I didn’t want to come back to this brown monochromatic landscape of a Colorado winter on the plains, months away from anything being green, where the fields and hills and trees are all brown. In Colorado, it won’t be until April, at the earliest, when I’ll start to smell the earth again, not just the flowers that start blooming but the pine trees, too.
But a few days after I got home, I went for a walk on trail where the grass was yellow-brown, smashed down from months of no water and being tread by cattle, looking dirty and thin. The mood in the skies matched mine: big dark clouds piling up to the west as a storm front moved in, accompanied by a cold wind. Along the trail, the ancient and huge cottowood trees were shaking and rattling in the wind, and my first thought was: I love it here.
I realized there is a difference for me between beauty and wildness, although often the two can come together, like a summer day in the mountains when the streams are full and the flowers are blooming. California is full of beauty—almost a paradise in some ways—but it’s also crowded and noisy, and you almost never get away from people, especially along the coast (inland is probably another story).
Even in a remote a place as Big Sur, where there are no towns and hardly a restaurant, dozens of people wander the beach and stop at the road pull-outs to take pictures of the green hills that drop sharply to the sea. The spectacular sea coast of Point Lobos, south of Carmel, even on a winter day in the middle of the week, was crowded. Near Monterey, every morning I walked a path along the shore, where I saw sea otters, harbor seals, pelicans, 10-foot high turqoise blue waves crashing on seastacks and white sandy beaches. But if I turned away from the ocean, I confronted a row of houses packed together that formed an almost solid line of human structures going from Carmel to Santa Cruz.
In contrast, on the trail last week near my Boulder home I saw almost no one, and the landscape was open, the line of brown rough hills seemingly unpopulated to the west and north. It felt wild, like there was room for my spirit to soar.
At my cabin, I get the same sense of spaciousness and of utter peace and quiet that is rarely disturbed in winter. In these days of little snow, Meeker Park (above, last week) is not pretty in any sense of the world; nothing green, no flowers blooming, most of the birds gone for the winter, everything dormant, the dried grasses bent by the wind and snow and the creeks frozen, while the fierce winds whip veils of snow off the top of Mount Meeker. But it stirs something in my soul, something that isn’t moved by the beauty of California. I don’t know what else to call it but wildness.
Lovely appreciation of a barren season. Thanks.
Posted by: Rachel Maizes | February 03, 2013 at 11:13 AM
Lovely! You write of an area that will always be home to me---it is very possible to get away from all people/noise in the Santa Cruz area--I did frequently in my 24 years there. Also while it looks like a fairy tale and is so beautiful--there are also bitterly cold winter rains, earthquakes, mudslides and more--there is a downside to every area. I love your photos, I love your writing---and I love the California Coast but am thrilled to live in the beauty of Colorado.
Posted by: shoney | February 03, 2013 at 12:00 PM
I find many uncrowded places also. I have not been to Monterey or Big Sur in many years but I do know where to get peace as I do not go to the popular places for the tourists. There are lots of off the beaten place to get away. You do know them in your area and know which ones are going to be overrun. That's the beauty of knowing an area well. But so glad to hear you escaped and had fun!
Posted by: Sally | February 05, 2013 at 05:29 PM
I totally understand what you mean here. This happened to me in New Zealand two years ago. It was exquisitely beautiful but surprisingly crowded and did not feel wild at all. It irked me no end that we always met people on the trails and the coastal areas were overrun. Then, I read in my guidebook about a corner of the country least visited by tourists. We asked around and no one had ever been there or thought it was worth visiting, so we headed straight to it and spent most of our remaining weeks hiking in the amazing mountain parks there and DID go days without seeing another soul . . . but as soon as we descended from the mountains we were in the thick of it again.
In New Zealand and England (where I lived for a few years) I missed the wide open landscapes and the vast scale that I have always known at home, both in Alberta where I grew up, and in BC where I've lived most of my life since then. I missed being able to disappear into the wilderness and re-emerge days later feeling I'd visited another world. I think, to be fully human, we need that option to available to us at all times.
Sometimes I think it's WAY too busy here and threaten to move to the Yukon to be left alone and get some privacy. The population density in BC is one of the lowest on earth at 4.8 people per square km (especially when a full half of those people cram themselves into Vancouver - far, far away from me) but the Yukon's 0.1 people per square km is the most enticing statistic I've ever laid eyes on. (To get a sense of these numbers, compare them to 93.3 per sq km in California and 19 in Colorado.)
Posted by: Laurel | February 07, 2013 at 11:53 AM
Oh, and I suppose one's idea of "crowded" is relative to what one is accustomed to. Having a few people milling around is crowded in my books and more human contact than I encounter on a day to day basis at home, but others might consider this quiet and peaceful compared to what their used to. To me solitude and wildness are inseparable - can't really have one without the other.
Posted by: Laurel | February 07, 2013 at 11:58 AM
What a beautiful picture of Big Sur, probably one of the wildest places you'll see along the California coastline all the way from SF to San Diego, but I know what you mean. Sometimes I think that growing up in this bio-region caused me to think of "green" as "tame." The only places that green in western Kansas were fields of wheat in the spring, while the pastures where the native grasses still grew were a much milder green.
Posted by: Julene Bair | February 17, 2013 at 08:58 PM