[January 17th-March 26th I worked on a conservation crew in the angeles national forest, my first time visiting california. ive been re-reading journals lately from this time and I wanted to throw some of this writing down here. why? i dont really know. maybe i shouldn't be looking back on things like this and maybe im too sentimental, but this kind of hurts my heart. but in a good way i think.]
Friday, February 11th, 2022. 7:53 PM
A gentle evening breeze that sounds like someone sighing deeply, or drawing breath sharply. Feeling roses bloom of gratefulness for this simple life I lead, where my work feels enough. For my daily routine of watching the sun come up over the mountains on the other side of the lake, and for watching it hide again in the evening behind the ridgeline beyond my tent. For acknowledging nightly the big dipper, and betelgeuse, and the whims of the wind, and the heat, and open water and crashing waves of water and water dried up.
For being myself again, it feels. For being stronger every day, and conscious of the subtle slow ways of the Earth beneath, around, above me.
This battle in my mind for control over my own life and what my mother would want for me. (I started weeping. I couldn't sleep.) I live such a crazy, free, cosmopolitan life. I bare the length of my legs in the daytime, the front of my thigh is pocked by ink. Things I would never let my mother see.
Today we went to the beach. I undressed and Taylor and Jacob and I laid on one blanket in the sand and watched a tide pull in and out. Oh wide blue sky, hot february sun over Santa Monica, the numbing ocean water lapping at my feet first, then slowly anesthetizing, the rest of my legs, then the trunk, then daring myself to be fully swallowed by the Pacific, bobbing playfully with a wave rolling in, rolling out, pushing, sweeping me up.
My glasses are off, distant laughter, blunted worship of simple touch, hazy sight. Licking my salty lips. Turning back towards the sand, your eye catching on your own shadow spilled upon the beach foam. And then I know I'm not done yet--I turn back to the wave.
Saturday, February 12th. 7:23 AM
Little birds in the morning by my tent that sound like children screeching in glee, playing and shrieking.
10:52 AM
A little nomad girl stands at the gates of a city. She flees for the wide-open plains.
Here at Castaic, the gentle hill where I've set my tent is graced by shrubby green where the earth isn't eroded through to the dirt. A bed of lupines, little violet flowers, little lacy weeds that remind me of the spleenworts and meadow-rues of home.
2:52 PM
Now the afternoon sun is high and hot overhead, yet the breeze chills the skin slightly and the moon is sighted faintly in a very nearly perfect blue sky. To growth, to burning, to reaching, to broadening vocabularies--of movement, of knowledge, of ways of strength.
4:50 PM
The eye of the sun shines through the leaves of the eucalyptus trees, beyond the stairs to the campground, sending our shadows long across the pavement where Jacob and I sat basking in the warmth. Ravens swoop and cast their shadows upon the hills. Their coats are shiny and they bob lackadaisically, claws scratching over the fissured earth. Two sat by the stairs, heads close together like teenagers gossiping in a highschool hallway.
To the left of the lake, the shadows gouge deep into the sides of the hills, running down towards the water. Above, the sky's blue gently turns from a pale yellow to a deep lilac, which will only grow as the day goes. In between the moon beams brighter. It is a perfect time now, like sugary jasmine tea, like a warm smiling embrace, like a lover brushing his lips upon the space on the back of your neck.
As ravens swoop, the tinier birds (whose names are not known to me) frighten me as they stir in a bush or low among the grasses. They flit up, and flee, flapping in little bursts, bouncy, choppy flight.
February 13th.
Hot sun falls onto Castaic, heat that steals your strength, that leaves you content to lie atop your sleeping bag in your tent and watch the shadows sway and dance over the taut fabric as a light, teasing breeze barely ruffles the eucalyptus leaves. Beyond their sparse canopy, the blemishless blue sky, and two ravens in flight, wings parted proudly to catch the air. A gasp of chilling water would hit good right about now.
February 15th, 3:06 PM.
Today I unzipped my tent and saw looming dark clouds and felt the cold. The lake seemed moody, enchanting. Stray sunrays filtered through the dense cloud cover. The rain began lazily and weakly. Ravens still swooped and perched atop branches. We got our trailwork assignment, did some tool cleaning, then went climbing.
