Chapter 9.
Canada Lobo
One Down and Two to Go
Whap! Whap! Whap! The tent was hitting me on the head again. I woke, the inside of the tent glowed light blue. The moon was up. Katy was asleep. I changed positions again and lay wondering about the coming day. There was nothing to do in the hours until sunrise, and not much after that. I consciously stopped wiggling my feet, that was the way to try to wake up, not get back to sleep. I dozed and awoke in the noise of the wind several more times.
Katy was the perfect child when she wasn’t around her siblings, particularly her little brother. She was well behave, self motivated, self-occupying, a popular baby sitter, a solid student who needed only some organizational (and sometimes motivational) help to make good grades. She and her brother had an “intense” relationship, as someone had once put it. To summarize the situation, Katy took out all her frustration in life on her brother, and some of this spilled over to the rest of us. When cornered, she could be instantly intransigent and unreasonable. There was none of that here, though. There had been none of that when she and I had taken her fourth grade mission trip to Santa Clara, just the two of us. That time I had been amazed, this time I was expecting it. I’d told Viann just last week that Katy clearly needed more space and maybe I should take over most of her management, as she was now a teenager. Viann struggled with it, usually unwilling to be adequately firm or predictable. It wouldn’t be easy for me either, but it would do all three of us good for me to figure out how to deal with her positively and effectively. Given more space, such as we had here, it looked like that might not be so difficult, but it would still require patience, persistence, and willingness to stick it out for many years.
After several doze – wake – turn cycles, I awoke to sunlight on the side of the tent, and less noise. It was daytime, but probably not time to get up yet. One thing was nice; we had both stayed warm enough last night, so we had some reserve sleeping warmth for this outing.
I sneaked a look at my watch; it was 6:15, time to try to sleep some more before getting up for today’s hike. I rested some more, thinking. Everything around got brighter. Finally I got out of bag, pulled on pants, and hike off towards the outhouses. Halfway there, I said to myself, out loud, “One down and two to go.” It was too many hours before the boat came to return us home to be counting, but there were three nights and the one just past had been one of them.
There is a hereditary condition in my family that I refer to as “Trip Constipation.” I wondered, as I had in the Grand Canyon, if that would be a problem on this trip. Without any normal feeling urge and just on a whim, I sat down in the outhouse rather than standing up. Right off, “Ploop!” No trip constipation problem this trip, probably a result of the same hyperactive intestines I'd experienced before, lying there wiggling all night. Now if I could just feel like eating, I could get into a normal routine.
Back in the tent, I had my daily ration of Lucky Charms, Katy her bag of Fruity Pebbles, all with canteen water. We were going to try to use up one of the two canteens today.
One thing after another and soon it was ten until eight. “Come on, Katy, let’s go.”
“I don’t want to go.” She was ready except for doing her hair, though. I had the daypack ready with all our essentials including lunch.
“I know, but we should go on this hike. Who knows what we’ll see, and they’re going
to drive us most of the way.”
”How far?”
“This hike would normally be thirteen miles over and back, but they’re going to drive us on roads for about half of that. The part we’re supposed to hike is only six miles and we don’t have to do all of that if we don’t want to. We should at least go and see what’s there.”
“Oh, OK, I need to do my hair.”
“Here, I’ll take the hairbrush, you can do it while we wait for the car or somewhere. Get your shoes on.”
“OK.”
Shortly we were hiking up the trail to the kiosk. YCC workers had already eaten and were moving out to their work areas for the day. One was coming back into camp with a wheelbarrow containing a big box marked “Sunday,” presumably tomorrow’s food.
The shower tent had blown over. We tried setting it back up as a public service. One of the YCC leaders came along from the other direction and helped. “Well that might do for a while,” he said calmly with a light British or Australian accent.
Out at the kiosk were other YCC containers with trash waiting to be trucked away. We had to haul in our own food and haul out our own trash for a three day stay, doing it for fifteen people for a week would have to be a major undertaking.
We met Andrea in the white dirt pass. She was going in to make sure that everyone who was coming knew we were about to leave. We went on out to the kiosk and waited, the first ones there.
Eight people, exactly a truckload, finally showed for this trip: the two of us, the two ladies camped behind us, an older lady by herself, a couple in their thirties who could be foreign tourists, and another interpretive park ranger, this one visiting from Joshua Tree on the mainland. Busman’s holiday, it seemed.
First we had to be instructed about how to use the truck doors. Winds on the island could be significant and gusts damaging, so the rule was, never have doors open on both sides at the same time, and when you had a door open at all, always hold onto it. There had been incidents when a gust had blown a door right off of a vehicle out here.
This was not hard to imagine.
We all put our gear in the back. There were three benches, Katy wanted to sit in the very back; we piled in after one of the ladies. The ones in the middle bench worried about my legroom, but this was no compact car, it was OK. The possibly foreign couple sat in front with Andrea, the driver.
We would drive with the windows up, again because of the wind and dust. The truck, in addition to having off-road tires and four-wheel drive, had compartmentalized air conditioning, which we could use. With just one setting at the front controls each bench in the rear had it’s own fan and thermostat settings. We all played with our vents.
And so we were off on the road back towards the compound. “This seems easier,” I muttered to Katy, referring to our backpacking hike from yesterday.
“Yeah,” she mumbled back in a deep, whispered baritone.
The gate by the power shed was open; we slowly passed.
