After two consecutive outings of absolute and perfect aloness on the trail, I decided a little company would be in order. I’ve known Gaston Lagaffe since childhood, and if you are not familiar with this classic comic strip anti-hero, I highly recommend you look him up. These days, he spends most of his time seated at a computer, researching his latest invention, concocting schemes to avoid parking tickets, dreaming of Mademoiselle Jeanne, occasionally working, and often napping, or ‘thinking’ with his eyes closed, as he would protest. I thought it would be a great idea to enroll him as a walking buddy for an excursion into the Pleasant View Ridge Wilderness area of the San Gabriels. A win win; he gets to breathe some of that clean mountain air–rare treat for an office worker/inventor/comic strip character–and I have someone to chat with.

“Sweet. A hike! I’m in.” Gaston replied when I asked him to join me. He is a born enthusiast. “Should I drive?”

“Absolutely not.” The last time I sat in his junkyard jalopy we miraculously survived a flight. Yes, a flight, across a cow pasture, when Gaston volunteered to demonstrate the turbo booster he’d himself installed on his salvaged and often rebuilt Fiat 509 replica kit engine the night before.

“M’ENFIN!?” he’d exclaimed befuddledly in his native French, as the jalopy landed and rolled across the grass until, having slowed down to a crawl, it rear-ended a matronly Hereford grazing in its path. The incident instantly inspired Gaston to spend the next month drafting plans for a drone-propelled milking apparatus, but I’ll spare you the details of that experiment.

A combination of the early morning departure, the hour-long drive, and the mountain air got Gaston ‘thinking’ less than a mile from the trailhead. I droned into my own state of semi consciousness, lulled by the rhythm of my footsteps on the trail, the welcoming warning cries of crows, bluejays, sparrows and chipmunks, and stoned from the earthy smells of the forest of cedars and pines. After emerging from the sylvan depths of Cooper canyon, the trail undulated gently in a transitional zone, between high desert chaparral and alpine forest, crossing many scree slides littered with desiccated carcasses of fallen trees in various stages of decay.

“WOW!” Gaston exclaimed. “What was that?”

“A dead yucca. Watch out for the leaves. They sting.”

“Looked like a giant swan, with claws instead of feathers. Or kinda like the Gaffophone. Remember the Gaffophone?”

“How could I forget?” How could anyone forget the gargantuan hybrid string and wind instrument, best described as a bass harp, whose sound waves could literally take down airplanes when plucked the right way.

“I bet it would sound terrific from up here.” Gaston marveled at our first open and expansive view of the Antelope valley as we approached Burkhardt saddle. I worried for the pilots at Edwards Air Force Base,

After a well-earned snack break, we resumed our trek, due west, for the brutal ascent towards our destination, first Will Thrall peak then Pallett. Despite having consumed a protein-rich energy bar, Gaston was almost instantly cradled back into a ‘thinking’ state. But not for long. The terrain was slippery, the grade steep, and my breathing heavy.

“Are you sure this is safe?” Gaston could be unpredictably reasonable.

“It would be easier if you actually did your own walking, that’s for sure, but yeah. It’s safe.” Not very nice of me to play the guilt card,I know, especially with the poor frightened little figurine weighing merely a few ounces, but to my defense, I was struggling. In a good way, of course. Slowly but surely we continued, passing the inspirational plaque dedicated to Will Thrall at the summit of Will Thrall peak, which reads: “There’s physical, mental and moral strength to be found on a mountain peak.” My friend was reassured by the fact that enough people had traveled this far into the wilderness to warrant a monument. We took a couple of photos and moved on, following a faint use trail which I soon abandoned to walk the more interesting ridge.

“This isn’t walking. This is climbing.” Gaston said. His voice was shaking. I couldn’t tell if it was from fear of heights or from all the bouncing.

I didn’t answer. Instead I focused on where to plant my feet next.

“You’re using both your hands, and your feet. You’re climbing. You didn’t say anything about climbing”

“Are you scared?” I said, fully under the spell of the adrenaline rush that accompanies me with the summiting of any mountain.

“BOF!” He answered. Meaning…? Well, actually I’m not so sure what he meant. “No. I’m not scared. You’re the one who’s going to get hurt. you should be scared.” I guess he meant that my bones were more breakable than his, and he was right. “I don’t get it. All this work to get a nice view. Someone should build a solar powered ski lift.”

