At The Ranch

Into the Hills

Early season rains have coaxed a faint green from hills that have been golden brown all summer. By early spring, if we're lucky enough to experience normal rainfall this year, they'll be emerald green. They'll explode with color—and with visitors—as the wildflowers bloom in mid to late spring. On this cool January day, there are few visitors. I have the place more or less to myself, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, we opened our home at varying times to five overnight guests—both friends and family. We gave gifts. We received gifts. We prepared meals and baked cookies and made peanut brittle. A lot of peanut brittle. We hosted get-togethers. We attended get-togethers. We spent the holiday season sipping wine and hot chocolate and watching Christmas movies and being with those dearest to us, and had a great time doing it.

It is now the afternoon of the first of January, US Pacific time. I've pitched a comfortably large tent and set up my camp stove at what once was the site of the Rolling M Ranch. Artifacts of the old ranching days—red barn, windmill, cattle chute, corrugated shacks—are still to be found around the campground and throughout the hills. This will be my Walden Pond, my Zoro's Field, if only for a short time. When all is said and done, I will spend a tenth of a percent of the time in my self-imposed isolation as Henry David Thoreau spent in his. I set up my radio too. Thoreau would almost certainly not have approved of radio, had he lived to see it. I'm okay with that. In his opening chapter of Walden, Thoreau was careful to caution the reader that his volume wasn't to be read as a how-to.

I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. [Emphasis in the original]

Here, I have every intention of taking Thoreau at his word. This night in the hills may have been inspired by the autumn I spent reading Walden, but I'll be doing it my way. 

So many of the questions of Thoreau's day are, for better or worse, asked and answered. Industrialization is a done deal. Western materialism is a done deal. While there is much in Thoreau's writing to inform our modern views of humanity's relation to the natural world, the stark sense of austerity and back-to-nature purism that a literal reading of his work imparts is, realistically, out of reach. The best most of us can hope for is to make our way as happily and productively as we can in the world that we have, and to take the time to recreate and reflect and enjoy the things that make all those efforts worthwhile. I went into the hills because it was a good time for a change of pace. I went into the hills to temporarily replace the bustle and the celebrations of the holidays with silence, or as close an approximation thereto as possible. I went into the hills to feel firsthand something approaching the chill of a winter's night, and to wake up amongst the dew-covered oaks and sage. Oh, and I went into the hills to activate Chino Hills State Park, K-1139, and make a bunch of QSOs from inside the park, because I'm getting pretty close to earning a kilo for that park.

Solitude, and Connectedness

I drove into the park through the north gate, printout of my reservation in hand, and checked in. The park employee asked how many people were in my group. "Just me," I replied.

"All right. Gonna enjoy some solitude."

"Yeah. It's just me, my radio gear, and a hundred or so of my closest radio friends."

She laughed and gave me a sticker to put on the car window, with the combination to the gate that would be locked for the night written on the back.

Dinner was a burger made from roughly equal parts beef chuck and bacon that I ground just before leaving the house, topped with a slab of Monterey Jack cheese and slathered with whole-seed mustard. After dinner, I fired up my Icom IC-738 and started tapping on the code key. The sun has long since gone down. Invisible energy goes out into the dark and the cold from my antenna, and invisible energy comes back in response. A lantern illuminates my paper log sheet, on which I struggle to write the incoming call signs in the howling wind following the cold front that brought rain to these hills the day before. The voices heard on SSB before dinner all sounded friendly; now even the dots and dashes sound friendly. Sure, I'm alone out here, one of fewer than ten people in these fourteen thousand acres of state parkland, but contacts are coming in every couple minutes from every corner of North America. Doubtlessly almost all of those operators are under a roof right now, in a dedicated radio shack or at the kitchen table of a warm house. Where they live and what they do for work and how they spent this New Year's day are unique, and not at all the same as my story, yet in the minute or so it takes to complete a CW QSO we share this experience of radio across the distance and the darkness and the differences.

There are familiar call signs. There's N0RSR in Arizona, whom I met years ago on satellites. There's W6LEN, an operator just 40 kilometers away in Huntington Beach. I've worked him dozens of times, met him in person once. He's a big part of the reason I'm doing Parks on the Air (POTA). 

