Steve and Judy's Travels!

The shame of it is, Southern California has so much great stuff. Oceans,
beaches, cliffs, tide pools, rolling brown grass savannah dotted with oaks.
Disneyland, Sea World, San Diego Zoo. It would be such a great place to be,
it is so good, if it hadn’t attracted so many people and become a victim of
its own success.

Today’s adventure, a birthday party. Our passing through NoCal happened to
coincide with a birthday celebration for Allison’s third birthday and
Jacob’s thirty-first birthday, and we got invited! We got to meet and hold
the new babies we haven’t seen before, meet Mason, visit with the Mike and
Jacob parts of the family, see Nina, Paula, Juanelle, Katie’s mom, some
other of their friends, and eat Pizza. Where else would you want to have a
birthday party but at a pizza parlor? We stopped and set up at Morgan Hill, a small town twenty miles south of San
Jose, typed the address of Stuft Pizza into the navigator in the Jeep, and
buzzed in for the visit. Thank you Mike and Katie, Jacob and Yousun, for
inviting us. What a charming bunch of kids. Tomorrow, we continue to Oregon. We hear there is some weather up that way.
We’ll be careful.

Enough of Southern California. Judy visited with her mom every day. Did
some errands. Took care of some stuff. What can be done has been done.
Our mission today was to escape the LA Basin. Mission accomplished. We’re
stopped for the night at the Lost Hills RV Park on Interstate 5 in the San
Joaquin Valley. One day, from Temecula, we drove to Anaheim for an errand, over to Belmont
Shore to see sister Sue, then back to Temecula. Another driving adventure.
Traffic considerations dictate every movement. We didn’t get on the road
before nine. We were careful to be back by four. Southern California
traffic is just like Denver rush hour traffic, stop and go, but over 100
times the area, and all day long, with concertina barbed wire around the
road signs on freeway overpasses. To get into the basin, we drove in from
the east through heavy traffic for a hundred miles. We drove out to the
north for a hundred fifty miles of heavy traffic. All that traffic breathing the air before we can. We’re breathing seconds,
air that has already been used. The cars turn it white. There are hills
all around, five miles away, but we only get glimpses of them through the
haze. We are such smog weenies. No tolerance. Eyes burn, lungs hurt,
headache. We listened to a Los Angeles traffic report. They listed ten
accidents, ten car fires, then switched to the weather report. The
meteorologist began her report with “A beautiful day in Los Angeles today,
eighty-four degrees, the reason we all live here.” We think we’re the only
ones who have noticed something is not right here. Something is just not
right. I know, I’m ranting, I’ll stop. But this experience is going to leave a
mark. The reasons we left here in the sixties have only compounded. A
fresher sharper appreciation of where we live and what we do.

Went for a run while we were in Montrose. A Saturday. I meant to just run
around the park, but on the first lap I passed a wood stile over the
barbwire fence into the pasture. Who could resist that? I crossed the
stile into the meadow, up the dirt road deeply rutted by the pickup truck
hauling feed to the herd even when it’s muddy, through the open gate into
the next pasture, then the next, then above the irrigated fields to the
scrub flats, then the juniper/pinon forest, then hills, through the barbwire
gate to public land, to the top of the ridge. There I am at the top of the
ridge, looking back on the Uncompahgre River Valley below and the smaller
valley on the other side, thinking to myself: what could be finer than a
cool blue day like this, leftover fall colors, October, deer hunting
season… October. Deer hunting season. I’m running through the forest in tan
shorts, mostly brown hair, no shirt, sun-tanned torso. What’s wrong with
this picture? I thought about it. I hadn’t seen any hunters on the way up.
Had we seen any deer around here? No more than a hundred. Shots fired?
Just a few in the distance. How good was I feeling about this? What should
I do? I could kick rocks and make noise while I ran, as long as I didn’t
sound like a clumsy deer approaching. Don’t breathe loudly or cough, don’t
want it to sound like a buck snort. I could sing or whistle, but that is
contrary to my nature when I’m out in the woods. I want to pass quietly and
participate in the wilderness, not send it scurrying away ahead of my
approach. I returned by the route I came, and survived the adventure, but undeterred,
I ran the same route the next day, dressed exactly the same, ……with the
addition of the newly acquired day-glo orange stocking cap.

Hey. Football is not such a stupid game after all. Not when the Bronco’s
offense scores 49 points.