Walking with Oaks 4

I’m so glad to be back at Pine Valley Creek.  It feels like a long time since my last visit even though I now come more frequently. I used to visit once a year, but since the onset of the pandemic I have returned in every season, even if I almost missed the winter.  Today is March 4.  Already I see a few tiny pink flowers in the grass, and a couple other plants beginning to bloom, but the willows and deciduous trees are still barren.  It rained yesterday so I worry that the creek may be too deep to cross.  But when I follow the trail down to the creek’s edge, it’s quite shallow, so much so that I can either find a narrow place to jump across or make my way over the rocks without getting my feet wet. This is so different than last March, when I was wary to even wade across, but this year has been very dry.

In other ways too, this visit is quite different from my experiences on March 20 2020, almost a year ago.Having come more frequently, I’m beginning to know this valley more intimately. A year ago, I didn’t know what to expect. Now I think about Pine Valley Creek a lot. As I drove here today I wondered what I would discover, trying not to anticipate what I might write.

A year ago, could I have imagined where human beings would find ourselves now?  The stay at home order had just been declared, soon parks would be off limits.  I suppose I had hope that after a couple months of disciplined quarantine things might get better. But even then, we knew that vaccines would be close to a year away at best. I assumed that the upcoming summer residency where I teach would be canceled, but I wasn’t ready to imagine that not only the following winter residency, but the residency for this upcoming summer would as well meet over zoom. Thinking back, I must have imagined some of the deaths, some of the political uproar. The predictions being circulated were far lower than over the half a million lives that have been lost in the US thus far, a year into the pandemic.  I certainly feared for friends in New York, but living in California, last year the pandemic felt somewhat distant. I didn’t want to imagine the loss of loved ones, even if I suspected that Covid had already caused the pneumonia that suddenly killed a dear friend stricken with cancer. I certainly hoped that national elections would bring change, but I never imagined that hundreds would successfully storm the capital, breaching all security in protest as the election results were being confirmed.  Mostly I found myself taking it day by day, wondering how long things would be closed, how artists would survive, how my daughter would manage with home school, or how I could coax her out of her room. Although time slowed down, the pandemic focused thoughts on the present. 

A year ago, I had no idea how much Pine Valley Creek would have to teach me. Now as I begin to walk, I view these oaks not only as ravaged by bark beetles, but by a pandemic, one brought about by human behavior, a carelessness that would inevitably bring suffering to the human species as well.

The first tree that I come to, a very large coastal live oak, is almost devoid of leaves on many of the upper branches. Other branches are just lightly dotted with green, very different than the fullness of a healthy oak. Some of the lower limbs, including one large branch to my right, are fully leafed out, whereas one huge branch to left has broken off and is lying on the ground at my feet. Crown thinning is always the first sign of beetle infestation. Death can take years.  This tree seems to be barely hanging on.

I walk past a few living trees and several huge logs and quickly come to the creek. Crossing, I continue on my walk up the west facing valley slope as the trail meanders past oaks and chaparral. I remember how delighted I was when I first discovered this trail, as opposed to the dirt road that traverses the opposite slope. While I pass many bleached logs and barren trunks, significant parts of the trail are shaded by still living trees. Even if not what it once was, this trail, as its name, hidden canyon implies, is still a place of wonder. Walking intermittently under the protective leafy canopy of the graceful oaks is such a contrast to the dry brush covered hillsides. Occasionally passing a thick moss-covered trunk I glance upwards, and as I notice that many of the upper branches are barren, pause in sadness, breathing with the tree and wishing it well. Fortunately, these infested trees are relatively rare.

From what I can tell the oak borers have largely done their damage and flown further north. I walk in appreciation and gratitude, occasionally glancing at a naked tree towering above the chapparal on the opposite slope.

