Concentration

I walked west, into the sun, straight up to the rock formations that sat on top of the hill. The lichen encrusting their cracked and layered sides somehow gave them the look of granite, and weathering, and great age, although I suspect they aren’t that old at all. Nor are they as hard as granite; they’re only the soft and crumbly serpentine and sedimentary rock that make up what geologists call “San Francisco Melange”.

My eye loved the mottles and textures of the rocks. My camera lens made them boring. I tried to change its mind. No luck. I’d been clicking and snapping for a while when a flash of mustard flickered in the corner of my eye. There was a climber clinging to the side of one of the big rocks, in the shadows. Deep in my fight with the camera, I hadn’t noticed him — and likewise. He hung from a ledge on the rock face, stomach pressed against it, all of his attention lodged in the tips of his fingers and his toes. He had no room left in his brain to process my footsteps on the gravel-like path, or the clicks of the camera shutter.

He scuttled like a spider, a slow, careful spider, across the boulder while I clicked and clicked, looking for just the right angle to capture a deep groove carved into the side of a rock. Neither one of us heard the crunch of the hikers coming up behind us until one of them said, “Look at the hawks.” I looked up and saw one, two, three hawks wheeling in circles, reddish-brown against the blue sky. No — it was two hawks, and something black, a crow or a raven, screaming, screaming as it dove and stabbed at its enemies. How had I not noticed that?

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