Walking a New Path

My weekly column is now about paths and streets and tracks, caminos and chemins – finding a way.  Here’s one about a new trail in an old park.

The Lace Lichen Trail is the first new trail in 75 years at Point Lobos State Reserve, near where I live on the Monterey Peninsula. 

These 400 acres of cypress and pine forest along a stunning rocky oceanside promontory first became an official state park in 1933, but long before then trails and paths already snaked through the landscape.  Deer had formed windy ways in the woods, and the Ohlone native Americans had cleared away routes so they could gather sage and abalone.  19^th century visitors to Point Lobos, smugglers and artists and picnickers, cleared back more branches and dug out steps down to the sea. 

By the 1950’s park staff and volunteers had formalized these old tracks into trails named for their location -  North Shore, Carmelo Meadow, Bird Island, Cypress Grove.

Last year, as attendance at what has been called “the greatest meeting of land and sea” grew to nearly a million visitors a year, they decided to add the first new official trail in nearly a century.

I walked the new Lace Lichen Trail for the first time with my adult children Owen and Norah, at their invitation.  It was the day before Norah’s wedding.  Talk about a new path!

If our lives are journeys, (“the way,” “the pilgrim route,” “a long strange trip”) it’s a special day when we walk a new path.   This was a special day.

I say that this Lace Lichen Trail is new, but the first part is actually an old trail rebuilt.  Before, walkers had to watch out for lots of roots and bumps and narrow spots. You had to be careful going down and up the winter creek beds. Now it’s so hard and smooth and wide, it’s barely recognizable as the old trail.  With its new form, and some little bridges over the gullies, it now meets ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) standards..  For the first time, people in wheelchairs can move with ease through this mysterious forest, where feathery lace lichen droops from the branches of Monterey pine.

The trail is better for parents too – they can now smoothly wheel their kids in strollers, as the smell of the sea and the roar of the waves beckons them westward. 

And every walker is much safer than before, since the trail, which used to be shorter, now extends with brand new sections all the way from the park entrance to the sea, where you used to have to walk along a road.

If life - and marriage - are journeys, we surely know that those paths have bumps, gullies, narrow spots and some danger, if only from distracted drivers. 

So it is definitely a blessing when folks open up a new path for us.  It’s a gift to find a route that welcomes us all, that is safer, and has bridges.  A way for wanderings and discovery, whatever our age or ability.

Thanks, California taxpayers and Point Lobos Foundation for this blessed new path.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter

On the Road Again

My name, Deborah Streeter, means literally “bumble bee on the boulevard.” 

Deborah is the Hebrew word for bumble bee.

The people who first called themselves Streeters, in ancient Kent, England, lived on streets.  Our family story is to joke that we're not street walkers or street cleaners, but merchants.  When the Romans came in with their great invention, roads, we said, “Goodbye path in the woods, we’re moving our store to the street!”   Street-ers.

Belden Lane in his great book Backpacking with the Saints, about hiking as a spiritual discipline, and how taking along the writings of different religious authors can deepen a wilderness hike, tells of realizing, after a lifetime of hiking, that his own name, Belden Lane, describes well his own spiritual quest:  Belden is Old English for “beautiful hill,”  and he likes nothing better than hiking a trail and a track and  - yes –a Lane.  “My very identity calls me out to the edge,” he writes.

So this Street-er likes to walk also, and is very fond of different kinds of routes.  And like a bee, I am happiest travelling far and wide, making pollinating connections.

This past September I walked six straight days, 10-15 miles a day, in the Brionnais region of France, southern Burgundy.  Here are a few memories from my walk.

Margaret and DeborahI walked with my old friend, Margaret, with whom I am have walked once a month or so for over 20 years.  We hike near her home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, or mine in Big Sur.  We’ve done the “Power Walk” part of the Big Sur Marathon a few times, 21 miles up the coast on the closed Coast Highway with many other walkers and runners.

