After a Long Trek
There is a certain wildness about the California wilderness that is not present back East. The mountains are steeper, the roads and trails longer, more barren, the plants at once more menacing and thorny. Beauty bares fangs. Maybe it is the constant blazing sunshine, the bleached empty riverbeds and the scarcity of running water that conjures up panicked images of a bitter crawling through sand-choked deserts, dying slowly of parching thirst. Perhaps, it is the often-told heroic stories of men and women who fought and died to conquer the west, to scale and tame the grand majesty and the seething, surging power of its mountainous landscape. But maybe, just maybe, California the wild-eyed child serves to remind those of us who have forgotten, that for all its apparent fragility and gossamer-thin ecosystems, nature remains a world that would and could engulf us if we allowed it to.