Hiking

1979, Santa Barbara

     Rick and I believed that we could gain knowledge by exposing ourselves to peak experiences. We made a habit of not just being observers of life’s extraordinary and ordinary moments but being actively involved in experiencing them, searching them out and sometimes even forcing them to expose themselves to us. We were definitely not tourists.

     In 1979, during my sophomore year at University of California at Santa Barbara, Rick and I took an environmental studies class together taught by Dr. Roderick Nash, a prominent environmental studies professor and author who wrote the tome “Man and Wilderness”, of course, our ES101 textbook. Nash was charismatic, handsome and most of his classes were filled with women who fought it out for the closest seat to the lectern. It was common knowledge that “Dr. Rod” slept with many of the freshman nymphs and his quarterly three- five day hikes into the local mountains and the High Sierras were his modus operandi for ensnaring the young ladies. One of these hikes was scheduled to go into the Santa Ynez mountains about one hundred miles North of Santa Barbara where, with proper guidance, you could find ancient Chumash pictographs etched and painted in the caves and overhanging shale and sandstone cliffs. I can’t remember why exactly, I think one of us had something to do that weekend so we decided to go on the hike a couple of days early.

     We quickly packed all of the gear figuring what we would need for a two-night backpacking trek, which wasn’t much, then took off after our morning classes were out. We followed the 101 north past Goleta, El Capitan and Jalama then cutting inland North of San Luis Obisbo and through Morales Canyon to the shale oil fields that become the nascent foothills of the Santa Ynez mountain range. Oil derricks that looked like giant black dinosaurs surrounded us on both sides of the road. From afar they appeared big but as we drove off the paved road and onto the dirt access road and moved closer you realized how large and how powerful they really were; moving up and down in a slow-motion perpetual see saw. Rick and I looked at each other and instinctively knew what we were going to do. We pulled up to the biggest one we could find and proceeded to hop the chain link fence that surrounded the black iron rig. Locating the metal handholds that were welded to the center support, we proceeded to climb up the hot monolith, one rung at a time. Higher and higher we ascended until we, one in front of the other, reached the fulcrum of the beast, hopped on top of the giant metal joint and one by one on all fours holding tight to the underbelly of the I-beam scampered to the end and toward the huge head of the monster. It continued it’s slow powerful ascent as we reached the end and could both sit on the head, holding on tight. From there, some forty feet in the air, we could practically see the distant ocean. Then, arriving at its peak, it began its methodical descent and we could both feel the tingle in our groin as the machinery went down. We rode it for another twenty minutes and it was exhilarating and freeing to ride that oil derrick. I felt like Major Kong riding the atomic bomb in the Dr. Strangelove movie but we were not destroying or desecrating anything. We were building something, confirming something, our lives…and asking the question, why not? After our measured “E” ticket ride on the derrick, we got into our car and continued through the oil field, through Morales canyon and into the Santa Ynez wilderness area.

     We located the Chumash Indian trail head and parked in the dusty lot where our class was to congregate and leave in a couple days. We were alone, save the cliff swallows, and hadn’t seen a car in the past two hours; no other cars were in the lot and we liked that sense of solitude. We opened the hatch to my beat up Toyota Celica and proceeded to take inventory of our gear. With Rick, there are certain moments, like a comma in a sentence, where there is a break, a realization, a reassessment and as we were looking at our clothes, hats, flashlights, sleeping bags and pads, without words, I knew we were in one of those commas.

“ Do we really need to take our jackets…it’s not that cold.”?

Rick said looking at me with that head tilted smile. I knew where he was going.

 “ Do we really need the long pants and hats?”

I added and let Rick finish the thought off.

“Do we really need clothes at all? Let’s go native… no clothes, no packs, no sleeping bags, nothing.”

“…And no speaking!” I exclaimed.

     And that was the last thing either one of said for the next two and a half days. Through grunts and hand gestures we agreed to take a small stainless steel waterproof canister of matches, our shoes and the trail map. For the next two days we walked along the trails, followed the map and located the caves and rock pictographs. In the morning we looked for wild food like miner’s lettuce, manzanita berries and mesquite leaves. Midday, when the sun beat down on us, we covered our bodies from head to toe in mud from the cold water stream that cut through the narrow canyons we followed and at night we lit small fires to keep us warm and lay huddled in the dirt and grass. On the second morning we used charcoal from the spent fire to make elaborate designs on each other and we quickly became unrecognizable as college freshmen; we looked like crazed aborigines. On the third day as we were foraging for berries along-side a trail in a beautiful meadow, we heard voices in the distance. Even in the short period of a few days, because we hadn’t spoken in three days and hadn’t encountered anyone, we had a heightened sense of hearing. When we heard the voices we hid behind the manzanita bushes and, peeking through the leaves, could see our class, six girls and two guys making their way up the trail, led by Dr. Nash. As they got closer and closer we slowly came out from behind the scrub and met our class right there on the trail. They were startled and dumbfounded to say the least and were not sure who we were. One of the guys picked up a rock, the girls giggled when they saw our decorated penises. Once they realized who we were, we all just stood there on the trail laughing, cracking up. We broke our vow of silence and recounted our trek and told them of the sandstone rock Cairns we left on the trails marking each pictograph site and bid them farewell.

     Rick and I continued on the trail and hiked out, talking the whole way, reaching my car with the “Question Authority” bumper sticker about two hours later. The ride back to our apartment in Isla Vista was pretty uncomfortable. We did not realized how dirty we were until we were in the relatively clean environment of my car. We talked about how we freaked out our class, turned on the radio and heard the news about the Three Mile Island Nuclear accident, then settled in and listened to Steely Dan and the “Caves of Altamira” the whole way home, both naked in the car.