Information Blues.

Lately I’m obsessed with wild fruit. There’s so much fruit out there! It’s fascinating.

It started with a mountain bike ride through Wildcat Canyon. I’d bombed Havey Canyon and was out on an exploratory mission to the end of Wildcat. I was feeling tired, yet still somewhat committed to the idea of looping back to the ridge somehow. I began slogging my way up Belgum Trail, which turned out to be not such a good idea as I was soon presented with a series of 20% vertical fire road walls. I climbed a few of them but lost focus. I stopped under a shady tree and noticed it had fruit that looked like rainier cherries. Wild plums. I ate a few and couldn’t stop. Then I walked across the trail and grazed at a blackberry bush for a while; I climbed to the top full of wild fruit.

Now I want to collect wild fruits for a blackberry pie. I want to make wild plum pie; there’s a recipe in the cookbook my sister gave to me for christmas. I walk through Berkeley and leer at the fig trees, the quinces, the lemons. I harvested some mint from the sidewalk Monday to make post Juan’s Place tea. I went over to Brian’s place last week and what was growing in front: a cling peach! He didn’t seem very interested in it, but I was overjoyed.

(And now I suppose is where I admit to harvesting a wee stalk of oregano from Bess’s garden on the way home from a hill ride a few weeks ago. It just sounded so good in my snackmaster sandwich.)

There’s a certain leap of faith involved in eating a wild thing. There’s no guarantee it’s going to taste good. It could be dusty or housing a worm. I don’t have any concern with buying fruits from the market, but out in the wilds it’s a different thing.

Yesterday I rode over the hills and out Happy Valley Road. I didn’t bring any food with me, and towards the end I was starting to fade. But I got lucky: there were millions of ripe blackberries growing out of the creek at the Orinda Country Club. So I parked my bike against a telephone pole and hung out for a while blowing off dusty blackberries. I was sweaty and faint, dorked out in spandex, foraging. But I felt so lucky: each berry tasted different. And there I was, healthy enough to ride forty miles, fortunate enough to own a nice bike and live in a beautiful place. While the suburbanites drove by, insulated from the world, I was standing around counting my blessings and scratching my forearms with wild berries.

Today after work I had no commitments. The weather was nice, and lately I’m all too aware that summer is almost over, so I seized the opportunity for a spontaneous hike.

I drove into the hills and ended up at Sibley. There’s only one trail there I haven’t walked, which is the Skyline Trail which connects Sibley to Tilden as part of the Bay Area Ridge Trail. I’ve seen the trail before, but could never picture how it went.

That’s what I find myself doing often when I’m in the hills: trying to understand where everything is. Which peak is that, what valley, how do they connect? I used to think of the Berkeley/Oakland Hills as sort of two dimensional, but I know now they’re vividly three. In the hills there is no such thing as a straight line; it’s more complicated. I know them pretty well from the front (bay) side, but from the other side I have almost no idea what I’m looking at. As a self-taught hills fan, hiker, biker and conceptual, amateur local geographer it pains me to admit it, but it’s true.

The Skyline Trail left Sibley and descended into the back side of the hills. The trail plunged down into twisted stream thickets. Bay leaves were already turning yellow and falling. The poison oak was burning red in a creaking grove of eucalyptus. The forest was dense; there were too many leaves, too much information to concentrate. It was quiet, but the breeze made it busy. I followed the traces of the wind through the trees; my peripheral vision was getting more and more active as I started to feel paranoid. I knew that if I ran into another human it would be startling, strange.

The first person I saw was a lot like me, going the other way carrying a water bottle wearing flipflops. He wasn’t paranoid; he seemed quite peaceful.

The trail kept going down and the brush was so dense I couldn’t tell exactly where I was. But I could hear a rush, like a waterfall, or maybe the wind, or no… the far end of the Caldecott Tunnel. Commuter traffic surging in and out, exploding and disappearing. I thought I saw primitive structures through the trees, and there were. There was a ring of old trucks, junk, unidentified structures above the east end of the tunnel. I passed a dilapidated shed on the other side of a fallen barbed wire fence. I passed a section of barbed wire that someone had covered with pvc pipe so it was passable, a trail headed up and over. All of these were great mysteries to me.

But I kept walking. And finally somebody overtook me: a 50something man in full speed hiking mode, gaunt and severe. He said nothing. The trail was loose and starting to climb up, and I thought I saw tractor tracks, and then I ran into the tractor, parallel parked in the apex of a crazy switchback. It looked like a futuristic dinosaur, yellow and biodiesel, and to my paranoid monkey brain I almost expected it to start moving. I kept walking and between the trees I thought I saw Grizzly Peak. I approached some unknown corner of Fish Ranch Road, trying to solve this puzzle, when I felt a pinch in my shoulder. The pain increased to a jab; I’d been quietly stung in the back by a wasp, on an unchartered trail at 7pm.

It was very confusing. I wanted to take my shirt off, as if that might explain something. I saw spider webs and wondered if I hadn’t been bitten by a spider. I imagined pygmies with blow darts crouching in the ferns. I started to look behind more often. And then I realized I should turn around.

I was walking back and nothing else was happening so I decided to go on an adventure into the abandoned shed. I stood at the overgrown path into the trees examining the leaves, and since none were poision oak, I took a few steps in, and peered into the dark of the structure. I considered calling out; what if somebody was inside? But I didn’t say anything. I took a few more steps, and saw in the dark a chair. I got closer and made out bare springs on the seat, the skeleton of a cushion. I considered turning back, then decided maybe I should enter the shed, see what really went on there. So I wiggled through a few more branches and then I was in the shed, standing on old wooden planks that looked like railroad ties. There I realized there was a vertebra sitting next to the chair, and in the corner a storage shelf with a few broken plates and a piece of bone, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark I noticed a rusty knife.

I emerged out of the undergrowth with wide eyes. I walked back to the top, and all the time I was wondering: where am I?