I'm not sure why I'm writing this note in my journal. I never could keep this diary up-to-date on a regular basis. In this age of increasingly limited energy supplies, will someone find this little book high up in the coastal mountains of California, and bother to read it? Probably not. If this journal is ever discovered, the person doing the discovering will probably yell out with glee and proclaim, "Toilet paper!"
Nevertheless, I feel the need to write my thoughts. Maybe that happy person will partake in reading before recycling these pages.
I just completed my last drive, I'm pretty sure. My old beat-up RAV4 won't budge another inch. Flimsy ride, anyway. Ah, well, it got me around for years, and many miles.
My hometown, Santa Rosa, simply felt too claustrophobic. I wanted something different from the usual neighborhood gathers each weekend, and all the constant discussion about ongoing life changes due to the energy crisis. Many of my neighbors are really worried about food. And this guy, a lawyer I think, showed up to one dinner gather. He kept going on and on about nuclear war. Made a persuasive argument for its eventuality, too. Aye, that was too much! I don't need to be reminded about the possibility of starving to death, or being part of a global nuclear gift exchange.
Yes, it was finally time for something different! So I jumped in the RAV, which had been sitting unused for months, and headed for the hills. A squirt of the sprayers cleared the windshield of dust, and a glance at the dashboard showed that I only had a half-tank of fuel. I didn't even bother to look for any of the gas stations on the way out. They were probably closed.
Besides, my money was tight. Unemployment checks only went so far, especially during these days of rapid inflation.
I headed north on Highway 101. With traffic eerily light, and the sound of an internal combustion engine thrumming in my ears, I easily got lost in thought about the growing crisis. Protests and near-riots had begun over fuel and food prices in some cities, even uncomfortably close in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. Certainly Santa Rosa wouldn't be immune for long. Just a matter of time. This had me worried most, but the growing drone of food shortages also nagged me endlessly. The two were linked, of course. As fear over nourishment grew, I gathered the situation could get messy rather fast.
Ukiah seemed uncannily lifeless as I rolled through. Parking lots at local shopping centers along the highway were bereft of vehicles. The road seemed like a drought-parched riverbed, one that meandered past structures with dark, hollow windows reminiscent of the sunken eyes of the starved.
Eager to get off of broad, empty 101, I took the cutoff onto Highway 20 and headed east toward Clear Lake. After a stretch, I went north to Lake Pillsbury on a lonely, windy road through beautiful, green country. Before long, I encountered the access to Hull Mountain. Some called it Mt. Hull. Guess it depended on which map you read. I'd only been to the top of the peak once, long ago, during the 1990s dot-com boom when life seemed to be going so well. You know, swimming in money and all. Now, a deepening depression covered the land with a dark pall that seemed to make even the sunniest days black.
I faced perhaps my last opportunity to see the grand view from the summit. I would do it.
Even in the great 1990s financial bonanza, I was cheap. My RAV was bare-bones and only had front-wheel drive. The only concession I made was to have AC and a CD player. I popped in an old, beat-up disc: Dead Can Dance, “Toward the Within.” One of the back speakers didn't work, but the melancholy and introspective music was still quite audible, and it fit my mood rather well. I rolled down all my windows to get that open-vehicle off-road feel that I so enjoyed when I was younger and traipsed all over the mountains, burning gas and beating my cars to death for no real purpose.
Then I took off, up Mt. Hull's vast and steep slope. The old dirt road had undergone severe erosion over the past winter. The RAV lurched over deep ruts, loose rocks and wind-broken tree branches. Dust lifted high into the air behind me. In the steepest sections, I couldn't let the car stop. There wasn't enough traction for me to resume my upwards climb. I kept the vehicle at a constant speed and left the gear in second. The RAV crashed over potholes, thudded over narrow toppled tree-trunks, ground through rocky outwashes. Some of the thuds were quite jarring. Loud. At times, I thought the car would stall. Palls of dirt sometimes swirled through the cab. Perhaps a year ago, I might have winced at this sudden abuse to my car, wishing to keep it going for as long as possible. But, today, I continued, and watched the wilderness roll by. Driving didn't seem to have much of a future.
A wonderful mix of oak trees, Bay laurel, walnut and gray pine gave way to Douglas-fir and red fir as my altitude increased. A startling number of conifer trees were dead, or dying. Some kind of disease or other stress left a brown blight on the forest. A dramatic change from the Mt. Hull I had seen years ago. Another sign of the growing crisis.
The firs, dead or alive, informed me that I neared the mountaintop. As did the grade. It had more-or-less evened out to horizontal. I continued on, eager to get to a little turn-out that I had stopped at long ago. A place that had a good view.
The RAV sputtered, jerked, and quit. I quickly popped the gear in neutral and guided the vehicle off the road, next to two massive wind-sculpted firs that hadn't given up on life just yet. The fuel gauge read empty. Damn! No surprise, really, but it was still a bit shocking to see the gauge on "E". This was it. My car was kaput!
It would be a long walk home. At least I had brought my gear. And the first leg of the trip was downhill. A big, steep downhill, but down nonetheless. Maybe, once back to Highway 20, I could get a ride back to Santa Rosa. Some folks still drove places. Including trucks hauling food and other necessities.
I wonder how many more people would do what I had just done? Maybe the top of Mt. Hull would become a vast vehicular graveyard. A funny image is brought to mind: Hundreds of rusty hulks lining a fading mountain road. Surely, not that many people were as foolish and silly as I!
