"Raglan Road......."

"On a quiet street where old ghosts meet,
 I see her walking now
 Away from me so hurriedly, my reason must allow
 That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay.
 When the angel woos the clay, he'll lose his wings at the dawn of the day."


These are the closing lines of an Irish poem set to song. It has haunted me from the first time I heard it sung by Luke Kelly. Others have tried, but he has captured the essence of the heartbreak contained in the words. He sings the song almost as a dirge, in a strong, direct and almost harshly masculine voice.



"I saw the danger, yet I walked
 Along the enchanted way.
 And I said let grief be a falling leaf
 At the dawning of the day."



"Well I loved too much; by such and such
 Is happiness thrown away."


You Tube has a video of this song performed by Luke Kelly.



The poem was written by Patrick Kavanaugh, noted Irish poet. There is a video of  Patrick reading
"Raglan Road" on YouTube. The personal story behind the poem is touching.

SRH

West of Bishop....High Country...and an Apple Core

The Only Sound Came From the Wind and a Stream

That long and "ever-ascending" drive took me to this vista looking west to the rugged peaks of the main Sierra ridgeline. Lake Sabrina lay a few miles further in the valley below. Campgrounds were closed, or being readied for closure by forestry crews as barricades and signs were placed before the entrances to the sites. There were probably no more than fifty people in the area....most at Lake Sabrina. I think this view rivals any other view that one could find elsewhere in the Sierra. This was a place where one felt alone and unconnected to the world of man. I wondered what it would be to die here surrounded by indifferent nature. But for my sense of self, I was no more than a deer standing on a bluff.



Into the Gorge

To my left a rushing stream tumbled through rocks and down a gorge on its way to some of those ditches that watered Bishop. I stood on the banks and stared at the water rushing by for a long time. All my life I have been fascinated with water tumbling along a streambed. One of my earliest memories is my pretending to fish with a safety pin tied to a string. That particular "stream" was running in the gutter along the curb in front of my house. I was probably three years old. I had hopes that just maybe a fish would come down stream. I can see that clear water and the glinting pin as if I leaned over that curb just yesterday.

The "Eddy" Swirls in the Lower Left

I purposely ate lightly on the trip, ignoring the clock that so rules our lives in telling us when it is time to eat, whether hungry or not. While standing above the stream pictured above, I ate an apple, gnawing every bit of flesh from the core. When finished, I tossed the core into the stream aiming for the white water, but falling short, the apple fell into an eddy swirling adjacent to the rushing current. The apple core bobbed and swirled within the eddy, making a counterclockwise circuit that carried it just to the edge of the main current where it met the pull of the two forces...the eddy pulling it back and the stronger current tugging it forward into the main stream. Over and over again the core was pulled back into the eddy. It never did escape the little cove in which it was trapped.

We are all caught up in the pull of our present lives.....a type of spiritual gravity that is a product of our environment, our genetic makeup, our upbringing and exposure to experience, and our education.
I saw in that apple an analogy to those who struggle to leave the pull of their own life's eddy in a search for a better life, or in the search for knowledge of self and soul. Poverty, lack of education and of opportunity, ethnicity, language and parentage are some of the forces of gravity that pull one back from change and growth and personal happiness. Transcending that pull and entering into a different current is not easy. It requires the conscious choice to change and an effort that could try the soul.
Think of the gang member, or the minority student, or the poorly educated  individual who wants to
rise above his or her current status. The societal barriers are immense. Or think of the person who finds that the job, or a marriage, or the social group is unfulfilling. Change is a huge challenge.

All this in a lifeless apple core. The damn thing disappeared from sight, perhaps lodging between stones or washing up on the bank of the stream. That is an end no apple core could want.

SRH

A Day in Bishop....October 2011

The "High Country"...I love that expression...it is fraught with rugged and romantic meaning to me:
Clear and open vistas, streams, wildlife, snowfields on the high peaks, meadows, silence, wildness, chill at sundown, bright stars and the Milky Way, sighing pines in a breeze, fluttering aspen leaves.....and perhaps a sense of aloneness, a facing of oneself and a sorting of what is important.

Like most travelers to the Eastern Sierra, I passed through Bishop on my way to Mammoth and the fly fishing streams and lakes of the "high country".  Bishop represented the near-end of the journey. One could relax knowing that some portal had been passed through....the trip was almost over. Perhaps a stop at Schats and almost always a topping of the gas tank at the Shell station constituted my acquaintence with Bishop.

