The Trail
The first to walk the sacred path were the Kumeyaay. From the great water, they gathered fish. From the land, they collected acorns and hunted game. Their path led up the Jacumba mountain where the shaman received the sacred songs and learned the sacred dance. The pathway from the sea to the highland and to the great desert beyond was a path made by sacred existence.
History books will say Kumeyaay means “people of the West.” But that would be wrong. Those are history books written by people new to the land. For “West” is a matter of perspective, a perspective foreign to the Kumeyaay. Those who said the Kumeyaay people were from the West saw them as being from the place at the end. The place where the trail could go no more.
But the Kumeyaay were not at the end of the trail. Their homeland sat at the beginning of the world, at the very center of the ripples they set in motion. And their homeland sat atop an ancient cliff at the edge of the Great Water. Their very name included the word, meyaay, meaning steep cliff. Their name came from the land because they were the land – the physical, touchable, material existence of the divine. For in the language of the Kumeyaay, the word for land is the very same word for the human body. For the Kumeyaay, there is no difference between the land and the human being. Each is the sacred spirit in tangible form.
The sacred path emerged slowly over thousands of years, but the trail… No. The trail seemed to come all at once. Steep and rugged, the mountain had been little disturbed until the men came from the East. They opened the sacred rocks and found them pulsing with veins of minerals. They cleared the path, cutting back and forth across the steep grade until its zig-zag pattern was tame enough for horses to make the climb. The horses were followed by wagons. The wagons were followed by stage coaches. Soon the trail became a road, first dirt and then covered by planks of wood. Years later, it was paved. Over time, the road became a highway. Then, the highway became an interstate bringing travelers and other newcomers, people of the East.
Today, travelers can speed across and out of the desert in their air-conditioned carriages and climb up over the Jacumba range with ease. There’s no need to stop and rest, no moment to be still and hear the shaman’s song or witness the sacred dance.
Without a thought, drivers can climb the ancient path and crest up the desert ridge, grateful to smell the moist cool air of the Pacific on the other side. They feel relief to find, at last within their sight, the end – the end of the road.
They coast down the mountain with joy to be free from the desert heat and eager to see the great water. They speed past the mini mansions of Granite Hills, past the post-war tract homes of El Cajon and La Mesa, zoom past la Mision Basilica San Diego de Alcalá – not the first one, the one built in 1769 because that one, as you know, was burned to the ground by, ahem, the Kumeyaay. They speed past the mission rebuilt by Junipero Serra. But even those earthen walls erected by the saint himself do not inspire a genuflection by the drivers hurrying west along the interstate. They rush past the bones buried in California’s first cemetery, unhaunted by the ghost of Padre Jayme.
The travelers cut through Mission Valley. They stop for gas at Costco and then drive on west, oblivious to the ghosts of the battles fought at El Presidio Real de San Diego. They cruise past the gates of Seaworld and continue on into the streets of Ocean Beach, where even those paved paths reach their end, finally at the edge of Sunset Cliffs – the cliffs, the meyaay. The meyaay that gave name to the Kumeyaay people.
The travelers reach the end of the world and they search for a parking spot. They step out, glance at the great water and congratulate themselves for having made good time on the highway, on Interstate 8, unaware that the road, the trail, the path has another official name. Unaware of how to even pronounce it if they do – the Kumeyaay Highway.
⧞
It was a Sunday afternoon and the call came out of the blue as I folded my young son’s laundry. A 212 area code. New York. I used to work there, before I had found my way home to California a few years earlier. So, it was odd that headquarters would be calling me at all, let alone on a weekend.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Michelle. Hey, it’s Ken.”
I had no idea why Ken would be calling me. He’d been my boss years ago. I didn’t know him all that well. After a tidy exchange of the normal chitchat, he cut to the nut graf.
“Look, I’m not calling about work. I have a personal problem. I hope you can help me.”
This was odd, I thought.
“Sure,” I said, trying to imagine what was coming next. “What’s up?”
“It’s my son,” he said. “He ran off a couple of weeks ago. He’s just 15.”
“Oh, geez, I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t imagine.”
I knew Ken had a family, a nice home out in Connecticut. Some kids – but I didn’t know anything else about them.
“Yeah, it’s been rough,” he said. His voice was matter-of-fact, just the way I’d remembered it from our time in the newsroom, but there was a tenor of fatigue behind his words.
He’d been a top editor on the foreign desk. I’d seen him keep his cool while juggling five or even six breaking news stories at once and wrangling errant correspondents who’d wandered off track. He was an old-school pro. To hear the fragility in his voice, even slightly, instantly triggered my own parental fears.
“What can I do?” I asked.
He sighed. “Well, the other day, he sent an email to his sister, letting her know he’s OK. We’ve traced it to San Diego. Looks like he used a computer at a public library in, umm,” he paused, “Pacific Beach. Is that anywhere near you?”
“No, that’s up by central San Diego, I live on the border,” I said. “But, I know the area really well. You want me to go look for him?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to send you on a goose chase. But, gosh, I don’t know. I’ve never been there. I just thought you might have some ideas.”
“OK. Tell me everything you know,’ I said, clicking into reporter mode. “Where exactly? And, when was this?”
“That’s about it,” he said. “This was, what?, the day before yesterday and the police helped us trace it to this library in Pacific Beach.”
