Horizontal & Vertical: Walking
To not expend the vertical at the expense of the horizontal, or, how to walk two ways at once, take full advantage of variable radials and find a point of culmination, that is, a place to stop, take it in, and turn back.
*
Heading south from Mill Valley to Highway 101 to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, I am drawn off course onto the curvy road over to Tennessee Valley where I stop my car in the parking lot at the head of the gate-closed, L-shaped tar road that leads to the corner turn to the west which leads on to the wide, relatively level trail that goes down through the valley to the Lagoon and narrow Cove with a sand covered beach and the creek outlet on the edge of the Pacific. It is going on one o’clock and what drew me is the bright angled sunlight - particularly so, after several days of rain, delectably warm - the breeze, and a sudden desire to break pattern. It is the day after Christmas during which we had a large family dinner and now a Boxing Day dinner party looming with the promise of twenty people carrying leftovers soon to arrive through the same door. I needed a break, a quick adventure before pulling back on to schedule. The parking lot is full and then some – families, groups, couples, bike riders, joggers and folks on horses already arriving back or now starting to make a kind of pilgrimage down the initial stretch of road between the high barren slopes dropping down from the various Headland hill tops to the adjacent, barely visible, brush surrounded stream that runs under a long row of thick tree trunks of which mostly are ancient, green leaved Eucalyptus. I squeeze my car into a place next to a fence.
Normally it takes an hour and a half to walk all the way down past to the Cove and then back – particularly if you are talking with friends and hang around on the beach on the other side of a small creek that outlets in the ocean. If I was to keep my obligations for the rest of the afternoon, the question would be where to stop on trail and turn back, a hard thing to do when pulled by the slow, sloping gravity towards the ocean, including the inborn desire to reach a terminus, especially one that reaches out beyond itself in what appears as an infinite horizon of sky and water.
The Tennessee Valley Trail is a particular favorite for young families. There are no real high grades to climb and the asphalt road at the short corner of the “L” breaks into a light, sparsely chipped gravel trail over which it’s relatively easy to push a baby in a stroller. The relatively new families with one or two young children often appear clearly happy, in fact exuberant, to be free from the predictable habits and walls of their combined domestic lives. Perhaps similarly, the Trail is also a favorite one for robust sounding, peripatetic talkers, whose voices often seem joyfully full of the confessional that fill the passing ear with elliptically overheard phrases, variously exporting the impatient release of secrets, observations and/or thoughts, things one imagines that can only be said away from the office, the home, far from the ear of a difficult partner, client, boss, sibling, child, or, one suspects, the assessments of a local therapist.
I am not sure in what way the Trail itself accounts for these resonant sounding revelations. Maybe the urge to tell is partly given birth by the physical and energetic momentum of walking towards the Ocean, and that in combination with the particular topography of the width and shape of the Valley - the high hilly slopes that accent down from the four and five hundred foot heights of the Marin Headlands to bottom out into a relatively narrow spread of space in which there is still room for a corral and horse training rink, the ranch house at the corner L-shape, and the ghosts of cattle and other farm animals that are now replaced by the frequent occurrence of light brown deer under the Eucalyptus or up the slopes, the occasional sightings of singular black bobcats in the now, new green grass, and an occasional, mostly in the evening, gold coated and, if dark, amber eyed cougar. Of course, the birds: the descending and elevating groups and couples of dark winged buzzards, black crows, red-tail hawks, and, at night, the echoed calls of an invisible owl or two.
Indeed, not long after I round the corner on the gravel trail, a father, who is escorting his youngish kids, tells me to be on the lookout for a bobcat across to the lower slope on the opposite side of the valley. “That’s really a treat,” he says. I amble on to face the breeze that is now warm and swift, flowing in from the ocean. Up and down the trail’s low slopes, I spot nothing in the green meadow to other side of willow stands that cover the creek. Instead now, the eye rises west into the transparent blue sky where stiff wind appears to have uplifted and carried multiple kinds of birds into flight. Young, small buzzards are wheeling, appearing and disappearing in and out of the interweaving cuts between the rain-fresh, brown and white, craggy rock-cropped hills. The buzzards’ flight patterns are punctuated by the direct transverses of smaller crows, each one appearing singularly purposeful in going from side of the Valley to another, some heading towards the dark trees that saddle from the shadowed ridge up the northern side.
Yet, as I continue to walk along towards the horizon, what catches the eye most are a separated pair of red-tail hawks, one maybe 100 feet overhead, and another 100 yards further west towards the ocean, each one, wings outstretched, alternately catching, holding still and drifting to the current of the wind; I study the one overhead as closely as I can, now to the north, its gray belly, plump - perhaps filled with the recent cargo of a rodent - it swivels slightly from side to side. It’s hard not to be totally impressed with the bird’s supreme aerial confidence – indeed beauty – and its simultaneous ability to take care of its predatory nutrition needs. In a short while, the wind current exhausts itself; the bird drops down and flies back around through a semicircular route; it is now more to the south, a little off-slant to my eye, almost parallel to my gait. Then something astonishing occurs, maybe something more accountable because of the deep southern angle of the winter sun: when the hawk’s belly tilts against my eye, the dark sewn red of its tail flickers up into an illuminated crimson, an open feathered glint as startling and sharp as the edge of a knife. Once, then twice, and a third time – one visual ‘cut’ after another - before the bird floats further back inland behind my forward steps.
Over the years – it seems I learn again and again – sometimes it is the intersection of the horizontal (walking forward) and vertical (looking up) that can define and complete a walk, at least one in which the eyes and feet work to achieve a kind of collaboration. Indeed, as the feet move forward, the eye does its own form of sky-walking, actually a kind of flying in which, today, for example, the various birds floating overhead take the eye in what seem all manner of arcs, lines and full circles, alternately or simultaneously intersecting in a series of parabolas, each one tilted at a different angle, whose positions shift to concur with the wind’s diverse currents. The eye orbits up and down through this vertical space – quick or slow, in either small or large fractions - to engage the luminous edges of a constantly, and differently slanted, parabolic kind of circus: the birds – in this case - rotating the eye’s focus across a shifting axis and, on more than one occasion, providing a full, maybe dramatic stop: the hawk’s crimson flicker.
Time is bearing down on my walk. In the distance, I can well see the pale blue horizon over the silver glazed waters both of which are framed within the profile of the cove’s intersecting hillsides, each one a steep slope down, as if, in some ancient geological time, the two edges were the facing angles of an upside-down triangle. I am torn by anxiety of wanting to go all way, to let the trail’s horizontal gravity draw my feet down to edge of the ocean, or to resist and turn back to meet my Holiday obligations. My eye rises to one of the Red Tail Hawks as it arcs up into a fresh wind current, one bird among the sight of many, each one pursuing multiple arcs and lines – each a radial within the immediate horizon. At that point, the eye shifts slightly down and outward to fully embrace and include the green spread and shape of the immediate valley. I am struck still, brought to a full stop. The sudden full axis and collaboration of horizontal and vertical, the intersection of which culminates in one unified space and moment: a pleasure, fulfilled. I can turn back without a further step.