After a while, the trail, which has been climbing, gently descends until the creek is not far below.  Looking across the banks, the increasing wide grassy meadow looks like a bone yard. I begin to look for pathway to cross the creek. I seem to have many choices. This is another change in the past year. There are now multiple narrow trails cutting down from the main trail. From what I can tell, many more people have visited in the past year than ever before. On every trip this year, I’ve seen other cars in the parking lot, whereas they were a rarity before. I remember last May at the height of spring when Pine Valley Creak was bursting with people, and children’s laughter dominated the space as much as bird song, Today I’m greeted by a chorus of birds, but I do hear other human voices by the time I leave.  During the pandemic this trail, like many, has served as a refuge.  It reminds me of an article in the New York Times about mobs of local tourists exploring all of the far-flung areas of the islands, instead of flocking to the downtown malls.

As I cross the creek, and begin to walk past the logs scattered on the ground, I see plenty of cow pies, but no cows. I assume that most of the droppings are not new, but deposited before my last visit in October. Since it’s rained recently, it’s hard to tell. But will I find the acorns that were so elusive my last visit?  I walk past the logs and branches, and some still standing trunks devoid of limbs, and pass by a couple of small oaks without spotting any.

Finally, as the meadow narrows, I come to one of my favorite trees, a rare large coastal live oak an oak that I’ve been photographing on all of my recent walks with trees. I stop and look. There are plenty of acorns, easier to spot now that they have turned brown.  They still aren’t as abundant, hanging from every branch, as I had anticipated, but there are plenty. Perhaps when I came in October some of the acorns were not yet fully grown. More likely I found so few because I was looking with an untrained eye.  There are several other large living trees nearby. Once I start looking closely at the oaks, I find a fair number of acorns as well as many branches with small brown caps from which the acorns had already fallen or been carried away by another creature. When I cross back across the creek, I continue to spot acorns as well as empty caps on the many smaller trees.

There are even more when I look down.  In many places the leaves and branches lay clumped beside the upslope side of the trail.  Many acorns, having rolled down the hill, are nestled in these piles. On my return, even in the first grove of oaks by the parking lot, where I hadn’t seen any acorns on the trees, I realize that I just have to look down. There are plenty of brown acorns or acorn shells at my feet, cow pies as well.  Slowly I am learning how to look.

As I walked along the trail, I was reminded of a hike that I took maybe five years ago in April. I think I’d just past the large meadow, where at that point many of the dead trees were still standing, when I met two or three guys with backpacks, headed into the wilderness, the only time I ever recall meeting backpackers. They were visiting from mid-west, grateful to be in California for spring break from their university.  They marveled at how beautiful the area was.  At some point I said yes, but what about all of the dead trees?  They shrugged, asked what has caused the mortality, but didn’t seem too concerned. It was true that any healthy forest contains trees in various stages of decay, but not clump after clump of denuded or fallen trees. I couldn’t help think of their reaction on this warm sunny day. At the time, I was incensed with what they were not seeing, refusing to notice, in order to declare this valley so beautiful. Truthfully, I recall that my heart too was swelled with appreciation, was touch by the beauty walking under the still living oaks.  But that joy was also tinged with sadness and loss.  I loved walking under the graceful oaks, but also noticed all of the downed logs, and the bleached trunks bereft of branches.

I never experienced this canyon before the oaks were struck by Goldspotted oak borer, but when I first arrived almost a decade ago, all of the trees were still standing, so it was more possible to imagine the groves as they once were. My early photos that were taken at a distance showed many clumps of grey intermixed with somewhat fewer clumps of green.  Now it was as if many holes had been punched in the oak canopy. Too often as I hiked I felt the full forces of the sun. There were too many meadows, old growth groves of oaks transformed into charnel grounds.

