Both Mom and I had ants in our pants to get out of our Stuck House, so once Mom finished working yesterday we got in the Covered Wagon and drove to a trail in Big Sir. We got to the bottom of the trail when it was dark and spooky, so we had no idea what it would look like when we woke up. The way it usually works is the hotter it gets at our Stuck House the colder it gets at the beach, so I hoped it would be nice and cool in the morning.
“Mom! You’ve ruined it! We’re going to die now,” I said when I stepped out into the warm, sunny morning. “It’s only 7am! It’s been this hot all night. Anyway, I kind of thought we would be near the ocean and it would be foggy…” I looked around. All I could see were the kinds of plants that you get in hot places, and lots of brown grass. “You missed the ocean. By a lot,” I told her. “Yeah, well… apparently Big Sur has an inland side. Who knew…?”
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This trail was like nature’s storage room, where all the cool things to see were in one place, but all disordered and piled on top of each other in a way that made them hard to look at. There were big bits of sandstone sticking out of the ground that had holes scooped out like swiss cheese, and slabby bits of rock all fanned out like someone had knocked over a stack of pancakes, and little villages of boulders in shady glades that definitely had gnomes living behind them, and a tractor that had been used in the revolutionary war, and a patch of fuzzy white plants that looked like they were covered in frost as a fashion statement, and wildflowers in all the shades of grey, and as we got higher there were views of the mountains in every direction that you looked. We could even see off in the distance where the mountains fell into the ocean and the cool, grey fog clumped like a bad mood.
We were within a quarter mile of the tower on top of the mountain when we somehow got turned around again and found ourselves walking back down the trail the way we had come. “I’m not having much fun, are you?” Mom asked. “No, [snap] not really [snap],” I said with my tongue hanging around my ankles. “Screw it, this is good enough,” she said. But “screw it” doesn’t make you magically land at the bottom of the trail like Mom thought. We still had more than 5 miles to get back, and it was getting seriously hot.
-Oscar the fly trap
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