A Hike as an Imagined Book

Our first hike of the new year was in Tilden Park, a huge resource to those who live in the San Francisco Bay Area and perhaps less known, but equally spectacular, to visitors from beyond. It has been a ridiculously dry and windy winter, which has brought us an attention to a different kind of detail: the wind has shaken loose lichen and sticks and lichen on sticks and moss of varying names. My favorite, I learned at the Oakland Museum of California, is wolf lichen.

The trail was packed with ambling couples, dogwalkers, ambitious outdoorsfolk, groups of wandering children and adults. As I busily scanned the ground by a creek trail for new kinds of lichen, I heard a woman mention "holes." Across the creek, a view normally shielded by foliage, but now exposed, was this…


Mysterious. Like cave dwellings. Imagining this walk in book form, I saw that it contained much that revealed and concealed. The cover would be woody, mossy, very textural. The first openings would have cutouts to show the paths beyond, layering like a topographic map. Every now and then a turned page would reveal a dog, a particularly lovely stick with lichen, a tree with a cave in it, overheard conversation from the trail. Leaves would abandon the trees, fall away. And then you might see this sight: a distant view with holes in the hills, leaving you to wonder about who or what might live there, and how they might be viewing us. New ways of seeing. 


Comments

Velma Bolyard said…
i love this--much to think about as usual, alisa!