Easter's winter

Early April and winter lingers.

Forecasters warned a weather disturbance would slam into Central Cali on Sunday; it is still disconcerting to bundle up more for Easter than for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

With this in mind I hesitated to take a day trip to the Carrizo Plains National Monument, a park in eastern SLO county that attracts meager crowds on normal days. But these days are not normal.

Since writing a piece on wildflowers I am abnormally interested in the spring phenomenon, a seasonal orgiastic fest made deliciously gorgeous around bends and straightaways of the California backways. Buzz on the street is that the drab confines of the Carrizo Plains burst with colors, a startling exuberance in a park whose natural endowment excludes trees. Thank President Clinton for signing an executive order that created this monument with three days to spare in his presidency. Unlike other units of the national park/national monument system Carrizo is managed by the BLM, an agency without a conservation pedigree.

At the KCL Campground I counted six eucalyptus - not quite a savannah. Squeezed between the Caliente and Tremblor ranges the flatlands abound in gorgeous carpets of lupine, daisy, goldfield and phacelia. Splotches of yellow and green also adorn steep hillsides, too far for me to identify them.

Water collects in the middle of dry Soda Lake. Alkali marks its periphery, a wholly inhospitable surface where wooly sunflowers manage to survive. The mighty chilly temperatures barely top 12 degrees and I am having trouble surviving ...

Not quite this dramatic but the wind and now sprinkles of rain don’t invite prolonged exploration. Odd since the thermometer will soon flirt with 40 degrees and remain there for months.

I got shaken some more by the San Andreas Fault, a fracture that separates the park through its entire length. Wallace Creek suffered an abrupt realignment in the mid 19th century when a powerful earthquake rocked the area. (One struck northern Baja today ...)
Near the park's northern edge I leaped out of the car to study a road sign the describes an intersection of two roads in the middle of a field. Does the earth move so fast we do not have time to realign directional signs?The back roads leading toward the communities strung along Hwy 101 cross gentle rolling hills studded with expansive oak groves and, you guessed it, more wildflowers. Pretty country. The headwaters of the Salinas River look good, too.
A soft rain washed over the windshield ushering perfect driving conditions. I love to drive in the rain, a romantic interlude that always recalls a scene in Claude Lelouch’s “Une Homme et Une Femme” where we spy the two protagonists engrossed in a passionate discussion, in between sweeps of the windshield wipers. With songs streaming in over Radio Canada in French the imagery almost worked.

[At McPhee's Grill in Templeton, a famed eatery with adequate but nor superlative fare (except for a spicy tortilla soup) I stand with hair at the longest ever. It will remain long even after Tuesday's haircut, a trim more than a shearing, the first since November ... I love it!)