“This building has batteries and an inverter. The inverter chooses between solar, wind, or diesel, whichever is right at the moment.” She didn’t quite understand what the inverter was all about. That’s OK; there were things I didn’t understand too. An inverter would just convert that battery power into alternating current so it could be transformed to house voltages and carried around to the various appliances on the island.
We rumbled through the gate and passed the frame house on the left. It looked quite well kept up.
“This is where the Vicker’s permanent caretaker lives. This house is the oldest frame structure on the island, built sometime in the 1870s.”
There are differences in houses that are so far from civilization, I thought.
“Keith and his wife live here 12 months a year. They only go to the mainland on vacation a week or two per year.”
We turned left as the road curved down behind some barns.
“These barns are from the same period. We still use them today.”
I noted park service vehicles parked in them.
“These boilers on the right have an interesting history. One of the earliest exports from the island was wool. During the Civil War, the sheep ranch here shipped a significant amount of wool to the mainland to be made into uniforms.”
The thought of shipping wool all the way from here to east of the Mississippi in the 1860s was a little puzzling.
“Then when the war ended, the bottom dropped out of the wool market. They brought all the sheep here, boiled them down, and sold them for candle tallow and other animal products.”
A general wave of shock passed through the vehicle. Business was business, I supposed.
Moving a little ahead, “That building over there is where the hunt is hosted. People will be moving in there today while they get ready to start.”
It was a dark green, more modern house with a TV antenna. Like my TV antenna at home, the lower “channel 2 and 3” elements were blown off. A big black truck was parked near a carport-like appendage.
We turned and crossed a ravine and headed west up into the hills. “All ranching stopped here in 1998 and all of the cattle were removed from the island. The Vicker’s have a lease through 2011 to conduct stocked deer and elk hunts (there are about 400 each) on the island after which it all goes over to the Park Service and then they’ll have to remove all the deer and elk too. Even then, they will always own the little compound here. That’s a nice way for the family to keep its heritage while the islands are returned to a more natural state. The Vails are silent partners.”
The truck edged slowly up the bumpy, two rut road, winding up and down the canyons. The map said, “Smith Highway.”
“Some of the roads are steep, and if you want to get out and walk at some point, I won’t be offended at all. Just say so.” The couple in the front buckled their seat belts.
I had hopes of perhaps seeing San Miguel today, from somewhere along the road or perhaps from the beach at the mouth of the canyon if we went down that far. We reached a plateau. There was waving dead grass in all directions punctuated by rolls and cracks in the land, and the occasional ranch roads and livestock fences. The sky was gray with fog rolling over the north end of the island, not at ground level but a few hundred feet up. Even if San Miguel could be seen from here it, we didn’t have the visibility this morning.
To our south was a canyon with some low, gray buildings in it. We stopped to hear what this was about.
“That’s the emergency island fox breeding facility. The Channel Island Fox is found only here and on Santa Cruz and the population has gotten alarmingly low. We’re not sure why, it may have something to do with predation by Golden Eagles. A couple of years ago the biologist came out on a four-month study grant, discovered the problem, then we got emergency grant money to try to prevent an extinction and he’s been full time ever since.”
We all looked at the low gray buildings, teaming, we imagined, with captive, safe foxes.
“The nice thing about being on volunteer staff here is that I get to sleep up in the ranger housing and have meals with the rest of the staff. Then we can talk about their projects and find out how things are going.”
Sleeping in a structure with solid walls did sound nice.
“And this is ‘Windmill Canyon.’” There was indeed a large windmill, running apace in the canyon, looked like a 30-40 KW model, probably ten meters high. “We used to have two of them but one blew down.”
“Really?” another passenger queried.
“Yes, sometimes we have gusts of over a hundred miles per hour in this canyon. It just blew right over.”
This, too, was not hard to imagine. It looked like the wind down there might be 60 miles per hour right now.
“We have wind, solar, and diesel and a system that automatically chooses the right one.”
The truck stopped, one of the ladies got out to open a gate, and shut it after us. Andrea got out and switched the truck into four-wheel drive. We started down a steep incline. The road turned left and continued down, then reversed direction, a switchback.
“That’s ‘Fox Rock’ ahead, although most of us think it looks more like a gopher.”
It did look more like ‘Gopher Rock.’
“It’s named that because this is Lobo Canyon, ‘Lobo’ is Spanish for ‘Fox.’
Ah, a stretch.
The road bottomed out. To the left, up canyon were a picnic table and some small trees with little protective fences around them.
“Those are ‘exclosures.’ ‘Enclosures’ are meant to keep things in, ‘exclosures’ are meant to keep things out.”
She pulled over and parked. “The car will be here all day and we leave it open. You can have access whenever you like. You can leave some or all of your stuff here; you can hang around here. You can hike down the canyon with us but if you don’t feel like going all the way you can come back here early and rest.”
The Hike
The sky was still gray. It was chilly. All appeared to want to go on the hike, we got the gear we wanted to take out of the back and stood around in a large circle. Andrea needed to do something with her pack and invited the ranger from Joshua Tree to tell us a little about things there for a few minutes.
We learned mainly about the Youth Conservation Core program, in use in both parks. There were certain manual labor projects that needed to be done in the National Parks. For instance, all of the Pig Fences on this island needed to be removed. There were once wild pigs here, I didn’t catch why. The YCC hired high school age kids and paid them minimum wage for a week of work in one of the parks. They camp there and are fed by the program, as we were witnessing in our own campground. They went to work every day and came back tired.