Once we did a five-day backpacking trip with a couple of other women in the Three Sisters Wilderness of Oregon.  We had won the trip at a church auction and we were all proud, women in our 50s and 60s, that we could do the strenuous backcountry hike.  But our leader was a little bossy about the correct way to hike and cook and put up our tent, so one day, to annoy him, Margaret and I started speaking only (bad) French.  It was very satisfying, and we also realized that we both knew enough French to amuse ourselves for a day.  Hence was born our dream to hike someday, without the annoying leader, in France.

I found a company, Highpoint Holidays, that offered countryside “independent walks.”  They give you a detailed guide booklet (“follow the track through the woods for 500 meters and take the grassy path to the left by the tree with a giant growth.”) and a good map and set you out hiking from tiny town to tiny town, between 17 and 25 kilometers a day.  Each night you stay at a different little chateau or farm or villa, where the charming hosts feed you a four or five course fancy French dinner, make you breakfast the next day, pack you a lunch, and you’re back on the route.  (Amazing, $150 a day for three meals, lovey private rooms, the detailed map – and your hosts then carry your stuff to the next place!)

The countryside is rolling green hills, mostly farms and woods, fields with large white Charollais beef cattle or hay and corn.  We walked a lot along hedgerows, very neat and well maintained tractor roads.  Each day we stopped at several lovely 12^th century Romanesque churches in the tiny villages we traversed and then went looking for our evening lodging, an old Georgian guest house or working farm or restored barn on the outskirts of town.  The churches were my passion and the reason for choosing this region.  Margaret patiently learned about chevets and crypts and tympanums and St. Martin and St. Hillaire and Abbot Hugh of Cluny.  She was more interested in the cows and very neat garden and comparing the neat woodpiles to hers at home.  As we walked we discussed husbands, our kids and their partners, travel, church history.  We hardly thought at all about work or politics for a week.  We saw no other walkers. 

One day it rained all day, but we had been warned and were prepared.  Our map and guide got a little soggy, and we got lost at one point, but that led to a delightful chat with a postman and a bored French woman in a tiny town.  We found a church for lunchtime shelter and ate our chevre and jambon sandwich and yummy fresh tomatoes in the back pew, leaving a note and a donation for the gift of a dry hour.  Our destination that afternoon was La Violetterie, a family home where 80-year-old Madeline welcomed us with a blazing fire and tea and cookies.  “I have been thinking about you in the rain all day,” she fretted as she hung our wet things over radiators and prepared our yummy dinner of Charollais veal in prune sauce and tomatoes from her garden stuffed with caviar and a creamy cheese. 

I could tell tales all day of our very different hosts and other guests and delicious meals and cool old restored houses.  But it is the route that I recall with the most fondness, the smells of hay and pond and sunflowers, the carefully trimmed elderberry-lined hedgerows, the steep old steps that led us from a little bridge over the stream up to the ridgetop ancient town and church.  Who built those steps, what stories of ten centuries could they tell? 

And the quiet.  The route kept us off most roads and instead meandered through woods and beside fields.  Some of the farms were abandoned, but most seemed well maintained.  In the US there would be creeping developments of McMansions at the edge of town, but the French have stricter laws on maintaining farms, our hosts said, and the prized grass fed beef gets a very good price at the market auction house we passed in the little town of St. Christophe en Brionnais. 

After a day or so I was able to remember that I was just walking, I had no schedule or appointments, just follow the various twists and turns. Margaret was good at reminding us, since our hosts weren’t ready to receive us til 4PM, that we could stop and lie in the hay for a while, or sit on an ancient stone wall and look across the vast green valley.

Actually I guess I wasn’t a Street-er on this trip, but reverted back to the little paths and tracks of my ancestors.  It was a shock to come into the huge (1500 residents) town of Charlieu with actual stores.  We quickly found our way back to the hedgerows.   

Our last night was back at the same chateau where we started the loop, but our hosts Olivier and Pascal seemed to know that we did not need another boisterous boozy opening meal as they had served us six days earlier.  Over a much simpler repas we discussed village politics (Pascal is mayor of tiny Varennes Sous Dun.)  The other guest, Vijay, an Indian engineer living in Frankfort, who regularly stays with Olivier and Pascal when he visits the local Bosch plant, compared village economies of France and India.  It was a gentle way to reenter the world of highways and cities. 

