I’ve been living at Pi since June 1, when the Point Reyes National Seashore re-opened its gates to hikers after COVID closures. Life in the city was cozy enough, but with no job to engage me, no school to attend, and no cultural institutions open to enjoy, there was little to tie me there.
I arrived, of course, with my cat Pogo, who celebrated his 17th birthday sniffing around the deck and garden, but keeping close by my side. He was suffering from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, barely summoning the strength to eat anymore, and he perished two weeks later, as it happened, on my own birthday.
Now, it is just me, joined by the occasional mouse who finds his way into the house or studio, or the friend who stops by for a masked chat or a hike, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a weekend. August brought my daughter Annie and her boyfriend’s visit, a COVID risk we were all willing to take and one that joyfully punctured my usual bubble of isolation and loneliness.
But two companions greet me on a daily basis, and though inanimate, they are lively enough to capture my attention. I refer of course to the sun and the moon, whose quiet predictability – immune to politics, protests, or pandemics – are a balm during this troubling time.
I keep a lookout for them. Though their easterly arrival each day (or night, in the case of the moon) is obscured by the tall cypress and eucalyptus lining Route 1, I can track much of their arcs over the broad pasture and witness their descent behind the distant Inverness Ridge to the west.
The moon, of course, is delightful. Who cannot fall in love with the sliver of the new moon, the crescents of the first and third quarters, or the luminosity of its fullness? This weekend will be a “blue moon”, the second full moon in the month and timed perfectly to augment the spookiness of Halloween.
Yet it is the sunset that interests me even more as I write this. Each evening of these past five months, I have paused on my deck, often with a glass of wine, to witness and to salute the end of day. I’ve been tracking the setting sun, taking mental notes of its point of departure. At the summer solstice, when the sun follows its northern-most path in the sky, it sank behind an enormous eucalyptus tree at my neighbor’s land. Each night since then, it dips not only a little earlier, but also a little more southward. At the fall equinox, it set midway over a large barn, due west, and I made a little mark on my deck to record the position. Some of these sunsets have been spectacularly colorful, and some, with the fires and the choking smoke, spectacularly scary.
Now the sun continues its southward march, setting a few minutes earlier each day until the winter solstice, when it reaches its inflection point and starts the journey northward. I plan to be here, glass in hand, to catch it.