What was most interesting was that the programs were very popular. They had something like 200 apply for 75 positions at Joshua Tree and the selection was by lottery. People who came back for second and subsequent terms would sometimes be put in leadership roles.
There were maybe 12-15 youth and some others who looked like leaders in the group here this week. I overheard some talk that sounded like they might be cleaning up and going back on Tuesday. They all seemed polite and well behaved, what little time they had to be somewhere interacting with anyone else. Everybody was typically bundled up pretty well, especially with cold weather hats. In August. Perhaps they had been warned.
“Thank you,” said Andrea. “There’s poison oak here, for those of you who are sensitive to it, particularly right here at the beginning. I’ll point it out as we go, but don’t get too far ahead of me going down.”
We started down the trail, single file more or less with Andrea at the head and Katy and I near the back. Andrea talked as we walked, pointing out various geological features or plant life or talking about particular places in the trail.
The canyon contained a spring-fed creek that we were roughly following. Every pool had tadpoles in it, in both sizes.
There were lichens on everything, not only the rocks but also the trees. Katy and I recalled our lichen’s song from ten years ago. We were alerted to and passed some poison oak. This was the first time I’d ever seen any close up to know what it was. Everyone was careful. Andrea said you could effectively wash it off with just cold water.
We stopped at a flower growing out of the rock called a “Live Forever.” I arched my eyebrow at this notion. We took a picture. We saw another plant that had come over from the mainland, but the color and shape of the flower had changed to match the local pollinators better. The mainland version was dainty and yellow. This flower was long and red.
“So, if you knew this plant on the mainland, you wouldn’t even recognize it here?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s right, sometimes they change quite a lot.”
She explained about mammals on the island, there were only three indigenous species; there was a mouse, a fox, and a skunk. The interesting thing was that, because of the size of the island and it’s apparent support capacity (at least the theory went) all the animals evolved to about house-cat size, three or four pounds. The mouse got larger, the fox got smaller, and the skunk stayed about the same.
“How did they get here to start with?” someone wanted to know.
This was a long story. Some scientists thought that some time ago (it wasn’t said how long, ten thousand years? A million?) sea level compared to the island’s profiles was lower, maybe twenty feet. (This was about the amount that sea level would change if Greenland melted, I thought, but that change would go the other way. Maybe during an ice age….) Andrea had a map on a laminated card that showed that the four islands, San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacapa, were once all one island, San Rosarita, it was called (in the sense of Pangeia, the original lone continent in plate tectonic theory). Down on the Anacapa end, the island was closer to the mainland than today, maybe only three or four miles. (We were currently 26 miles from mainland, and the closest point of any island, over on Anacapa was eleven.) Some even hypothesized a land bridge.
Plants, for the most part, had an easier time. A chance seed could blow over and germinate much more readily than any type of animal.
One Island Packers trip in recent years had seen a bunny rabbit out on a drifting kelp bed five miles offshore. Indian elephants had been seen swimming three miles out, so migrations of that sort, accidental or otherwise, were thought to be possible. The chance of a species moving to the island and getting established was worse than winning the sweepstakes (I thought she might mean ‘lottery’). That rabbit, for instance, would have to be a pregnant female, then the litter would inbreed and if there were any genetic deficiencies, they would be magnified and work against them. On the other hand, genetic strengths would also magnify and work for them.
Somebody asked about the elephants. I thought about house-cat sized elephants.
This island was the biggest source of pygmy mammoth remains in the world; in fact, a complete pygmy mammoth skeleton had been excavated from here. This was unusual in that the island typically was not excavated; discoveries were just marked and visited but not recovered in deference to the Chumash (natives), who had sacred sites and gravesites and other ancestral claims here. A normal mammoth would stand eight or nine feet high, a pygmy mammoth four to six feet. “They must have been evolving down to house-cat size,” I thought.
Somebody asked how, with only ten inches of rain per year, all these plants and animals could survive.
A study had been done of “fog drip” on San Miguel and it had been concluded that fog drip was worth, perhaps, an additional 140 inches per year of rainfall. Watching the fog in the channel and over the beaches in the morning and throughout the day and multiplying up by a whole year, it was possible to imagine that. Of course, this was Santa Rosa, such a conclusion might extrapolate to these beaches at least. On Anacapa, they had said that sheep had survived by licking fog drip off each other when natives (or was it European ranchers) tried raising them there. There was no other source of water.
We came to a stream crossing which was swampy enough that we expected we might see actual frogs there. Katy was very interested. The species was “Pacific Chirping Frog” and we did in fact find some, in sizes from a quarter inch up to perhaps one inch, some green and some brown. Katy tried to catch one. I helped a little. Finally we did find one. She wanted to keep it and take it home. I reminded her that it wouldn’t be happy at our home, or in transit. We tried to take a picture and let it go back. We heard no chirping.
One of the ladies ahead was complaining about her knees. Mine were in a little mild pain themselves. “It’s sure nice to be old enough to have to worry about your knees, isn’t it,” I remarked, dryly.
Further down was a formation called “Surfer Rock.” You could stand in it and look like you were surfing. Several hikers took pictures in various surfing poses.
Up above was a classic example of pig fence coming down to a cliff and tensioned by a big rock overhanging.
“That’s a headache for the person in charge of removing all the pig fence on the island,” Andrea quipped, giving that person’s name.
I thought, if it were me, I would clip the rock loose and let it crash down then pull the rest of the fence up from above. I was sure, however, that such a technique would mean too much environmental impact for the current administration.
Erosion was discussed. The canyon was formed mostly from water erosion, but there was also precipitation erosion and wind erosion acting on the canyon walls. There were caves and interesting curves in infinite variety at all levels up and down the walls. At the top on all sides were plains of dead grass. It could be the Palo Dura Canyon in the Texas panhandle.
We stopped and studied some Indian Paintbrush. We had these in Texas. Andrea told the story of the Indian Paintbrush, one of her favorites.
The tribe had a recorder who kept the tribal records in paintings but he was growing old. His grandson was apprenticed to him but just wasn’t getting it. He didn’t seem to be much of a painter. Finally, he went off on a dream quest for a few days to make a decision about whether to do this with his life or to look for something else. Late on the third day, he railed against the gods about this issue (I could identify with that) and they answered him with the most beautiful sunset imaginable. The gods then dripped the myriad colors from the sunset down onto the flowers, making Indian Paintbrushes. The young man went on to become the most legendary recorder in his tribe.
We passed through a large stand of “Horse Hair.” Katy picked one that had a curly end. In the flat down below, there was even more Horse Hair, punctuated by a few Cat Tails. “Enough for a whole horse,” I mused.
There were numerous birds in the canyon; we observed many without comment. We came to a high point in the trail along the east wall where Andrea liked to stop and talk about the Peregrine Falcons. There were some on the island and we might see one, he would be sitting along the ridge at the top. This led to a long discussion of DDT, its history and its effects on various animals. Like most forms of pollution, DDT had been in common use in the U.S. up into the 1960s when had been banned. It concentrated its way up the food chain, and among the animals to suffer most from it were birds, whose eggshells wouldn’t calcify. They would either lay embryos without shells, or the shells would be too fragile and would break prematurely. Species became endangered. Like most forms of modern pollution, although the U.S. had banned DDT, other countries still used it. There was still quite a bit concentrated in the environment, even in places like this. The connection between this and the Falcons was not clear. I didn’t pursue it.
One theory about the problem with the foxes was predation by Golden Eagles. There had been Golden and Bald Eagles out here too. We weren’t looking for any and didn’t see any. All these connections were unclear too. There was a lot one could know about even a simple, sparse place like this. It was getting over my head.
As we continued down the trail, someone saw a Peregrine Falcon up on the ridge to the left. Andrea got out her binoculars and passed them around. The falcon took off and flew away to oohs and ahs. It seemed rather small of a bird from here, but it was hard to judge size and distance. Katy and I were near the end of the line, the binoculars ended up with her for a long while.
We also saw Red Tailed Hawks. I had seen one of those from George Purcell’s office at JPL, when he had a view of the canyon above building 238. Even up in town like that we were still fairly close to the wilds in some respects.
We came to a confluence of canyons. I had learned this concept in the Grand Canyon. Katy wanted to take a picture. I discussed the shortage of film but promised that we would keep this place in mind and might take one on the way back up if it still seemed important enough. I wished I’d brought all four 24 rolls that I bought rather than just two. “What had I been thinking?” I complained to myself again. Film wasn’t that heavy or bulky.
Further down there was another confluence of canyons. Andrea offered that since we were ahead of schedule and a well-behaved group we could climb up this one as a side trip, or not, at our choice. Everyone went up the side canyon to the sandstone flats where climbing would become necessary to go further. Katy did some climbing making me a little nervous. She stayed within earshot. When the lecture started again I called her down.
Andrea showed pictures from her interpretive pack of various species we had talked about, the fox, the falcon, the maps of the island, ossified plant forms on the beach, “caliche forests”. This was a beautiful place, carved rather quickly (geologically) out of sandstone with interesting forms and shapes everywhere. There were more stratifications like the ones in Water Creek, none of them quite plumb.
She explained about the North American and Pacific tectonic plates and how they bent together here. “Pulverizing the L.A. basin,” I thought, remembering a talk given by Tom Yunck at work. She showed with her hands about how this bent piece had turned sideways and that was why we had the islands and the east-west coastline in this region that was part of a generally north-south coastline.
“You know, the interesting thing about this,” I added, “is that the plates move at about the same rate your fingernails grow.”
This was always an interesting fact to laypeople.
Sitting hikers were getting cool and putting on jackets and sweaters. Andrea started the group down toward the beach “to get our warmth back.”
“They have a biologist here, but do they have a geologist?” I asked, “Is all that work mostly done by now?”
“A lot of that has been done,” she showed me a geological map of the island, “but there is a lot of interest with anthropologists.”
Part of the coolness was from the stiff breeze, we were nearly close enough to the ocean to hear the breakers now. It was only a short walk down the trail from the confluence to where we could see waves at the mouth of Lobo Canyon. Some asked if they could go down to that beach. We were welcome to try, but Andrea thought it might be impossible without wading, which was OK, or without going down a slippery grass slope just here, which was also OK, but be careful.
Nobody took the offer. We all stayed with the group as it moved out onto the cliffs for the next warning lecture. We heard the story of the Chumash economy, the fact that they had actually had currency, which was where the name Chumash came from somehow. We learned how they had nothing to trade with the mainland that the mainland didn’t already have but that they quarried some sort of mineral here that was traded around all the way up into present-day Nevada. Eventually it got so valuable that they had to post guards at their quarries.
