I was tired. I was hungry. I was thirsty. But most of all I wanted to be done. The fun was long past, the adventure gone. What began as an off-trail adventure had become a desperate scramble.
My friend and I found ourselves perched on a high cliff that had masqueraded as a ridgeline. There was no easy way back the way we had come, and a long stretch of chaparral still separated us from the Cold Spring Trail. A helicopter flew over. I was practically salivating at the thought of a ride in that buggy.
Hoping for the best, we began to head down off the ridge.
The descent — sliding unceremoniously on our butts into the side canyon — was faster than safety would normally dictate. Then it was back up the far wall, this time without worrying about the damage done to us by the thorny, resistant vegetation. We crawled quickly, pushing, clawing and tearing at the bushes, ignoring our bloody scrapes and ripped clothes.
Finally, exhaustion forced us to rest for a moment. We bid good-bye to the dusk and prepared ourselves for the night.
I looked over at my friend. The sparkle was gone from his eyes. His face was smudged with dirt. The sleeve of his T-shirt was torn in several places and he was panting from the effort. Oak leaves and assorted grime stuck to the nape of his sweaty neck, and he looked more chimney sweep than hiking companion. I’m sure I looked worse.
After a few minutes of rest I felt an ant on me and before I could brush it off, it bit me, painfully. Angry, I crushed it between my fingers, and an acrid odor rose from it.
Just then a lemon-yellow banana slug captured my attention as it stretched to bridge the gap between two rocks. I picked it up and put it in the palm of my hand. After perhaps a minute, it began to extend each of its four eyes out from beneath its yellow, helmet-shaped head. The longer pair of eyes emerged slowly, hesitantly, ready to retreat at the slightest peril. The lower pair were smaller, used more to probe what lay in front of them, and they popped in and out as they encountered my fingers.
The slug slowly traversed my palm in rhythmic contractions, leaving a trail of slime across my hand. It tickled ever so slightly.
I softly placed the banana slug on the ground and for several more minutes we watched its progress through the plant litter. Though its forward movement was painfully slow, the slug glided along, in, under, around and over pieces of decaying wood, leaves and stones without the slightest disturbance. In its own way, the banana slug was both graceful and delicate.
When I looked up, some of my fatigue had gone.
It helped to rest awhile, to let my breath catch up, but this unexpected interlude had brightened the moment. It was sunset, and the canopy was silhouetted black with bits and pieces of orange and yellow on the horizon. Suddenly the chaparral did not seem so confining, our predicament so awful.
To know the chaparral, you have to confront it directly. Caught in its midst, alone, with no roads near and its wild aroma all around, I caught a whiff of some deeper meaning.
Listening to the sound of nothing as it passed by, feeling the night flow in, knowing there was an hour or more of hardship ahead, I began to realize there was no easy way out of this moment. But there was some comfort in accepting this fact.
Whether due to this newfound inner peace or simply a bit of luck, from there the way was less difficult. After hours adrift in the chaparral, we finally collapsed onto the trail, savoring the firm openness of the path. Lying back, shoulders on the upper slopes of Montecito Peak, with the lights of Santa Barbara twinkling in the haze, I felt a goodness inside me that could have come from no other experience than one just like this.
Later one evening, browsing through a favorite book of mine, Camping in Our Mountains, by Selden Spaulding, I came upon a passage that captured the feeling perfectly:
“Looking back now on these escapades it is hard for me to see what fun there was in them for us. Invariably, after such an exploration, we arrived at our homes scratched and torn and utterly weary; yet there was always the feeling in our breasts that we had done something fine that day and there was always the undiminished enthusiasm for another such adventure.”
Amen.
