Changing Plans

* * *

I rolled out of bed early Saturday morning and drove all the way to Stinson Beach and out along Bolinas Lagoon to hike up the little-known, unmaintained Morse Gulch Trail. I was disappointed to find the trail flooded with running water. You'd probably want to be wearing shorts and sandals to go up there. 

I considered heading out to Point Reyes, but it was a bit too windy for that to be appealing, so I drove up Bolinas-Fairfax Road instead and stopped to poke around the redwoods near these little roadside waterfalls. It was a little ominous to see the understory of ferns in such sad shape. They haven't bounced back from the drought as nicely as one might wish. Sword fern is probably the canary in the coal mine for the redwood forest as a whole. 

Hygrocybe punicea

I've been re-reading The Secret Knowledge of Water by Craig Childs. Lots of interesting and surprising, beautifully written stories about water in the desert. No one in a desert takes water for granted.

It was quite blustery up on Bolinas Ridge. That weird-looking spot on the ridgeline in this image is a tree, and I thought the tiny spot next to it was a person (until I visited a week later and saw that it was the top of an adjacent Doug fir tree). A few squalls blew through as I explored along the ridge, each time chasing me back to the car to await their passing.

Speaking of passing, this is all that's left of a tall acorn granary and nesting tree that I've photographed a few times. For years I've always slowed down to a crawl to check the bird action here. There's a convenient pull-out in case I'd want to stop to watch the goings-on. High winds and rot finally took their toll. The acorn woodpecker in this image was probably born in that tree.

While I was poking around I found this deer-browsed bay laurel that appeared to have been sculpted by an arborist.

It was difficult to do photography in the space between rain squalls, but I stuck with it for one of my favorite mushrooms, the purple Laccaria, and an enticingly delicate coral mushroom.

I always forget how hard it can be to look up a coral fungus in a mushroom guide. There are several genera that can be called "coral fungus," and even with pictures I can only guess that this one's a particular species of Ramaria. Maybe you can help me. Can you look at the spores and tell if cystidia are absent and clamp connections are present?

* * *

Cataract Canyon

* * *

I took in the view out our back window one night between rain storms and enjoyed seeing stars in a clear sky. There was Orion off to the southeast. As a boy, Orion's Belt was one of the first constellations anyone ever showed me. I can picture myself as a boy looking into the night sky as if I were recalling a movie. I thought what a long way I've come since I was a tow-headed kid in the '60s. But old Orion out there, he was just the same. What's five decades to a constellation that probably looks the same now as it did when the Earth was still just a hodgepodge of dust, not even a planet yet, just a sidekick of the Sun.

Incidentally, that was about 4.5 billion years ago, and the sun's predicted to last another 4.5 billion years, give or take. This little middle part between the beginning of the world and its end is where human beings and waterfalls exist. We also exist between the smallest particles and the very edge of the universe. I like to think of our place in the grand scheme of things as being at the crossroads of the infinities.

I was the first person to park at the bottom of Cataract Gulch on the Martin Luther King holiday, but I was soon followed by many others with the same great idea. The Alpine Lake reservoir was filled to the brim, and all of Mt. Tam's ravines were running full steam ahead.

Here's a short, roaring clip of Lower Cataract Falls.

This is the falls and pool at the junction of the Helen Markt Trail. Do you remember that big log that used to be jammed at an angle in the falls? That log got blown out of the waterfall in the big atmospheric river event of February 2014, but the big log remained in the pool. Not any more. It's gone! (See the before and after about half-way through this post.)

I met a guy at Junction Falls who was hiking down from Rock Spring and told me there was a gorgeous waterfall higher up that reminded him of Hawaii. I don't know if this is the falls he was talking about, but it looked good enough to me to call it Hawaiian Falls.

* * *

Communing with Rev. King

* * *

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.... We aren't going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality....

“If there is to be peace on earth and good will toward men, we must finally believe in the ultimate morality of the universe, and believe that all reality hinges on moral foundations.”

--Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., from his Christmas Eve Speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, 1967

* * *

Looking for nature-related inspiration from Martin Luther King, Jr., the "interrelated" quotation seems to be one of the most often cited online by nature folks. I was interested to see how close his thinking was to one of John Muir's most famous lines: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

King and Muir shared that insight about interrelatedness, but of course King's inspiration came out of work toward social justice. When the challenge to white privilege via bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, was met with diabolical hatred, King did not seek inspiration in the mountains or anywhere else in nature, but in the kitchen of his own home, in the middle of the night, while his wife and daughter slept. He had just received yet another terrorizing phone call from a man who threatened to kill him, and it pushed him to the edge of endurance. "I am at the end of my powers," he wrote. "I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone."

But even in that moment of extremity he sought a way forward, and a veil was pierced: "I tell you I've seen the lightning flash," he wrote. "I've heard the thunder roar....  At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything."

Intellectually, it may be hard to conceive a moral universe, the fundamental belief of King's philosophy. The evidence of our own eyes would seem to go against it. Water falls from the sky and seeks repose, making beautiful waterfalls: a play of physical forces, neither right nor wrong. But in such moments of grace as related by Dr. King, perhaps reached only when we refuse to stop or retreat in our march toward whatever truth beckons to us, but instead to venture forward, might we experience the flashing lightning, the roaring thunder, the evidence of things not seen.

* * *