They had lived off whatever was available and, as with most Indian tribes, made some use of every part of every plant or animal that they consumed. They fished for shells and abalone and we had a good history of their usage from the garbage dumps they left. These dumps, called “midden”, made black, shell-fragment filled layers in the sand. Where erosion would cut away you could study several inches or sometimes several feet of the piles. We toured some of these.
It had been debated how long the Chumash had been here, then a female hipbone had been found and carbon dated to 13,000 years. It was estimated that 500 Indians lived on Santa Rosa and about 2000 on Santa Cruz. They knew the springs and water sources. In 1811, they had been ravaged by disease (possibly, I thought, but it wasn’t said, European disease) and there had been a couple of earthquakes and there were fishing problems and other difficulties. These were taken as signs that the era was over and they all moved off the islands. There was still a big Chumash group living and active today around Santa Inez, the living heritage.
We could see breakers about a mile offshore. A reef, we were told. Checking the map later, I noted this was Rodes Reef, marked as “+1” fathom. These islands were the site of numerous shipwrecks, including one within the last few years when a full load of tuna went aground on a beach and couldn’t be recovered because they couldn’t get a crane into the site. A multi-million dollar cargo lost.
We would meet back here around 12:30 to return, or we were free to go back up canyon now, the truck was open if we wanted to rest up there.
Various of the hikers drifted off to different resting places, some on down the waterfront, exploring more cliffs, some under little sand overhangs, others in the partial shade of dunes. A few went back up towards the mouth of the canyon. We stood near a cliff, not near enough to be dangerous but enough to make me worried, not staying long.
We went back a little ways and up a sand-draw looking for a place to lunch. I picked a protected sand gully that still had a little late-morning shade and we sat down on the crusty sand surface. There was some of that caliche in the sand on the sand wall behind us.
Today’s menu was peanut butter sandwiches, partly mashed. Katy inspected them for whether or not they had butter. She had made them, some with butter and some without. It was never clear to me when they were in this state how you could tell which were which or what type it was that she wanted. We cored apples. Katy had a dessert bar, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything more. We worked at emptying the canteen.
A gust of wind blew the empty lunch bag (just a plastic grocery sack) high into the air. Katy instinctively jumped up to go after it just as it circled down right into her up-reaching hands.
“Wow, that’s a cool game, dad, can we put that in the book?”
“Of course.”
Some Fruity Pebbles got spilled out onto the sand. We would end up leaving some of them.
In a few minutes, another, different gust blew the lunch bag up again, but this time it headed up the little sand canyon we were in several dozen yards and landed thirty feet up a steep wall. We walked up and inspected the problem. We really didn’t want to litter and I wanted the bag back for trash. I was thinking I could climb up and get it when Katy volunteered and started taking off her jacket. She was probably adequately skillful for this and less than 2/3 my weight. I let her go after it and it took her about 30 seconds to get up to it and stuff it in her pocket, then she rested.
“A different version of the game,” she shouted down.
Katy took a picture, the camera froze mid cycle. I inspected it and decided that some sand must be wedged in the button.
“That might be our last picture,” I quipped, something else to worry about, a shift in worry from inadequate quantity of film.
Not only would it not finish the cycle, it couldn’t be opened or closed either. I dug in the pack for the knife and started gouging at the button, finally freeing it up. You could still see sand in all the parts, but at least they were moving freely again. I put the camera away to try to avoid more trouble.
We headed back to the mouth of the canyon for the return hike. Most of the people were already there. I took out the GPS receiver and started getting a fix: SRLOBO while Andrea rounded up the rest.
Two elk were in view on the west slope into the canyon. Katy got the binoculars out again. Everyone looked. The elk made their way up over the ridge and out of site. The binoculars stayed back with Andrea.
We went up the trail, loosely. For most there was less sight seeing and more hiking on the way back. We passed up all those potential picture sites and saved our remaining film for unexpected opportunities.
“We can finish this roll today and save the last one for whatever we see tomorrow and the trip back,” Katy suggested, “How many pictures are left.”
“About one, maybe two, maybe none.”
At one turn in the trail something moved under foot. A snake!
“Katy! Look! A snake!”
She came running back. It was gone; I didn’t want to poke in the brush for a snake. There was one species of snake on the island too. It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous.
She still wanted to take a frog home, or at least get a picture of one. We stopped at each marshy stream crossing all the way back looking for frogs.
Andrea, catching up with us, said, “A person who studies frogs is called a ‘herpetologist.’” All the grownups smiled approvingly. Katy still had her nose down in the Horse Hair, fishing around for a frog. I crossed over and helped look in a different place. “Here’s one.”
One of the ladies asked me if I was a geologist, I said no, but I used to work in Global Positioning System technology and there might well be one of our receivers on one of these islands monitoring the faults and plate motion in the area. I didn’t go into as much detail as I had on the boat returning from East Santa Cruz, Andrea had covered most of that material and I didn’t want to give any of my partially conflicting knowledge.
Katy found a frog, got it up into her hand and tried to take a picture, though I figured the camera was probably inadequate at this range.
We continued up the trail for a while more, passed that one little piece of poison oak on the side and came to an oak grove amongst some rocks and pools in the stream. Katy stopped to look for frogs again. This blocked the road and the other hikers, as they came up, started sitting down on the rocks. It turned into a nice, half hour rest stop. Finally Andrea arrived with about three stragglers, sat down and talked some about how the cessation of ranching operations was allowing various plant life to start to grow back all over the island. It had been two years and she pointed out various plants and other features that hadn’t been here just a couple of years ago.
