Nothing But Air beneath Me

     I was running towards the edge of a cliff. A man running behind me was shouting,  "Run! Run faster!"

    This was not a nightmare, and it was a dream only in the sense of my having at any time in my life dreamed of flying, which, actually, I never have. But here I was, running as fast as I could, encumbered as I was by the harness around my chest and legs, towards the edge of a cliff and the emptiness beyond. Suddenly I was the Road Runner—one moment running on the cliff, the next my feet churning on air.

    Then I was just sitting in a hammock under a gorgeous kite bearing me up through the air with my pilot, Sebastian, behind me. All I had to do was sit comfortably on my swinging chair and enjoy the amazing sensation of floating above the Alpine peaks and the chalets and streets of Grindelwald, Switzerland, as the fog revealed and then closed again blue patches of sky.

    A few days earlier, walking back to our hotel after a hike, my sister Sharon and I had paused to look up at the colorful paragliders dotting the sky like bubbles. "Did you ever want to do that?" Sharon asked dreamily.

    I shrugged. Not really; basically I like my boots on the ground. Still, it would be beautiful to see all those snowy Alpine peaks, the Eiger and the Monk and all their minions, from the sky. "Well," I added with a shrug, "if someone offered it to me, I would take it."

    It didn't occur to me that all I had to do was pay my money and I, too, could be floating in the air under a large umbrella.

     But Sharon, who has always had dreams of flying, was already thinking that maybe this was her chance. In the next few days she did some research, some thinking, some looking at her budget, and then announced that she was going to book a trip with a paraglider.

    As easy as that? If Sharon was going to take this adventure, so could I. "Sign me up, too," I said.

    It was foggy on the day of take-off. The four paragliding pilots and their passengers waited at the top of the cliff for a hole in the fog. Sharon was first in line. "Run," her pilot cried, but before they reached the take-off spot, the hole filled, and they had to step aside. I was next in line.

    Um. I thought I would watch Sharon jump off a cliff first.

    Suddenly there was a hole in the fog and I was ordered to run and Sebastian was shouting at me to run faster, and then I was floating. As easy as that.

    It was beautiful. It was dreamy. The fog obscured the tips of the Alps, but its shift and swirl made beautiful, changing pictures. The pilot turned us to the left so we could fly over the dark green forest and silver ribbon of the Milibach River flowing out of Bachalpsee, where I had been swimming a few days before. There, from my floating chair, I uncorked a small vial of my husband's ashes and watched as his spirit disappeared over the river, the forest, and the Swiss Alps.

Bears and Apples

    Three nights ago I woke up to something big scrambling off my deck. I shook myself awake enough to turn over and look out the window and saw a large black bear lumbering through the moonlight into the woods.

    I never did understand what he was doing on my deck—or what startled him off it. But there was no mystery to why the next bear appeared the next night. 

    I awoke to the sound of apples hitting the ground. Time was when I would have leapt out of bed, down the stairs, and out the door to chase the bear off. My apples! But now I thought, well, I couldn't reach the apples myself, anyway. Might as well let the bear have them. And I went back to sleep.

    Yesterday late afternoon I heard apples hitting the ground again. I looked out the window. Bear again. A little bear, not a cub, but not one of those huge lumbering things, either. He was so little he was cute. I had to laugh. As soon as I opened the door and walked onto the deck, he was off like a shot, so I didn't get any pictures.

    I have never had so many apples as I have this year. They are small because I haven't given any attention to the tree, and, actually, they aren't quite ripe yet. The bear doesn't care. And, being a small bear, he doesn't break branches when he climbs the tree, and sometimes he leaves apples on the ground for my harvest. We have an agreement.

    I am careful in my relationship with the wild creatures. I love my lame fox, who looks right at me and barks at me and has no qualms about curling up to sleep in front of my garden. It is tempting to make a pet of him, but I won't. I don't think it's right or a good idea to make a pet of a wild creature. I'll let the fox recognize me and go his way; I'll let the bear eat the apples and let him still be scared when I open the door.

    But, darn he's cute.