But in my dreams I go back to the fields and the churches.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter

Moving Directions

As an adult, I’ve moved 6 times.  Some of my changes in residence were moving away from something (first marriage failed, apartment too small for growing family, unexpectedly unemployed) and some were moves toward something (new relationship, new job, surprise small inheritance that emboldened me to make a crazy move.) 

We are increasingly a world of people on the move.  Migrants, immigrants, emigres, refugees. My life will never come close to that of a refugee, but all humans share this basic pattern, that sometimes we move to get away, and other times we move toward something new.

The average American moves at least 12 times in their lifetime, or every 5 years (depending on how you read the stats – your mileage may vary.  Younger people are now moving more often.)  Those figures include childhood moves.   I know people who moved almost every year as a child, different schools and friendships formed and then left behind, over and over.  I am very grateful my parents were able to stay in the same suburban New Jersey house for my whole first 18 years, while they took jobs all over the greater NYC area.  For children the moves away seem especially painful.

After our various adult moves, my husband and I finally settled into this house, and we just realized this month that we’ve been here 20 years! I’ve never lived that long in any one place in all my 65 years.  These two decades have been anything but consistent.  My kids grew from elementary school to adulthood and marriage.   Like my parents in that New Jersey house, I’ve had several different jobs while living here.  But I’ve slept each night in the same bed, shopped at the same stores, learned the local roads and parks and libraries and schools. 

I imagine I have a few more moves in my future.  I don’t expect to take a job in a new city, but this house may not work well if I live to old age. It may be too remote and labor intensive to live in alone.  The older we get we start to think about where we want to die, what house, what town.  If we have a choice.

Most Americans say they want to die at home, and expect to, but the stats remind us to be a little more realistic: 75% of us will die in hospital or some kind of nursing facility.   Even though I’ve done some planning and saving, I still worry about these future moves.  The day will come when I have to move in both directions.  I will move away from my familiar life here, and towards my last move in this life.

This business of moving towards death is on my mind because I just helped a dear elderly neighbor come home from the hospital and die in his own home.  My friend’s life makes mine look like a nomad’s – he had lived for 50 years in the same small cabin he built in the woods.  As he aged he was increasingly reluctant and unable to leave the house.  He did no moving, either away or toward. 

I had envied him his simple house and life, but I saw how his world shrunk as he aged.  He had no choice but to stay where he was.  I worry about waiting too long for a move.  His stuff piled up around him.  I offered to help organize it, but he declined.  I think it gave him comfort, memories.  Not having moved for 50 years, he was never forced to lighten the load.  Now my friend’s nephews are cleaning and clearing out the cabin, and all his stuff is moving out without him. 

Unlike my neighbor, I have children who will probably take care of me and help me move, maybe in with them.  We sometimes felt a little sorry for our friend, but he chose his life, and was so adored by neighbors like me that we willingly helped him make that very last move from hospital to home and from home to death. 

I guess that’s the best we can ask for, that our last move is easy, and not alone.

Copyright © Deborah Streeter

Raze and Raise

Your building columnist raises hell about hell.

“Sometimes there’s hell to be raised, and other times there’s hell to be razed.” 

Rev. Julian DeShazierRev. Julian DeShazier, a young black hip hop artist, preacher and pastor of University Church at the University of Chicago, spoke at our regional church meeting last week and encourage us to raze some hell.

Hip hop is not my first language, or tenth.  I heard a fair amount of hip hop on the car radio with teenage kids, and despite my best efforts to be the hip Mom, I found myself repeating my parents’ complaining questions from 30 years earlier – “Where’s the melody?  Why are they yelling?”  (And my parents were asking about the Rolling Stones!)

But listening to Julian (hip hop name Jkwest) I did figure out that I share with these artists a love of words and word play and quirky rhymes.  The one that struck home for this decidedly un-hip hop preacher was “raise” and “raze,” especially when applied to hell.