Finally we all arrived back at the truck, and after some rearrangement, got in and started back the way we had come. There was ‘Gopher Rock’ as we made the first switchback.
At the top of the hill, she stopped the engine. We all wondered what we were going to get out and look at now.
“This car won’t switch out of four wheel drive with the engine running, we have to baby it like this,” she muttered, making the necessary adjustment and restarting the engine. We continued up to a closed gate. I was on the outside this time and got out to open it and let the truck through.
To our left we could see four horses grazing on a prairie of dead grass. Somebody asked about them.
“Those are the old workhorses from the ranching operation, there were about forty of them and they were working up until two years ago when they were retired,” Andrea explained, coasting to a stop so we could watch. “The island is the only place many of them had ever known and most of them were near retirement age anyway, so they were just retired in place here where they will live out the rest of their days.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the younger of the two ladies sitting behind us (I thought it might be ‘Judy,’) “That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard all … all …” she wanted to say “all day” but it had been a pretty nice day, and an unusual one for most of us city folks, so that didn’t seem right, “…all year!”
“Ideal indeed for the life of a workhorse,” I thought.
We wound around back down towards the compound. It was much brighter and less cloudy now than it had been earlier when we drove out. This would, indeed, have been a long hike on foot.
“Does anybody want to use the ‘real’ restrooms?” Andrea asked, pulling up by the generator house.
Several assented, and we made a long stop there. I walked around the building, rubbing greasy dirt off a few windowpanes to look in. There was a bank of batteries, maybe fifty. That looked familiar. Most of the room was empty, dark. Another room contained generators, not running at the moment. We were certainly on wind power today, or solar. In another there were large tools and implements. Around back there was an ignored-looking four-wheeler with a flat tire.
The restrooms were immaculate and included handicap access. There wasn’t much toilet paper, however.
Back in the truck for the last half-mile before the campground kiosk, we talked a little about the hunt. “Look,” Andrea said, “here they come behind us.” We turned and looked back. Two big black trucks were coming out of the compound behind us, leaving their own rather large plumes of dirt. “Those hunting outfits are rather plush,” she commented, “quite luxurious and expensive,” with a laugh.
It really was two different worlds. We were here on the cheap, low impact plan, taking pictures and leaving footprints, backpacking from the boat up to the campground. The hunters, probably flown in, were sleeping indoors in bunks in a house and had a staff to take care of all their needs.
We saw them as pillagers, they saw us as tree-huggers, kind of the Republicans and the Democrats if you wanted to believe such stereotypes.
Our truck stopped at the campground, theirs went on by.
“A person in a wheelchair is supposed to come in tomorrow. His party has special permission to camp up by the restrooms but he has to be driven everywhere, and I’m supposed to do that,” Andrea explained. I’ll know about 9:15 in the morning whether he’s coming or not. He has a reservation but there hasn’t been any confirmation in the last couple of days so we’re not sure.”
I was impressed at the degree to which the Park Service would make such accommodations. It was probably a matter of Federal Law, the “Americans with Disabilities Act.” In fact, most of what we were experiencing here wasn’t as strict or hand-off as the more popular places, like the Grand Canyon, for example. The few people that made it through all the hurdles of motivation and capability to actually be here weren’t that much of a threat to anything, maybe a hundred or so over the whole visitation season. The paper said that the park itself had some 60,000-70,000 visitors per year, but the number to Santa Rosa would be a small fraction of that, maybe 5000 counting campers like us, YCC-like operations, the permanent and seasonal residents, the Vicker family and their guests. This island was also less popular with the rangers. Andrea had explained how a shoulder injury and desire for more remoteness had gotten her onto this routine. Lots of people went to Santa Cruz and she just didn’t have the strength to handle all those packs anymore. It was a 3-1/2 hour boat ride to even set foot on this island, more than twice that of the others. Probably most of those visitors went to Santa Cruz and Anacapa. Santa Barbara and San Miguel were for the truly hardy (particularly San Miguel). We had gone to the right one for our level of capabilities, whatever our motivations had once been.
I was never sure what Andrea’s day job was or how it worked out with long weekend visits to the islands every three or four weeks. Was she a teacher?
“If they don’t show up, I’ll bring the truck around and we’ll go to the beach at East Point tomorrow,” she was usually level in expectation of her duties, but taking us out to the beach was clearly her preference. “I’ll know at 9:15 and if I can I’ll come around and see who is interested in going. Otherwise, you can go to the beaches nearer the campground or go on hikes in our ‘safe’ area. Good luck.”
We unloaded the truck and faced into the wind walking back to our tent. “Our little home,” I called it, “our little condo.”
“What’s a condo, dad?”
“It’s an apartment that you buy rather than renting,” I remembered that condos had just begun to become big about the time I was Katy’s age. My parents had thought that the notion was crazy, “What about liability, what if there’s a fire,” they had pondered. Things change.
One tent site had three tents in it. Two were completely unprotected by the wind shelter. One, about the size of ours, was blown over on its side, but held in place by a bunch of stuff inside.
“Looks like that tent has a couch in it.”
“What?”
“See, it looks like a couch holding over that blown-over tent.”
“Yeaaah.”
Back in our own tent, which was still upright, Katy discovered that she had her own door. Being the smaller of a two-tent set that could be connected together, it had an opening on the right side (when viewed coming in the main door) that would be the connection in that setup.