Above, airplanes crisscross the sky, some departing Los Angeles and surrounding airports, some arriving. I take a couple breaks from the code key to monitor their communications with air traffic control. There's a 737 from Orlando in contact with Los Angeles Approach on 124.9 MHz descending toward runway 25L at LAX. I think of the flight deck, of the pilot monitoring who's doing the radio work as his aircraft passes just six kilometers away from being directly overhead. I think of the hundred or so passengers, looking to the flight attendants to take the remains of their snack wrappers and drink cups before the inevitable announcement that seat backs and tray tables must be returned to their full upright and locked position. Maybe some of those on the left side of the airplane look out the window and see a dark patch between the Pomona Valley and Orange County, completely unaware that anyone is in that dark patch at this very moment. Their stories are as varied as those of my contacts, yet we share this world and are connected in ways that we're often not ever aware of.

After I complete the last QSO of the evening I crack open a can of Bell's Two Hearted Ale. The beer's name, I'm told, is more a geographic reference than a literary one, but I don't have to believe that. Included in this trip's equipment list is an anthology of Hemingway short fiction.

Visitors

The radio contacts are not the only thing to break the silence of this night alone in the hills. Four times during the night I am awakened to the sound of coyotes calling to each other, their shrill, almost ultrasonic, yips and howls carrying over the hills and canyons. Phase cues suggest that the questions and subsequent answers are separated by hundreds of meters. It's the original mobile two-way communications setup, as effective under the conditions as VHF simplex.

Within a couple minutes of it starting up, the coyote dialog winds down, questions receive their answers, warnings are given and heeded. The relative silence seems to return, but it turns out not everyone has had their say. A great horned owl calls out with the same hoot-a-hoo, hoo, hoo that was heard outside that cabin in the New England woods a century and three quarters ago. We sometimes hear a great horned owl outside our house, just ten kilometers on a straight line from where my tent stands tonight. We even named the owl—Howard—and eagerly await hearing from Howard on those California nights when it's cool enough to sleep with the air conditioning off and the windows open. On this night, against all odds, I like to think that the owl near home and the owl now near my tent are one and the same, that Howard has dropped by for a visit, that somehow our home is not entirely disconnected from the natural world and this place I have come to in the hills is not entirely disconnected from home. 

Other familiar sounds are with me this night. Bill McKibben points out in his annotated edition of Walden the difficulty in finding a place in the lower 48 states where one can go fifteen minutes without hearing the sound of a motor. The airplanes overhead more than take care of that, but as the wind dies down and fellow campers turn in for the night, the faint hum of the Riverside Freeway on the other side of the ridge to the south becomes audible. On the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Southern Transcon, between the hills and the freeway, a train horn occasionally calls out into the night, getting just enough of my attention to make the rumble of diesel engines and the click and clack of steel wheels on steel rails noticeable. I recall that Thoreau also heard train whistles. As it turns out, the cabin on Walden Pond was closer to downtown Concord, Massachusetts than my tent is to Yorba Linda, California. A good friend of mine likes to imagine Thoreau walking to his mom's place every week or two to do laundry. He certainly had visits with his friend Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, and other friends in Concord, and makes no secret of it in his book. Silence and solitude are as much a state of mind as they are a place of sparse population and reduced sound energy.

Tent-Warming

Overnight the temperature gets down around six or seven degrees Celsius. There are certainly parts of the world that get colder, but we should be able to agree that this is cold enough to start thinking about adding supplemental heat to the interior of the tent. I don't have anything nearly as romantic as the crackling of a fire in a wood-burning stove. The hills and mountains of Southern California burn, and burn furiously. Wood fires aren't permitted anywhere in the park, and out of respect for other people who want to enjoy the park, woodland critters, and nearby homeowners, it's a rule that I don't hesitate to follow. I have to settle for a catalytic heater. I attach a one-pound bottle of propane to the heater, light the pilot,  and then power up the heater. Carbon and hydrogen atoms, in the presence of heat and catalyst, are persuaded to end their millennia-long association and go on to combine with some of the surrounding oxygen, showing their satisfaction with the new arrangement by giving off energy. Warmth from the sun that struck some plant before the dawn of humanity now heats my tent. Plenty. After a half hour I turn the heater down from the high setting to the low setting, and spend a warm night by a faint red glow.

