Through the chaparral to the stream below

With a college friend's family, we went on a hike for Labor Day. I like the idea of a restful, active, enjoyable  Labor Day in which activities are engaged yet no money changes hands, no labor is for me done on this day of rest for the working class (Go Samuel Gompers!). We drove up into the hills above Santa Monica and parked along a city street of hedges on one side and concrete piles holding a house 30 feet above the other, building into the slope. A birthday boy of 65, his two daughters, a son-in-law, a friend, and the Bijurs. Miriam went on my back in a framed backpack that looks old enough to have held my younger brother in his baby days.

Down the road and past a gate and up a road avoiding mountain bikers in their skin tight performance fabric patterned and logoed clothes. Cliff and slope to one side and around the curve the canyon to the left opens up and out and down and behind our left shoulders a glimpse then a view of the fogged in seashore a few miles away. Up the road then off it and down a trail that once was a road down to a private camp in the valley now long since abandoned and the chaparral, wild fennel and mint and dry dry sumac and manzanita and scrub oak that looks like no oak tree found on a street called Oak Street in a town in upstate New York or outside Ann Arbor. There are still bits of asphalt but mostly the trail was a stiff dirt path with bushes close enough on either side to scratch at our clothes. Down into the canyon and the scrub trees became larger and broader and we needed to duck beneath branches and around overgrowth. Going under a branch with 20 pounds of cheerful squirmyness on my back called for the use of muscles and balance more closely associate with yoga than hiking. It took a village to get us around some obstacles, lifting branches, holding out supports, spotting routes.

At the end of it, water, real flowing cold natural beautiful water in the midst of the hot dry hills of Southern California. A stream, not just a trickle, down the middle of the canyon and our destination, after the leaning aging deserted stables and other outbuildings of the former camp, a tall thin waterfall with a giant rock for sitting on and contemplating at the bottom and a fern lined pool at the top, deeply shaded and musical.

Then back up, a quicker route and more sure with the terrain and down the road and up the road and a few minutes in the car and we were back in the grid of Santa Monica and ready for a drink and a meal and a scrub to get poison oak oils off the ankles of those of us foolish enough to wear shorts.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Branch Library

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs
lunch: pasta leftovers
dinner: provencal-y chicken and boiled potatoes