Wine at Lucien Le Moine

Lucien le Moine cellar Image from lacavestore.com

    The perfect place for an education on centuries-old wine-making techniques is in a centuries-old wine cellar, such as the one I was standing in—seventeenth-century construction—in Beaune, France, last June. The large wooden beams, stone walls, arched stone ceiling, cool air, and redolence of aged wine gave testimony to what Rotem, co-owner, with her husband, Mourin, of Lucien le Moine winery, was recounting about making wine, 

    At Lucien le Moine, Rotem said, they make wine the traditional way, eschewing (if not actually scorning) faster, more modern methods. "Time is our best ally," Rotem said: the more time, the better the wine. At her winery, wines age long in oak barrels, harkening to the days when parents would buy a bottle of wine at the birth of a child, of that year's vintage, and open it at that child's wedding, many years later. So could it be with a bottle of Lucien le Moine wine. 

     Rotem and Mourin don't use sulfites in their wines because the lees, left to dissolve in the barrel, act as a preservative. Rotem puts it colorfully on the website: "The lees help the wines develop their natural energy and their freshness,…a tranquil and constant energy" that works with its best ally, time, to make a superior wine.

    Was it superior? We moved to the seventeenth-century tasting room to find out. "Inhale the odor of the wine," Rotem instructed, "then swirl it [don't swirl first], then sip it." Savor the taste. Recognize the difference in the second sip. Where did the taste linger? Did it remain in the sensory memory long after (days after) the wine had been drunk? 

    Rotem debunked one myth after another. The "legs" on the glass after the wine has been swirled are meaningless, she said. It doesn't matter what you eat with which wine; the important thing is that the food doesn't overwhelm the wine. Forget analogies ("hints of blackberries, plums, leather…"). "If you want to taste strawberries," Rotem said, "buy a basketful at the market." 

    The important things to consider when buying wine, Rotem instructed, are the date, the cru (the group of vineyards), the winery, and the very vineyard itself. Each vineyard on the spine of mountain above Beaune has a different terroir and therefore a different appellation. In this one wine you can taste the rock of the soil; in this other one you can taste the weather of that couloir. Each knoll, each year, each season produces a different taste. It isn't the name of the grape or the name of the vineyard that is important but the precise name of the village, the cru (go after grand or premiere cru), the aging—look at the date and, if you can remember it, I suppose, the weather at that cru that year. Look for well aged wine. The way they make it at Lucien le Moine.

    It wasn't a bunch of bosh. The wines I tasted at Lucien le Moine that day were superb. The taste of the grand cru wine stayed on my palate—remained in my sensory memory—for two days. It was that good.

[A case of 2019 Lucien le Moine clos St. Denis grand cru sells for $2,296. Just in case you wanted to know.]

    

    

The Slaughter of Owls

     I'm sorry to report that the US Fish and Wildlife Service is slaughtering barred owls in the Pacific Northwest. The barred owl, they say, is an aggressive species native to the eastern side of the United States that is moving into the Pacific Northwest, displacing the northwest-native spotted owl, the notorious icon of the timber wars of the eighties and nineties.

Northern spotted owl. Photo by Frank D. Lospolluto, on savetheredwoods.org 

Spotted owls need old-growth habitat; thus the conservationists' argument that cutting old-growth forests for timber was detrimental to the spotted owl, an endangered species. So timber sales were challenged in court, and again and again, the spotted owl won. Ostensively, the cutting stopped, although in actuality it only slowed.

    And yet the spotted owl has continued its downward spiral, and it seems that those mean bullies, the barred owls, are to blame. 

    So, again we're going to slaughter a species? Think: buffalo, wolves, coyotes. Think: passenger pigeons.

    But Elizabeth Kolbert, environmental writer for the New Yorker, tells us to also think hedgehogs in the Hebrides, rabbits in Australia, mongooses in Hawaii—introduced animals that wrought havoc in native populations of birds and mammals. Where we made the problem, some conservationists say, we have a moral obligation to try to fix it—to rid the Uist Islands of hedgehogs, Australia of rabbits, Hawaii of the mongoose—and the Pacific Northwest of the barred owl. US Fish and Wildlife has concluded that the demise of the spotted owl arose "almost certainly owing to the human transformation of the landscape"—i.e., destruction of old-growth forests, inviting the barred owl into spotted owl territory. 

Barred owl. Photo by Fyn Kynd on savetheredwoods.org 

    So, if we caused the endangerment of the spotted owl, are we not obligated to do what we can to reverse that trajectory?

    My heart, not to mention my mind, doesn't know where it rests because a beautiful barred owl lives in my woods. I cannot bear to think of someone shooting it. I can't bear to think of my nights empty of the barred owl's calls. I can't bear to think of that beautiful bird, that one particular bird, deliberately shot. I love the northern spotted owl in general, but I love the barred owl of my own nights in particular.

