"There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again."
-Rumi
It started with P and me noticing a road sign somewhere along the Bloxham Cutoff. "Idlewild Road".
"Misspelled," I noted. "Should be I-D-Y-L-L-W-I-L-D".
And that's how thoughts returned of my real laughing place, the one spot during some pretty lousy teenage years (isn't that everyone's experience?) where I could find some peace and perspective.
Idyllwild, California sits halfway up from the Hemet Valley, where I lived and went to high school, to Mount San Jacinto, which towers over the valley at 10,800 feet.
About two-thirds of the way up winding California Highway 74 the desert scrub gives way to lodgepole pines, and the air takes on that dry, clean, pine smell you only find in the high forests of the west. At about 5,000 feet there still lies this little community of 3,000 hippies and refugees from the frantic pace of southern California living, scattered in A-frames and log cabins nestled among the towering trees and massive boulders.
During the tumult of my late high school years and into college, I often trekked alone up the hill to Idyllwild, and stepped off on one mountain trail or another with a bota bag of wine, some water, a knife and a stick of dry salami, and a little string cheese. I would disappear into the mountains for hours at a time.
My favorite spot was a meadow known as Skunk Cabbage, probably 9,000 above the desert floor.
It's marshy in the summer, frozen in the winter. Only a few hikers ever make it that far up the hill, so there's solitude. On one side, if I remember correctly, you can gaze down through the smog at the valley below, and on a clear day see all the way to the Pacific, maybe forty miles away. When things were tough, I marched up there quite a lot, and just sat.
It must've still been floating around in my addled old brain yesterday, because while I was on yet another interminable call I started searching Idyllwild real estate and sent P a link to a beautiful, reasonably priced (by 2024 standards) home on a cliffside right outside of town, ringed with patios to take in views of the mountains that cradle the spot. Then after work yesterday, as I groused as I often do about this place and the unhappy turn my vocational life has taken, the conversation turned to how we might make it better. I can mostly work remotely these days, so anyplace with an internet connection is a candidate for our final home. The evangelical MAGA provincial vibe of here grinds away at our souls, a constant irritant that one can't really escape. Why not go live among old hippies in the mountains that meant everything to me once, long ago?
So we're taking a few days in a month or so to go walk those trails again, and see if the magic is still there. P's never been, so it'll all be new to her. We'll hike around Tahquitz Peak, drive through the Garner Valley and take in vistas that look like the opening credits of Bonanza, walk the shore of Lake Hemet, the old reservoir tucked high in the hills where I used to camp with my buddies Rob and Ed. Hell, we'll even go see Rob, most likely--he stayed in the area, is a railroad engineer now with the Union Pacific, and has gone out of his way to stay connected all these years.
I guess I've turned into a stereotype, the guy at the end of his career starting to feel the tug of the familiar, and the need to be around people and places I swore off forever as I drove east on the I-10 after graduation nearly forty years ago, headed for pilot training in Mississippi, my father's ancestral home. Mississippi's crazy now, always has been actually, and the South slides into something I'm afraid I recognize quite well. Maybe going home to dwell among a bunch of goofy Californians is an option. We'll give it a look, and see what happens.
But now, back to the insanity. One hearing down, and the first of five calls coming up in about two minutes. The grim trudge continues.
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