“Raising hell” is making trouble, acting out.  When adolescents raise hell it’s often dangerous, like driving and drinking in excess.  We hope it’s just a phase and they’ll grow out of it. 

Julian said usually we Christians disapprove of hell raising.  When Jesus says, “Unless we become like children we’ll not enter kingdom of heaven” we often picture sweet little cherubic kids smiling and listening to their elders.  No hell raising there. 

But he told the story of going to a discount clothes store with his wife and young son and seeing some other kids, not at all cherubic, but rather tired and frustrated waiting for their shopping parents.  The kids were tugging at the massive racks of cheap child-labor clothes, pulling stuff off, crying in frustration.  Julian identified with those kids and imagined maybe Jesus meant this kind of child could also show us what God’s kingdom is like.  Kids who are “bad,” disobedient, who want to be outdoors and free.  They let their parents know by pulling some stuff down.  We all remember that frustration, wanting to be free of stuff and expectation. 

Maybe, he suggested, God wants us to be like those kids too, raze a little hell, say no sometimes to decorum and expectation?

Notice Julian’s word play?  He surely knew that we mostly white Californian Christians, as hip and liberal as we were, were not going to sign up for hell raising as our Christian duty.  So he did a nice quick hip hop turn of phrase and said he meant that we, like those kids, should raze some hell.  We should be tearing down, like those clothes racks, the structures of injustice that are hell to the poor and even the rich.

Small diversion into some word derivation: (This is me, I’m not sure hip hop artists consult etymology.com, maybe they do.)

-“raise” comes from rise, and even rear – to bring up, come up, lift up.

-“raze” – comes from a totally different word, to scrape, like razor, and has come to mean to demolish or destroy.

So raise is good, right?   Bring up, rear a child.  And raze must be bad, demolish, destroy.

No, more complex than that.  Remember Picasso said, “Every act of construction begins with destruction.”

And what exactly is the hell that we are raising or razing?

I looked for the history of the phrase “raising hell” and it’s pretty vague.  A more common phrase with a similar meaning is “raising Cain.”  It seems that Cain, the Biblical first murderer, embodies the hellish - chaos, being bad, disobedient.  You could say that Cain was hell’s first resident (if you are a Biblical literalist, both about Cain and hell.)

In addition, etymologists say that the “raise” part of the phrase raising hell or raising Cain is not really raise like rise up or rear, but “summon or cause a spirit to appear,” like “raise the specter” of something.

So the first phrase, raising hell, means summoning up the spirit of hellishness, a spirt of chaos and lawlessness, personified in a person (Cain) or a place (the realm known as hell.)  I know I as a teenager enjoyed summoning up the spirit of hellishness.

But hell in the second phrase is different.  If you “raze” hell you are talking about a structure, hell is a structure or a building.  Julian was telling us that some buildings are so bad, so corrupt, so hellish, they need to be razed, torn down.

Could this distinction apply to this week’s political news?  One might say that the crazy populist forces behind Trump and Brexit are hell raisers, lawless lovers of chaos who summon up (successfully) our disobedient ignoble natures. 

And Clinton, and those behind Remain – maybe they are trying to raze hell.  Not hell as a place over there, on the other side of the wall, scary demonic others, immigrants and Muslims.  But hell as structures.   That systemic hell must be torn down, and then rebuilt as something different.  Would the Remainers say that, granted, the EU has problems, needs some tearing down and some rebuilding, but not totally rejected? Here in the US both Sanders and Clinton have been saying we need to raze some walls and structures of inequality, not build up Trump’s new walls.

Trump does seem like an adolescent hell raisers.  Kasich tried to sell himself as the only adult in the room, and got 3% of the vote. 

But it is old folks who are acting adolescent, voting for Trump and for Brexit.  The young polled that they want to stay and rebuild – are they just more mature than their elders?  Why don’t more of the young vote, for Brexit, for Sanders?  Is voting just a futile old attempt at shoring up a building that needs just to be razed and rebuilt? 

