Treasures: Rodeo Gulch

I live in paradise (sorry to brag). People may not frolic naked (I count that as a blessing, actually) and we may lack fruit trees outside the window; perhaps the temperatures we have in the summer are not always paradisiacal and the fumes from fires encouraged by drought do not please aesthetic sensibility, but Northern California is quite the country and Santa Cruz county is bursting with many of the wonders of nature. If it is mountains one desires, and ours are too small, we are just several windy roads away from the Sierra Nevada range (and Tahoe!! and Yosemite!!). Redwoods? Check. Madrones? Ah yaz. Pines? Yup. Firs? Really . . . yes. Lighthouses? Harbors? Grassland? Farms? Sweeping views? Uh-huh.

Driving home from my summer school class in Aptos today, I decided to take a scenic route, or a severe detour, up Rodeo Gulch. I had not been up that road since last summer and knew it was a fairly peaceful road, and oh, absolutely gorgeous. Apparently I had forgotten how gorgeous. To ye Santa Cruz County dwellers, take a detour someday, sooner than later; it is not a sight to have missed. Take it slow. To ye other Northern Cali friends, stop by, I’ll give you a tour. Anyone and everyone else, come visit for some time, there is so much to see. Bring your bike and walking shoes, these things are better taken in gradually, not flown by. Do not drive the speed limit; 35 mph is too fast to see much of anything.

Rodeo Gulch meanders off of Soquel Drive (busy mania central) and rolls through small, open fields past trees and wildflowers. It is a sparsely populated area of old Soquel, rather undisturbed. The road climbs up switchbacks to the ridge from which one can see the waves of trees tumbling out to mingle with the distant blue of the ocean, bleeding moisture into the dallying departure of fog. From leaving the oak framed vista (and leaving out 99.9 percent of the description before and after the named point) and climbing several turns, the road drops a hairpin and many bouncing curves to a choice: Laurel Glen or Mountain View. Laurel Glen eventually dumps off onto Soquel San Jose Road, which, although a beautiful route, is out of the way. But Mountain View is fabulous also. The trees, the ferns, the stream, oh, everything, everything is awe striking. There is that rich, dark soil on the steep hillside dancing with redwoods and peaking through the yellow grass on the opposing gentle slope. All the descriptions I could muster for the remainder of Mountain View and Branciforte would sound strikingly similar: dark soil, redwoods, mountains painted with green, always green, trees in the near distance with a gently rolling meadow, yellow with grass that will become brown, then green, then watercolor, every year, in the foreground, spotted with oaks, firs, and redwood groves. But it is not all the same. Any film would fail to capture the angles and lighting, and it is not the incompetency of the artists (I did recognize the big tree forests and the clip from Tikal in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi), but nature in its moment portrayed on a screen or on special paper is not, will never be, the same as standing in the spot and realizing, my eyes, all my combined senses, are overwhelmed, in love, and selfishly insatiable.

Folks—it is beautiful. I know that word is overused. And what is crazy is this is, for the main part, new growth. The whole darn place was clear-cut. Gone. That was a bit of a reminder for me: I need to prune myself, or let myself be pruned, to make a millionth a step toward growth. Yes, clear-cutting is extreme, try selective cutting. Just as it is good to let the forest burn periodically, I need to get burned. Otherwise dead, useless bits crop up along the forest floor, little silly things I am unwilling to properly deal with—fears, grudges, dreams deferred—and then when the fire comes through, it is not simply a healthy cleaning, but a devastating burn. 

What does Annie do? Read :)

Well, I have read Cold Mountain. And it wasn’t half as bad as multiple people made it out to be. I liked Ruby, and Inman too. Ada was a bit annoying but not wretched. The language was not riveting . . . what made it worthwhile? The philosophical musings perhaps. The attentiveness to nature, to the individual aspects of the terrain of home. Those are probably the very things that have turned folks off to Charles Frazier’s novel, but it is where I was able to connect, even though initially the descriptions seemed wanting of eloquence, they did bring back the wee romantic’s desire to go play in the Appalachian Mountains and reminded me of the expansiveness of my own playground, but taken down to Cold Mountain level: The color, the feel, the emotion of one stream/river/creek in one place. Inman has vivid, almost developed beyond reality, memory of the land of Black Cove and Cold Mountain, of detail. It is easy enough to be enamored of a place as a vague whole, but it takes and is so much more to pay attention to the individual brush strokes and how they make up the whole. The aspects of the land become poetical fragments; all together the poem is complete, but each separate line, word group, is captivating in its own right. In a nutshell: it is about a woman, Ada, left to tend a large amount of land with no knowledge of the how and a soldier’s journey to this woman through the south and up into the mountains; it is about the people who transform Ada and the people transformed by Inman, with the Civil War and lack of trust permeating their lives.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin. Read it. It is not a fast read, if read quickly, the book is lost. But it is hard to put down. Grushin has a way with word and description that paints portraits of the Russian landscape and life with incredible potency. The language is genius; it flows and swirls and stumbles with Sukhanov and the life that seems to be taking place around him, behind him, within him, and apart from him, as the surreal present collides with the neglected past. The words color and leap from the page, enrapturing the senses to feel and experience, yet releasing long enough to chastise Sukhanov, but before one can flounce off in disgust of his outbursts, his insensitivity, his seeming stupidity even, there is pull to pity, to relate, and again, one is lost weaving in and out of that potent dream life with Sukhanov, as Sukhanov. 

Initial Musings--what on Earth am I doing?

I’m thinking about starting a blog . . . it could have been started over Spring break, but I would have needed to have remembered my camera (food, yello). It would have served the same purpose as the e-mails (namely, entertainment and expression of sorts, the joy of writing), but it would give me something to do now. The dealio is that I am here, in the place with the people to whom the emails were sent. Who would read it? Does it matter? What would I write about? Books? Adventures beyond the literary scope . . . ha, uhh, really, lacking in that department. I did head out to downtown on Monday to discover . . . no more free parking?! Nope. Not in the immediate downtown vicinity, so I parked two streets over from Pacific, which is no big deal, I’m just sick of gimping around in a boot. Whine whine whine. Pues. Results perhaps on Thursday. But what happened downtown?

Well :) I went to . . . Logos! and Bookshop Santa Cruz! Shush, reading is a good thing. And bought: MacBeth, The Merchant of Venice, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Cringe. Yes, I do have The Complete Works of Shakespeare and The Necessary Works of Shakespeare. But the latter is what I have at home and it does not have Love’s Labour’s which is what Shakespeare Santa Cruz is performing, along with Othello, which I am super excited about and have full intentions of attending. The other two are in the Necessary volume (what a preposterous idea), but it is quite cumbersome. If I go off to gimp around the harbor or whatever, I would prefer to have a book-sized book, not a text size book to read.

Cooking adventures? Hmm. I made pugliese bread. It turned out fabulous.

Shucks, it looks as though I did do the blog thing. I exist online. What a scary thought. But why a blog? Hmm . . . because, selfishly, I like to write, but I can be very reclusive and as a result unintentionally exclusive. It is not an excuse not to chat with folks in person or on the phone; although I do ignore phone calls sometimes. It is just an experiment—writing semi-publically. Pues. Es todo. Yes, I’ll use Spanish de vez en cuando. Jejeje. Tis fun. Maybe I’ll even write alliterative blogs (oh, it is so much fun, alliteration . . . I carried on a hypothetical conversation in my mind for the endurance of a ten mile run—all of my hypothetical responses were expressed alliteratively).