The post office? I have to worry about the post office? Indeed I do. Which may be what draws me to the most useless and retrospective of pursuits, the imaginal reconstruction of hikes I never took.

Why now? I haven’t been capable of hiking for 52 years. The answer must have something to do with being an astonishing 73. Am I finally maturing? Coming to grips with things? If so, what things?

Okay, let us start, not to mention end, at my childhood home. Who would name a town Banning? That’s what one does with books. But a town, what does one do with that? You live on the very edge, my parents decided for reasons that are forever unknown. And the very edge in this case meant having nothing but a quarry for a neighbor and being set in a chaparral forest.

There is no such thing as a chaparral forest, of course, unless you are seven or eight years old and a considerably shorter than the greasewood growing down from the mountain slopes. As for the mountain slopes, they figure prominently. Mount San Gorgonio rose right behind us, and Mount San Jacinto opposite, shooting up on the other side of the intervening pass. This “pass” proved to be the prevailing theme. We lived in “the pass,” a concept which extended to the town of Beaumont slightly to the west.

Consciousness at the edge of a town that is barely a town will inevitably turn to something else. Which in this case was, to me, inescapable. The mountains. One 11,000 foot range behind us. The opposite range across the pass. Hard to argue with mountains. Also hard to miss.

I learned to hike in summer camp and brought the skill home. Neither of my parents walked anywhere. The possibility really wasn’t discussed. But I set off now and then, skirting the quarry to our north, crossing the wide, dry bed of the San Gorgonio River, and heading up the hills. Not very far, of course. I was probably about 10 years old when I started doing this. Sometimes doing it alone, maybe occasionally with my brother or some other kid.

The big hiking goal was the B Mountain. Someone in town, I think the high school football team, decided to proclaim Banning by marking a B on the most obvious hill. For a kid it took quite a while to hike the steep desert slopes to the letter, which upon inspection, was always a disappointing patch of lime that had been spread in the right configuration. Having eyeballed the place, I hiked back down. It was a destination.

The real challenge in getting there was crossing the riverbed. Actually, by the time it had come that far out of the mountains, the San Gorgonio River was beginning to lose some of its drama. Here the banks were cliffs, but not unscalable. The river wash itself was somewhere between 100 m and 200 m across, an expanse of gray river stones, dry as bones.

A mile or two to the northwest, the river was a true canyon. The banks were 100 feet or higher, and more or less vertical, true cliffs. The dry streambed looked very much the same, no vegetation, gravel and river-pummeled stones sitting there waiting for water, it seemed to me.

I was quite attuned to rivers and water as a kid. Maybe something in me, something atavistic and northern European, just couldn’t get with the desert program. In those days, a good part of the year there was a small rivulet flowing down the center of the river wash. In high water it was maybe 2 m wide. And some locals had optimistically piled stones here and there to create a seasonal wading pond. I noted all these details. The river had great potential, I decided. With time and a bit of luck it might even somehow return to its former glory.

Because everyone knew that the San Gorgonio River had had its moment. That was in 1939, seven years before my birth. A September tropical storm had blown in from Baja California and deposited 24 inches of rain in parts of Los Angeles, probably more or less the same in the mountains above Banning. Which must’ve given the San Gorgonio River a new lease on geophysical life. The river canyon filled from bank to bank. Water came rushing down from atop the 10,000-foot ridge above…peaks so close that one could see the pines outlined against the snow. The town flooded.  The reborn river rushed past Palm Springs in search of its lost destination in Mexico…the Gulf of California.

Was I born too late or too early?  More on this soon….