Seeing my way back to the trail

Part 4 of 5 

I had to get out of the house. After three weeks of iritis - an inflammation of the eye - this winehiker was mired in cabin fever. Spring weather had arrived early, and I needed to fill my lungs, stretch my legs, make some boot tracks.

And so I hopped in the truck. But because I wasn’t yet comfortable revisiting my favorite narrow winding roads, because I’m still quite bothered by bright light, because I craved some hillclimbing, and because I hadn’t been hiking for 3 weeks and wanted plenty of mileage options in case of early fatigue, I held myself to visiting Rancho San Antonio County Park in the Cupertino foothills - about the closest park offering any shady forested hills. My only concern was parking - being that Rancho is a very popular park (it’s free to park) - but I managed to snag a spot overlooking the Glider Bowl, where it’s common to see hobbyists work their remote-control aircraft.

I laced my boots, shouldered my rucksack, and started walking. I hadn’t been too sure if I’d be able to reconnoiter the trails’ ruts, rocks, and roots. And for somebody who wants to always take note of what the plant and animal kingdoms are up to, I had further questions. Would I see the harbingers of Spring - the miner’s lettuce, the cow parsnips, the checker lilies? Would I even notice the western fence lizards, the rufous-sided towhees, the dew in the grass? Would I be able to accept less than seeing these things?

Well, I had to get out of the house. And I was determined to see something. I opted for a steady, measured pace and, fortunately, I saw all of the above, and more. As I usually do, however, I also let my other senses soak in Nature’s show, and so I ate the miner’s lettuce, I heard the lizards scurrying about the forest floor, and I whiffed the laurel and also the trailside mugwort, its heady fragrance announcing Spring to me like no other species can. And, lo and behold, I also spied a blooming hounds-tongue, it’s star-shaped cobalt flowers reaching to the sky, reaching to me, as if to prove to me that every day can produce a miracle.

Yes indeed, seeing is believing.

Granted, I’ve not regained full vision in either eye. I can see distances and I’m OK to drive, but anything closer than about 18 inches causes me to reach for these silly 3X coke-bottle glasses that I find myself carrying around for reading, writing, and to inspect checker lilies with. Throughout this ordeal, it seems as if somebody had taken my eyes into a Photoshop application and applied a white overlay to them. Everything is just too bright, just a little too white. But today’s 10% overlay was certainly much better than how things were for me two weeks ago, when that overlay was more like 80%.

After today’s hike, I didn’t go to the nearest winery. Preposterous, I know, but instead I went home and I slept. I slept for 2 hours, too - something I don’t commonly do, 20 minutes of meditation usually being enough. Oh, but I’ve been sleeping a lot lately. A friend remarked that all that sleeping might have something to do with how disorienting my vision problem must be for me. That might be true, but I also know that when the body needs to heal, sleep - and allowing yourself the time for it when you need it - is just about the best thing you can do for yourself.

Well, I am going back to work tomorrow morning, and I’m going to find out just how healed I am. But if I can’t make it through a full day of pecking at the computer keyboard, I’ll log off and head for home early. In the Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force, Clint Eastwood’s tagline is, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” I believe I know mine. At any rate, I know my health is all that I really have. And so I’ll continue to pace myself this week.

Mm-hmm, I got a good healthy dose of health today. Gloryosky, I’m back on the trail!

~winehiker

« Part 3: Things are beginning to look up | Part 5: I knew these tastings were “blind”, but this is ridiculous! »

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 9:54 pm and is filed under grape squeezins, winehiker's trails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.