I Can See For Miles

The sunrise lit the sky on fire, shades of orange, red and crimson playing upon the blue of the sky and the white of the wispy clouds. It was a perfect backdrop for a Sunday morning of geocaching and I ascended into the mountains behind Santa Barbara in search of hidden treasures.

As it sometimes happens with geocaching, everything I tried to find was elusive, hiding itself from my peering eyes, coming up empty time and time again.  I continued to search, but to no avail.  I looked around to get my bearings and that's when I saw the directional sign for La Cumbre Peak.

As a teenager, La Cumbre Peak was a common destination. Sometimes we would drive the winding road in the darkness to beat the sunrise and watch it come over the mountains; in winter it was typically the closest snow to Santa Barbara, and while there wasn't much it served the purpose for snowballs and the occasional snow person.  Other times it was an escape from the June gloom, rising up and breaking through the fog, looking out onto an ocean of puffy white.

I took the road less traveled and headed up the winding road, remembering some of the curves like I had driven them yesterday.  The road to the peak itself was closed, so I walked the last quarter of a mile, heading to the top.  Not another person or vehicle in sight, I wandered along the potholed road among the pines, maples, manzanita and chaparral. I sat near the inactive fire lookout tower, closed since the early 1980s, void of windows and personnel.  I looked as far as the my eyes could take me; the view of the Channel Islands, Santa Barbara and Goleta, the Santa Ynez Mountains and Gibraltar Reservoir are breathtaking.

Aristotle said that memory is neither perception nor conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. Today, like all those years ago, I was as far away from home as I could be and yet still see the city of my birth, alone in the present, connected to the past and wondering what the future would bring.