Contacting the Redwoods on the California Beach


Summer brings with it a certain set of rituals and rituals, and everyone’s is personal and unique. for us all-week praise for the season, T invited authors to share their own writing. Here, the poet Barbara Jane Reyes It describes an annual voyage along the California coast.

The summers of at least the last ten years have found me and my husband fleeing illegal fireworks and screaming sideshows in Oakland, California, and making their way through the Santa Cruz mountains, the Monterey Peninsula, and the iconic Bixby Bridge to Big Sur. . In coastal redwood groves, I overhear children marveling at the oldest of the trees. “So long, as long as the moon,” one says to the other. I think that this line will end in a poem I will write soon. I can’t help hugging these giant trees and walk away with my hair and arms covered in cobwebs; I thank them for sharing their space and whisper, “Excuse me, we’re just passing by.”

Loggers cut down most of the oldest dogwoods more than a century ago, but the daughters of trees grow in circles or fairy rings surrounding the stumps, and the fallen trunks are covered with moss and mushrooms—turkey tail, pink-edged hood. We wonder what creatures or spirits live in the hollow chests. Along nearly dried-out creeks, the blackberry blackberry is thick and sore, but offers the perfect place to stay still and spy on swallow-tailed butterflies. We climb uphill, the land under the sequoia canopies is soft and cool, covered with branches and needles. Root systems spread and push the soil up the stairs. Further uphill, we clear the tree line and the land is now fine white sand left over from an ancient ocean. Redwoods have given way to fragrant sage, twisted, smooth red-barked manzanitas, ponderosa pine, and we watch woodpeckers fight each other in turf wars.

On the Monterey Peninsula, on the shores of Pacific Grove and Point Lobos, and at the entrance to Moss Landing Harbor, we find sea otters swimming on their backs in the algae, where they roll their bodies in the water, squirming and rubbing their faces. fur. We sit on the rocks and watch them no more than two meters away from us, undisturbed by our presence. On the other side of the breakwater, an otter dives into the surf and emerges with shellfish to open its furry belly. Harbor seals are now breeding on the shores and the salt air is filled with their barking. In the thickets of the Salinas River Beach dunes, we count the tiny brush rabbits burrowing into their burrows.

All this tells me something about poetry – observing life sprouting from fallen, burned, dead things; the stillness and quietness required to watch a single hummingbird drinking the nectar of monkey flowers; Our smallness under 200-meter, thousand-year-old trees; spotting a kestrel or a Cooper hawk flying above us on the top of a mountain. I’m thinking of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Wind Hover” – “jump and slide / He turned the big wind back. My heart is hiding / It’s been scrambling for a bird …” As an expired (failed) Catholic – eight at the Holy Spirit School in Fremont year, four years at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward – I think, “My church is here on the mountain, under the redwoods, by the sea.”

Growing up in suburban Fremont, not far from all this beauty, color, and texture, I didn’t know the names of trees, flowers, or creatures. I’m sure I asked my parents and I’m sure they bought me and my sisters books and took us to the public library as a way of telling us to look for it ourselves. The natural world was a faraway place beyond what we could see through the car window on our family trips – to Cannery Row, Hearst Castle, Solvang, and eventually Disneyland. Finding trails to the mountains, away from safe and docile tourist attractions, souvenir shops, and public restrooms, was not something we did (I didn’t know we could). How many neatly composed family photos do I have of my three sisters, parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles wearing clean white sneakers and clean jeans, cameras hanging around our necks, American place names printed on our newly purchased T-? shirts? I found many of these photos at my grandfather’s home in the small Philippine town of Gattaran, which is a grueling 12-hour bus ride northeast of Manila. These were the memories we sent “home” to show our extended family what our “American” life was like, and that our summers were full of comfort, fun, and safety.

I would like to think that my grandfather would know me now, not as the clean-dressed teenager who buzzed, crawled, safely away from the swaying stuff, but as his 50-year-old American grandson who emerged from the bushes with sweat, burrs and insect bites. , scratches and cuts from many blackberries, stones in my socks and shoes, my legs covered in dust and mud, a head full of poems waiting to be written, smelling like the sun.

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of “Letters to a Young Brown Girl” (BOA Editions, 2020), “A Call to Girls” (City Lights, 2017) and other books. He is an adjunct professor in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *