top, I have the most marvelous and rat free and in fact healthy-for-the-back bed in the world.
I also take long curious hikes to see what’s what in the other direction inland, going up a few miles along the dirt road that leads to isolated ranches and logging camps—I come to giant sad quiet valleys where you see 150 foot tall redwood trees with sometimes one little bird right on the topmost peaktwig sticking straight up—The bird balances up there surveying the fog and the great trees—You see one single flower nodding on a cliff side far across the canyon, or a huge knot in a redwood tree looking like Zeus’ face, or some of God’s little crazy creations goofing around in creek pools (zigzag bugs), or a sign on a lonely fence saying “M.P. Passey, No Trespassing,” or terraces of fern in the dripping redwood shade, and you think “A long way from the beat generation, in this rain forest”—So I angle back down to the home canyon and down the path past the cabin and out to the sea where the mule is on the sea shore, nibbling under that one thousand foot bridge or sometimes just standing staring at me with big brown Garden of Eden eyes—The mule being a pet of one of the families who have a cabin in the canyon and it, as I say Alf by name, just wanders from one end of the canyon where the corral fence stops him, to the wild sea shore where the sea stops him but a strange Gauguinesque mule when you first see him, leaving his black dung on the perfect white sand, an immortal and primordial mule owning a whole valley—I even finally later find out where Alf sleeps which is like a sacred grove of trees in that dreaming meadow of heather—So I feed Alf the last of my apples which he receives with big faroff teeth inside his soft hairy muzzle, never biting, just muffing up my apple from my outstretched palm, and chomping away sadly, turning to scratch his behind against a tree with a big erotic motion that gets worse and worse till finally he’s standing there with erectile dong that would scare the Whore of Babylon let alone me.
All kinds of strange and marvelous things like the
