It’s quiet. The breeze is laden with it. In the distance: city, ocean and busier, quicker trails. In the moment: quiet. On the wooden bridge that separates Will Rogers State Park from Temescal Peak, the world comes to a standstill. It’s good there’s a bridge, I think. I’d spent so much of the hike staring at my shoes, dodging rocks and black beetles, because I’d always been unsteady on my feet. If I avert from the ground I’ll surely fall. It’s good there’s a bridge, because I can clutch its metal railing and look up and see all the world’s green.
But it isn’t always bad being glued to the ground! I’d have missed the rattlesnake otherwise, or the lone purple flower, or the lizards only ever scurrying off somewhere, always in motion, never letting people look too long. My friend crouches beside me with a digital camera. The flora and creatures rooted beneath us seem to never stay in focus. We’ll look back at the photos and skip past the blurry bits, or think of how much better they were in person. The beauty hides in the grooves and fissures of Los Angeles; places you can find only by walking, hiking, imparting a few hours to a verdant other side.
We hike further, higher. Black mustard petals and tall grasses brush against our arms, leave behind scratches, get stuck in our hair and jackets and socks. The trail will linger with us for weeks. There isn’t much shade in Will Rogers. It’s all yucca and desert pincushion dappled in a midday glow. The dust and dirt that gets threaded in our clothes lend us some glow of our own. How much higher until we escape the muggy morning and reach sun? Another mile, another stairway, another bend around which a new angle of LA appears.
The landscape makes me want to scream my favorite words, pretty words and weird words–whimsical! critter! dawn!–as though I could sew them into my skin and become like this window of peace in Southern California. But I’ve always been overdramatic. You should have seen my face when we found the Temescal Canyon waterfall! We heard it first, of course, rumbling and wet. And then there was another bridge, spitting us out across the overhang.
It’s good there’s a bridge, because I can pause on thinking about how much I’ll miss this next week, next year, next century. There’s just a bridge, a waterfall, a mountain and me.