“Does he have any friends here?,” I asked.
“No, not that we know of.”
“Any money? How is he getting by?”
“Yeah, I wish we knew. He had some money from his birthday saved, but that’s all we know.” He paused and took a breath. “You know,” he said with frustration, “I’m sorry to bother you with this. This is crazy.”
“No. It’s OK. I’m glad you called. I’m sure I can help,” I said, trying to convince myself.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Yeah. Of course. Just,” I paused. “Is there anything else that would help me narrow it down? Maybe,” I said, reaching for ideas, “maybe help me understand why he ran off?”
I don’t even know why I asked. The reporter in me just couldn’t help it.
He made a heavy sigh now, his breath weighing on the speaker. “He just… He just wants to be on his own,” Ken said. “He wants to do what he wants to do.”
With that, I understood.
“Ken, I know where he is."
⧞
My parents split up right before I finished high school. It was a horrible break up, back when divorce was still considered a scandal. In my small town, suddenly, I felt like an outcast. I dealt with it like too many teens do, I ran away. As soon as I graduated, I loaded up the back of my pickup truck and I took off for the coast. I just needed to get away, to get out of the valley where I’d grown up, to get past the ring of mountains that surrounded me, cutting me off from the rest of the world. I wanted to be free.
I found some roommates and started working. School started and life got busy. But, whenever I could, I’d go out to the Pacific, find a spot along the cliffs and just sit there staring at the endless water at the infinity of it.
It occurs to me that we Californians are all a bunch of outcasts, even if we are born here. We’re descended from outcasts and it’s in our blood. With the exception of the First Nations, of course. The rest of us all come from somewhere else. People whose parents or grandparents or great great grandparents are from somewhere else. Outcasts, I say, because somewhere along the chain somebody looked around at where they were and said decisively “To heck with it all, I’m getting out of here.”
Imagine the courage it takes to leave a place you and your people have always been. The defiance of that move. The drive that comes from saying “I don’t belong here. This is not where I belong.”
Many of us come from people who left the Old World, landed in the new one and, for reasons as plentiful as the stars, decided to just keep going and going and going west until they could go no more. That’s us. That’s California. We’re the weirdos and the freaks who just kept going.
When I first moved to San Diego, one of the first things I did was point my car west and follow Interstate 8 toward the sunset. I cut through Mission Valley, past the gates of Seaworld and into the streets of Ocean Beach. I drove until the road could go no more.
My own marriage was on the rocks then. When I needed to breathe, I’d put my son’s car seat in the back of my Volvo and drive out to the beach. Holding him as we looked out at the infinite blue, I’d find the peace I needed to keep going, to keep moving forward. The spot there at the edge of the great water was not an ending for me, it was my new starting point.
Sitting there at the edge of the water in Ocean Beach, I realized I wasn’t alone. That spot, that very spot at the place where the trail met the cliffs and the water, it was a magnet. Like a mystical iman, that spot drew outcasts and misfits of all sorts. The wanderers and buskers, the surfers and dreamers. The runaways. Just the sort of folks who made me feel that, at last, I’d found where I belong. I’d found my tribe.
⧞
Ken and I made a plan to scout for Dylan. I figured there was about a one-square-mile corner of Ocean Beach where he’d have to be. “I know a bunch of surfers there. I’ll get them all to go out looking for him.,” I said. “We’ll print up fliers. We’ll find your son, Ken. We will.”
He sounded relieved. “I’ll put together a flier for you and call you back,” he said and he hung up.
I started making calls to begin rounding up my tribe of friends. And I waited to hear back from Ken. But, the call didn’t come.
Monday passed, and Tuesday. But no word. Maybe Ken had decided my idea was too much of a long shot. At least, I hoped that’s all that had happened.
The weekend came and, again, I was doing laundry when the call finally came.
“Hey, Ken, what happened?” I asked. “Uh, is everything OK?”
“Yeah, yeah. We’re OK,” he said brightly. “Dylan’s back home.”
“Oh, great!” I said. “So, he came back?”
“No, no he didn’t. I found him”
“What?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“So, after you and I spoke, I flew out to San Diego,” he said. “And I went out to Ocean Beach. And, just like you said, I walked until I got to the water and, well, there he was. Just sitting there on the wall.”
“Really? What’d you do?” I asked.
“I saw him there and I just walked up to him and said ‘Hey, Dylan.’”
“Damn,” I said. “That must’ve been a surprise.”
“Yeah, I’m sure I was the last person he expected to see,” Ken said with a laugh.
“I’m glad you found him,” I said.
“Yeah, me, too,” he said. “But, I gotta ask. How did you know?”
I sighed. “If you’re a teenage kid, you’re running away and you’re in San Diego, there’s only one place you end up going. You follow the road until the road just doesn’t go anymore. It’s where we all end up.”
“We?” Ken asked.
“We,” I said. “You know, the searchers, the wanderers, the kooks. We go until we can’t go any more. And that is where you need to go when you need to start again.”
I wasn’t sure whether Ken really understood, so I let it go. And, I didn’t mention the sacred pathway, or the shaman’s song or the sacred dance. There was no need to explain the holy place of the meyaay, where the land and the people are the same. Ken had journeyed to the end of the trail and it was there he’d found his son. And for Ken, that’s where the world could begin again.