Turn Left at Mumy Lane off of W. Line

But I had always wanted to spend time exploring the immediate countryside that surrounded Bishop. There were the treelined lanes that started in town and stretched straight out into open land and usually ended at a ranch or simply died out in the sagebrush. Fall colors had begun to paint the trees in yellows, golds and reds. I found several of the treelined lanes off of West Line Street and walked for several miles up and down Mumy and Reata Lanes. A number of "ditches"...streams of crystal clear water...crossed under the lanes, bringing water to the croplands and grazing fields to the east. Each ditch was identified as to owner, though I wondered if any of them were still alive because the ditches looked as if they had been flowing for decades. These waterways played, and still do play, an important role in the development of Bishop. They existed long before the suburban sprawl that has grown up around the perimeters of the town, and represent the result of the complex water-rights issues that had to be worked out by early settlers.

West Line was also the road to the high country lakes west of Bishop. I had time and I had always wanted to visit those lakes. Lake Sabrina (Sa-brine-ah as the locals call it) is the largest and closest.
Taking a left, I drove up an ever-ascending road into golden aspens and pines. But that is another story.

SRH






"Ditch" Water Passing Under Mumy Lane

The High Country West of Bishop (From Reata Lane)







"My Trip".......Sierra Vignettes from 1964

Mid-June, 1964


The stark grandeur of the Sierra rising up out of the Owens Valley stunned me. I had never seen such a thing in person. Nature, and the wonders it presented on that trip, formed an impression that has lasted to this day. I had always been intrigued with the idea of being a Forest Ranger. It seemed a romantic and rugged way of life. And though I had been accepted to Loyola University and was to start classes about eight weeks hence, I resolved to look into the Forest Ranger opportunity as a transfer to Humboldt State in Arcata in my sophomore year. As it happened, I found the curriculum at Humboldt dauntingly science-oriented and I decided to go on at Loyola U.

I have never lost my enthusiasm and joy at seeing those landmarks I discovered for the first time in 1964. They are like old friends and represent some sense of permanence and continuity in the world.

The standouts are......

Red Rock canyon with its multi-hued mud towers arrayed like some ancient fortress; the scene of many an early cowboy movie and completely accessible back then; with names and graffiti carved into the lower columns, some dating back years....

Red and black cinder cones dotting the valley floor; some overlapping others. Ancient lava flows, now frozen, gushed from those cones and flowed for miles. The highway had to be cut through those flows. The basalt palisades just before Little Lake rose almost two hundred feet above the floor of what had been the bed of the ancient glacier fed Owens River on its way to southern Death Valley to form a number of lakes.

The "Hubcap Capitol of the World" in Pearsonville. A vast junkyard of old cars with racks of hubcaps arrayed for hundreds of feet. Hubcaps, back in those days, were made of metal and mostly chrome plated. Pearsonville is no longer the hubcap capitol of the world. It looks forlorn and abandoned now, there being no evidence of management.

Owens Lake, dry and glaringly white in the afternoon sun. At that time the minerals and salts of the lakebed were "mined" in ponds where briny water evaporated under the hot sun and left crystalline residue that was scraped up and bagged for shipment to chemical processing centers. The different colors of the crystals were startling...reds, oranges, browns, ochres and greens. I remember fierce winds raising monumental clouds of salt and mineral dust over the lakebed as we drove south on our way home,

The "Ghost Trees" that dotted the valley floor north of the Owens Lake. The valley floor had once been fed by the Owens River all the way to the Lake. Once that water was diverted by Los Angeles, the stands of trees that grew along the river course and its tributaries began to wither and die. Many were still standing, but dead and bare. They disappeared over the years and I sometimes wonder if they were a figment of my imagination.

Manzanar, the "Re-location" center for the Japanese-American detainees during WWII. All that remained in view from the road was the stone guard-house that stood at the entrance of the center.
A bit north was a large hangar type building that served as a hall for the detainees. Manzanar has been made into a monument and tours are now conducted for visitors. Forty-eight years ago it was a desolate and forgotten place...but not forgotten by the people who were forced to live there for years.
On the western edge of the reserve there is a white obelisk towering above the camp cemetary. There are only two graves still marked by stone monuments. In one of them lie the remains of a two year old child. I found it touching to see hundreds of small paper origami birds and ornaments windblown through the sagebrush and desert terrain....all left by visitors. Many had faded messages handwritten in Japanese or English.

Olancha....on the map, but really a gas stop and a few commercial establishments, the Ranch House Restaurant being the only notable one. The inside is still hung with the pictures of Hollywood stars who had stopped in for food while shooting on location in the nearby mountains. I remember the huge cottonwoods shedding the "cotton" from their flowers in such quantity that the roadside looked buried in snow drifts.

Independence, Lone Pine and Big Pine.....Small towns that were stops for tourists and served local needs. My impression is that Independence and Big Pine have diminished markedly as businesses faltered or the old owners retired. They were charming in my eye back then. They still are.

