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The Talking Stick

Snively’s Ridge

by Laura R. Joseph

On the one year anniversary of our first successful climb up to the top of a California ridge named, Snively, my husband, Roger, and I decided to give it another go. This time we took the Mesa Trail to Fern and the Sky Trial to Snively’s, which was a huge improvement over last year’s spur-of-the-moment, crawl-on-all-fours up Garaza Canyon. We decided to heed the advice of last year’s climbers who told us too late that although Garaza Canyon Trail was indeed on the trail map it was only suitable for horses. Coming down that same trail this year we were struck with disbelief that we were even able to make it up that way without four legs and hooves, not to mention water. At times it was a 40 degree incline with dry, humped paths full of rocks and eaten out troughs where the water flows down the mountain when it rains. Let me make this clear--there is no easy way up to Snively’s Ridge, it is a blood-spitting journey--yet this time it seemed less traumatic.

It starts like this. Each morning we awaken in the Carmel Valley we head down to Garland Ranch Regional Park for our daily hike before breakfast. Once you find yourself walking easily around the Lupine Loop or even beginning the ascent through a lovely, wooded ravine on Mesa Trail, it’s not a huge leap of faith to think you might be able to climb higher. Soon, after some minor huffing and puffing, you find yourself at the La Mesa Pond where there is a skull and bones sign that innocently points the way with a single arrow to the 2600 foot Snively’s Ridge. At this point my eyes usually light up with anticipation or daring (can I make it?) while my husband interprets the sign as a challenge to his manhood. He doesn’t necessarily want to go up, but he has to in order to avoid self humiliation. Not every time evokes the same reaction, however. One of us has to give the nod of ’go ahead’ and then the other has to accept the dare. Some days one of us says ’Nah’, and on other days there are the various lame excuses, “no water” or “I’m hungover” (it’s wine country after all), but today is apparently a green light for both of us. 

First there is the sign, the steep ascent, and two hikers who won’t rest until they reach the top. Of course, my husband doesn’t really get the whole Zen, in-the-moment, process thing...he’s in it purely for the end result, to plant his erect flagpole into the rocky earth of the arrogant ridge which towers above us. Me, I like to stop often along the ascent to gaze out over the valley in awe of the majestic mountainous views. On this note we begin our ascent straight up into the clouds, sweat pouring out from under our winery-monikered caps, Leki sticks clicking against the dry, rocky soil; each time we come to a right turn in the path our faces light up in hope that it is the last. But as we turn the corner there is always one more steep switchback into the fog and then another and another until it seems we can go on no further. Looking down we can see that any hopes of turning around are out of the question unless we want to slide down on our backsides through rocks or hurtle ourselves over into thin air. So upward we go, on and on, my husband letting out occasional, very audible belches of last night’s rigatoni and Rocking Horse Zinfandel. Just when I’m contemplating how to get my husband’s large, dead body off the mountain (do I leave him here covered in flies while I get help and a latte?), the last ascent appears with a blue sky high above the clouds and fog and a treeless ridge rising above it. My husband turns to me and pretends to curl his imaginary mustache, “Snively’s, I presume”, much like they used to say Newman’s name in Seinfeld. And so we scramble on up to what by now seems to be our redemption. Inevitably, there is some slight woman or an elderly man sitting calmly on the visitor’s bench surveying the view. Did I mention they are never sweating? Were they dropped here by a helicopter? I take out my map and search it ravenously for another, clandestine way up. Surely they didn’t labor as we had to get here! But alas, there they always are, sitting in the mid morning sun, so relaxed you’d swear they were sipping a Starbucks latte. We exchange small talk; on this particular day it is a slender, middle-aged woman with a five month old puppy who, I might add, is also not panting. (Is there something in the Californian water? the wine? and if so, haven’t I drunk enough to experience the same benefits?) There is a slight mist and the whole world is green and gently rolling as far as you can see. Lightheadedness comes and goes just as quickly and we marvel at our new found ability to get to the top once again. We aren’t dead yet. 

Steep and treacherous as the descent is, all the way down I am thinking, “At least we’re not going uphill.” My husband has gone on ahead and all I can hear is his boot occasionally slipping on loose rock or the click of his Leki stick on solid ground. The belches seemed to have stopped. I suddenly find myself feeling both sad and frightened as if I’d just met another man whom I couldn’t resist and knew it would eventually lead to losing the man I had. Gazing out over the lush green mountains, I knew I had found a new hunger to climb higher and higher, a love my husband might not share with me and so would be a distancing of sorts. As I take the first few steps downward, I wince with remorse for giving up the precious ground I had gained with such difficulty just moments before. I begin my descent reluctantly, not easily relinquishing today’s victory over inertia and the safety of routine. But it’s a long way down and by the time I hit Waterfall Trail my heart and mind have nearly been willed back to the ground, back to the life I lead on the days I’m not climbing Snively’s Ridge. On the last leg of trail through the scarlet poison oak, the moss strewn living oaks, and the madrones, I catch a glimpse of blue-washed denim below and then there he is, my husband, standing patiently like a horse that has thrown you but stops up ahead to loyally wait. His Cleveland Browns cap cocked slightly to one side, he looks a little worse for the wear but my heart stops, just for a moment, at the familiarity of this sight and how I love it. Yes, he will mumble and grumble in his weary smugness, that “he’s been there, done that” and so never needs to do it again. But he does need to do it again! We all need to do it again. To find a way to keep climbing upward, to separate and to come together once more with a new appreciation for the other’s individual life force. 

