done.’”

The late Jim Rease (aka “Roger’s other wife”) described Epperson as a man whose mind was always on the job: “When we camped and hiked in Prairie Creek Redwoods (in Humboldt County), he’d stop and notice trail work that impressed him. ‘That’s nice!’ he’d say and take a picture of it. ‘That would work over in Morgan Territory.’”

Hiker Leia Hartje stands by the brace that Roger Epperson designed to save the limb of this old valley oak at the Morgan Territory campground.

An avid art collector and photographer, Epperson marshaled his aesthetic sensibility to extract maximum beauty from the landscape. Whether creating a trail or wielding a camera, “He framed things like a painter,” said Rease. ‘That’s just the right pitch,’ he’d say, ‘just the right angle. You see this vignette when you sit here.’ And he’d refer to landscapes as ‘a Francis Gerhardt’ or ‘a Yoshida woodblock.’”

Former EBRPD General Manager Bob Doyle, a close friend of Epperson since high school, admired the fearlessness of Epperson’s work ethic: “A lot of staff sees land acquisitions and thinks, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to take care of that?’ Roger would get an assignment and take it to the next – three or four times – level. He never complained about a new acquisition. He had this uncanny ability to look at a piece of trashed property and enjoy converting it.”

Alderdice echoed Doyle’s impression: “When Roger was told there was no funding for a pavement project or to put up a house at a staging area, he found a way to make it happen. He wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. The new bridge at Round Valley was something Roger started. The district followed through on it because of his insistence.”

“Everything Roger built was heavy: ‘built for bear,’” said Doyle. “He worked in Shell Ridge Open Space before he got a park district job, and I can still find things he built. They’re 8x8s, not 2x4s. They’re big pieces of rock with a board on top. Heavy and strong – heavier than an engineer would need.”

Those who love the massive valley oak standing sentinel on the Morgan Territory campground have Epperson to thank. Faced with amputating a major limb or installing a tall, heavy iron brace to save it, take a wild guess which option Epperson chose.

Epperson’s perfectionism reflected no stern and stony personality. “He was Puck in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” said Doyle. “Lighthearted. Not just fun loving; he was the creator of the fun. He’d walk into my office, blow past the secretary, come in and do whatever he wanted. He’d sit at my desk with his feet up on it – muddy shoes – completely inappropriate. I really miss that.”

Spring sunrise at Roger Epperson Ridge, Morgan Territory Regional Preserve.

Epperson’s playfulness extended to his love of language, including a parody of his own fastidious personality. “Roger wouldn’t say ‘that hit the nail on the head,’” said Alderdice. “He’d say ‘that hit the head of the nail on the head with the head of the hammer.’ He was forever changing the words in songs: Elton John’s ‘count the headlights on the highway’ became ‘count the head lice on the highway.’”

The urge to tinker with words also permeated Epperson’s work as supervisor. Doyle remembers Epperson’s coinage for “overgrazed” as “cow burnt.” And following a saturating rainfall, Epperson would say “that was a real pond filler.”

Despite Epperson’s physically short stature, his commitment to excellence exerted a tall influence on those around him. According to Rease, “Roger’s obsession with details influenced me in my own attention to detail. Before we’d take a trip, he’d research the back roads – always a very circuitous, less-traveled and scenic route. The routes were as good as our destination. That didn’t mean an overbearing pushiness, but a direction that increased everyone’s enjoyment – a game plan with thoughtfulness, which I still strive for whenever we do things with our friends.”

Back at the monument in Morgan Territory, dawn had finally overcome darkness. As the top of the sun’s disk flared above the Sierra and lit the beacons of Diablo’s twin peaks, I read a secondary inscription on the Epperson monument: “All things must pass.” And another line in the George Harrison song came to mind: “Daylight is good at arriving at the right time/It’s not always going to be this gray.”

Ahead lay a morning of communal panoramas and private ravines, the screech of golden eagles and the silence of coyotes – all beneath a sky scoured by the light that had arrived at the right time. I faced the etched rock, pinched the brim of my hat and turned away, sensing the presence of Roger Epperson, one hand my shoulder, the other pointing down the sunward trail.

November 30, 2023

Light pollution threatens body and spirit

Galaxy gazer. Photo by Carl Nenzen Loven.

It was late. Late in the year and long after nightfall. I was standing on a tall hill a few miles from home. It was dark, but the darkness was more than acceptable; it was essential. If your plan is to get pelted by the glory of the Leonid meteor shower on a chilly November night – if you insist on paying that price – you find the darkest sky in the county.

Above, Leonids skittered across the pond of the cosmos like water bugs, some flaring out so brightly they made me blink. Below, in the moonless dark, the world was heard more than seen. I went quietly. Whatever creatures were out there, I wanted to hear them before they heard me. I didn’t use a flashlight. Whatever creatures were out there, I wanted to see them before they saw me.