Bishop....the metropolis of Owens Valley with several traffic lights and a modest golf course. Home of Jack's Restaurant and Schat's Bakery, or Bakkery, as they liked to spell it. We stocked up on Sheepherder's Bread, the best bread I have ever found as a base for a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich.
So a tradition was born....I never fail to stop tat Schat's for Sheepherder's and other baked goods.
Jack's Restaurant was old when I visited it on that trip forty-eight years ago. I believe some of the same waitresses are still working there today. They are a sassy bunch, but get the job done.

Sherwin Grade...back then this section of 395 was the death trap for any car, for that matter most cars, that had any issues with overheating. I wonder if any cars existed at that time that did not have cooling challenges when climbing mountain grades. That overloaded, swept-fin Plymouth we were in certainly didn't meet the challenge. We had to resort to the aforementioned canvas waterbag slung over the front bumper to refill the radiator while parked alongside the road. Sherwin Grade climbed around 2000 feet up from the valley floor along a tortuous route that tested all vehicles. It is now a four lane road and is an easy drive in modern vehicles.

Tom's Place....A landmark stop that has stood at the top of the Sherwin Grade for a very long time. My father stopped there as a boy when taken to the Sierras on family vacations, so I felt some kinship with his experience of the place. A restaurant, a bar, a grocery store, a sporting goods store, and a bait shop.....all under one roof. The gas station pump was outside next to the hitching post. And one could spend the night in one of the small cabins across the road. Tom's Place had it all.


This marks the end of my trip though the past...of my introduction as a teenager to the Eastern Sierra.

Going forward I will recount that October, 2011 trip.

-Continued-


Red Rock Canyon



The Eastern Sierra

What People Notice.....

I first grew a beard in my mid-twenties to mark a change in my life. That initial growth was dark with tinges of auburn. At a point going forward many people that entered my life never saw me without a beard and mustache. My dear wife only knew me with facial hair, as did my two sons. I will never forget the look on their faces, and the tears that flowed down the boys cheeks, when I walked out of the bathroom after shaving my beard in preparation for a minor surgical procedure. "I want my Dad back!!" and "Tell Dad to grow it back!!" and "You look weird!!". I did grow the beard back, but some time later (I don't remember when) I decided to reduce the full beard to a goatee, trimmed close and by then gray in color. The darkness had long left those whiskers.

I shaved my chin around five weeks ago. There was a reason for doing so, but I was free of the hair that had marked a memory and a time. I wanted to present a different face to the world. I will admit it took me some time to adjust to the face in the mirror. The clean chin didn't bring youth back; maybe I'll achieve that by shaving the mustache some day soon.

Anyway, I was amused at the lack of immediate notice that people took of my "new" look. I told no one what I was going to do, so as I walked into the office the morning after, I received only a few puzzled looks. After a number of "You look different this morning..." comments, several gasped "You shaved your beard!!!" Others took several days to figure it out. I just laughed each time the revelation came through. What struck me was the fact that so many didn't have a clue what I had done, yet they, in time, realized something about me didn't fit the old image. Sometimes I had to tell them.

As to my new look?......Several of the "girls" in customer service agreed I looked like a movie star. I think they were mostly sincere. When asked "What movie star?", one came up with Charlton Heston.
I thought a few seconds and said "Thank you, but I need to warn you I am not immune to such flattery". I checked it out that night in the mirror...I don't think I look like Heston at all..... Maybe some other rugged Hollywood type as yet to be identified.

SRH

A Full Moon rising....August 1st

Through the Eucalyptus Tree

The rising of the Full Moon is a special event to me. I think most never give it more than a glance. It really is a very strange presence in the sky...held there by earth's gravity... reflecting the sun's light and illuminating the landscape. I expect it to flood light into my bedroom early the morning of the 2nd. Occasionally it is visible through the bedroom window as it sets into the west. The last time that happened the moon took on the color of burnished 24 k gold.



Perhaps this post will remind others to look up and wonder.




30* above the Horizon


SRH

                                                                                    

August First ...

Three weeks ago today I began my preparation for the hernia repair and not without misgivings. Physically, fasting and drinking no liquids after a certain hour, it was not a challenge. I had essentially been on a very low calorie, near starvation diet for three weeks in order to lose weight and ease the surgeons job. I lost ten pounds in that time. However, in dealing with the doctor-predicted difficulties I would experience in recovery, I couldn't help but have some second thoughts about going forward with the procedure. But one is swept along by events and I knew that it was best to have the hernia repaired...if for no other reason than to rid my physique of that "Alien" bulge.

As it is, I am in disbelief at how well I feel. I stopped the hydrocodone over a week ago, went to Tylenol Super-Strength, and stopped the latter on a regular basis several days ago. I took my first mile-long walk on Monday at a slower pace than usual and felt some fatigue afterward. But each day I feel more "normal".

SRH