Cataract Falls

* * *

The water's flowing nicely in Cataract Creek. It was raining when I set out down the trail, and I took a leisurely stroll along the creek, taking in the refreshing sights and sounds of the rainy season's arrival.

With nothing to hinder me, I flowed with the water.

Every now and then something would catch my eye. I took a lot of photographs that didn't make the cut. I just liked being out there so much I didn't want to rush.

Unfortunately I forgot to bring any food or water. I drank from the creek a couple of times, but I sure wished I'd remembered to bring a snack bar or something. I decided to go no further than Upper Cataract Falls. I'd somehow spent about three hours getting there. It took about a half hour to return to my car.

Quite a few people were on the trail, trailing kids and dogs and friends and family members. Everybody head-to-toe in rain gear. I should say almost everybody. One young man was hiking with no shirt on, feeling his oats. A couple young ladies had me take their picture with a phone camera down here at the base of the falls, then they leaped across the creek and scrambled up the slick rocks to the top of the falls. The season is autumn, but the rain brings everyone back to life. Standing at the fence near the base of the falls, the scent of bay laurel was sweet in the air.

* * *

Contentment

* * *

Back in my Navy days, when I was 18-22 years old, my best friend and I read a lot of Hemingway. We wanted to be world travelers and great lovers and suck the marrow of life. Our nemesis: contentment. To be content was to be marrow-less and inert. Fast-forward to middle age, and one day I realize I am content. Dammit.

I was content--but not really. I still had a hankering for adventure. Not climbing Mt. Everest or anything. Maybe get married. Take vows and keep them. Get a more meaningful job and stick with it through thick and thin. Enforce a modicum of physical toughness by getting regular exercise and eating right. Start a blog and keep at it even when you think you're running out of steam. Stuff like that.

Sometimes you have to put energy into the system to break out of the rut of contentment. Sometimes energy comes into the system from the outside, from the demands of work or marriage or what have you. Either way, life has a way of kicking contentment's ass, and when that happens, when we insist on keeping our contentment, the result is depression and other nasty afflictions of one's spirit.

So I was thinking about this stuff as I was biking home from work last night, and I realized I had a photo from last Sunday's outing to Mt. Tam that I could turn into a kind of kid's story about contentment. It all starts with a seed.

The seed drops out of the bay laurel tree and bounces when it hits the ground. It bounces into a little depression on a big rock. It thinks how nice this little bed is, and it lives like that for a couple of months before it feels a stirring within. WTF? it asks. (Hey, I said "kind of" a kid's story!) The little peppernut likes things just the way they are, so nice and comfy. But then the winter rains come, and the peppernut thinks it's going crazy for a minute. Something weird is happening! Over the next couple of days, a little root comes out and burrows into the little bed of dirt. The peppernut stands up on its root and says woohoo! It likes the view. A couple of cotyledons pop out, and of course as time goes on, the peppernut goes from seedling, to sapling, to full-grown tree making flowers and peppernuts of its own.

By this time it has given up on contentment. For one thing, it lives on a rock! All those bay laurels in their thick juicy soil have it so easy! Okay, they have problems of their own, but none of them had to make it while living on a rock. Living on a rock made growing up a lot harder, and it took a lot longer. Sadly, many peppernuts that land on a rock don't get to grow up into a flowering tree at all.

So tip your hat the next time you walk past a bay laurel growing out of a rock. We're in this wild world together, after all. It's fine to rest on your laurels, but you don't want to rot there.

* * *

Choice

* * *

They used to say humans are the only animals who use tools. Then someone noticed monkeys using tools and even ravens using tools. I haven’t kept up with all the animals that have been discovered to use tools, but I often think about the underlying question of what basic attributes set us apart as human beings. Until recently, everything that occurred to me fell short. Other animals think and learn and remember, and they feel pain and pleasure and emotion, and so on.

Then I wondered if humans are the only creature that can be honorable or dishonorable. Many animals can be cunning, but it seems to me their cunning is in the service of their true nature. A wolf doesn’t wear sheep’s clothing, but it probably would if it ever became as clever as a human. You’d never need to ask an animal what its code of honor is. I’d like to ask our presidential candidates what their code of honor is. What are the top three to five ideals they have lived by? Do they have a history of working for public benefit or private gain? Can they make a joke at their own expense or do they make jokes about others? Do they take responsibility for their mistakes or do they make excuses and rationalizations?

At around 7:45 this morning I heard a sudden loud holler come from the woods across the way. I was on Bolinas Ridge at the Serpentine Power Point and looked north to see where the noise had come from. The shout was so loud that I thought there must be a rambunctious hiker on the Cataract Trail. But as the sound sank into my brain cogs for further processing I realized the sound had come from a coyote. A couple minutes later the coyote howled again—and yes, I mean howled! It was soon answered by other coyotes with howls, barks, yips and whatever other sounds coyotes make. Icing on the cake of a gorgeous morning.

I thought of another potentially distinct human trait. Humans feel shame. Many years ago, I took an emergency medical technician class where one of the EMT instructors told us that sometimes people who choke on their food, even in a crowded restaurant, are found to have wandered off and quietly choked to death. The EMT said some people feel ashamed to have food stuck in their craw, so they go off by themselves to try to cough up the offending chunk, only to asphyxiate and die alone in a stairwell or restroom stall.

I suspect there is no such thing as a wild coyote that feels shame. I’ve seen dogs that appeared to feel shame, but I figure it was humans who did that to the dog. So, perhaps humans aren’t the only animals that feel shame. But they might be the only animals that inflict it.

Being honorable and dishonorable, bestowing praise and inflicting shame—these are probably uniquely human traits. Part of our true nature. But maybe at an even more fundamental level, humans are the only animals that face such dichotomies in their lives, and are therefore the only animals with the power to choose to act one way or the other.

* * *