One set of lights, however, was hard to ignore: a galaxy. A galaxy not above, but below. Spread beneath the horizon from northwest to northeast were the lights of East Contra Costa – miniature points of white and orange punctuated by blue and red, glittering like the stars of a spiral galaxy seen edge-on.

Brentwood formed the galaxy’s bright nucleus. Northeast beyond Brentwood glowed Oakley. Far northwest flowed Antioch’s river of lights against the backdrop of the San Joaquin’s dark bank. A ripple of white marked the galaxy’s eastern hinterland: Discovery Bay.

If the lights inspired a celestial metaphor, they also inspired dismay. The glare of human habitation bleached the black sky to a blue-grey that erased the dimmer meteors and stars. High overhead, in the darkest sector of sky, the sapphire pendant of the Pleiades was barely visible. Those primal lights blossoming in the meadow of darkness above were no match for the phony photons of humanity below.

We Homo sapiens have fought the darkness from the beginning, illuminated caves and continents, resisted night as we resist mortality itself. Step out into your back yard tonight and look up. On a clear, dark evening you should be able to spot about 2,700 stars. If you live near the center of an East County city, you’ll be lucky to spot a hundred.

Astronomy buffs aren’t the only ones to suffer from humanity’s assault on darkness. Our inefficient artificial light wastes energy, scrambles the life patterns of wildlife and disrupts human biorhythms.

The light pollution that washes out all but the brightest stars is due mainly to poor design, which directs artificial light not only downward, where it’s needed, but upward and outward, where it’s wasted. But poor design is the tip of the iceberg. Light – for billions of years expressed mainly as sunlight and moonlight – exerts its power on all the world’s creatures.

The artificial light that makes days unnaturally long and nights unnaturally short alters the feeding patterns, breeding patterns and migration schedules of birds. Some arrive at their nesting sites too early in the season. Ocean-based gas flares on oil platforms and land-based searchlights attract seabirds and songbirds like magnets, causing them to circle the lights till they drop from exhaustion. Birds on their night migrations crash into brightly lit skyscrapers.

Ponds and marshes, once far from civilization and now flooded by the light of highways, no longer provide frogs and toads the illumination signals evolved over millennia – signals that govern their nocturnal breeding habits.

The loss of darkness collides with sea turtles’ preference for dark beaches on which to nest. The reflective sea horizon no longer shines brighter than the artificially lit land behind the beach, confounding turtle hatchlings. In droves they head away from the water and die.

The lights of Hong Kong. Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski.

Light pollution is also hazardous to human health. Our biological clock depends on darkness as much as light. Increased artificial light at night from lamps, TVs and electronic gizmos disrupts our circadian rhythms and contributes to sleep disorders. And it gets worse: evidence gathered over the last decade is persuasive enough to have prompted the AMA in 2012 to support continued research into the connection between excessive artificial light at night and the incidence of breast cancer. In 2007, the World Health Organization’s cancer research division classified night-shift work as a “probable carcinogen.”

Were light pollution perfectly harmless to our physical health, it would remain harmful to our spiritual health. When we lose an appreciation for darkness we lose an essential component of human consciousness. The lights cast across the cosmos were not turned on by a switch thrown by human hands. We internalize that fact through awe and wonder: the direct experience of the night sky. The vast and cold emptiness between stars is the rule throughout our universe, not the exception. When we internalize that fact, we’ll treasure the warmth of our relationships more than ever. As darkness makes light sweeter, emptiness makes interconnectedness sweeter.

As I stood on the hill that night and followed the shining slashes above, I felt a connection to humankind more powerfully than if I’d stood smack in the center of the city. Far from the fluorescent tubes of the grocery store and prismatic acrylic refractor globes of downtown, I felt what my ancestors felt when they stood beneath the dome of darkness strewn with stars, planets and the gossamer river of the Milky Way: I felt the immediacy and ancientry, the greatness and smallness of my place in the cosmos.

My meteor stint was an all-nighter. By 5:45, as the faintest rumor of dawn betrayed the Sierra’s sawtooth silhouette, the local coyote pack had regathered and launched into its pre-dawn chorus, sharing tales of the evening hunt. A single voice – the pack leader’s – suddenly penetrated the shrieks, howls and rapid-fire yaps. The chorus fell silent. The leader took a few moments to speak his piece, and the pack erupted in another geyser of noise. The leader’s chant silenced them again. And again they answered.

The call-and-response ritual continued for a minute beneath a paling sky flecked by the final stars. And I wondered if any coyotes had remarked on the streaks in the sky or the two-legged creature atop the distant hill. The pack and I had pursued a different quest that night but had shared the darkness.

I wove my way back down the hill, guided by the immeasurably slow swelling of dawn, looking forward to reunion with the other creatures connected to me.