    But Fish and Wildlife has identified two main threats to the spotted owl's continued survival: competition from barred owls and habitat loss.

    Nonetheless, both the BLM and the US Forest Service are even now offering timber sales in old-growth and large-tree forests of the Applegate. Wouldn't it be a better solution to the demise of the spotted owl to stop destroying this habitat? Why have we chosen slaughter of birds and of trees instead of keeping the trees and, consequently, perhaps, keeping the owl, as well?

    I recognize the conundrum of invasive species brought into an environment by human acts. I don't know the answer. Still, I say to Fish and Wildlife: Stay out of my woods. Leave my barred owl alone.

    

    

Seven Days of Backpackng North of Yosemite

Diana Coogle, Sarah Nawah, Scott Mattoon
in the Emigrant Wilderness Area

     Standing at the rock edge of a pool of cold, clear-to-the-bottom water, I clasped my little backpacker's towel to my dripping body and gazed at the scene in which I had a moment before been immersed: the long, narrow cup of granite that held the water, the clump of red and yellow wildflowers in a crack of rock at the water's edge, the rush of a little cascade falling into the pool from the long stream down the mountain, and, beyond, occasional stands of pines among the enormous white boulders culminating, far above, in the peak called Granite Dome.

    It was beauty beyond comprehension. Not even a photograph could serve as Gerard Manley Hopkins's latch or catch or key to keep back such beauty, and so the beauty of that moment vanished except in my memory, where it stays rich and vibrant.

    My hiking partners for this seven-day backpacking trip in the Emigrant Wilderness Area were Scott, from California, and Sarah, from Pennsylvania, 

Sarah and Scott at our camp on Gnome Lake

with whom I had hiked in the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon last September. Scott, who is training to be a leader on Sierra Club trips, kept the lead. Sarah hiked next, I last. Day after day we hiked past enormous pine trees, 

through large meadows still vibrant with lupine, groundsel, butterweed, Indian paintbrush, valerian; past tiny streams giving life to still more wildflowers.

 We climbed Mosquito Pass, then rested for half an hour on its flat top with the stark, rock beauty of Sierra-rich views around us. Veins of rose quartz flowed through the granite. A packer with his mule train ambled past, an iconic picture in the high Sierra.  I spread some of my late husband's ashes on Mosquito Pass. 

    On the sixth day, Scott led us off-trail, over granite boulders with flowers tucked in crannies and cracks, up rock steps easy only for giants, on thin, narrow ledges, up flat slabs, or leaping from rock to rock over streams in deep chasms.

                        Photo by Scott Mattoon

It was stupendous hiking. We camped that night not far from an unnamed lake now dubbed Gnome Lake, blue water with undulating lines of green grasses outlining its contours, and a rock at each end for good swimming access. 

Gnome Lake

A waterfall made a long slender silver thread on the cliff above our tents. A glacier, we knew, was tucked up there on Granite Dome, on whose flank we were camped. 

    We hiked 42 miles in those seven days. Scott gave the trip a Sierra Club rating of four (out of five) for difficulty. Our highest altitude was 9370 feet, on Mosquito Pass, but we were almost as high at Gnome Lake. I had nine swims in five lakes, plus four dips in two pools. We spent our nights under brilliant stars. Scott watched the  Perseid meteor show. (I slept soundly in my tent.)

                                                                                        Photo by Scott Mattoon

 We saw an eagle, a marmot, various tiny frogs, a dragonfly caught in a spider web (which we set free), and we heard coyotes and an owl. 

    But there is no way to give voice to the beauty of that landscape. I will return.

Me and Sarah on the last day. Photo by Scott Mattoon

PCT Thru-hiker

        When I returned to my car at the top of Cook and Green Pass after a 12-mile hike partially on the Pacific Crest Trail the other day, a young PCT thru-hiker (Mexico to Canada) was sitting at the campsite there. He told me he had injured his leg and needed a ride to town, where he would "hang out for a few days and let the leg heal." I suggested he spend the night at my house, and I would take him to Ashland the next day, where he could find a motel to stay in.

    So after an hour's ride Nibbler (his trail name, because he was always nibbling on a block of cheese) found himself standing at the door of a lovely house in the Siskiyou Mountains.

   Taking off my shoes just inside the door, I asked him to do the same. 

    He took off his shoes, then said, "My socks are dirty, too."

