Santa Barbara Foothills Hikes: Teardrops at Teardrop
Filed in archive on November 7, 2005
A good friend calls the place "Teardrop". I wondered why, but in my head I imagined a place with beautiful little waterfalls dripping like tears from the rocks. On a quintessentially gorgeous Santa Barbara Sunday we tackled the Teardrop hike with full abandon. I had my secret agenda to figure out why he calls it by that name, but soon realized that this was not going to be an average, ordinary hike. We were celebrating the life and memory of a fallen friend. Chosen ones carried his Ashes, and we found a place to scatter them, saying prayers as his simplified essence spread and reentered the biosphere in a new form. A small red newt crawled along the rocks near where we held this ceremony - it was covered in gray ash! For me a poignant example of life already passing along through the food chain, starting a new cycle.
Tears dropped on this hike of the same name, but there was laughter as well -- and sweat! We had to bushwhack our way through completely overgrown sections of chaparral and do a tip toe dance over creek bedrocks and broken tree limbs that served as natural bridges. Each turn in the hike showed another incredible hidden nook and cranny that you felt you could live forever. Smells of fall filled our sinuses and thousands of leaves crunched under our feet. We were eager to try to dip in the fresh water pools to attempt to thwart the seemingly inevitable chance of getting poison oak.
I could not help but start to think about the indigenous people who must have dwelled here in paradise. There were sections of the hike that opened up completely; well-shaded flat mini-mesas right along side the river. These areas contained powerful historical energy for me. It was hard to explain, but I had flashes of past times. Maybe it is just too much Hollywood ingrained upon my brain, too many quick, blurry memories used as plot enhancements in scripts for movies on the big screen. But I could swear that I felt a presence of life in these open spaces by the river that backed up against the edge of the cliffs on the other side. They were sheltered, with a great water source, and bountiful biota to choose from for sustenance.
Trees love water, and the array of foliage was spectacular in all the colors of the transition to winter: oranges, bright reds and dim reds, yellow Maple leaves, all shades of ochre and brown. White mushroom growths clung to the sides of tall Pines like precarious settlements on the sliding hills of Quito. I remember smiling and thinking to myself how lucky I am to be sturdy enough to manage a non-trail scramble such as this. The secrets of the Santa Barbara foothills can only be divulged through a rough hike deserving of jeans and a long sleeve shirt. Without the shirt I ended up with scratches up and down my arm -- but no poison oak yet -- YAHOO!
ER Harris
Tags: Santa Barbara
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Response from:
mana
(11/08/05 8:44am)
thankyou for the clarity of images expressed through your writing
Response from:
mana
(11/08/05 8:45am)
thankyou for the clarity of vision the openess of expression
this is good writing
this is good writing
Response from:
chuk
(11/10/05 5:34pm)
ER is the true master of colorful and expressive writing style, great for an outdoor weblog, really takes you there. It almost got me interested in seaching the SB foothills for poison oak....almost
Response from:
latif
(11/11/05 8:42am)
You express the landscape as we find it now, end of 2005, I imagine what could have been, had not the thunderous herds of armies from Spain, Portugal, and so-called United States of America, the last invaders who fought cheap wars with Spain and the Native Peoples of California to get at the gold, silver, oil and semi-arid zones for growing citrus...Growing up in the 40's and 50's in the San Gaberiel Valley just 15 miles from City Hall LA, my home was surrounded by farms, berries, cabbage, peaches and plums, run by the recently released Japanese prisioners from Santa Anita Racetrack...oh yes I wonder what it would have been like in 1,500 c.e., before the Missions and all the "discoveries" -- what can be discovered that already exists! No European's discovered America, it was already there, there with a sparsley populated number of humans filling valleys, plains, mountains and islands which did not exsisit, what a joke.
The native plants and grasses, shrubs and trees, species of fauna lived in a somewhat balanced state, though there is really no such thing as a balanced state in nature; ie, look at the hurricanes of this year, a cycle puny science cannot predict or measure because this planet exists in a kind of benign chaos, despite what puny big brained beings do, a little hickup...woops there goes another Boulder Dam, sneeze and most of California is underwater...
I always sense in your writing this kind of underlying wisdom and I would love to hear more about this deep insight of yours.
Latif The Poet
The native plants and grasses, shrubs and trees, species of fauna lived in a somewhat balanced state, though there is really no such thing as a balanced state in nature; ie, look at the hurricanes of this year, a cycle puny science cannot predict or measure because this planet exists in a kind of benign chaos, despite what puny big brained beings do, a little hickup...woops there goes another Boulder Dam, sneeze and most of California is underwater...
I always sense in your writing this kind of underlying wisdom and I would love to hear more about this deep insight of yours.
Latif The Poet
Response from:
latif harris
(11/11/05 8:44am)
please see last
Response from:
latif harris
(11/11/05 8:49am)
You express the landscape as we find it now, end of 2005, I imagine what could have been, had not the thunderous herds of armies from Spain, Portugal, and so-called United States of America, the last invaders who fought cheap wars with Spain and the Native Peoples of California to get at the gold, silver, oil and semi-arid zones for growing citrus...Growing up in the 40's and 50's in the San Gaberiel Valley just 15 miles from City Hall LA, my home was surrounded by farms, berries, cabbage, peaches and plums, run by the recently released Japanese prisioners from Santa Anita Racetrack...oh yes I wonder what it would have been like in 1,500 c.e., before the Missions and all the "discoveries" -- what can be discovered that already exists! No European's discovered America, it was already there, there with a sparsley populated number of humans filling valleys, plains, mountains and islands which did not exsisit, what a joke.
The native plants and grasses, shrubs and trees, species of fauna lived in a somewhat balanced state, though there is really no such thing as a balanced state in nature; ie, look at the hurricanes of this year, a cycle puny science cannot predict or measure because this planet exists in a kind of benign chaos, despite what puny big brained beings do, a little hickup...woops there goes another Boulder Dam, sneeze and most of California is underwater...
I always sense in your writing this kind of underlying wisdom and I would love to hear more about this deep insight of yours.
Latif The Poet
The native plants and grasses, shrubs and trees, species of fauna lived in a somewhat balanced state, though there is really no such thing as a balanced state in nature; ie, look at the hurricanes of this year, a cycle puny science cannot predict or measure because this planet exists in a kind of benign chaos, despite what puny big brained beings do, a little hickup...woops there goes another Boulder Dam, sneeze and most of California is underwater...
I always sense in your writing this kind of underlying wisdom and I would love to hear more about this deep insight of yours.
Latif The Poet
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