November 15, 2023

Guardian angel overworked, underpaid

Energy unleashed at The Slot, Point Lobos.

It was exhilarating – in all the wrong ways. One moment I was crouching; the next I was flying. Backward.

The time was November, 2006; the place: Point Lobos in Carmel. The sun was high and so was the ocean, swelling and slamming against a peninsula of rock called The Slot.

Every third or fourth wave was a paragon of physics: gathering itself, cresting and striking with optimal force. Water became thunder. Blue-green erupted in geysers of glinting white.

Imagine The Slot as a bent thumb protruding from Point Lobos’ south shore and hooking parallel to that line for 40 yards, forming a cove of sloshing seawater behind it. The thumb’s knuckle is a hill of nubbled Carmelo Formation rock that dips down to the thumbnail, the ideal spot from which to bag photos – up close and perpendicular – of breakers pummeling the promontory’s midsection. I hopped onto the thumb, clambered up the slippery knuckle and slithered down to the nail.

The ocean was in a cooperative mood. As the sun climbed toward noon the breakers burgeoned. I squeezed off my last shot and started back up the knuckle. I was almost to the crest when a breaker barreled in and launched a plume that rose high and fell hard. I reached down and found a handhold. The curtain of seawater stooped to my level. Whap. Feet slipped off wet rock but fingers hung on. I stood up and kept going, knowing I’d be given a three-to-four-wave reprieve before the next breaker would hit.

I knew wrong.

The next wave threw no curtain skyward; it threw a wall. I crouched, groped in vain for something to grip, and looked up. Sea and sky were erased. The wall, a Jackson Pollack masterpiece of silver spatter, rushed straight at me. I heard a seething noise and then something that sounded like – and felt like – swack.

Those who suffer physical trauma are often condemned to remember it too clearly. I was spared. My rough-and-tumble trip backward down the hill and into the cove began too suddenly and ended too soon for fear to take hold. The other blessing: I fell enveloped in seawater; couldn’t see a thing.

Three impressions stuck: the heaviness of the wall of water that hit me; the sensation of striking something that took my breath away; and the image from several feet under water of a fantastic swirling of green, white and gold above.

When I broke the surface I let out a whoop. I was alive. I had landed on my shoulder and not my skull.

I dragged myself out of the cove gashed and grateful. And embarrassed. I’ve apologized to my wife, my boss, my broken collarbone, my collapsed lung, my torn rotator cuff and my guardian angel, who must be thinking, “I’m not getting paid enough to cover this guy’s butt.”

Why do edges attract us so? Why do we lean over the rail and look down, climb to the summit and look up; scramble onto the promontory and look out? Is it, in the words of Mount Everest chronicler Jon Krakauer, because it’s “titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier”? Do we pursue these moments, as he claims for himself, “not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them”?

I answer only for myself: No. I don’t go to the edge for the danger. I go for the view. I’ve cracked my skull on Yosemite granite to gain a special view of Nevada Fall; blistered my skin with Sunol poison oak to gain a special view of Alameda Creek; shredded my shins on daggers of manzanita to gain a special view of Morgan Territory. Some views are hard won; some lessons should be learned. Icarus’ wings and my collarbone learned the hard way: fly too near the sun and you get melted; wander too near the breakers and you get busted.

But the edge shouldn’t be dismissed. Only on the edge can we be both here and out there: clinging to the faithful grasp of earth while floating like a hawk on the updrafts of epiphany. Ask any cliff diver, hang glider or rock climber. At the world’s extremities – say, a thumbnail – are extreme experiences found.

I’ve returned to The Slot several times; returned to witness up close the terrible beauty of the out-there of ocean battering the here of earth. I’ve gone to the edge and looked down, looked up and – yes, my wife, my boss, my bones, my lung, my cuff, my guardian angel – looked out.

July 23, 2020

Neowise – flight of the cosmic moth

Comet NEOWISE C/2020 F3 in the skies above northern Saskatchewan. Photo by Tero Patana/iStock/Getty Images

The night sky was a dance floor, polished lapis lazuli scuffed by the soles of three pairs: in the west, Saturn and Jupiter had come to the party as a couple but were practicing prudent social distancing. Eastward, Venus and Aldebaran were dancing cheek-to-cheek. South, the odd couple of Mars and Moon were about to split up: Luna heading east, leaving the god of war in the dust of her glow.

But the main attraction was Comet NEOWISE C/2020 F3, a spray of mist low in the northeast, intruding on constellation Auriga’s locals like a tinhorn in a boondock saloon. A shallow dome of burnt gold stained the sky above the Sierra Nevada Range; the comet would soon disappear behind the swell of solar glare.

It was July 11, 2020. I stood on Round Valley’s topmost hill after a 1-mile, 1,000-foot climb through the shadows of blue oaks, the trail clarified sporadically by lunar light. The climb was dark but I deserved no sympathy. Those who find themselves alone in the dark should take consolation in the lives of comets.

