the moderate thrill of mild adventure (or, musings on my weekly trip to ramona)

There's something about it. Is it the curves and twists that display breathtaking view after breathtaking view? The feel of your car's effortless acceleration as it kicks up an incline? The sharp line between mountain and sky? The feeling of leaving reality behind and entering a realm free of urban concern? The small country touches?

It's not quite a mountain, but bigger than a hill. It doesn't take long to get to the top before you go down again. Sometimes, you'll get stuck behind a slow-moving boat trailer or chicken truck. The destination is not the most exciting of places, just a medium-sized mountain town, with its collection of quaint antique shops (for the tourists) and sparkling new strip malls, parking lots freshly paved. Within a block you leave behind wooden fences and dirt roads and enter a main street just like any other, with Albertsons and banks and repair garages. The high school kids are not different or backward. Nothing is perched on a cliff or overlooking a dramatic view. Just Ramona.

Driving up though, it's like leaving behind cares and concerns, zooming up a mountain, soaring through curves, escaping the inescapable housing complexes and ubiquitous gas stations of the valley below. There are some amazing views, and when the sky is just the right blue and the sun is in just the right place, the hills scissor the sky and sit aloof and proud against the backdrop of clouds. Sometimes you'll come around a bend and there a mountain sits, larger-than-life, the road ahead disappearing into the belly of the beast. Before you get there, the road will curve away and you'll sidle up to the giant and say hello. Until then, it's like approaching a new mystery, going underground to discover what lurks. Feeling the weight of earth above your head and grounding you, reminding you of both human engineering and mortality simultaneously. The conflict of science and nature, entwined. The birds that soar above the valleys take on the illusion of majesty, no matter what kind they be. It's all hawks here. Eagles.

Too short, the drive is. Soon enough you'll find human kind again, destroying and building, multiplying...so close to the wonders of wilderness that the threat feels imminent, palpable. Which will win? On either side, civilization is creeping up on the unsuspecting, will they be taken advantage of? Will a line be drawn, a contract signed? Is fire enough to keep them away? How soon will our experiences of nature be contained, boxed in by irrigated lawns and 7-elevens, a dollar to visit, a quick hike, the possibility of seeing something rare that used to not be so rare before...before we all got greedy and took what isn't ours to take.

Until then, you appreciate the moments you have.