Hike

Went for a four hour hike with my friend Kimberly in Ojai. Never been to Ojai before. Nice little typical southern California town. We hiked up into a big canyon. It was green, you could say lush in its way. I was following my footsteps. Concentrating on balancing, breathing, moving with a steady rhythm. A tiny paper white Poppy with lavender edges and three faint blue dots in a triangle centered on each petal stood alone beside the well-worn path lined with Sage bushes and Manzanitas celebrating itself. Its delicate colors vibrated against the sandy ochre rocks beneath our trudging feet that were being ground into smaller and smaller pieces, pebbles and finally dust.

We stopped beside a small stream for a rest in the shade. I sat on the trunk of a tree that was growing almost horizontally before stretching straight up again, making a bench with a back rest that swayed a little with my weight. Sometimes nature is so accommodating. I noticed a spider above me that was very still. It was hanging in its web, dangling with the breeze. I looked closer to see that it was dead. I imagined a mother spider who had produced hundreds of babies before giving in to her dying.

On our way back down the mountain, the sun was stronger and beat us down our descent. Another dead bug. This time a large beetle with legs up in the air. What happened to him? Was he simply unable to right himself? Imagine being that close to accidental suicide all your life. It reminded me of a moment a couple of weeks earlier when I was sitting on the porch of my father’s house one evening, with my sister. We heard the loud buzzing of a beetle flying around, banging into the screens while we were talking. A pretty common occurrence there, we didn’t mention it or wonder what it was. Finally, as she was laying on the bench, deep into a story about her daughter, I watched the big black bug come flying toward the lamp standing just east of my sisters head. He made a big slow circle around the lamp and then crashed into the metal lampshade and fell to the ground. My sister wasn’t aware of the tragedy from her head. Before going to bed I checked on him, surprised he was still lying on the floor. He was dead. You keep finding dead bugs, said Kimberly, but I disagree. They keep finding me.