January 2, 2006

• Walking back into our apartment after nearly a week and 1/2 away from it was strange. Our place smelled like thousand-year old dust and our cat was a feral, wild thing. I never noticed it before our late night homecoming yesterday, but our apartment is curiously sparse; the walls are plain and broad and the furnishings dot our bare wood floors miles apart from each other.

  This impression could be the result of just getting back from our friends Allyson and Jessie’s homey L.A. apartment decked out fashionably with amazing art and filled with our favorite friends laughing, talking, and playing games, which was preceded by the eye buffet of the Seqouia National Park, again preceded by three days of Christmas Family Bonanza in Michigan. Wow. I think we cut our own, personal little hole out of the ozone with this trip.

  However strange it is to be back, I am happy. I think you know when your life is going well when you don’t dread coming back from vacation. My job is fine, I get to spend every day in love and loved by the most awesome guy I’ve ever met, and I like who I am and what I do almost as much as I like wondering who I will become and how I will become it. And as much as a part of me marvels at how anyone is able to find the one place in the world where they feel at home, the more I visit other places, the less surprised I would be if we came back to Chicago after grad school to plant roots. If I have to live in civilization (and not on a mountain top or a secluded nature preserve), Chicago is my favorite place of all the places I’ve been so far. But there are many places yet unseen.

  Shaun and I both were lucky enough to have today off work to recoup, do laundry, get groceries, and chase the musty smell out of our humble abode. We just ate yummy homemade Vegetable Barley Soup and now its time to catch up on our Netflicks.

  Below, for your reading enjoyment, you’ll find a little moment in time captured from a blog entry written while we were on vacation but without Internet access.

  Oh yeah, and Happy New Year!

  My Ancient and Depraved Colonel
  © The Author, Wednesday, December 28 2005

  The skin of a Sequoia is amazing to touch: the consistency of a parched patch of wood is almost that of a flakey, soft croissant; the texture of a water-heavy piece is tender and spongy like wet cardboard. The bark of a Sequoia is 31 inches thick and the feel of it will haunt you.

  Yesterday we took a seven-mile hike through the surrounding areas of Cedar Grove Village, the location of our snuggly hotel in California’s Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Park, and ended up at the General Grant Tree Trail. Since U.S. settlers did much of their exploration of the Sierras after the Civil War, a whole slew of trees have ill-fitting patriotic namesakes. If I were to name the world’s largest living things, I think I’d skip petty human war heroes and go with something a little more grandiose: Zeus, Gorgeous George, The Bearded Lady, The Big Kahuna, or simply Fatty MaGee. Although, in all honesty, any given name is meaningless: delicious 2,700 year-old silence reigns supreme here.

  On the trail, with my neck thrown back like a Nebraskan tourist on Chicago’s Malignant Mile, my mouth gaped as my unblinking eyes filled with the sinew, tangle, and force of the 311-foot Sequoias above me. There is something wicked and ruined about the majesty of these trees; their mutant claw-like limbs jut obscenely miles up the trunk, their shallow roots emerge gnarled and twisting from the soft earth underfoot. These mammoth, unapologetic creatures remind me of a description of a character named Andrea from my current reading, Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees. Andrea is said to be “a tall, very tall, man, with a ravaged face of great breeding…” In the same passage, Andrea greets the Colonel with another phrase fit for a Sequoia, “My ancient and depraved Colonial.”

  Ancient and depraved indeed.

  Today we trekked up to see the largest living thing on the planet: The General Sherman Tree. Before a so-called virgin birthed a man named Jesus, while Romans stormed wildly about Europe, a not-so-distant settler from Asia may have seen this tree as a germinating seed, softly shedding its tiny seed coat onto the ash-rich soil after a fire thrashed fiercely here in the months before. Growing up to three feet annually, the tree would soon loom above her and she would notice and love it and fear it. So respectful were her peoples that it is rumored that they would not dare set up camp in a Sequoia grove, for fear of the powerful spirits that lurk amongst the muted, freakish trees. How did humans ever stop worshiping the earth? How did we become so separate and unmoved?

  Freezing rain sent us back to our hotel earlier than I would have liked, but its better to be safe than to find ourselves dead or in a horrible situation created by winding mountain roads, a wimpy Geo-metro, and merciless ice.

  Now that the rain has calmed and our tummies are full of tuna and crackers, we are off in our ponchos to hike a nearby 6 mile trail called Park Ridge, which doesn’t require driving to get to and boasts spectacular views of snow covered mountains. I like listening to the snow crunch beneath our boots as we walk and thinking of nothing and saying not a word but knowing love and all the rest just the same.

  Tomorrow we drive to L.A. and there will be talking and laughter late into the night. But I am here now. Completely and utterly here.

  Edit Wednesday Night:
  Pushing ourselves up the cruelly steep mountain trail, we paused for a moment to look at the craggy hills surrounding us and we wondered how many predators knew our exact location and the best way to sink their teeth into our clumsy, sweaty, fleshy bodies. At first we guessed 50 and revised it down to 20. In any case, I felt something’s beady little eyes tracking us and licking its chops.

  By the time we were a quarter of a mile into the hike, a thick, creepy fog descended upon us, making any mountain view impossible. So thick was the fog that we missed the sign that indicated our trails end and we didn’t know we’d done it until we ran into a sign for yet another trail.

  We gazed upon a total of six pretty munching deer and we heard one coyote howl and bark. We smelt a gamey smell that stunk of the spray of a big cat. Although that could have just been our B.O. We felt our caves swell up to three times their normal size and noticed the beginnings of incredibly steely buns.
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  In what mind set are you entering 2006?

  • 7:25 pm
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