I fear for our nations and for crumbling structures.  We’re already living in hell.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter

Nests

Lots of homebuilding this week here on the Monterey Peninsula, land and sea.

The AquariumStanding on the deck of the Monterey Bay Aquarium this week, it felt like I was in the middle of a busy, noisy construction site for a new subdivision, hundreds of new homes being built all at once. 

But instead of lumber trucks and cement mixers coming and going, filling every lot with identical new homes, it was pelagic cormorants building nests on every available space on the lower ledges under the Aquarium’s decks that hang over the bay.  

Like new families rushing into their first homes to set up the nursery, these long thin black birds (sort of like flying unopened umbrellas) dived and tugged at the giant kelp seaweed and then flew back to the ledges, building material in their mouth, to create a birth shelter for their young.  Each year the birds build a new nest, lay eggs, feed their young yummy regurgitated fish from the rich bay waters, and watch them grow and fly away.  Until next year, when maybe the kids set up housekeeping on the next ledge and do their own building.

Cormorants on the ledge by Tyler Shewbert at http://cormorants.smiocs.com/Inspired by this sign of a vital economy (new home construction), I stopped on my way home to check out another favorite animal’s new family home.  Well, new family, but old home.  For years I’ve admired a large woodrat nest up in a big old cypress tree at Point Lobos State Reserve, another place I volunteer.  Unlike the cormorant, wood rats build one nest for the ages.  But winter storms make some spring restoration necessary and I was glad to see the nest looked good, strong and neat high in the tree. 

I didn’t approach the nest (that’s the point, ten feet up on the tree out of my range and that of other predators) but I know that inside there’s not just a newly fortified nursery for the five litters of babies that will be born there this year, but a whole range of specialized rooms – bathroom, storage room, bedroom.  I joke with school groups that I lead that the only room that’s missing is the TV room, since the reception is so bad here on the Big Sur coast, but otherwise it’s a cozy multi-roomed house.  Even though the rats, unlike the cormorants, keep the same house, their kids too, like the birds, will have to build their own new nest.  No millennials getting free rent from mom and dad.

Sometimes I ask those school kids what room in their house is their favorite, as a way of making the point that all animals, including us, want to live in a habitat which provides three things: food and safety and community/family.  Most kid’s favorite room is the kitchen, which is really all three, food, safety, family.  Bedroom is mostly safety.  (I bet these kids don’t even know what a TV room is – in their house everyone probably sits around staring at their own screen.  Not sure that’s the most nourishing or community building kind of habitat.)

A Rat’s Nest from Zulu Thoughts at http://bit.ly/1raiLSK When it comes to building materials, the rats use twigs and sticks for their large nests, building ingenious beams and joists and walls and windows, and bring in lace lichen and leaves for softer beds.  The birds use the marine equivalent of sticks and twigs, fronds from the giant kelp seaweed.  But this damp and rubbery material won’t stick together on its own – it needs some adhesive.  The cormorants use a handy local product to replicate what the cement truck brings to a building site – their own guano.  It’s much like cement, same texture and color.  And readily available, no need to go to Home Depot.

It’s interesting that for some animals home construction means just building a nursery/family room, and only in the spring, like the cormorant nest.  Then off they go for the year, finding food on the fly (literally), sleeping here and there. 

But others, like wood rats are more like us – many rooms for many functions and lots of stuff, built to last year round. (Wood rats are also known as pack rats.  In their store rooms are not just acorns but any shiny trash they can find, which they save for years.)

Obviously my life, and my home, are more like the wood rats’.  I have a strong safe house and I expend time and capital on it constantly to keep it so.  I would be lost if I had to roam most of the year without kitchen and bedroom and strong walls.  I tell myself.  Maybe all those specialized rooms and insurance bills just keep me stuck in my pack rat style existence. 

Could it be that those retirees who’ve sold their homes and travel the nation in their Winnebagos, whom I mock and scorn, are really free as a bird?  Maybe they’re the ones who know that home is really just where the heart is.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter