Having just completed a class in “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Wolf’s classic, I do understand why the lighthouse is always there, never goes away and eternally beckons. That’s what lighthouses do. And there’s a Jeffrey pine in my life that does exactly the same thing.

Gentle Reader, you’ve heard it all before. How I never made it to the lighthouse, sorry, the pine. Not during my ambulatory life, that is. But the pine is looming still, even getting closer. Because after a modest amount of online research, my brother and I have determined that it is indeed possible. Not only to get me to the pine, but to hang a right, and start up the alluring riverbed that points up and up to Mount Gorgonio, almost 12,000 feet above the level of our very own Pacific Ocean.

Not to belabor the point, but I believe that I was connecting with my own inner non-desert child. Fuck this desert, all my northern European genes were saying. And they were saying this whenever I was driven, or later, rode my bike, up to the end of the paved road on the Bench.

The latter was a plateau. It was high enough above the poor little town of Banning to accumulate some actual snow, even when the lower altitudes, like my house, melted it away. And late in my pre-divorce childhood life, I began to do a bit of hiking on my own. I climbed, or almost climbed, B Mountain, the conical hill behind town which sported a big limestone letter proclaiming the local football team. And this involved crossing the dry bed of the San Gorgonio River.

The stony expanse pounded with water energy. Yes, it was dry, but just take a look at the thing. It was a wash. This was where the famous flood of 1938, or was it 1939, roared down from the heights. And just take a look at the bluffs defining the Bench. Maybe 70 feet high in places. A steep river edge where, from an adult perspective, I can see how the water pouring down from the mountain ran into a wall, and undermined that wall higher as it turned left and rolled south and eventually east in search of Palm Springs. More than 28 inches of rain fell during those storms in the late 1930s.

As a kid I sensed something about that once and future flood. Water, with all its power and fluidity, brings life. And destroys it. And in deserts that are prone to flash flooding anyway, add a bit of height, plus a hundred-year storm…and you’ve got a potent symbol of what was looming for the Bendix family. The waters finally came, washing away the nuclear family, like a nuclear bomb. And to keep the metaphor going, reappeared or re-exploded less than 10 years later in the form of an emotional crisis that led me and my spinal cord straight into a bullet. 

But life. Water brings life. Water brings trees. Trees are in forests. And in the dry, desert where I grew up, symbolically in sync with the emotional aridity of the family Bendix, from an early age I marveled at the trees we could barely see on the mountain ridgeline above and behind our house. More water up there. More life up there.

So looking down from the Bench, as far as one could go on paved roads before hitting a locked Banning Water Department gate, there was that place where the moist nurturing forest was making a bold sortie into the desert. One pine growing all alone in the dry river bed. The last, absolute last, pine before the whole thing degenerated into desert.

So that’s the scene. And the scene, the real one, seems to have changed. With the advance of Google Earth, there appears to be a road. If not paved, graded and probably drivable. And it proceeds up the dry riverbed, past the iconic tree and up, up, into the mysterious upriver steepness.

Brother Richard and I are having serious discussions about driving a four-wheel-drive vehicle up that road, giving me a chance to complete something. Which also threatens to knock the energy right out of the symbolism. Because, after all, the pine, seen close-up at ground level, will reveal itself to be a tree. Nothing more. And that’s why I plan to insist that we park as close as possible and take some time. Because I know it to be a brave tree, sticking its roots out there.

 And these days botanists know that no tree is alone. A subterranean network of fungi connects trees in a grove. And I have already decided that this one has a direct line to the rest of the San Bernardino National Forest, that this Jeffrey pine turns in a report to the weekly arboreal staff meeting.

It was respected as a listening post, keeping an eye on the arid lands beyond. Just in case the desert started encroaching up the slopes…vis-á-vis, global warming. I didn’t know that trees were connected, as a little boy. I didn’t know I was connected too. There were people who cared about me…whom I hadn’t even met. And the wider world wasn’t that arid. What I didn’t know, I hoped for. Such are the forces that keep us going.