Mount McCoy

My friend Steve and I have been hiking buddies for almost twenty years.  Occasionally we walk the mall, or the neighborhood, or nearby trails, or the winding road up to the Reagan Library; but our favorite and most frequent hike starts at 5:30 AM and takes us up the twenty-seven switchbacks to the top of Mount McCoy.

Our community of Simi Valley looks like a football stadium, flat in the middle, surrounded by hills.  It is about ten miles long east to west, and four to five miles north rim to south rim; and Mount McCoy is a prominent feature of the west end.  If the weather is fair and the light is favorable, you can make out the huge cross that crowns the hill, a holdover from the days of the el camino real, which connected the California missions.  From the trailhead, our hike is 2.4 miles round trip, with an elevation gain of 600-plus feet, roughly the height of a 60-story building.

The view of the stadium in the early morning is breathtaking, because as the sun rises above the eastern rim and lightens the sky, the town below is waking up; and there is a narrow window of time, neither night nor day, when you take in the fading and speckled checkerboard of porch lights and streetlights and headlights, as the dark-thirty commuters head out.     

We have been up and down this hill nearly two thousand times, including a fair number of moonlight hikes, enough miles to take us to Chicago and back; and in those countless hours we have talked about everything.  Grandkids.  Dodgers.  Politics.  History.  Religion.  His corny jokes.  My long-winded stories.  Favorite authors; our very own traveling hillside book club.

Steve is a Cal Poly graduate who taught horticulture and agriculture before getting his doctorate and becoming a principal; and on our hikes he has been my personal tutor about Southern California flora and fauna, biomes, the gestation period of bovines, the care and feeding of chickens, and all the flowers and herbs you can pick along the way to spice up your turkey dressing.

And trees!

His walking quizzes have been particularly vigorous when it comes to the genus Quercus (oak), of which there are more than 100 species.  He has some personal favorites, which have become required learning for me:  Quercus agrifolia (California Live Oak), Quercus lobata (Valley Oak), Quercus pacifica (Channel Island Scrub Oak), Quercus suber (Cork Oak) and Quercus vacciniifolia (Huckleberry Oak).  Oh, I almost forgot; he also collects cacti; hundreds of them in his yard.  You must be careful where you sit.  Yeah, really!

As he has schooled me over the years on native plants and animals; I have found Steve’s intellect to be world class, his knowledge encyclopedic, and his geekiness just plain scary.

We have enjoyed “the hill” in all seasons and all weathers.  At the winter solstice the sun peeks over the hills in the southeast, and we track the progress of the sunrise northward along the eastern horizon through the vernal equinox, when the sun is due east and sits in the saddle where the freeway connects our town to the San Fernando Valley.  It reaches its most northeast wake-up call at the summer solstice in June.  Then the return trip, inching southward along the eastern horizon week by week, through the autumnal equinox until rising again in the southeast on the winter solstice in December.  Another year of conversation and admiring the oaks and the heather and the sage and the mustard plants and the prickly pear cactus and the bunnies.     

We have ascended the hill in muggy July heat and frigid January mornings. Right after our clocks spring forward, we need mounted headlights, like a miner, to see the trail.  There is a special joy when it is foggy; you are in a grey cocoon for most of the hike, but near the summit you rise out of the fog.  You find yourself on an island, with a cross, surrounded by a blazing white and frothy lake, like the sensation of being in an airplane when it blows through an overcast sky and you are dazzled by the sun’s glare above the clouds.  It may be gloomy down there, but up here it is magical. 

In the earliest days of our hill adventure we could get up and down in about 50 minutes.  Allowing for a few minutes to sit on the rocks at the foot of the cross, we could easily accomplish it in an hour; but as the years have worn on, and the knees have worn out, we have had to allow for extra time. 

Steve has soldiered on for years with a sore knee; and it is mainly his fault, because he regularly does an imitation of a teenager and engages in one of America’s most hazardous sports — church league softball.  As for me, just about everything hurts, and what doesn’t hurt, doesn’t work.  For these reasons we had to slow down the frequency of our hikes, and when Steve had knee replacement surgery, I wondered with some sadness if we would ever hit the hill again. 

Yet he was determined to get back to work and back on the hill, so he took his rehab and stretching seriously.  In the days immediately following the installation of his bionic knee; he needed help standing up, could hardly bend his knee at all, and suffered innumerable indignities.  But he worked it.  They said he might get back on the job in four to six weeks, but nothing was said about going up and down a skyscraper without an elevator.  It was good to hear that he was able to return to the office; but it shocked me when he texted, “Wanna try the hill tomorrow”?

He climbed slowly out of his truck, carrying something resembling a ski pole.

“I see you brought your cane.”

“It’s a walking stick.”

“OK.”

We made it to switchback # 19, when he stopped for a breather; but he didn’t want to quit.  On we went.  He said it hurt, but he had gone from a knee bend of 10 degrees the day after surgery, to 120 degrees that morning on the hill.  We took our time, establishing a new PR for length of time on the hill at an HOUR and 50 minutes, up and back.  Steve felt bad for holding me up; but truth be told, this is a new and comfortable pace for a guy who is closer to 80 than 70 and who has only two stops on his transmission – SLOW and PARK.  We brought the hill to its knees six weeks to the day from his surgery, and we have the selfie to prove it.

Since our pace is slower now, we have more time for Dodger talk, more grandkid tales, more gossip about the school district where we have both spent many years of our lives working with other peoples’ sons and daughters.  Two guys trying to trim the weight and the waistline, enjoying the journey, enjoying the views, walking to the contours of the hillside and the rhythms of the sunrise, smelling the flowers, building a friendship one step at a time.