According to the forecast, the rain was going to be relatively mild on Mt. Tam this morning, and since the wind is supposed to come up tomorrow I figured I should head up to swap batteries and SD cards on my trail cameras.
It was good to find that I could walk silently on the forest floor again, now that everything's wet and spongy, and the moss jackets on the trees were looking bold and sassy.
The woods were kind of spooky along the game trails. Back in the day I could have been stalked by mountain lions or even grizzly bears out here, and maybe some of that memory remains encoded in our neural net to give us a little thrill of fear. I figure it's never a bad idea to just be still and listen, though, and to move deliberately and with unconstrained awareness.
Now, instead of megafauna, we're being stalked by microbes -- and by "we" I mean the whole civilized world. Luckily we still have places like Mt. Tam where it's easy to manage one's social distancing. I encountered only four people on the trail, which was actually a little surprising since I was on human trails for only a short part of the route.
I carried my big golf umbrella with me -- my portable cave -- and after I'd finished with the trail cams I found a nice place to sit (in my rain pants) and sip hot coffee while listening to the forest music of wind and falling rain.
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