by Richard Seifried
Signal Hill Musings
March, 2010
As I do almost every winter day, I am sitting in our living room looking out over the hills and valleys that the Kings River has created over hundreds of thousands of years. The hilltops are of the same height, the result of plateau erosion.
The sky is a jumble of broken, gray stratus clouds. Winds, coming and going, cause the pines to move at one moment and then remain still until the next airwave strikes them.
Fog blanketing the Kings River Valley (as seen from Richard’s Signal Hill home)
John Muir said that nature’s movements occur in rhythms. I don’t recognize any mathematical weaving of the pine branches, but perhaps I am not as close to nature as I presume. Above us the stratus clouds move steadily eastward, the wind coming from the great storm that struck California.
It is easier for man to observe nature’s movements when he is out on the Great Plains. Two summers ago, my son-in-law Tom Shafer and I watched wave after wave sweep across the grasslands, beautiful undulations of greenery, bending, rising, and bending again. We could only marvel at such movements caused by our invisible atmosphere.
John Muir, who loved nature so profoundly, enjoyed the mathematical rhythms to the extreme. His favorite place, I think, was Yosemite. Once, hurricane winds were sweeping across the park, remnants of a Pacific storm. Muir and friends were sitting on a sheltered porch, watching. Suddenly, John jumped up, ran across the meadow, and climbed high up to the top of a tree. There he held on as the wind swayed him back and forth, absolutely exhilarated, observing the mathematical movements of the forest giants.
Even more bizarrely, a strong earthquake hit Yosemite. Rocks were tumbling down the mountainsides. Muir, to the chagrin of his friends, ran toward the sliding rocks and jumped from one large rock to another. Later he claimed that mathematics made his accomplishment possible. He had observed that mathematically spaced, the large rocks enabled him to do so.
Well, readers, I am not John Muir. The trees can undulate mathematically all they want but I will remain seated, drinking my morning coffee, caressing the shoulders of our little Yorkie-Maltese, Lucy Lou.
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