A Night on Mount Diablo

Went camping with friend Mary this weekend atop Mt. Diablo, right below the summit. It's the highest mountain in the area and really beautiful. Mary and I used to like to go camping all the time when we were in college, but we haven't been in over 10 years. I've really missed not being able to go camping with her, or even seeing her on a regular basis, so it was really wonderful when she seized a rare scheduling opportunity and we managed to find one of the only open camping reservations in the area--for one night only.

Mount Diablo has that rugged California landscape about it: live oaks clinging to the rolling hills browned by the late July heat, outcroppings of dry, hard stone, and tons of poison oak. One of the great things about getting out into California open space is smelling that wonderful earthy, tangy smell. It is so lovely. We had a full moon to our very selves, and it was the first time since I can remember where we weren't shivering our butts off in the rolling fog of night. We were actually above the fog line, and we watched as it rolled in, covering San Francisco so that the only visible landmark was Sutro tower, and filling up the lowlands and spilling up over the foothills and filling in the valleys, slowly creeping toward us but never quite reaching our vantage point high above the world. We watched the stars roam across the night sky overhead, we saw the darkness of the cities and suburbs come alive with the constellations of orange streetlights, saw the streaming tail of the highway that brought us here. The land is so dry and parched in July that they prohibited campfires, but it was ok. We sat in the circle of light cast by our lantern, and we talked, and we not-talked deep into the night. We listened to the sound of the breeze fill the pines so that they created rumor and spoke their secret languages, heard the rustle of the dry, jagged leaves in the oaks, felt the presense and immensity of the wind like some giant, unknowable sea-creature come close, as if out of curiosity, and felt its wake as it moved like current through the last of the dry grass and then disappeared into the inky blackness of the atmosphere above us, leaving only stillness and inpenetrable silence. In the night, animals walked by our tent like menehune, unaware or unconcerned that someone woke in the night and heard it pass, and then closed her eyes to it, wishing that schedules were easier to schedule, and that opportunities like this would come by more often, and, most of all, that nights in summer were a little longer.