And what would people like us find on that evening mountainside, where the fire passed through some years before? The trail leads out and up through all the broken white trunks, charred in streaks of softly iridescent black and stood ghostly over the undergrowth. Our chosen path cuts into the dark, rolling green of the hillside where flickering wrens trill out their song and retreat into the dense labyrinths of chaparral which already look ancient though, here, they couldn't be anything but young. Then the leaves start to give way, higher up, where the reddish dust spreads thinly over rock deeply scraped by glaciers long since passed into dusk and vanished out into the vast lake now visible beyond.
Here the last of the snags give way to the first of the trees not touched by the flames. Here we see, by the dozens, the elegant thrust and curling away of the seeds fallen from the Incense-cedar still standing above us. Here Fox Sparrows have fed on the joyous red star burst of Sierra Gooseberries and left the spiny husks at the foot of the bush. Here among the natural rubble we can hold up the long, roughened, sun bleached cones in the dimming light and pick out, along the horizon behind them, the limbs of their sibling Sugar Pines, heavy with cones and silhouetted against the blush of sunset and icy blue of the lake now fairly glowing beyond.
The lights of three boats pass in different directions over that distant water, aligning together for a moment and then pulling away. And who couldn't feel it, then? The underlying spirit of that ridge-- its long held scarring, the traces of its more recent pain, and the mitigating grace of life both abiding and returning. It's everywhere as we turn back down the trail towards the warm home-lights of the forest valley and the headlights winking here and there through the trees. The bats are out now, their nimble shapes arcing and looping after unseen insects across the deepening blue of the sky as it drifts into night. Eventually, back down among the lost trees glowing faintly white under the moon, we stop to pick out constellations we are still learning as the stars take their places above. And, barely seen out the corner of the eye, there the gliding, faint outline of an owl as it lands on a faraway branch, black against the lighter dark of the lake now calming beyond.