My conversation with the backpackers pointed to the concept of shifting-base lines, a shift in the expectation of, or understanding of, the normal.  Despite the hiker’s remarks, today I would think that anyone visiting Pine Valley Creek for the first time couldn’t help but notice the abnormal number of dead parched grey trunks or the seas of fallen branches and logs.  But the dead trees were less evident than when they were all standing as barren skeletons with graceful limbs arching outwards in all directions covered with myriads of smaller branches and even a few browned leaves. Would this impoverished forest become a new normal?  Or would the signs of so much death become accepted?  Was it important for people to know about what this forest once looked like, or was I clinging to some idealized past?  One of the basic principles of ecology is that life is always in flux, constantly changing. Was I clinging to a fixed point in time?  What about the fact that restoration efforts thirty years ago, planting willows and oaks, contributed to the “normal” that we see today? Although in this case, I must also add that while restoration efforts were valuable, adding many juvenile oaks to the forest, the oaks felled by the oak borers were much more than thirty years old, many likely had thrived for centuries.

My growing awareness of the pines that also grow in this valley helps me to frame a response. I always have to explain why I’m writing about oaks in an area called Pine Valley Creek. True there is one small pine very visible at the start of the trail.  Further down I always look for a couple of others, tall, erect standing above all of the other trees right near the creek. Nonetheless, I’ve assumed that the name of the valley came from further up the creek, higher elevations where Jeffrey pines would be more abundant. But today I pause at one place on the trail where a small rivet flows down the hillside into the main creek. I notice first the branching skeletons of oaks, towering above the green foliage of the smaller trees. But another tree grows even taller than these oaks. Looking up and down this modest side canyon, I notice at least four pines, quite tall, that must’ve been growing here for some time. A tiny grove! 

It’s wonderful to see these pines.  There was a time when I and many fellow San Diegans delighted in wandering in the pine cedar forests further up the creek in what is known as Cuyamaca State Park.  Montane forests within an hour of the city is part of what has given this region its charm.  But all of that burned in the Cedar Fire of 2003, at the time, and until 2017, the largest fire ever in the state. A thick cloud of smoke had hung over the city for a week. making it unsafe to go outside.  Schools were closed, the sidewalks covered with a layer of ash, a story that has now become all too familiar.  In 2007 huge fires burned again in areas adjacent to and overlapping the 2003 fires. 

Except for the campgrounds, almost all of the Jeffrey pines and Sugar pines in the Cuyamaca Mountains are gone. To this day, grey barren trunks poke through huge thickets of ceanothus. The forests that I used to enjoy will not return in my life time.  I can only hope that my daughter, barely a year old at the time of the fire, will be able to experience walking in these forests by the time that she grows old.

I don’t have photographs of my many hikes taken over the years in the Cuyamaca mountains, but the experience lives in my memory.  I can visualize a forest with tall old trees hundreds of years old.  I remember the smell, the feeling of the moisture in the air, of walking the trails shrouded in the forest, the hot summer sun tempered by the tall trees. I recall even once making love in broad daylight, hidden in the trees, sharing orgasmic bliss with that of the forest. 

Imagining the forest as it was also sparks the possibility of imagining it’s return.  The Goldspotted oak borer is thankfully more merciful than fire, generally destroying less than fifty percent of the trees, although perhaps more than that in places in this valley. In contrast, when a fire comes through, especially the huge hot conflagrations that have become more frequent in recent years, it burns everything. 

Part of why Pine Valley Creek is so special is that the trails that I walk haven’t burned, although the southern part of the wilderness area further down the trail was consumed in the fires that devastated the state this past summer.  All of the dead and dying oaks only beginning to decompose provide a living memorial to what has been.  I began my annual trips to Pine Valley Creek to grieve with the trees.  Over the years my grief has been softened by the gratitude. I am so grateful that I am able to return to walk, each time noticing a bit more about what the forest has to teach.  In this way, recalling what was isn’t clinging to a distant memory, but honoring the ancestors and fueling the imagination of the living.

Paying homage to the barren oak trunks at Pine Valley Creek arrests indulgence in the forgetfulness of baseline shift. These reminders of loss serve as a memorial to the splendid groves that grew here until a decade ago, and a provocation to imagine what could be—both the possibility that the tiny oaks that are sprouting among the fallen logs will grow into tall trees for future generations to enjoy, and a warning that even worse calamities could befell the forest in the years to come.