Tejon Pass

In Los Angeles, people would be sleeping with the windows open, dreaming of blue skies, ice cream and sandy beaches. But here at 6000 feet, it was like winter.

Photo by adore chang on Unsplash

I awoke, shivering in the dark. The cold had gotten all the way in. Through the grey two-man tent. Through my zero-rated sleeping bag. Through my clothes. Through my hat and scarf. I felt my head.  My hat was gone. There was no way to stay warm without my hat. It was still dark. I felt around where my head had lain. Nothing. I moved my hands along my sides, trying not to disturb my friend Paul, still dead to the world. I was painfully cold. Just across the mountains was Los Angeles. People there would be sleeping with the windows open, dreaming of blue skies, ice cream and sandy beaches. But here at 6000 feet, it was like winter. There had been ice crusting the small streams we crossed on the way in, a couple of days before. I had to get up.

I opened the sleeping bag, found my jacket, unzipped the tent and rolled out, quickly turning to rezip the fly to keep the air warmer inside for Paul. I stood, pulled my jacket on and zipped it. The sky looked like dawn, but the mountains cast shadows across our small valley. It wouldn’t warm up here for a couple of hours. Where the hell was my hat? Still shivering, I looked around. Jack had driven us in, his borrowed four wheel drive pickup sat, covered with frost, twenty yards away. There was no sign of Jack. He could be absolutely anywhere. He didn’t even sleep in a tent. He had some kind of sleeping bag cover.  He would get in his sleeping bag, zip it closed, then pull up the cover, close it from the inside and simply fall over wherever he stood and fall asleep, looking like a giant grub worm. I almost never saw him go inside buildings. He lived on an island off Santa Barbara and was one of the few people who had a direct role saving the California Condor. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had sprouted wings and was on the way back from spending the past few hours on a summery beach in Australia.

The sun burst over a grassy mountaintop, shining on the steep hills across the valley. “I bet it’s warm in the sun,” I thought.  I turned and started off at a jog toward the base of the hill in front of me, dodging cactus, rocks and cow pies. I got to the base of the hill and switched to a run. I ran straight up the hill, through the long grass, toward the sunlight, as the light inched toward me down the hill. It was steeper and higher than I thought but I pushed on a few minutes more until I felt the sun on my back and started casting my own shadow, long and scraggly, up the hill. I stopped, raising my hands up and clasping them together behind my head to catch my breath. That was a lot of running all of a sudden. But it had worked. I wasn’t shivering. I could feel the sun’s warmth through my jacket. I still missed my hat but it would get warmer. I turned around. I raised my right hand to my brow to block the bright sun.

I saw our tent, like a grey raisin on the yellow valley floor. I saw the truck. I saw the creek that had made the valley - or at least the trees along the creek, where it ran along the base of the opposite hillside. I saw Jack, walking purposely in his long-john shirt and hiking shorts, about a mile and a half up the valley. We had been driving and hiking into this valley for a few days, but Jack was headed back towards us from even further out. I saw the collapsed settler house with its overturned truck we had passed the prior evening, along the creek. I had climbed under the truck to look at the engine and determined it to have been an early 1920s Model TT Ford. Paul had mocked me for that. I saw Paul emerge from the tent. He stood up. “That bastard is wearing my hat.” I thought. It was just a black hat, but Paul’s hats were usually grey or blue.

Off to the left, on my hillside, down below a little bit, I saw a corrugated steel tank on a rock outcropping, and a clump of black-green shrubs trailing down the hill. I had learned over the past few days that if there was a tank on a hill, next to some rocks, the tank was trapping water for cattle from an ancient spring. I carefully walked down and over toward the tank.  The hill was so steep it was hard to balance.

In about ten minutes, I was standing under the rocks, looking at the tank for the pipe that would indicate where the spring was. It was muddy around there. Very different from the parched land everywhere else. Animal prints were everywhere - so many I wasn’t sure what they all were. Jack would know. Paul would know three or four, less than I did, but would pretend to know them all so well he was bored by looking. Jack and I didn’t know each other very well, but we’d exchanged glances when Paul did things like that, and carried on with our curiosities, letting Paul do his performance for himself.

Then I saw it. The pipe was about four inches across and was bent around a rock. Water pooled on the ground where the pipe entered the rocks and mud. There would have been a pond in that spot a long time ago. I went over to part of the outcropping behind the pipe and pushed my way through the undergrowth.

There was a hole in the rock just big enough for a person, a few feet above the ground. I scrambled up and went into the hole. I pushed my way around in the dust. There was an opening on the other side with a view of the valley. On the wall of the rock to my right were five petroglyphs in red and ochre tones. I didn’t know what they all were, but one looked like a deer with antlers. I stared at them for a while, resisting the impulse to touch them. I looked away from the petroglyphs through the opening to my left. Grey-brown valleys, hills and mountains created every angular shape. Dark trees clustered together in trails and bunches on the distant mountains. Even way back here, signs of modern human activity were everywhere. Fences cut across the valley, creating a quilt of earth, plants and rocks. Herds of cattle roamed in clumps eating grass from the ground and hay brought up in round bales from the San Joaquin Valley to the north. Dirt roads and sheds dotted the valley. Airliners crossed the sky leaving vapor trails in the chilly air, heading to and from Los Angeles. I looked back at the petroglyphs. I felt something. A sense of calmness and sorrow. I would try to think about that later. I was trying to learn to think about feelings, where they come from and what they can mean.

Paul had probably seen me and realized what I would be looking for. For some reason I didn’t want to share the petroglyphs with anyone – especially Paul. I didn’t want his words to interfere with the beautiful feelings I was trying to understand. But he would probably know a lot more about those markings than I did. He had an anthropology degree or two from a local university. He should see them, I supposed. He should find them himself.

I didn’t really care if I knew what the petroglyphs meant or not. I looked back out at the valley. I felt the well of peace and sorrow somewhere in my heart, parting the chaos and darkness that usually clashed, bubbled and popped in there. I decided it was time for me to go. I turned and crawled back out of the hole.  I thought I could hear Paul approaching in the distance.  Those petroglyphs in that place on that morning certainly had messages. But I only knew, or cared to know what one of them was. To me, on that day, in that moment, they said, “This message is not for you.”

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Patrick McCarty writes about what interests him, which is a little bit of everything and a lot of certain things.  Right now, he lives in Houston, Texas.

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