Katy’s door led to the wall of the shelter. The main door, with the window, faced right onto the trail. I wondered if the connection-door zipper wouldn’t be poorer quality, as it wouldn’t be used as much, and if I shouldn’t tell Katy not to use it like another door. Not wishing to take up that battle, I rationalized that the zippers were probably the same for economic reasons and that equipment like this didn’t hold up forever anyway. For the fun of having her “own door” it was worth just letting her zip at it.
“Let’s turn the tent to face the other way,” I ordered. Currently, we could see sunrise shadows on the ridge to the northeast and sunset over it. We could reverse this by facing the real door, with its bug-screen window toward the other ridge to the southeast. That ridge was more interesting too.
“We’ll have to take everything out,” she protested.
“No we won’t, we’ll just lift it and turn it carefully and stake it down then climb in and clean up the mess.” We didn’t have that much stuff with us, the mess couldn’t be that bad.
We climbed out and went through roughly this procedure, trying to re-stake with reasonable taughtness.
“Let’s move the picnic table over on this side,” where the door had been and where Katy’s own door would now be, “and try to get it up close out of the wind as much as possible.”
We did this, climbed back in and re-straightened things that had moved around. There wasn’t much.
Katy went back to her book, I studied the inside of the tent.
“GreatLand,” I remarked, seeing the trademark.
“What?”
”GreatLand, that’s the name of this tent, as if whatever you would see
outside
was ‘Great Land.” Well, could be, I
thought. I looked out the window at
“Great Land.” Hmmm.
“Could be.” She went back to her book.
I took out my trip journal and made some notes about the hike. Then I made some notes about my mood:
Going on the hike was good.
Saw the frogs.
[The canyon was] Like seeing a river from top to bottom.
[This had been Katy’s desire for the “Big Trip” from the beginning.]
Used up the day.
Had a good ‘bob this morning first up – intestinal mobility, worry.
Katy is happy to be reading her book.
I am miserable.
Nothing going on here but getting sand in eyes.
Or lay here and listen to tent blow, which we’ll be doing all night anyway.
Throat is tickly – don’t know if it’s the climate or infection from John and Viann. (I had shivers last night, could have been a low grade fever, and a sinus-like headache.)
The boat will be here in 48 hours. That’s a long time.
I lay back and thought a while. Katy kept reading, rapt.
I don’t want to go to Alaska anymore.
or Antarctica,
or Mars,
I just want to be a part of people’s lives and not lose them.
All the stuff I do to stay busy just keeps me from this pain. There is nothing for 48 hours.
At least we didn’t go to San Miguel.
Katy was between chapters. She ate some Fruity Pebbles.
“What’s your elective in eighth grade.” I was trying to make conversation.
“I don’t know.”
”What did you ask for?”
“Art, Drama, or Chorus, I don’t know which one it will be yet. All I know is that the letter said ‘School 3’.”
That subject was pretty empty. I grasped for something else.
“How did you like Family Camp?”
“Great!” her reply had a good deal more enthusiasm than I expected. She spent a lot of the time surly and distant from us, as a Junior Higher with siblings nearby will do.
“What did you do?”
“Hung out with Jessica and Cassie and Ellie. There was also a boy, about the size of John.”
What she had liked, it was apparent, was her peers, the girls anyway.
We talked about tomorrow, thinking we would go out to East Point if the truck were available. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t. She still wanted to go snorkeling. I promised her we’d go back home somewhere where it was a reasonable thing to do and safer than here.
She read some more, I sure didn’t feel like reading Dostoevsky so I took out Our Town and read about Thornton Wilder on the back. When this was done Katy was still reading, so I read Act I. Viann had been bugging me to read this for weeks. “It will only take you a couple of hours.” As if a couple of hours for reading was an easy commodity.
And I don’t want to live in the Panhandle of Texas if it means wind like this all the time.
“Let’s play cards,” Katy suggested, at a stopping point.
“OK.” I searched my pack for the playing cards that we might have brought and decided that we hadn’t brought any. “We don’t have any cards.”
“Maybe we could make some, do you have any paper.”
I checked my trip journal, a 120 sheet college rule spiral notebook with tear-out pages, about 1/3 of which were blank. “Yes.” Half to myself and half out loud I thought about the logistics of this, how many to make out of a sheet, how to deal with the holes and lines on the pages. I decided on some compromises that would make it workable if we tried a little not to cheat.
“Let’s make eight cards out of a page, I’ll fold them and you cut them up.”
“OK.”
I tore out a page and folded it three times, making eight parts. She took the scissors out of my knife and tried to use them. They were too dull. “You need to sharpen these, dad.”
“Yes, that’s hard.”
“Not if you take them to the scissor sharpener. They call us all the time.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
She took the scissor attachment out of her own knife and it worked fine. All cut up, she started drawing a single star on the “back” of each one.
“Are you going to put that on all of them?”
Surprised, “Yes.”
I studied the problem some more and decided to just write on the corners. I said I was going to do all the Aces, then all the Twos, and so forth, but when I started; I did the Ace of Spades, then the Two, and then the Three before I realized what I was doing.
Katy corrected the drawing of the Spade to make it a little clearer. She also wanted to draw in all of the pictures and all of the Spades and Hearts and things on each card. I thought about calculating how many objects that would be, a few hundred.
“Let’s just do the corners and see how it goes.”
