Jane Merryman

           These hills have everything taken away from them except curve. It’s like walking into a painting. Or into an illustration in a children’s book, one about a reclusive child who discovers a landscape reduced to its geometry, a kid geometry of lollipop trees, hills the backs of sleeping giants. Half the painting is wide blue empty sky.

            An early June day spent on Estero Trail is like stepping into such a painting, a Wayne Thiebaud landscape filled with bold forms, broad unpeopled distances, and a deep sense of loneliness.

            I start by skirting the sleeping giants. The path dips down into the old tree farm, crosses a narrow neck of Home Bay, and begins a procession of rollercoaster ups and downs. At first it rises steeply, like Thiebaud’s dizzyingly vertical city streets, and hangs above Home Bay, a little finger of Drakes Estero, itself a larger finger off Drakes Bay where the Gulf of the Farallones pushes against the California coast. Low tide uncovers myriad channels that lace the bay into a sacred maze. Egrets patrol the mud flats, the flurry of their rookery barely visible in the distant pines. 

            The trail turns from water and wanders across wind-shorn fields and grassy cliffs down into Muddy Hollow and out to Limantour Spit. I am not going that far today, but far enough. Four and a half miles to Drakes Head.

            I know these four and a half miles. I know the wind and its bullying habit that makes me hesitate before taking the turnoff to the trailhead. I know the monotony of treeless hills, the confusion of now clear, now faint tracks, and the untidiness of their erosion. I know I will be the lonely child who undoubtedly becomes lost among false trails and lines of barbed wire marching off in all directions. I expect to see no other human until the last half mile at the end of the day. I know I will find something magical.

            The first bewitchery is the wind, always here, playing with the purple velvet grass and making whole hillsides dance. The second is the tree farm—Monterey pines arranged in strict rows. Never harvested, they have grown tall, their crowns thick. Once, this stand was gloomy; now luminescent leaves of elderberry light up the understory. Roses and baccharis along the sunny edges invite birds in to flit and chatter—robins, thrushes, mourning doves.

             Soon I leave behind these cozy woods and strike out under unrelenting sky, for until Drakes Head there are no trees except The Eucalyptus atop one of the rollercoaster rises. For nearly thirty years we have been friends, this grand old specimen and I. Each time I visit, it wears fewer leaves, and its branches, an elegant patchwork of beige, rose, and gray, reach out all the farther to one side at the behest of the constant wind. I used to straddle one smooth, curving limb like an enormous swing, but it has sunk into the sandy earth, permanently moored. Like the tree, the panorama of land and water is stripped to essentials of form and light, a triumph of minimalism.

             Although punctured by watery digits that have insinuated themselves into the land, this is dry country. I find concrete troughs ten or twelve feet in diameter containing only coils of rusted barbed wire and dead weeds. Ranchers have carved out several freshwater ponds where cattle and birds congregate. The dark, almost sinister waters are fringed with pond plants. One of them is Hydrocotyle ranunculoides. How I love to say that name, the zaftig syllables fill my mouth like chocolate mousse. I never use the common name, pennywort—too ordinary. Round, scallop-edged leaves one to two inches across—that some botanist thought looked like the leaves of a buttercup, Ranunculus—drift on the shallow water.  They are almost overwhelmed by pondweed, another floating plant with oblong brown leaves, a fine contrast to the green coins of hydrocotle. A few dainty white Lobb’s buttercups ride on the coffee-brown water. The dairy cows that graze here are shy and gentle. They let me approach within a few feet before loping off with a sudden jerk, or they sit on the trail and stare at me as I walk around them. I pretend I am perfectly cool about calling their bluff.

              In one of the ponds a smooth movement parts the water. A muskrat swims along the edge of the pondweed, its brown fur shiny and sleek, almost the same color as the water. It dives under, leaving no ripples. Little Wa-zhushk, the muskrat, plays an important part in the Native American story of the creation of Turtle Island. It is he who of all the animals is able to swim to the bottom of the deep waters and bring back a pawful of earth in order to begin the world anew. To this day, muskrats can stay under for a very long time, up to fifteen minutes. In the children’s book I have walked into, this creature is the magical one, the wise one. This must be true, for how did he get here, this denizen of freshwater, how did he find his way to this pond across all these dry hills and salty esteros?

               Soon I leave the cows and their empty troughs behind. It’s just me, and grass, wind, and ox-eye daisies covering the backs of the giants like a sprinkling of snow. I follow a faint side trail to the brow of Drakes Head and look down several hundred feet into a Thiebaud abstract acrylic of horizontal planes. The tide is out, revealing the anatomy of the estero: a wide green channel of deep water winds in sweeping esses between blue shallows. Dark patches of eelgrass float in the blue. Then the long line of sand dunes on the spit—beige, ecru, umber—and a strip of turquoise ocean beyond. Empty sky still takes up half the painting.

               A sea lion glides through the eelgrass. Hunting? Playing? I watch him for a long time as he turns this way and that; sometimes he seems lost, sometimes he is full of intention. At last he slips into the green channel and disappears.

               In the car on the way home I listen to a CD of Gregorian chant, music much like today’s landscape—spare, essential, lingering in the mind like a certain painting.