“A ski lift? It doesn’t snow up here anymore. At least not enough for skiing.” It used to though. Only a short distance from where we started that morning, in either direction on the Angeles Crest Highway, you can still see the remaining structures of now unexploited ski resorts. Their pillars and cables and machinery haunting the slopes of Mt Waterman, Mountain High and Table mountain like ghosts of a short-lived, wetter era.

“Hah! Want to hear about my formula for snow making? It’s coconut based.”

On a clear day, you get unobstructed views from this portion of Pleasant View Ridge reaching as far as the Sierras to the north, and a comprehensive panorama of the San Gabriels to the south. And they’re best enjoyed in silence, I believe, with just the whisper of the inevitable breeze in your ears. Something even a plastic figurine of Gaston’s stature understood. But his prolonged muteness on the way back to the car worried me. He wasn’t ‘thinking’ either, or he was doing so with his eyes opened for a change.

“You’re awfully quiet. Is the altitude getting to you?” I asked.

“Hm? Oh no. I was just thinking, Did you remember to display your adventure pass?”

“What?”

“Did you put that adventure pass thingy in your windshield? Because it said to do so at the trailhead.” Gaston insisted.

“Oh. No. I mean I don’t know. They never check anyway.” I didn’t tell him I have actually never purchased an adventure pass, much less displayed one. Because, first, I have never been cited for not having one–I know that’s not a fair excuse, kind of like a murderer saying he’ll just keep murdering until he gets caught, doesn’t make it any less wrong, but I don’t want to get into the politics of it–and second, I know how Gaston is about parking tickets.

“Yeah right. Who’s ‘they’? and how do you know they never check?”

“You’re worried about officer whatsisname?” I smiled. Ever since I’d known Gaston, he and a certain police officer had been engaged in a life or death cat and mouse game, a cop-and-parking-citation-avoider war as unresolvable as the Capulets and Montagues feud, the democrat and republican divide, the Rangers and Celtics rivalry (you non-soccer fans, look it up).

“You can laugh all you like, he’s one cunning law enforcer. And he always meets his quota.”

“When was the last time you got a parking ticket? Or a speeding ticket?” This time I laughed, even though I know it’s wrong to laugh at your own joke, but anyone who knows anything about Gaston’s jalopy would at least smile at the thought of it exceeding even a school zone speed limit.

“BOF!”Gaston was not amused. “I have never paid a parking ticket in my life.” He added defensively.

“So what are you worried about?”

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t get any. Besides, we drove your car, remember? So you’ll be getting the ticket.” Soon after this exchange my tired companion closed his eyes to meditate. I increased the pace, eager to beat the setting sun.

As suspected, there were no parking ticket on my windshield when we returned to the car. The disc of the sun, filtered through the forest surrounding the parking lot, was turning orange. Life all around us was audibly preparing for nightfall; diurnal creatures catching the last rays of heat while nocturnal beasts readied for the night’s hunt. We sat at a picnic table sipping a cup of hot tea, filled with all the positive energy we’d ingested during the day. Gaston was gazing at an eighty foot tall jeffrey pine that had been brought down by a recent storm, its massive trunk ripped in two, only four feet from the ground, with the lower part still stubbornly anchored to the forest floor, and the upper, totally stripped of its bark, resting at a forty-five degree angle on the unperturbed, erect trunk of a neighboring incense cedar.

“You think there’s a way to drag that tree trunk to somewhere flat?” Gaston asked. We’re talking about eighty feet of solid wood, five to seven feet in diameter. “I was thinking about the Gaffophone. It needs a low end wind instrument to round out the sound. If we could drag this thing to an open area, then I could hollow it out, drill some holes in the right spots, you know, like a giant recorder.” Gaston was inspired. He laid out, sparing me unecessarily technical details, his entire organic basso profundo musical theory, and how we should do this more often, so that he might single out more trees, especially those gnarly, twisted, windswept limber pines found at higher altitudes. He was envisioning plans to carve a whole orchestra from the forest, for which he would write a symphony to be performed every year on Burkhardt saddle, on or around September twenty-two, the autumn equinox, to commemorate this day, the day of Gaston’s first hike in the San Gabriels. He would name it “Mademoiselle Jeanne”, for his Dulcinea.

“What do you think?” Gaston asked.

“Zzzzzz.”

“M’ENFIN!”

 

Walking Project 133_Will Thrall peak – walk with an old friend from chris worland on Vimeo.