   I turned to look. They were streaked black with dirt. I suggested he leave them outside.

    He took off his socks. He said, "My feet are pretty dirty."

    I turned to look. Indeed they were! I started to tell him to leave them outside, too, but told him instead to walk around the house to the bathroom door on the deck. There I gave him a towel and offered him a shower.

    What a change after no telling how many weeks or months on the trail! A shower. A good big helping of a tuna-melt casserole, which he wolfed down so fast I gave him the rest of it, too. A real bed, with clean sheets. Total luxury.

    For his part, he was a charming guest. He cleaned the kitchen after dinner, made his own bed, and entertained me with stories about the trail. 

    I learned, for instance, that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail these days is as much a social as a wilderness experience. Because you are basically hiking the same route in the same time frame as the people you start with, they become your trail family.

    I have long been curious how PCT hikers keep their pack weight low. Did they, for instance, carry tents?

   Some did, Nibbler said. Some use tarps, some just bivy sacks. Some people don't carry rain gear. Some cut the belts off their backpacks to lighten the load. He himself had cut the strap off his headlamp and velcroed the lamp to his hat. Some people, he said, considered headlamps extraneous, but he sometimes walked after dark to escape the heat and thought a headlamp a necessity.

    I asked about bear canisters. He said people carry them where they are required, as in the high Sierra, and then get rid of them. When I asked how campers keep bears out of their food, he said most people sleep with their food in the tent.

    I was aghast. A bear that smells food wouldn't hesitate a minute to rip into a tent. Weren't the hikers taking a huge risk? 

    Well, he said, there are so many people at the campsites that the bears don't come around.

    That many people?

    Everyone has their luxury item, he said. I pointed to my Kindle—that was mine, I said. (I didn't mention the camp dress.) He said his was an extra pair of socks.

    The next morning, on my way to a hike on Mt. Ashland, I left him, refreshed and well fed, in front of the Columbus Hotel in Ashland. He would stay there a few days, then rejoin his trail family farther up the trail when his leg felt better.

    A few days later, on another hike, I saw a thru-hiker with a big pack. "Smart girl," I thought.

    

The Birthday Hike That Wasn't

    Sometimes the good and the bad happen in rapid succession.

    The intended good: A 12-mile hike in the Red Buttes Wilderness with my son, Ela, for my birthday last week. 

    The first bad: A flash from the "overheating" light when we're six miles up a winding, uphill, gravel road headed for the trailhead. Steam billowing from the hood.

    The good: A lovely little waterfall at the side of the road from which I fill the water bottle. Ela pours water into the radiator. And again. And again.

    The bad: A leak in the radiator. We are going nowhere.

    The bad: No cell service.

    The good or the bad, depending: A 12-mile hike before us, after all, just not where we intended.

    The good: Cell signal after three miles. Ela texts a friend for rescue.

    The bad: No response.

    The good: After another mile: a car coming up the road. William! He takes us to his house, where I call AAA.

    The bad: On hold interminably.

    The good: AAA response.

    The bad: My AAA membership is in Oregon, but the car is just over the border in California. AAA won't cross borders. More long holds to talk to AAA California. 

    The good: AAA response. They will send a tow truck from Yreka, California. I explain that it would be closer to send one from Grants Pass, Oregon.

    The bad: Rules are Rules.

    The bad: More long holds while they try to find a tow truck driver.

    The good: Response from a tow truck driver. We send the GPS coordinates for the location of the car. He would meet us at the car at 2:00.

    The good: A car to drive while mine is in the shop—William's parents'. They are vacationing in Alaska and won't mind, he assures me. 

    The bad: Ela and I wait another hour at my car for the tow truck. He watches the road. I write a poem. The two truck arrives with a very unhappy driver. The road had been terrible. His big flatbed trailer had buckled and fishtailed over every pothole. 

    The bad: I'm not happy, either, with my crippled car.

    The good: The tow truck diver hauls my car to my mechanic in Grants Pass. Ela and I go home in the Prius.

    The bad: Modern radiators are plastic, throw-away parts. 

    The good: Lighter cars have better gas mileage.

    Conclusions of the bad: A long, tedious day. I had missed my birthday hike.

    Conclusions of the good: Good friends to help. A car to drive while mine is being fixed. AAA assistance at no cost. Best of all, the competent and cheerful companionship of my son on a frustrating day.

    Conclusions of the day: Not so bad, after all.