And so...after some amount of time has gone by and his poison oak has dried up and he has forgotten the blood-riddled spittle...I will turn my aging face to his aging face one morning and say, “Do you want to climb Snively’s Ridge today?”

Poetry

Child's Play

Lying awake
My tongue searches repetitively
For the hole left by a missing tooth,
My first tooth lost to time and trauma,
Phantomly aching like an absent limb
Replaced by something new and foreign.
“I know it’s no big deal”, I lied to the dentist,
“But could I have it, the blackened piece of bone?”
(The talisman to change?)
Secretly I had planned to pierce it,
Hang it from my wrinkled neck.
The nurse grimaced, too late,
She had thrown it in with the hazardous waste.
So much for the necklace, not to mention 
The tooth fairy’s inflated sum,
I had to let go of my plan to go out 
With all that which I had come into this world.
“It’s no big deal”, I lied to myself,
Mourning the molar, my grandparents’ farm,
The death of my father and two good friends,
My first black kitten, my frolicking Lab,
The countryside full of trees,
A landscape I could actually see,
The handwritten letter, the milkman,
Silence.
My tongue slides up and down
Over the porcelain smooth surface
Of the computer-generated fake.
It reminds me of picture postcards,
How they tend to spoil the real thing
That when you finally see Niagara Falls
The mind’s jaded image cannot be overcome.
Sadness lives forever in facsimile.
I will never see California again
For the first time;
That is the vague ache of maturity,
The loss of a world untouched and innocent,
That place where children play.

The Autumn Gardener

Late August
the garden is overgrown,
suffocatingly verdant.
I perch restlessly on my Adirondack throne,
Clippers in hand, and wait.
I am sick of maturity,
Tired of grown up things that do not end.
My memories lead nowhere but into
Overgrown thickets,
Tangled, light deprived hedge rows,
endless thorny brambles
which have seen better days.

My most beautiful specimens,
the rubrum lily,
Siberian iris,
are being strangled.
Weakened by overcrowding,
they must be yanked out by their roots.
dusted off and put away in a box,
somewhere dark and cold.

Reliable raspberry patch
can not muster fruit;
blue pole beans slowly succumb to the
aggressive urban beetle.
Myself inert with hesitation,
I switch the cross of my legs,
Turning the thighs inward to ease the pinching pain.

Bracing against the flooding tension
I know I will have to begin extracting,
Both the living and the dead;
Cut things down
Pull things up,
Remove the over ripe veils that hide the bones.
I need to see where they are broken,
where they are weak and need shorn up.
The graying dirt must be churned up with air.
I like that thought of everything being bare,
Empty of a past that is missing breathing organisms.

But the trees will stay,
Bold and brave, 
Unflinching witnesses to the reconstruction.

Pure White

Thirteen months have passed since I visited
the carcass of the dead horse
decaying in the Pacific sunlight.
I have wanted to go,
Waited to go back like a kid waiting for Christmas,
intensely, with anticipation, with awe.
The bones, the hooves, the teeth
were what I longed to see and touch,
Without the flesh,
Without the declension of earthly weight.
I imagined the great bare rib cage
Heaving up from the grassy hill
Like a shipwrecked explorer,
Plain and simple,
Bleached dry and smooth.
I dreamt about coddling the
worn hooves in my aged hands,
Piercing the teeth for an adorning talisman.
I loved that horse,
Imagined its day of cantering and chewing,
how it must have instinctually climbed
to the top of that heavenly hill.
I envied him his death,
The way he found the highest place,
The loveliest place near the wild sea,
Surrounded by the softly contoured breasts
of the green Big Sur hills,
the scents of eucalyptus and redwood;
Warmed by the temperate January sun.
I think about him daily,
He is in my spot!
I want to go back,
Lie down beside him,
Bleach myself pure white.

What I Owe

The dog is busy with dogness
as she leads into the woods,
glistening yellow coat and velvet muzzle,
A perfect measure of what I owe
To innocence and helplessness.

It is spring,
interior season of hatching eggs.
Underfoot tender purple violets 
make me pause in familiar underpulse,
for the long ago days of the child
who never wanted to go inside,
who wanted to remain in the open,
become part of the grass,
the wind, the trees;
to live under the sky.

Bracketed now by ‘pre’, ‘perio’, and ‘post’,
life has moved on through ‘next year’ country
not knowing that it is a mockery,
Believing the frustration will eventually end,
Maybe with love or with child.
But the heart and mind are still longing.
It is not company for which I yearn.

Rambling walks with the dog,
Stumbling upon a dead horse,
a huge, startling carcass
of hooves and teeth and bones,
now talismans,
sacred in the morning sun.
Eyeing the bolting patient 
screaming obscenities at the technicians
who surround her and drag her
back inside.

Ambushed almost
by the media of a culture
who considers me a statistic of interesting hormones
(if the funding is there),
labeling me and assigning me
as if biology and sex were the end all.
I am not ready to become invisible!

I look down at the forest floor,
at the shy, ball-less violets.
There is no implicit faith in their outcome,
and yet they keep returning.
To where I’ve been walking all these years.
Are these the same blooms I trampled on then?
If so, I do not know for what they are lobbying.

Being no child nor bird,
I whistle for the dog.
She gallops toward me,
tongue hanging to the ground
smiling from ear to ear.
Falling to my knees I nuzzle her neck
and lean in to whisper in her floppy ear.

If we cannot accept our fortune,
Next winter we will leave here,
Cast out and fruitless,
But never alone.

Copyright © 2001-2007 Laura Joseph. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any content, publications, pictures or images, in whole or part, without prior express written consent of Laura Joseph is strictly prohibited. The accuracy and currency of content is not guaranteed.