WEDNESDAY, MAY 6
I’ve always liked this place on Highway 99 between Yuba City and Sacramento, especially on a day when the sky is filled with puffy, scattered clouds. The earth is flat here. It was once a vast inland sea opening out to the Pacific at San Francisco’s Golden Gate. Of course, that sea and it’s opening to the Pacific existed long before the first humans appeared on the planet.

From where I stopped the car to take the picture this afteroon, the sky seemed as vast as it ever is anywhere on earth. I aimed the camera north west to get this photograph of the Sutter Buttes in the distance beyond the rice paddies. The Buttes are said to be the smallest range of mountains in the world. The “range of mountains” is really just the remnants of a volcano that didn’t quite blow its top. A great basalt plug rose up out of the ancient sea and cooled before it erupted. Over millions of years it eroded down to the circle of hills and buttes. When I was a boy, I liked very much to climb both North Butte and South Butte. I was scared of rattlesnakes; but I climbed anyway, watching very carefully where I stepped. I always saw snakes when I climbed in spring, summer or fall. It was a good lesson in life: Be careful where you walk.

As Robert Frost says toward the end of his poem, Birtches, “I’d like to go by climbing (one of the Sutter Buttes). I’ll post the entire poem on the BLOG... along with some other pictures I took on Route 99.




BIRCHES
by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.