If the orbit of planet Earth resembles a wedding band, the orbit of Comet Neowise resembles a rubber band stretched to the snapping point; the comet’s current orbit will extend 66 trillion miles into the hinterlands of our solar system. The astronomers of ancient Greece named the satellites of our Sun planetai, wanderers. Had their science been more advanced, they’d have applied the metaphor to comets. Neptune, the remotest of the wanderers, traces its ellipse around our Sun once every 165 years. Comet Neowise won’t return till A.D. 8700.

I stood on the hilltop, gaze fixed low on the northeast. No voice of bird or mammal broke the silence. I was alone in a dark and remote place but compared to the long loneliness of Neowise, my isolation was trivial. Like a moth from myth, the comet had flown from a desolation beyond fathoming toward a flame of gold, condemned to careen around that flame, be flung back into the frozen night, wander there for thousands of years and repeat the ordeal for thousands more.

The comet flaunts its blue ion tail and golden dust tail. Photo from Getty Images.

On July 3 Neowise, having cut inside Mercury’s orbit, made its closest pass by the Sun at a distance of 27 million miles, boomeranging around our star at 48 miles per second. Eight days later, as I watched it recede like a ship on the horizon, its sails billowing in the gale of solar wind, I strained to grasp what I was looking at. A mere 80 million miles away, a 3-mile-wide chunk of ice and dirt was escaping Sol’s gravity well like a cutter escaping a maelstrom. Neowise makes its closest pass by Earth today, July 23 at a distance of 64 million miles, having slowed to a mere 27 miles per second.

Weeks earlier, as the Sun’s heat caused Neowise to begin its transformation from chrysalis to adult, tails began to form. After tumbling unseen through the void for thousands of years, the latent light of Neowise was finally kindled. The first tail, tinged blue and streaming straight back, was made of ions and gas. The second, the dust tail, estimated at more than 10 million miles long, was golden and diffuse. On July 13, a rare sodium tail – exuding the yellowish hue we see in sodium vapor streetlamps – was detected. As Neowise flew off, the Sun’s coronal mass ejections and plasma waves caused the comet’s dust tail to develop synchronized bands not seen since Comet McNaught in 2006. Neowise had become a rockstar.

For millennia, comets have been construed as portents of disaster: the death of monarchs and fall of empires. Comets are unnervingly unlike most celestial phenomena. The routes of planets in the night sky have long been plotted. The gloom of a solar eclipse or flamboyance of a meteor shower – those spectacles occur at consistent intervals; their comings and goings can be predicted. But comets can come out of nowhere, emerging wraithlike in the hovering darkness. Despite our astronomical savvy, no one can predict which iceball in the Oort Cloud’s rubble will get sideswiped into our Sun’s gravity well and intersect humanity’s 21st century. No one saw Neowise coming.

Evening of July 21 – time to say goodbye. I reached my sanctuary atop Round Valley’s northern hills in time for the setting of Sun and Moon, and rising of a fierce southwest wind. I tightened the drawstring of my hat.

Moonset over North Peak, Mt. Diablo State Park. July 21, 2020.

As night fell I trained my gaze on the sky below the Big Dipper – on a spot slightly west of a line from Megrez through Merak – and strained to resolve the comet through air dense with wildfire particulates and light pollution. Around 9:30 Neowise appeared, in the exact spot it was meant to be, like a wisp of fog, moth soft, drifting through a streetlamp’s gauzy glow.

When Neowise returns in A.D. 8700, who will see it? What manner of Earth civilization will turn its gaze skyward? Will Homo sapiens have abandoned the planet, or vice versa? Or does the comet herald a doom more imminent: the self-extinction of entities – though 7 billion souls strong – as infinitesimal in the scale and story of the cosmos as their infinitesimal blue world.

I turned my gaze away, west past the amassed black of Mt. Diablo, then southeast, where a light glared from a puncture in the sheet metal of night as if heaven were blazing behind it – the planet Jupiter. From behind the Vaqueros Hills rose a faint glow, the melded radiance of street lamps and homes in distant Livermore; sign of a species that has fought darkness from the beginning; illuminated caves and continents, resisted night as it resists mortality. I cinched my pack tight and took one last look at Comet Neowise fluttering away. I knew I wouldn’t see it again.

But on the way down, back in the shadows of oaks, just before the silhouette of foreground hills obliterated the heavens, I came on a clearing and looked up. The sky had darkened and the comet brightened. There we were – lone wanderers in the dark – in the exact spot we were meant to be.

July 5, 2016

Constellation Arrowhead – connecting the dots

A fleeting vision in our night sky: the constellation Arrowhead. Graphic by Ger Erickson.

