White Mountain

A path led by the side of a rickety old fence, through a sparse pine wood, and across a well traveled road into a quarry where they used to extract Carmel stone from the hillside back in the 30’s. In the years since the quarry closed, rain and erosion had carved deep ruts and gullies through the soft rock in the center of the clearing, leaving the white soil so poor only the most adventurous and misfortunate saplings dared make it their home. Beyond this lunar-scape lay a seemingly endless forrest of pine and oak and Spanish moss. In those years when my friends and I had gained the mobility and independence afforded us by our bicycles, these woods became our refuge. We sped our hand-me-downs and Christmas presents through the low hanging fog down a long, steep street never worrying about how exhausting the return trip would be. And when we arrived, departed from the order of the civilized world, we built a new colony of forts and got our tires stuck in the mud. We scraped our knees and elbows and tried out new curse words, emboldened by knowing only the trees were there to scold us.

Every child needs a place like this, a place where they can light off fire crackers and pretend they are Spider-Man. Away from the scornful eyes of elderly neighbors, where the ground is thick with wet pine needles to cushion their fall when reality inevitably punches its fist through the window of fantasy. A kingdom of their own making, one part Lord of the Flies, one part Camelot. Dangling my feet from the branch of a pine, hanging upside down and laughing; this is what always comes to me when I think of the good old days before taxes and debt and sex. A playground with no safety regulations, no signs save for the one dented No Trespassing warning that held on for dear life by a filament of rusted bailing wire on the gate to the service road leading into the quarry. We kings need not heed such trifles, instead as all kings must, we turned our attention to war.

It started with water-balloons, the confetti pink and orange of which probably still litter the rotting ramparts of our once great fortresses. We hauled them by bucket and backpack and battled until we were soaked through and shivering. When we grew tired of that game we armed ourselves with paintball guns and wore the welts on our skin like decorations of valor. Many years later I’d think of how easy it was to assume the posture of a soldier as I patrolled the wadis cutting though the Iraqi countryside; how similar the terrain felt under my boots and the thrill of the hunt for man. It’s alarming still that the game and the ugly truth could intermingle so closely in their effect. Blood dripping from a scrape on a knee, blood oozing from a hole in a chest, like I’d been creeping eager toward that moment since boyhood.

Like most childish pursuits we slowly divorced ourselves of the mountain. We got driver’s licenses and girlfriends, or at least spent our waking moments thinking about how we’d get girlfriends. We ventured into the woods less and less. Instead we packed beers and pot under our seats and drove past the quarry instead of to it, spending our evenings building bon-fires at the beach and scattering when the we saw flashlights heading toward us from the dunes. We donned jerseys and ran along the road past the crumbling white rocks, training for cross country and football. The barren field and it’s sickly little pines looked smaller and less inviting than we remembered, the ruts hardly tall enough to hide us anymore. I raced my Jeep Cherokee as if it were a Porsche around the winding back roads of Pebble Beach and the same pine needles that had once saved me, turned into an oil slick sending me careening off into a ditch. I cursed the forrest for making me look so foolish and spent the evening trying to devise a plan to free my Jeep without alerting my parents.

Then even the city grew too small to hide us. We scattered north and south and east from the coast. Most of us went to college, or at least tried it out. Some stuck around, got jobs they eventually turned into careers, and now drive past that quarry each morning with more pressing concerns filling the space between sips of coffee. When we get together these days, it’s an event: a dinner, a movie, over-priced drinks, weddings. If any of us find the time to ride a bike, it’s because we’ve started to notice more hairs in the sink than we expected or had to loosen the belt another notch. We ride alone, not to any destination, but as if fleeing a slowly dimming light.

There’s a trail off Highway 68 that skirts the road and dead ends in a large clearing where the Pebble Beach Company stores building material and unused pieces of slowly oxidizing machinery. Sometimes when I visit home, I’ll drive up there with my dad and his faithful idiot black lab for a walk. Cooper spends the whole time zig-zagging across the trail, sniffing at tree stumps and discovering tennis balls other dogs have left for dead, while my dad and I wander around conversation. About halfway along there’s a break in the path that turns right and winds down into the pines toward our old refuge. I always pause and consider taking the detour, then I’ll look back at my dad and the baseball cap sitting atop his gray hair, down at my belly grown soft from good food and booze and convince myself there’s nothing left there for me now. That world out of view is for boys to return. Men, it seems, keep walking forward.