7:07 PM
The moon is making its bright path through a night sky swirled with the remainder of this rainy day's clouds. My tent vestibule is a mudpit. I went down the slope behind my tent to smoke and saw her light come boldly through the eucalyptus trees.
We made chili for dinner on the coleman stove and sat in the truck, seeking refuge from the cold and wind, and talked of our dreams, goals, fears. The sun was setting: as the stew cooked down we witnessed gold hillsides framing the bright blue lake, sun finally fully revealing itself, indigo mountainsides, on the other side of the sky, in the direction of the tents, a sunset enhanced by the diffusion of clouds, light divided up by leaves + branches.
Now I am warm in my tent, listening to Townes Van Zandt. The promise in her smile shames the mountains tall.
I will learn, grow, and love.
As I was finishing my day, doing my silly little human tasks, I saw the moonlight spill broadly into the black lake.
February 16th.
These off days I've been skipping early sunrises but this morning I still felt the moment when my tent's fabric lit up warmly, suddenly. Last night was strong winds that flexed by tent, driving the walls flat, roaring and flowing through and up the valley with abandon.
The sun and the clear skies surrounding her promise the mud will dry, and one day again the earth with be cracked, parched, dusty, begging for rain.
We worked on the trail today and got home a little after 5:30, tail end of sunset. I looked out the F250 window and the big beautiful bodacious moon was rising out of the cover of the hills framing the lake. She is casting a shimmering spotlight onto the dark water. I feel like maybe, if I tiptoed, I could dance upon its surface.
February 17th, 4:24 PM.
It's been a month now, on the job, sleeping in that dank little tent. At the very present moment we're verging on golden hour, sun creeping closer and closer to the horizon, warm light spilling onto the trees, cement, lake, hills.
When we were working in that patch of forest the late afternoon light was spilling onto the leaves of the eucalyptus. That young frail foreigner, and so many needles of pine. I cleared brush from the path, pinecones impaled themselves upon the tines of my McLeod. I unearth another potato bug, pleased to see its silly grubby body. I found an earthworm and smiled, picked it up and saw its ridged length flecked within by excreta, pulse with digesting decomposition, the shed waste of trees, looming high above me, animal droppings, insect casings, whatever finds a resting place in this soil.
A recent burn zone, the dirt smelled healthy, conducive to life. I raked and listened to Flora Purim and thought about the ego. Playing in the dirt, daydreaming of the future.
Come across the stump of a pine, glazed with sap, adjust your trajectory, rake on. I set my nalgene on a wide stump perspiring with the sticky fluid of this tree's life. When I placed my gloves on the stump the sap soaked into the leather, leaving little dark spots like tears on a pillow.
Friday, February 25th.
I was accepted into the PCT rock crew for the summer. So all that is left to my decision. To be on the road again.
I was sitting under the waving eucalyptus trees, at the wooden bench onto which daylight filtered through leaves swaying in the wind. A wind that is not violent, but still chilling, a wind that tugged the hoodie off my head, sent the strands of hair that escaped my bun flying free.
Earlier I walked up to the water tank. Everything is changing, blooming. First the only flowers were the little magenta ones scattered amongst the clover, peppering the scrubby low-laying greenery, spreading over the earth, protecting it from growing barren and dry as it is in patches where once many feet danced, or paced or walked upon it. Families, scouting troops, trail runners and their dogs. Now me and my lonesome. No child, no husband. I thought I felt my womb stir, but no blood has yet spilled forth.
But now lupines everywhere bloom erect in worship on the sun, where once I saw only the delightful seven-pronged starbursts of their leaves. There too are yellow buds, and from bushes with little succulent-like leaves grow bursts of pale-pink tiny flowers, fringed with delicate hairs, and of course the bush-mallow buds. As I walked back down from the water tank I saw a little yellow butterfly that seemed to be bouncing on waves of wind, past to flowering shrubs, descending into the valley.
The lake is deep blue, in constant rhythmic movement. The pulse of the water never seems to die. Ravens swoop over it, graceful. But the wind is not kind to me, it hurts my hands to write outside, so I am hiding in the truck.
How I forget to, or avoid writing some days, instead letting my experiences pass through my perception like sand filtering out from between my fingers. They say it is enough to be in the moment. But my obsession with writing, my disappointment in myself when I do not record, or depict what I can see stems from my greed for life itself.