Beneath a night sky of diamonds scattered across the black velvet of space, our earliest ancestors looked up and saw patterns. They connected the dots: a group of stars became the diagram of a lion or bear, a queen or a hunter and his dogs. Those patterns were permanent. From millenium to millenium, the position of the stars never strayed, the diagram was never distorted.

But some heavenly objects did stray. The astronomers of ancient Greece named those objects planetai, wanderers. The planets. The star constellations are set in stone, but the planets wander into formations of their own that, like star patterns, remind us of familiar images. One of these temporary constellations is visible now. Let’s call it Arrowhead.

Step outside at 10 p.m. Pacific Time and look south. Across the horizon hangs the constellation known to the Babylonians as Mul Gir-tab, the creature with the burning sting. We call it Scorpius, the scorpion. Some civilizations have juggled two metaphors: the star pattern reminded the Indonesian Javanese people of both a swan (Banyakangrem) and a leaning coconut tree (Kalapa Doyong).

But in July of 2016, people of all cultures can savor the sight of a new, though fleeting, constellation. The planets Mars and Saturn plus the star Antares trace the pattern of an Arrowhead. The point of the arrow is Mars. The arrow’s lower barb is Antares; its upper barb, Saturn.

Scorpius and its current retinue of planets plus permanent retinue of star clusters. Graphic by Ger Erickson. — Scorpius and its current retinue of planets plus permanent retinue of star clusters. Graphic by Ger Erickson.

Arrowhead or no Arrowhead, the southern night sky of 2016 is rich in delights to the eye and imagination. Mars sweeps past Antares every two years but stargazers have linked the two reddish objects for millenia. “Mars” is the name the Romans gave the red planet, but the ancient Greek word for Mars is “Ares.” The Greeks considered the reddish star in Scorpius to be Ares’ rival: thus the name “Antares” – anti-Ares. The god of war, Ares, and the heart of the scorpion, Antares: a clash of formidable and forbidding powers in the heavens.

Mars “sweeps past Antares” in only a visual sense. The light of Mars that strikes your retina takes 4½ minutes to make its current 50-million-mile journey to Earth. The light of Antares takes 550 years. How can a star so distant shine so brightly? It’s easy – when your radius is 883 times greater than the Sun’s and you shine 12,000 times brighter than the Sun. Were Antares to replace the Sun at the center of our solar system, it would engulf Earth and Mars.

Mars and Antares share a reddish hue, but the hue springs from a radically different source. Stars generate their own light; planets reflect the light of their parent star. Antares’ reddish light is the fire of an enormous thermonuclear furnace burning at a cool 6,500 F. The red of Mars is sunlight bounced off a few million square miles of iron-rich minerals – a big desert.

Got binoculars or a small telescope? Swivel over to Scorpius and you’ll be treated to the vision of some of the finest star clusters in our local cosmos – the M7 cluster and the Northern Jewel Box in particular.

The planet Saturn. Photo by 3quarks/iStock/Getty Images.

And let’s not space out on that golden planet way out in the solar suburbs, the farthest planet visible to the naked eye: Saturn, which completes one orbit of the Sun in 29 Earth years. Saturn is a prime example of the strangeness of the cosmos. The ringed planet is large enough, minus its rings, to fit nine Earths across its diameter like pearls on a string. Yet as a “gas giant,” Saturn is so light it would float on water. And as telescope owners are well aware, Saturn’s ring system is approaching its maximum tilt toward Earth. Late 2016-early 2017 is prime time to view one the wonders of our local universe: the golden rings of the golden globe we call Saturn.

Stargazing is more than an aesthetic pleasure. From the beginning of our species’ days on Earth, the ability to make the connection between patterns in the physical world and the world of the imagination has helped us survive and flourish. When we gaze into the night sky of A.D. 2016 and see a scorpion – or an arrowhead – we’re re-enacting an ancient and impactful feat. May you enjoy keeping that tradition alive this special summer by stepping out beneath the stars and connecting the dots.

January 18, 2016

Make the pilgrimage with Annie

When winter rains turn hiking trails into rivers of mud, we trekkers get our revenge by taking it inside: we grab a steaming beverage and nestle into our favorite chair with a good book. When we need a ride out of Cabin Fever City, there’s no better form of transport than our very own author-ignited imagination.

What to read? If you’ve ever felt the sun on your face in spring and been engulfed by a wave of awe and gratitude, or if you’ve ever witnessed up close the suffering of a loved one and shuddered at the hideous side of our existence; if you’ve ever been overwhelmed by the world’s beauty or suffocated by its horror and wanted to put a name to it, pick up a copy of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard.

“Pilgrim” is a book about the world of water and sky, trees and insects; broad in scope and painstaking in detail. It’s a book about the author’s inner landscape, an intimate and confessional diary. And it’s a book about the Why of the world’s joy and misery, an attempt not only to describe, but understand.