Coffee and a Satellite

As the predawn sky begins to lighten, I emerge from the tent. As promised, everything is covered in a thick layer of dew; it's a good thing I remembered a towel to wipe down the picnic table that will be my operating position for the morning. As it is at home, coffee is the first consideration of the morning. Something else for Thoreau to disapproved of, this time expressed explicitly in Walden, but I feel as though he might come round if we had the chance to talk it over. For me, it's not about the pharmacological effect, or even the warmth. It's a process of creating and enjoying the cup, an engagement of the hands and all the senses. At home, I do this by making pour-overs or espresso shots or caffe lattes with swirling patterns of free-pour latte art. In the field, my brewing method of choice is a Bialetti. I measure whole coffee beans, sourced from a Colorado roastery that I discovered while on a road trip from California to Michigan, into a hand-operated grinder and turn the crank. The ground coffee goes into a filter basket that will sit atop the water reservoir. I grab the main part of the pot and screw it tightly onto the water reservoir. Atop the camp stove, the water in the reservoir will boil. Steam pressure will force hot water up a tube and through the coffee grounds in the filter basket. From there, the brewed coffee, still under pressure, will be forced up a tube in the main pot to an opening just under the lid, where it will cascade down into the pot. The pressure exerted by the steam isn't nearly as much as that from a pump-driven espresso machine, but it's enough to get a more forceful extraction than what a pour-over or a percolator would yield.

While the camp stove does its work, I set up the rig and start calling CQ on 20 meters CW. After about a dozen contacts I glance to my right. Steam rising from the Bialetti tells me that coffee is ready. I step away for just a moment to fill my cup, then continue to make CW contacts while sipping coffee and munching on a frosted cherry Pop-Tart. After an hour or so of CW and a little SSB, all on 20 meters, it's time to QSY. Satellite AO-91, which was literally on the other side of the world as I finished my last sip of coffee and my last bite of Pop-Tart, is now off the west coast of Mexico and about to rise over my southern horizon.

As with last night, there are familiar call signs this morning. On satellite, there's K6SFO in the Bay Area, N6RSX just over the hill in Brea, XE1MYO in Mexico City who likes to hunt and activate POTA, and WD9EWK in Arizona, who was on the other end of my very first satellite QSO on a summer day almost four years ago when I stood on the deck of my condo contorting my HT to align the rubber duck's polarity with that of the satellite. On CW, there's AK9A in Wisconsin, who seems to find me on every activation, and F1BLL in the South of France, whom I've worked a half dozen times, more than any other single station in Europe. With loss of AO-91's signal, the activation ends. I tear down the rig and break camp. An hour later, I'm back at home, my stuff put away, heating up Christmas tamales from the Mexican restaurant down the hill for lunch with my wife. After all the celebrations of the past several weeks, our empty nest is empty once again. It's time to put on the Rose Bowl game and get on with the New Year.

Conclusion

I grew up in the 1970s and '80s, years before the Information Revolution really took off. Some of the simplest aspects of modern life that today we take for granted—getting a train schedule, buying tickets to a ball game, waiting for an important telephone call—were painfully tedious. Television had three networks and, if you lived in a large enough city, a roughly equal number of independent stations that showed almost nothing but syndicated reruns. I honestly wouldn't go back if even by some magical happenstance I had the chance. Our mobile phones and computers and smart TVs are a miracle of technology, but they do come with a risk.

Like the passengers on that passing 737, it becomes easy to go through the world at 35,000 feet and miss so much, to become so worried about handing off the empty Coke can to the flight attendant that we fail to see the dark patch off to the left, or take the time to wonder who or what is there. But what if someone did see, and did wonder? What if he or she made it a point in the days after landing to go exploring, to get to know the terrain?

Unlike Thoreau, I won't—can't in good conscience—make a case for throwing off the trappings of the modern world. We're well past going back. In all honesty, we probably shouldn't go back. Life expectancy in the middle part of the nineteenth century was in the 40s. I will, however, fully get behind Thoreau's assertion that the quick tempo of modernity can too easily become an end in itself, and can become distracting. We miss the point. We don't get to know the terrain.

The terrain can be varied. It can be Morse code on a straight key. It can be dropping the stylus on a vinyl record and hearing that analog sound, with just enough surface hiss to remind you that you're alive. It can be crafting raw lumber into useful furniture, or soldering together a component for the shack, or enjoying a day of fishing. I've never been one for New Year's resolutions, but I'm always up for making adjustments, even using something as arbitrary as a new year as the starting point. This year's adjustment is to find new ways to get to know the terrain. This is the year I'll read at least ten books—real ones, with real ink on real pages—starting with that Hemingway anthology. This is the year I'll get back into running. There's something in that dark patch outside the plane's left windows. Let's see what's down there.