With me tearing and folding and Katy cutting and putting on stars and me putting on the sixes and Clubs in all the corners, top and bottom, the workload was about even. As I finished up the Clubs, she started drawing faces on the Spade cards and got down to drawing ten additional Spades on the ten, in the correct pattern and inversion, I noted, before I was done.
“Lets stop here and see if we can play something with them before we do any more work,” I suggested, efficient as always, thinking that the drag of drawing all those Spades and Diamonds and things would be too much of a drag even for this situation.
“OK.” She stopped and asked for a sandwich bag to put them away in. I retrieved one, one of the last of our spares, and we put our new cards away for the moment.
“If we’re going to use the regular shower, we need to do it pretty soon before all the kids get back. Let’s put on our swimming suits and get our towels and soap and stuff and go look at that tee-pee. If it’s up, we’ll go in and use it. If it’s not we’ll just use the shower head right in the middle of the trail.”
“OK.”
After a while we walked up the trail, the wind blowing, but not at its worst. The tee-pee had indeed blown over; only one of the three poles was in place on the ground. No one else was there. I put the poles in place and Katy re-tied them to their stakes. We worked with the plastic tarp to get it into the proper position while the wind kept blowing it out of our hands. Finally it was ready.
“I’ll go in first, that way if it blows over it
will be me
and not you in there and when I’m done I’ll be the one to stand around
shivering while you go in,” I offered.
”OK.”
There were solar water bags all around the base of the tarp holding it down. These were supposed to get warm during the day and a person would use one of them then refill it for tomorrow, or the next user. There may have been ten of them, but I figured they were probably meant for the YCC crew. We could use their tent, but I didn’t want to use up their hot water.
I got in. Things seemed stable. I got my suit off and pulled on the shower cord to wet up. It was cold but not freezing. I got soaped up then put the soap away, rinsing the outside of the soap bag as always, then rinsed in stages with the rag. I sprayed my hair superficially with water but didn’t do anything else. That was enough. I got my suit back on and got out. Katy went in. She took about the same amount of time then asked for the towel to be handed in. By the time she came out, two youths were waiting.
As we walked back, Katy asked, “Can we lay on the top of the shelter and look at stars tonight?”
The family of three had shingles on their shelter. Perhaps it was possible. I had studied their shelter at some length before we turned the tent earlier.
“Maybe so, but I’m worried about climbing up and down. We’ll look and see when we get back.”
This investigation was more educational than I had expected. The family of three had the only full roof, and their whole shelter was larger too so they could get the tent in with two picnic tables, one on each unprotected side! Our roof was scrap lumber, slatted, and about half covered. We would not be able to climb on it. Ha! That’s the trick; they had been here before and knew which shelter to go for! (They had been here twice, we learned later. Making memories on Santa Rosa.)
The sun was still out. Wind dried; we weren’t cold. We put on our clothes for tomorrow. I realized that I had only one more pair of clean underwear so took one of the dirty pair out to the spigot and rinsed it out, hanging it from the animal-protection food hook in the shelter for the night to dry. “If it blows away, it blows away,” I thought.
We sure had a lot of water left for the mid point of the trip. (I had calculated the mid-point of the trip to be 1 a.m. Sunday morning, the middle of the coming night.) Of those three 20 pound jugs, we still had two full and had used less than half of the leaky one marked “X.”
“I’m going to bathe in our water tomorrow if we can’t use any more than that!” I said. “Forget the spigot.”
I looked through my books. I thought I had Dostoevsky, Wilder, and a little green Gideon New Testament like you get for graduating from high school. It wasn’t a Bible; it was a little devotional booklet about hope that my mother had given her father in 1953! There was, however, some Bible material in it that I might make use of for “church” tomorrow.
Katy suggested using my backpack against the tent wall to prevent the flapping. She had done this on her side with some success. I complied, thinking, “duh.” I also pulled down the empty canteen to be most of my pillow for this, the second night.
The YCC mess crew was hollering “dinner time,” (whatever their term for it was) sounding like teenage hog calling, but it didn’t last long. The same thing happened every morning, but in more subdued fashion.
I went out to take out my lenses. The first one came out fine. The second one blew off of one hand and onto the other one. It was a close call; I just barely recovered it upside down off of the heel of the little finger side of the wrong hand. All the rest of the process went fine, between wind gusts.
As we walked up to the toilets, Andrea was leading two young fellows in packs into the campsite. We would learn later that they were sea-going kayakers who had come over from San Miguel in the relatively heavy seas of the day. They’d had quite an adventure, closely monitored by Park Rangers on both sides, and were quite worn out.
Back in the tent, we settled into our bags. Katy kept reading far beyond the time when I couldn’t see well enough to make out words on the paper, and then turned on her flashlight.
“You need to finish up soon,” I ordered.
“I know, I just want to finish this chapter,” she replied, now having a little limit. “Do you have your flashlight?” she asked.
“Yes, my regular one and the emergency one in the backpack and extra batteries for both, but we don’t need them much. We can see well enough to walk at night and anyway we’re trying to be in tune with light and dark so we don’t need it very much after dark anyway.”
“OK. We’re all set.”
“Yes.”
She turned off the flashlight and turned over to lie down. I noted that the canteen was just a bit too high and a bit too hard. Tried some adjustments without much improvement.
I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, “Loves’m.” I meant to do this every night, especially while we were out here. She responded in kind.
The position changing, tossing in the wind started for the night. On one occasion I woke up laying on my back, back stiff as a board. Perhaps I had slept a whole hour at one stretch!