Swallowed

Cirrus clouds layer the sky, like long wispy strips of confetti frozen in the act of falling to earth. The sun skims over the silhouette of nearby buildings, and short trees cast long shadows. I am roused by the howl of an unknown animal. Three cries and no more. Birdsong fills to overflowing in the ravine of Warren Woods. It sounds incoherent, a mess; I cannot grasp the hidden symphonies, the meaning of it all.

I walk.

Under my feet crackles the mournful voice of forgotten branches, strips of bark carelessly shed by trees, and thousands upon thousands of dried-out seed husks, their life essence forever leached away. Light is life. Infinitesimal specks of light in the distance engage in a chaotic dance. It is all very mysterious, like some curvilinear Brownian motion, like drunken dancers careening through a crowd and randomly colliding with faceless strangers. They are nature’s agents and I cannot grasp their agenda, their intent.

I walk.

Catching the whiff of mint, I kneel to inhale a plant’s scent. Each of its leaves is partitioned first by the veins that give it life and then into smaller roundish speckles that resemble scales – just like mint leaves. It is not mint. While kneeling, a hummingbird appears out of the tangled branches and rises up meanderingly to a great height. There it stops, as if uncertain where to go. The hummingbird manages to convey a sense of absolute stillness, despite its near-invisible wings fluttering valiantly at twenty strokes a second, despite its heart pumping at a prodigious rate of up to a thousand beats per minute. As I stare intently, the spell of indecision is broken, and it swoops down, ghostlike, with unerring precision and blistering speed, as if it were a bird of prey intent on prey. Except it is not a bird of prey; the hummingbird lives on nectar. I lose sight of the bird, but I have scant time to register my disappointment, because a second one rises to the sky and performs exactly the same ritual. A third hummingbird appears and dives, and this time my eyes trace the path of the bird in flight as it reverses direction at the end of the dive and returns to where I imagine the previous two birds had emerged. Bewildered, I quickly realize my mistake – there were never three of them.

I walk away.

Much later, I find out that males of this species (Anna’s Hummingbird) perform display dives as a courtship ritual. A male bird accelerates to fifty miles per hour while descending, then unfurls and closes its tail feathers within a twentieth of a second, producing a loud chirp – its mating call. A twentieth of a second is faster than my eye can blink; I understand why I didn’t catch this aerial maneuver with my naked eye.

The trail snakes down the v-shaped slope of the ravine and disappears precariously at the edge of a short vertical fall. Is this trail made by man or carved by surface runoff during sporadic rainstorms?

(Am I making a mistake?)

Over the edge, the slope steepens. Each step I take is another input to a feedback loop that is amplifying my awareness of gravity. All other thoughts flee my consciousness. I crouch down, half walking, half sliding. Soft sedimentary rock crumbles with a sigh under my weight and rolls away and down, down, down…

(Too late.)

I hit rock bottom, the vertex of the V, the convergence of fear and curiosity, the familiar and unknown. Except it’s not rock I am standing on but asphalt. The signature white dashed lines confirm my suspicion. I know what I expected – the last vestige of untouched nature secreted away in urbanized La Jolla. Not this.

X marks the spot. I lay branches on the ground to mark my entry point, and gaze up longingly at the edge of the trail that brought me here. I am not certain that I can climb out of the ravine from X, where the soil is too soft to provide my feet any purchase. The evening light is dying, and the vibrancy of greens is slowly being bleached into night’s grey. A slim crescent in the darkening sky is my sole sliver of comfort. Something else is missing. It takes me a moment to pinpoint – the birds have stopped singing.

(What else can I do?)

I follow the abandoned road, this winding river of asphalt that is slowly dying from age, from neglect, from the encroachment of nature. The river banks are the interlocking vines and shrubbery that grow on a thin mat of soil over the asphalt. I have been a spectator for only a night, but the future of this forgotten road is as clear to me as a movie reel played on fastforward through time. By inches it will shrink, over years, until nothing is left.

I reach a point where the road has bifurcated completely – one semicircular section of the road has sunk four feet lower, while the rest of the road insists on staying level; there is a mutual agreement to separate. I have always been impressed at how utterly a layer of asphalt erases all traces of whatever lies beneath. Nature seemingly has no answer to the clinical efficiency with which roads and highways are transforming the landscape. Extracted from crude petroleum, asphalt is the black, sticky semi-liquid that binds together the crushed stone and gravel that make up our roads. How much asphalt and gravel does it take to drown the world? I hop onto the sunken section and got my answer: four fingers’ breadth – nothing, really. The earth is eight thousand miles in diameter; it will not be erased.

I walk on.

The vegetation becomes denser. The shrubbery has reached my waist; I tiptoe around them when I can and bulldoze across when I can’t. In the dimming light, I pick out the shape of a unique plant whose thorns I have learned painstakingly to avoid. I tussle with small trees and shield my face from branches that swat me with a will. On rare occasions when they get past my defenses, I have had to spit out leaves and twigs in disgust. I stumble onto trees and shrubs that form such an effective barricade that I resort to crawling through small chinks in their armor when I can find them and bludgeoning a swathe of destruction through them with hands and feet when I can’t. Sorry, sorry, sorry, I have to get through.

The road ends. It has been swallowed.

I hesitate. Though itself forgotten, the road is my only connection to the world outside this ravine, the world I desperately wish to return to. I have struggled through so much vegetation to get to where I am that I dread retracing my steps more than I fear what lies ahead. I warily peruse the sloped sides of the ravine and conclude that they are insurmountable. What am I afraid of?

I push forward.

I am swallowed.