pasithea

Friday was of course, Halloween, Samhain, All souls Eve, or whatever you wish to call it.

I hadn't really planned to do anything. My life is, as always, chaotic, and things like holidays have a bad way of sneaking up on me.

Anyhow, mid afternoon, a few people I knew also expressed that they did not have serious hard and fast plans but had a desire to do something. For my partner, decorating and carving pumpkins makes her quite happy, so we did that. I think we ended up carving 4 jack-o-lanterns, and we gave candy to trick-o-treaters when they wandered by.

The rest of the party showed up fairly late, and we mostly hung out and chatted in my studio for a while until we got bored and wanted to go wandering.

Yay! Wandering around at 3AM. Now THIS is my idea of Halloween!

And I knew the perfect place. A strange little secret I'd kept for a while but wanted to share with my friends.

The night was perfect for it. Very weird weather balmy and windy making the leaves dance around. High clouds reflecting the light of the city cast everything in a strange orange twilight, making it easy to see and removing all sense of time.

I took them to the Steven's Creek trail, but rather than follow the trail, we climbed down down down into the creek bed 30 feet below.

We were in the middle of a forest in the middle of a city. The creek-bed is largely artificial and the walls of the canyon, even more so. That plus the overgrowth gave the bizarre sensation that we were wandering through the ruins of a forgotten world. The remnants of mankind were apparent in a few places. Weird half-eroded walls made of bags of concrete, an engine block sunk into the creek bottom and resembling a fossil. Most of the creek bed is flat and easily walkable, nearly like an abandoned road, though in a few places it's strewn large rocks and boulders or fallen trees that we had to pick our way through, but nothing hard to navigate.

There were little sprinkles of rain off and on throughout the evening. Just enough to tingle on our skin but not to drop the temperature or really get us wet. Perfect weird and strange weather, and it quite suited our wandering in this alien world on the edge between the city and the wild.

Of course, I'd saved the best part. There is a part of this section of the creek where two highways intersect each other and it was this cathedral of concrete I was leading them to. It is the gallery of local graffiti artists. The way is guarded by a giant centurion with an outstretched hand reaching down towards all who enter his domain. Spray-paint murals climb the walls 30 feet tall and even the ceiling of this place. Devils, demons, three-dimensional piles of skulls and bones stand out in relief. The paintings stretch out onto the ground of the dry creek bed. This place is invisible to the worlds above it. Ground level, highway 85, highway 237, and the pedestrian walkway above it all, easily 100 feet above us. I had taken them to the underworld, a forgotten city beneath the city where the dead dance in a world of eternal reddish twilight.

We spent quite a while exploring this place, then we went a bit further up the creek and eventually up and out at El Camino. Then we took the 'official' path back and went up up, over all the roads to where we were looking down on where we'd been a short while before. Even if you know it's there, you can't see it. It's an interesting effect though. It makes you hyper aware of the amount of engineering that goes into a city. Layers on layers below us, and even the river bed wouldn't be the bottom. The pilings for the bridges easily run another 30 or 50 feet below ground, if not more. In a way, it's kind of overwhelming when you really wander through it and think about it.

Also sort of strange is thinking about all the intersections at that point. It's a place that's where highways intersect a river. It's the border between Sunnyvale and Mountain View. It's the intersection between city and wild. Between 'normal' society and counter-culture. Samhain marks transition to the dark part of the year. We were at that place just before dawn, neither fully morning nor night. The weather was a strange combination of summer and winter, it was both raining and not. In a few days, we'll have a new president, and I feel there's a change coming there too. As it turned out, that place was also in its moment of transition. As we were walking back to my place, the rain began to pick up more in earnest and became a downpour.

A few hours later, one of my friends was interested in going back to photograph the place and I was wanting to do some foraging, so we walked back to that area. The creek had returned. It was at least six feet deep and rising. Much of the artwork, particularly the parts on the ground will be washed away or buried. We were the last people to see it. No one else will be able to go down there for probably six months, and when it all dries out, new paintings will come, and the dead will dance again, but it will be different and reborn. In a sense, I took our expedition to the cusp of the world and got to show them a strange place the moment before it vanished.

All in all, I'm quite pleased.