#34, January 26, 2000
It was wild idea. Even a bit scary. I'd been to the top
before, in the mid-afternoon of one of those crystalline post-storm days when
the wind blows a chill right to your core. Now, he wanted to do it on a winter
night, with nothing more than a sliver of moon to light the way. Extreme!
But it wasn't just any winter night, or any mountain. It was
the morning of the new millennium, and on that piece of Sonoma County which is
first to catch the rays of a rising sun, Mt. St. Helena. So at 2:15 AM, when
the celebrants are straggling home from their parties, Bill Kortum, his wife
Lucy, and our friend Larry Modell and I pull out of Petaluma, bound for the
trailhead at Robert Louis Stevenson State Park.
All the way fog threatens, but when we hit the trail, the
sky is sparkling with stars. The first half mile ascends by switchback through
a dense fir wood. Each of us tends to our little cone of yellow light as we
thump along the rocky path, waiting. After the fourth switchback, there it is--
the Cheshire smile of Luna, darting among the trunks and branches. The promise
of a moonlit walk fulfilled.
At 4:10 AM we emerge onto the fire road which we will follow
another five miles to the top. The rising moon, a waning crescent, provides
enough light to walk safely on the broad way. Goodbye, flashlight! With over
three hours until sunrise, we have no hurry. The air is cold, but still. Below
us, fog stretches from ridge to ridge to ridge, in places glowing from the
waste light leaking up from Calistoga and Santa Rosa.
We
walk, and at times talk about mountains and trails, human greed and folly, and
visions of a way of life that follows nature. But hiking by moon and starlight
has its own sweet way of bringing you into a greater quiet. The starshine is
faint, but as minutes pass our needs grow ever more modest. When the moon
floats behind an oak, the stars let us to continue.
And ponder their miracles. Arcturus, an orange giant one
hundred times brighter than our sun, casting light it created when I was ten
years old. Andromeda, our spiraling sister galaxy, a window looking back over
two thousand millennia. The heavenly milk, countless stellar furnaces
stretching across unfathomable canyons of time. The supernova alchemists
forging from hydrogen and helium the oxygen, carbon, and iron that gave us
moons, mountains, trees, and feet. And eyes to watch Venus rising.
We reach the first of St. Helena's four peaks as the eastern
horizon begins to glow silver violet. We march steadily, and soon reach the
last and tallest peak. It bristles with telecommunications towers, bearing
mixed messages. We find a half dozen sun seekers there before us; dozens more,
including a few Petalumans, will arrive before the big moment.
As we wait, we share food. And drink hot chocolate milk,
some of last autumn's solar energy, courtesy of Clo. I swing up onto a propane
tank for a better view. Beneath me: Jurassic sunlight, captured by forests,
compressed and transformed in stone, now stored within the cold steel that
draws heat from the backs of my legs. I sit and wait and watch the eastern edge
of sky, for the sun to return from it's long looping night.
At 7:28 it crests the horizon, and the crowd goes wild.
Recently arrived cirrus clouds have swirled all across the slate blue sky dome,
catching the warmth of the new day. After some reverence and revelry, the four
of us start the walk home.
I pull out my harmonica and play Ode to Joy (what else?) The
fog splashdances in slow motion on the face of the Palisades. Lucy and I talk
about our children. The trees smell great.
My joy is extreme, and I thank my companions then and again.
We are light, surrounded by light.