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All manner of humanity lies tucked and smothered into narrow valleys between five perfectly spaced ridges.  Moms and tennis instructors and drug dealers and old men mowing their lawns and young men flipping their skateboards live and breathe and eat in the squalid air bottled down there.  Glimmering lights begin to wink on, one after another.  Streets begin to ignite slowly with headlamps, perfectly spaced thin grids of headlamps.

The five ridges stand ragged and stark against the soft blanket of incoming ocean fog.  A low breeze rustles the plastic ribbon against the stake at my side.  Click, click clic-k.  Silence reigns.

The valley sweeps away below my feet, a valley of scrub oak and sage and wasteland.  Here and there, if I peer carefully, I can make out a house.  But it is all wild.  Completely empty and wild all the way down the hill till the brown air of the valley begins.  The fence in front of my chest has a yellow tag on it that says "ELECTRIC FENCE".  I want to touch it with something metal and make it spark, but no, there is too much dry sagebrush about and last year the worst fires were all arson.

There is so much room in the world I am surprised that we insist on cramming ourselves into such narrow corners and then complaining that there is not enough room or food for everyone.  I have seen open spaces that have nothing in them, and then tried to ride to the end of the spaces and there is no end, really.  I eventually just find a road that takes me away in another direction and steers me back to another crowded corner of population.

Here there is a quiet crag on a silent mountaintop, an island of silence and sanity in an ocean of crawling, panting humans whoring after happiness according to the laws of technology, economy and sociology.  Anyone who wants to take a minute from all that can come up here and park their car at the gate and walk out into the silence as far as they want.   Answers are tied to noise and solutions and frustration; only in the quiet may one ask questions.  Brown air can't reach up here, the smells of barbecue and cigarettes and the sound of hip-hop can't reach. One may be still and think whether the laws of technology, economy and sociology must rule life, and where those laws might come from.  The quiet is friendly to inquiry within and the beauty keeps curiosity occupied in the meantime.

Beauty also reminds me, and I stuff my hands in my pockets and glare at the sun and wish she were here, and all reflection about sociology and economy becomes irrelevant.  Gravel crunches under my feet as I drag along back toward where I came from.  It is a gorgeous view, to be sure; all these multitude of mini-valleys but here I am all alone like a fool or a homeless person with my hands in my pockets crunching gravel and kicking stones along ahead.