I grabbed my backpack and headed for the viewpoint on foot. Birds sang. Insects flitted about. A periodic breeze rushed through the treetops, a sound that to me has a timeless sense to it. The rustling foliage brought to mind similar breezes that must have rustled the great lycopod trees of Devonian times, and the vast diversity of palm-like cycads during the Triassic. Dinosaurs must have heard the leafy rustling. Archaeopteryx, the proto-bird, must have felt the caress of such breezes. Nature's breath had washed the Earth for billions of years. The gently swaying trees remind me that life continues even as it undergoes massive change, and this makes me feel a little hopeful, or at least more at ease.
My walk wasn't very long. I found the little pull-out that I had visited a decade ago. It had changed some, but not dramatically. A fairly dense assemblage of weeds poked through the old gravel. The surrounding shrubs were thicker and taller than I remembered. A scattering of giant, old firs still sat to the north. They showed no signs of the blight that had been starkly evident on the drive up.
The view provided the same joy that I had remembered. To the west, I could see the coastal stratus rolling in like a vast tsunami on the Mendocino shore, say perhaps fifty miles distant. And, to the east, I gazed all the way across the Central Valley to the great Sierra Nevada. Mt. Lassen stood high, snow-less and pointy. The air had an amazing clarity. All the little details, from jagged rock outcrops to the sweeping forests and sharp treelines, were so easy to discern that it seemed like I could touch the distant mountains with an outstretched hand. Clean air: One blessing in a world of oil scarcity and limited driving.
Down below, to the west, I could just make out the town of Willits. Many of the residents, I knew from news reports over the years, have been busy preparing for the energy downturn. Pursuing renewable energy sources. Rebuilding their local economy. Good for them. I hope they do well. Indeed, I might migrate in that direction. Unfortunately, as my own desire to move to the region just revealed, I fear that Willits' proximity to the Bay Area could prove a big problem. The potential flood of refugees loomed large.
I looked upon the vast northern California countryside for a long, long time. Indeed, I'm still at the viewpoint, sitting on a log and writing in this book. When I pause to gather my thoughts, I drink the cool, fresh air, feel the breeze wash my face, and listen to the cheerful birdsongs. And I listen to the silence between the avian calls.
An intriguing silence. A silence, I now realize, that has been slowly returning to the neighborhoods of Santa Rosa. The drone of power lawnmowers has ceased. No more leaf blowers. And the rumble of car tires on pavement has become so rare that it is almost a novelty among children, drawing them out to watch when a vehicle rolls down the street. The sound of television and stereos, leaking from open windows on a warm day, has also lessened as rolling blackouts plague the country.
Yes, even as conflict and unrest erupt around the globe, a new kind of peace has begun to enter our lives. Some might see this as the calm before the storm. I'm not sure that this is the right analogy. The peace, I feel, will continue to grow even as humanity goes through its own self-inflicted turmoil.
It seems to me that the real crisis began long ago, with the Industrial Revolution and an attendant philosophy that places human beings in the same category as machines. This many-centuries-long emergency has unfolded in a myriad ways across the globe. The crisis for me is encapsulated in an adult life as a computer programmer who put in sixty to eighty hour weeks to finish one software project after another. I literally burned myself out even before I had reached forty. For others, the crisis is more evident in the horrors of industrialized war as the age-old battles over limited resources and political power continue to escalate. With nearly seven billion people on this planet, there seems to be an infinite number of ways in which to experience the industrial crisis. Indeed, for many of the luckiest (wealthiest), the crisis is a seemingly endless party. Tragic.
Nature had set her limits long before human beings occupied the globe. There are only so many resources available on this planet. It is clear that my species now bumps up against the boundaries. Eventually, I suspect, much of the human conflict will stop. Conflict, however, will not go completely away, for it is at the core of what it means to be alive. The fight for survival will remain as long as life exists. But the level, the noise, of conflict will ease over the years.
As human conflict finally wanes, as it must with the prospect of ever-diminishing non-renewable resources, and with a dramatic reduction in human population (a topic that simply scares me), the peace will likely get stronger. Yes, the peace that surrounds me, that special sense of life's timelessness, will continue. The thought makes me feel better. In the least, if I am fortunate enough to survive the historical transition that has clearly begun, I can look forward to a world where such peace might be easier to find. This depends on many factors, for sure. In my struggle to live, will I have the opportunity to pause, and enjoy the soul-soothing peace that surrounds me here on Hull Mountain? I don't know. But the idea offers some hope.
The sun is getting low. I should be heading back.
The walk down Mt. Hull, even with loose rock, sticks other treacherous footing, should give me ample time to enjoy the peace that I clearly sought by driving out here. A chance for me to gather myself for whatever events the energy crisis will soon bring. It is very uplifting to see that such beauty exists even amidst a great darkness.
I will place this journal under the driver's seat of the RAV. Maybe someone will find it in the years ahead. And maybe they will pause long enough to read the thoughts of a single person who is caught up in the culmination of a great crisis. Maybe the book will simply rot away as the vehicle is weathered by decades of Pacific storms. I doubt that I'll ever know.
Nevertheless, penning these words has helped me clarify my thoughts and better understand my concerns. I feel calm now. I look forward to the long walk home.
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