We're lucky, I know, to live in a place, hot and stifling and nail-scratching-irritating as Palm Desert is at this time of year, the "pit bull days" of summer like nowhere else - we're lucky to be able to peel ourselves out of the house, where we've been slugging along slowly for days, and within 45 minutes' drive, be transported to a cool, 6,000 foot elevation gain unto forest and falls.
The small waterfall at the base of Lily Rock, which is the most amazing shiva lingam on the planet and a heaven for rock climbers and hikers like me - was barely trickling today. I crawled under the fence, like a criminal, so eager to ascend the slick rock waterfall - the type and time of year where the water barely crawls down the surface into a tiny pool - that small waterfall, or water drip, with a one-foot wide flow of water singing past my feet - cleared my soul like nothing else. Not to mention the dehydrated body, the heat-frozen mind - this is my 9th summer in Palm Desert, and no matter how you divide it, try to get away, cope with lowdown days and being more active at night, enjoying the warm swimming pool under stars - the heat just fucking sucks, setting in like a county jail sentence time around late June and agonizing well into September.
The road to Idyllwild from the desert floor is always inspirational. Up Highway 74, past the new Santa Rosa/San Jacinto Monument Visitor Center - up seven-level hill, where in a daring series of no-shouldered switchbacks, you crescendo into quickly changing types of flora and fauna: now dirt hills, now giant boulders, now ocotillo, now yucca, and then, up top in less than 10 minutes to 4,000 feet from sea level, in stands of juniper and even pinyon pine, and a high country plateau that continues to rise skyward, into vast swaths of ribbonwood and several large and powerful oak groves, and then a little higher, over the Pacific Crest Trail, which crosses the highway just near the Anza turnout, and voila - the giant pine trees of Garner Valley.
Onward, bewitched now in the daze of....."trees," and 20 or 30 degrees lower temperature - windows are down now, AC is off..my God, there are actually purple wildflowers stretching across the meadows!! It's not real green - southern California's mountains are, after all, well within the arid zone and they drought in August, as well, to some extent, but there's relief in looking across the man-made Lake Hemet,up the turnout to the Zen Center, across a wide valley where Wellman's Ranch still runs its cattle, and a mountainside where I fought a forest fire more than 20 years ago during the Live Aid Concert, circa 1986.
Up a little higher, more curves, and Idyllwild, the town in the nest of the old glacier carved mountains' arms - Lily Rock, again, and the high touch of Mt. San Jacinto, over 11,000 feet, and the lower but very imposing Tahquitz Peak, where there's an old fire lookout - I've been up to both, but not today.
Today, we're just sitting, dazed, by the water, grateful to get out of a mucky but common "monsoon" heat that oozes northward from the Gulf of California into the Coachella Valley, far below us now and behind the monster ridge - creating its own version of steambath and thunderhead and oddly not bringing much rain, just sizzler temps and unbreathable nights that are often passable for long bike rides on summer-deserted sidewalks that nonetheless profer well-lit palm trees, neatly trimmed, and miles of country club walls - ahh, my surprising life in the wedge of home I own on California Drive, on side in Palm Desert and over my shoulder, swank Indian Wells. That' I'd ever live here, own a house with a pool, and be surrounded by multimillion dollar country clubs - life can be so weird.
At heart I'm in the mountain, meditating with the stream, and slowly allowing the water and stone to do their work of melting me into their faschia, the wear of unbearable, thirsty desert with its punitive temperatures and unforgiving unbreathability - the magnificent and sacred sand dunes once lurching behind my house, gone for golf - the good news, though, is that I can savor the tingle of this tiny, if forbidden creek, with its fat mosquitos and scolding I get from a rightfully-indignant local who reminds me that the water above the fence belongs to the water district and that I-Wild is in Level 1 water rationing - as always, if not worse - but I swear, I am bettering it with a prayer and an imaginary tear, if you will, of gratitude for its presence.
And rushing down the dark road I've tumbled down so many times before, at night, the milky way and stars that we can't see down here - lightning far across the desert, to the east, the little San Bernardino Mountains and Joshua Tree - I pull off at an oddly upscaled and paved and walled Vista Point to watch - irritated again by my re-entry to desert things, and the newly-paved and marked off parking, the people here predictably drinking beer and blasting loud and bad-tasting music - and a strong wind pushes my back, rushing down from the mountains - no wind in Idyllwild, just the cool "other side of the mountains, where the ocean influences take charge," weird here, in this weather no man's land with strangers in the dark, and seeing clouds across the valley floor blow up and light and fall empty again - and then, when I return home, only the stillness, punctuated by crickets; in the mountains, it was frogs.
As always, when I go up and down the mountain on the same day, I feel that light-headed tired sensation; I just want to lie down and read tabloid magazines. After all, it's quite the journey, dashing 7,000 feet up and back down, and embracing everything from mountains to deserts and all the transition zones and chapparal in between. After all, I've just rip-roared down the road filmed in the mountain driving scene in the movie, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."
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