A hike is not about completion. It’s about discovery.
The Henry Cowell Observation Deck Loop Trail is 5.3 miles that includes a hill, sand, rocks and an observation deck with a 360-degree view of Monterey Bay and surrounding mountains. On a day as beautiful as today, the loop might take you to another world.
Ask these guys.
Sleepy John Sandidge, Ben Rice, Laurence Bedford, Sven Davis and I are hardly touchy-feely. We could wear T-shirts that say, “Wrinkled on the outside, cranky on the inside.” All five of us squeeze into Ben’s Tesla; the three of us in the backseat are so jammed together we can’t put our seatbelts on, but we’re packed in so tight we feel we don’t need to.
At the beginning of the car ride to the trailhead the talk is pragmatic; we share information about a water bucket rat trap Sleepy John has discovered called Drop in the Bucket, of how to keep our kitchens from turning into ant farms, our problems with meniscus knee issues, girlfriend issue and memory issues. I learn that a nicotine patch could improve my memory. I never had much luck with nicotine patches. It’s so hard to keep them lit.
No doubt our need to share survival information comes from the heaviness of the times. The upcoming Nov. 5 election that puts us on the brink of patriarchal fascism can make it hard to breathe. Walt Whitman contended that the gravest weakness of democracy is the artificial, culturally manufactured inequality of the genders, “a corruption of nature.”
But there is also a smell in the air of a robotic American empire in the making, a future defined by AI neuro-chips in brains where we simply feel what we want, and a computer will give us exactly that. Maybe in a year or two I’ll write about these hikes when we’re joined by one of the new Tesla robots, carrying our lunch, our water, and lighting our joints for us on the trail. But with a hiking robot we’d never get lost enough to wander, trailblaze and discover. We would lose so much.
We step out of the car—yes, a Tesla—on the east side of Graham Hill Road, just past Rollingwood Drive. The day and the forest are so beautiful our humanness feels restored. We’re alive. I begin to sense that, like me, the boys are hoping for a moment of transcendence on the trail.
Sleepy John’s name is an intentional misnomer; at 85 he has more energy than the law allows, or at least more than they can apprehend. After our 30-minute ascent from the Graham Hill entrance up to the trail toward the Henry Cowell Observation Deck, Sleepy John stops inside a circle of redwoods. “Guys, gotta take a blow.” We look up to find a natural cathedral, the trees point to the heavens like the red roofline of an In-N-Out Burger, maybe the closest any of us get to a church experience.
We tend to walk in the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote, “I cannot believe in a God who needs to be praised all the time.” Furthermore: “I can only believe in a God who wants to dance.”
Sleepy John flops down on his back, stares straight up and says, “Oh, my god, the redwoods look like they are holding up the sky.” In a way, they are. Redwoods are stellar at capturing CO2 and producing oxygen. I turn to see my four supine friends, all staring straight up.
Though not a word is uttered about searching the sky for meaning, my four companions coalesce into a group meditation on the heavens. They breathe together. They don’t blink. My crankier-than-thou friends are sky gazing and redwood forest bathing.
It turns out that sky gazing is an established form of meditation that moves you out of your thoughts into space and emptiness. There is a social psychology study from the University of Toronto that finds that sky gazing can even make you a nicer person (“Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). The study says that sky gazing helps us feel “diminished in the presence of something greater than oneself … we realize how insignificant our problems are.”
Here’s the cool thing: “it may encourage people to forgo strict self-interest to improve the welfare of others.” Looking into the sky is where our empathetic imagination can roam free. There is hope for me and my hiking buddies yet; wrinkled on the outside, empathically cranky on the inside.
The trail up to the Observation Deck is steep enough and long enough to test us a bit. On an ascent we bend toward the mountain, it’s how we compare ourselves to the earth. We hike silently, the uphill trail makes our usual banter turn into sucking in all the oxygen we can.
The Observation Deck is awesome. The view across Monterey Bay goes all the way to Fremont Peak. We marvel at the majesty of the old, dead Woodpecker Tree and the ancient geology surrounding us, and then the future of humanity rides up the trail.
From the Observation Deck we see a stunning mare, her black coat shining in the sunlight, carry a young woman up the trail; two spirits in feminine form who are separated only by a thin English saddle, moving as one with strength and beauty.
My disturbing ruminations about robots and patriarchal fascism evaporate with this arrival of new, fresh air. I see them as the future of humanity with promises of peacefulness and self-restraint. I ask the confident young woman on the black mare if I can take her picture. She smiles gently and says, “Of course.”
When you make love, even though you and your partner know it’s going to be good, you never can really remember just how wonderful it feels until you do it. That is how we feel about today’s hike on the Henry Cowell Observation Deck Loop Trail.
To go back to Nietzsche, “Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement in which the muscles do not also revel. All prejudices emanate from the bowels. Sitting still is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.”
You can begin the trail at the Henry Cowell State Park Headquarters (where the circle is) or you can park along Graham Hill Road past Rollingwood Drive to walk the Observation Deck Loop. To get to the Observation Deck, go up Powder Mill Road, it becomes Ridge Road and then Pine Trail.