After a nearly fatal bout with pneumonia in 1971, Dillard retreated to the solitude of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and banks of Tinker Creek, where she found healing and inspiration. The result, in addition to her recuperation, was the book for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1975.

What makes the reading of “Pilgrim” so rewarding is Dillard’s dilated point of view. Her senses, her mind and her heart are fully open to the world’s phenomena – and their implications. She sees profundity in the simple and splendor in the ordinary. “It is dire poverty indeed,” she writes, “when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.”

“Pilgrim” is charged with an ecstatic tone but Dillard’s portrayal of the natural world is unsentimental. She not only concedes that nature is red in tooth and claw; she gives us the gory details. Her account of a frog’s skull being collapsed by a water bug sucking it dry from beneath the creek’s surface is a tour de force of ghastly description. Later, Dillard expresses bewilderment at the fact that 10 percent of the world’s species are parasitic insects, which suggests a disturbing possibility about the Creator: “What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harassing, disfiguring or totally destroying the other ninety percent?”

Dillard is a Christian, yet she draws from the wisdom of traditions as diverse as Buddism, Sufism, Eskimo lore and Hasidic Judaism. She embraces the paradox that existence is a blessing and a curse; that in our universe, creation and destruction are mysteriously intertwined. And yet she doesn’t let God off the hook for bringing it all into being. What Dillard concludes about the nature of God is consoling and disturbing, blatant and subtle.

“Pilgrim” urges us to step out and experience the moment. In a twist on the standard meaning of a familiar phrase, Dillard exhorts us to spend the afternoon: “You can’t take it with you.” For her, God’s grace imparted through the world of Tinker Creek is available at any moment. The least we can do is be present when the moment arrives. “The secret of seeing,” she writes, “is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the nearest puff.”

As a form of transport, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” is more like soaring than slogging. It’s a pilgrimage worth making.

January 5, 2016

Moss Beach – low tide, high visibility

Moss Beach marvels, clockwise from upper left: a purple-colored ochre star lounges in a tide pool; a visitor follows a squadron of pelicans above Seal Cove; giant green anemones flaunt their tentacles; and stalked barnacles cling to a rock face.

Sun and moon tug on our ocean and its waters recede. Earth twirls on its axis and the blue sky dissolves to black. These eternal rhythms do more than inspire awe – they unmask marvels. When the sun sets, we see stars. When the tide rolls out, we see starfish.

And we see them in full glory at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Moss Beach. When winter rains make a mudfest of conventional hiking trails, what better venue for an adventure than a sandy beach?

The organisms that roam the coast are as bizarre as the monsters of sci-fi. The hermit crab wears a snail shell like an oversized turban while scavenging for decayed plant and animal matter. The starfish known as the sea bat feeds by projecting its stomach through its mouth into its victim’s shell opening, discharging digestive enzymes, sucking its liquefied prey like some ghastly slurpee and retracting its stomach back into its body.

South of San Francisco and north of Half Moon Bay, the Fitzgerald reserve’s 3-mile stretch of shoreline and rocky reefs displays an impressive quantity and diversity of marine life, from delicate coralline alga to giant green anemones, from stalked barnacles to gray whales. Bird lovers can trace the graceful glide of pelicans low over the sea or watch herons wade in the shallows looking for lunch while harbor seals cool their heels on the sand.

For the record, you’ll find scant moss at Moss Beach. In the late 1800s, a German immigrant named Jürgen Wienke bought the seaside property and, according to legend, dubbed an odd form of alga growing there “moss.” Wienke’s misnomer eventually spread to include the entire beach. The moss you will find here is well above the beach – delicate tendrils flowing from a throng of Monterey cypresses standing sentinel on the reserve’s tall bluffs. The Bluff Trail affords not only a bird’s-eye view of the beach; from it you can commandeer a vista both intimate and breathtaking. Sunset on the Pacific doesn’t get any finer.

Harbor seals enjoy a snooze on a blustery afternoon.

Head south on the cliff trail and in a few minutes you’ll pop out onto a street leading to the historic Moss Beach Distillery, founded in the rum-running Prohibition era. You can mosey over to a patio anchored on bluffs overlooking the ocean and, libation in hand, sit down to an excellent seafood dinner. The distillery even boasts a resident ghost, the Blue Lady, responsible for weird cameo appearances on premises.

To catch the optimal exposure of Fitzgerald’s reserve’s reefs and terraces, visit at low tide. Log on to www.fitzgeraldreserve.org/newffmrsite/lowtides. The site gives you a detailed table of tides for a given date and time of day. You’ll find that this Saturday and Sunday, January 9 and 10, low tides in the afternoon will unveil the wonders beneath the water.

Surf’s down!

November 23, 2015

Epic effort? Hey, no problem

Photo by Chris Ryan/OJO Images/Getty Images

The host led Leia and me to our table. We took our seats. I said “thanks.” The host said “no problem.” I was tempted to tell the host “I’m mighty relieved to hear that leading us to our table was no problem” but I knew Leia would shoot me a glance that could melt iridium.

Leia ordered wine; I ordered beer. The server delivered them. Leia said “thanks.” The server said “no problem.” I was tempted to tell the server “that’s fascinating; it never occurred to me that delivering our beverages would be a problem” but I knew my reply would be interrupted by an eyeball-rattling pain to my shin delivered by the point of Leia’s shoe.

By the time dinner was done and we breezed through the restaurant’s exit, we’d been treated to an unofficial count of nine “no problem”s. I imagined thanking a Good Samaritan for yanking my car out of the ditch in a sub-zero blizzard. For my sake he missed his once-in-lifetime job interview, subluxated every vertebra in his spine and probably needed several fingers amputated due to frostbite. And I wanted him to know I appreciated it.

“No problem,” he replied.

It’s official: to paraphrase Nietzsche, “you’re welcome” is dead.

Is it unreasonable to demand that everyone be aware of the literal meaning of the words they use? Probably. I knew a guy who always greeted me with “hey, baby, what are you doing?!” I’ll never forget his facial expression when, after weeks of replying with “hi,” I gave him a play-by-play account of what I was doing. He looked at me as if I were radioactive.

It’s tempting as customers to view service providers’ “no problem” as dismissive and self-centered. “No problem” directs attention to the thanked person, the service person. “You’re welcome” directs it to the thanker, the customer. My personal preference, “my pleasure,” also directs attention to the thankee, but in a genial way: “I take pleasure in doing this for you” (that a problem might be involved is irrelevant and off the table).

So what’s the problem with “no problem? Are those who use the phrase being deliberately dismissive and self-centered? No, the problem is: they’re not being anything – but using words that convey meaning anyhow. The possibility that their effort on your behalf might have been a problem is not a thought that fires in their synapses. To them, “no problem” isn’t an attempt at precise communication; it’s an attempt to fill the moment with a social noise. “No problem” could mean “you’re welcome,” “my pleasure,” “no worries,” “whatevs” or “indubitably.” Its true meaning, I suspect, is far less genial. It means “I heard you thank me.” Nothing more.

And that’s the problem: We talk like we think. Unexamined language exposes unexamined thought. How many folks who use the phrase “I could care less” (instead of the original and correct “I couldn’t care less”) realize they’re expressing the exact opposite of their intended meaning? How many who use “it’s all downhill from here” as a negative term realize they’re flip-flopping the meaning of the original and correct metaphor (“after a hard slog uphill we get to coast downhill; it’s all good from here”)? Again: the exact opposite of their intended meaning.

In a world in which we’re bombarded from every point of the compass by those bent on persuading us to do their bidding – from politicians to advertisers – it’s never unwise to examine the meaning of words.

Some social critiques are attempts at promoting change. My riff on “no problem” has no such ambition. Let’s not fool ourselves: the situation’s hopeless. I’m not offended by “no problem” – just disappointed. But it’s only a matter of time before I lose patience and chasten a bewildered restaurant employee with my “no problem” tirade. How to avoid the unavoidable?

I should quit dining out.

October 19, 2015

East Bay park pros: stars behind the scenery

Eddie Willis explains Native American cosmology at Vasco Caves Regional Park.

It was late August but I wasn't late for dawn. By 6:35 the Round Valley summit was flooded by the light of a burnt-red sun flaring through a gap in the sawtooth silhouette of the Sierra. Atop that highest hill in the park – my treasured sanctuary – stood a blue oak I call Old One – my treasured tree.

As I approached Old One to pay my respects a strange object came into focus – dozens of strange objects. Throughout the tree's mesh of twigs and leaves hung tiny red … thingys … as if a swarm of miniature sea urchins had blown through and latched on.

I snapped photos of the little buggers, hurried home and knocked off an e-note to Denise Defreese, who at the time supervised Round Valley for the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD). The gist of the note: what the heck are these red thingys? Are they hazardous to the tree's health?

I hit “send” and moseyed downstairs to brew a cup of coffee and get down to the serious business of writer's procrastination.

When I returned to my inbox 30 minutes later I found that 10 minutes earlier Denise had written back, explaining that the thingys in question were “urchin galls” laid by gall wasps. No danger to the tree. She dialed me in to Ron Russo's excellent “Call of the Galls, The Lively Universe of an Ancient Oak,” published on Bay Nature's website.

Who says you can't get good service nowadays?

In 2014 the EBRPD, the largest urban park district in the nation, celebrated its 80th birthday, replete with art, harvest and wildflower festivals, concerts, a health program, outdoor movies, a gala dinner at the Claremont – you name it. But amid the well-deserved hoopla, the district did what it does year in and year out: provided access to the world of nature that lies just outside our doorstep; access to the awe that world inspires, the healing it offers.

I've been blessed. I've traced with my fingertip a bobcat's track embossed on the caked mud; felt the spring wind sifted through a thousand Coulter pine needles; heard the crazy chorus of a coyote pack assembling for the evening hunt.

Roger Epperson Ridge, Morgan Territory Regional Preserve. The inscription reads “In memory of Roger Epperson (1954-2008) in recognition of his significant and lasting contributions to the East Bay Regional Park District and the landscapes he loved.”

Mike Moran leads a Raptor Baseline expedition at Big Break Regional Shoreline.

I've been blessed. So I bless the rangers and docents and supervisors who help me understand what I'm touching and feeling and hearing. I bless those who negotiate with landowners and buy the properties; those who design the trails, build the bridges – heck, maintain the outhouses – at those havens of natural beauty. I bless those who do the dirty work of ripping out poison oak and yellow star thistle, and those who do the clean but hard work that takes place in offices and meeting rooms.

“What is it about the people in the district – in our DNA – that makes us responsive?” said EBRPD GM Robert Doyle. “We were small. We're big now, but we were small. It's still a family of caring. All our park supervisors care about their parks. They know it's pretty special to work out in this stuff – and that the public's who they work for. They're professional and very committed to their mission. And that's personal – as much as anything in the institution. I'm extremely proud of the staff here.”

The EBRPD heroes who over the years have graced me with their time and assistance are too numerous to recount, but include Carol Alderdice, Rex Caufield, Jim Cooper, Defreese, Doyle, Emily Hopkins, Carol Johnson, Isa Polt-Jones, John McKana, Patrick McIntyre, Mike Moran, Traci Parent and Eddie Willis.

Navigating this juggernaut through the turbulent waters of national and regional economics is no small task. For those unfamiliar with the scale of this enterprise, the EBRPD manages 65 parks (including shorelines, preserves, wildernesses, recreation areas, inter-park trails and land-bank areas) comprising more than 1,250 miles of trails laid out on more than 119,000 acres. And let's not overlook the 235 family campsites plus 42 youth camping areas; 10 interpretive and education centers; 11 freshwater swimming areas, boating and/or stocked fishing lakes and lagoons plus a disabled-accessible swimming pool; 40 fishing docks and three bay fishing piers. And when when 5,000 state park employees lost their jobs during the recent recession, not a single EBRPD person was laid off.

Where the district goes from here will be watched with interest by its constituency: the campers, cyclists and runners; the chirpy families, solo hikers and cyclist convoys who pay these facilities around 25 million annual visits.

One way the district must go is to adapt to the constituency's changing face. “Everybody knows that when you go hiking, you're enjoying it but you're also doing it for your health,” said Doyle. “It's part of your stress release and exercise. But the park agencies were never overt about it. It was, 'Go enjoy the beautiful scenery and the wildlife and the environment.' And we're trying to be more direct. We have a national crisis of obesity with kids, and heart attack with seniors.”

To that end, the district has become a partner in Healthy Parks, Healthy People, a worldwide effort to promote fitness by getting folks off their duffs and into the world of nature. Among the slew of activities offered by the EBRPD are bike rides, kayaking, birdwatching, wildflower discovery, a host of programs tailored to kids, and the Trails Challenge, the district's longstanding self-guided hiking program.

The district must also contend with one of the culprits in our current health crisis: the popularity of social media and its power to keep kids indoors and indolent. Doyle's generation “would be out climbing trees, getting dirty, looking under rocks,” he said. “Now kids go 'Eewww. I'd rather get on my social network.' And for us, the environment was social. We were always with a gang of friends – with our girlfriends, with friend-friends, in groups camping out. It was very social. But social now is 'social media.' So how do we build the next generation of park supporters?

“The generation who raised me are all gone now. They were all environmentalists. They were the people who established Save Mt. Diablo, Save the Bay, the state park system. They're gone. The people I got connected with in high school are in their 50s. Where's that next group of kids who wants to come charging up the road?"

That road is more than metaphorical. “We shouldn't say, 'Don't go off the road; this is a fragile environment,'" said Doyle. "This is a tough-as-nails environment. What ruins an environment is dozing off the hilltop and putting a building on top of it. If a bicycle or a horse or a group of kids get off trail, yes, they can cause some damage. So does a big pond-filler of a storm. My biggest worry isn't the economy or public support for the park district in general. It's: where do we get the next generation of men, women, Hispanics, Asians interested in representing the state and taking care of the parks?”

How we answer that question will cast a glaring light on the priorities of our heart. As Terry Tempest Williams put it in “Testimony,” “If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.”

Next time you cross paths with a park service worker, the star of the show – from whichever generation – grooming a trail or cleaning an outhouse, don't forget to thank that person. For us all.