Out in nature with a dinosaur

I’ve never been much for spiritual growth. Oh, I approve of it and everything, and I do try to keep in tune with nature and with my own vices, the former serving as an antidote to the latter. But sitting around in the wilderness holding a talking stick and speaking the language of the New Age (now not so new, although of course it never was) — not my cup of java.

Imagine my surprise, then, when last weekend I picked up the talking stick. Further imagine my surprise when I started talking.

What I said is not for consumption here. These are personal matters, and even though this is a personal column, it is not that personal. My spiritual journeys, as fitful and peculiar as they may be, are my own business.

Everybody’s gotta have secrets. If your life is an open book, then clearly there are chapters you have skipped.

But I can write a little about how I got there and what I did. There’s a guy named Michael Ellis, a protean naturalist and tale-spinner, who leads trips to places in California and beyond. We’ve been on a bunch of them — Death Valley, Carrizo Plain, Mono Lake — and have always had an informative and amusing time.

It’s nice to be out in nature with someone who knows what he’s seeing. (Michael Ellis can be found at footlooseforays.com).

Ellis was leading a trip to a campground called the Cedars, an eerie serpentine barrens in northwest Sonoma County, on private land pretty much a million miles from everywhere, or so it seemed. Serpentine is the state rock of California, and places where it appears on the surface are poor in minerals and inhospitable to plant life.

Because there’s little vegetable life there, there’s little animal life there. Animals that eat other animals go somewhere else where the pickings are easier. The landscape is steep, with lots of bare talus slopes and patches of smooth green rock. There’s an encampment there too, guarded by a sheet metal dinosaur fully 15 feet high and watched over by disco balls placed in the occasional tree crevice.

There are no cedars at the Cedars; the tree in question is really a Sargent cypress, which looks not that much like a cedar, so who knows how the mistake came to be made. Anyway, the historical error is now officially preserved by the owners of the land.

Ellis wanted to do a trip called “Natural History, Natural Mystery,” which combined a spiritual component with his nature walks and campfire activities. A woman named Kerry Brady was along to lead the spiritual part of things. The idea was that we could refresh ourselves by slowing down enough to notice natural rhythms. Inner journeys and all that.

She sent her charges off into the landscape to see what they could see, and more to the point, notice what they could notice. She suggested that we could nap first, so I did that. My spiritual training is sufficient that I can always slumber by a river in the heat of midday.

We were in a kind of gulch with steep, bare walls on either side. There was a spring-fed creek and some lovely calcium carbonate formations, white and eerie and moon-like. There was manzanita and Douglasfir and coffeeberry — no relation to, you know, coffee. I realized I was naming plants.

I have trouble staying out of my own way, or trouble getting into my own space, or something. A writer observes and then writes about it; in between, he has to remember. The process of remembering requires, for me, the process of making sentences. That puts me at two removes from the self who isn’t a writer.

I’m still not convinced that I need to be in touch with my inner anything. I mean, except recreationally, at moments like these. There are people who shut up for months at a time as part of a spiritual practice; I doubt whether I could get through the afternoon without talking.

But I am quiet now. The temperature is in the mid-80s; the red dust from the trail blows up in the light westerly wind. There’s not much to notice, or too much; when I am in a landscape without animals, it’s hard to me to stare at trees for a long time.

It’s boring. I have not gotten beyond boring.

I suddenly see a lizard. It is looking at me, or at least in my direction. I look back at it. I try to imitate the hunch of its shoulders, the wide brace of its feet. I try to get into my lizardness. And I sort of do. That’s the key bit; I sort of do.

Not transcendence; not bad, either.

In which our hero goes on a quest that most resembles a slow walk, and finds lizards.