Little Black Mountain

The difference between being alone and lonely

In 2002, Andy and I packed our cars full of clothes, books, and a recently rescued Mexican dumpster kitten, and moved to a cabin with no electricity on Little Black Mountain, in Cazadero, California.

I’d spent the majority of the previous year treading water in San Luis Obispo waiting for him to finish his final year at Cal Poly. In the mornings, I waited tables at a breakfast place called JD Scrambles in Pismo Beach, a restaurant that specialized in young blond waitresses in very short shorts and soft-focus watercolors of kittens playing with balls of yarn. I was repeatedly disciplined by the overly serious owner for violations of his dress code (I made sure to wear the longest shorts I could find) and was at a distinct disadvantage due to my brown hair and my terrible attitude. In the afternoons I played bartender at the local golf course and flirted with dirty old men for tips. I never received any formal training and had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I was excellent at shit-talking, so the golfers patiently taught me how to make their drinks.

I’d made the decision to move to San Luis over the course of a flurry of impassioned emails and one fateful phone call made at an internet cafe in rural Bolivia. After months of travel and attempts to distract myself with the shininess of the new and unfamiliar, I came to the realization that I was in love. I convinced myself that I only had two choices: to move back to the States to be with Andy, or get on a bus to Brazil and let the dream of being with him go. I chose Andy.

When I arrived in San Luis it became clear to me that I’d hitched my wagon to someone deeply embedded in a world I didn’t really understand. He lived in a punk house with a few other guys, his domain was a tiny room lined from floor to ceiling in glass and books. The house also included a bathroom that I never touched with bare feet, a wild garden, and a trio of chickens that roosted on top of the old wood-framed TV. The situation was dynamic and never boring, but the novelty wore off quickly.

Eventually I ended up finding a room in a shared home with a woman from Orange County who rode a Harley-Davidson Sportster motorcycle, cheerfully neglected her ill-tempered mini Aussie Shepherd, Domino, and committed herself to a devotional regimen of waxing, fake tans, and dieting. During my free time I scrambled up Bishop’s Peak or Cerro San Luis (Madonna), or drove out to Montana de Oro to sit by the ocean and wonder what the hell I was doing with my life.

The offer to move to Little Black came at just the right time.

In the loft at Little Black. Baby cats, baby lambs, baby faces.

We were to be caretakers for the regular caretaker, our friend Jacob, while he went back to school. Mostly we were there to water and tend the garden, check and repair fences, mow the meadow for fire safety, and make sure that nobody illegally hunted on the 600 acre Sonoma Land Trust property.

The cabin was a simple, one-room structure built by weed growers in the 80’s, with corrugated plastic roofing on one side, an outdoor shower, a wood stove that produced so much heat in winter that we spent most of our time barely dressed or naked, and a tiny propane fridge that rarely kept the milk cold. The other year-round resident was a dusty footed wood rat we named Cyrus the Wretched, who evaded all attempts at capture and spent the wee hours of every morning piling our shoes up in the corners of the cabin. The toilet was temperamental, and the land line phone was our only tether back to civilization.

I loved it there.

The driveway up to the mountain took 20 minutes to traverse. Adapted from a former logging road that was banked the wrong way, it was so narrow in parts that if you encountered another car you’d have to back down the mountain to let it pass. In the winter its culverts would overflow, spitting new rocky tributaries in long gashes across the driveway, making the drive up even more complex.

I’d inherited a tiny red Subaru Impreza from my sister Liz the previous year. It had a scrappy little manual transmission and a tin-can vibe that felt akin to driving a dented feather. In the winter I’d gun it in second gear over the rushing water, making the steep ascent with white knuckles and many prayers.

The mountain, though just an hour and a half north of San Francisco, was wild and remote, a land of redwood gullies, manzanita, bay, tan oak, madrone, and riotous hillsides of wild flowers in the spring and mushrooms in the winter. A family of mountain lions lived in a rocky outcropping just above the cabin. We always knew when they were around because our cat, Nala, would begin to cry and refuse to go on our nightly hike up to the Pole Mountain Fire Lookout.

The path up to the Lookout was both aesthetically dramatic and punishingly steep. A section of it was a sort of litmus test for a person’s fortitude. One night, after drinking a lot of whisky, we decided to hike to the top to see the full moon. Our progress was rambling and eventually halted when one of our friends sat down in the middle of the ascent and simply refused to walk any further. Nala, ever resourceful, would meow until one of us relented, picked her up on our shoulders, and carried her up the slippery terrain. Once we’d reach the top, she’d hop down and prance through a copse of madrones, sniffing for the golden eagle that nested there.

If you made it to the top, the payoff was huge. From the deck of the Lookout you could see from the Marin Headlands all the way down the coast toward Mendocino. It was the kind of view that reminds you of the miracle of all existence, and we had it all to ourselves.

Before we left San Luis, Andy and two other glassblowers had decided to put down a deposit on a converted warehouse in an industrial park in Atascadero, Ca to start a new glass studio. Our decision to move 7 hours away didn’t daunt Andy. He decided to stick to the original plan and made the commute down south for 2 weeks a month, living out of his truck and showering with a hose as he and his partners built the studio from scratch. When he was able to be in Cazadero with me, he spent his days working at his friend and mentor Sonny’s ranch and shop, building the annealer for his new studio and laboring on his land in exchange for Sonny’s equipment-building expertise.

That meant that for two weeks of every month, I lived alone at the cabin. Jacob and his girlfriend at the time, Melissa, would often come up on the weekends, and our friend Tim was a frequent visitor with his guitar, but there were long stretches when I was there by myself, learning to navigate being alone for the first time in my life.

Once the sun moved behind the western side of the cabin and began its descent, it got really dark. I’d make a cozy nest and draw or read, the space illuminated by candles jammed into old wine bottles and my trusty little headlamp. I had no cell phone, nor a computer. Aside from Cyrus the rat and Nala the cat, it was just me, my thoughts, a portable Discman running on batteries, and the sounds of the wild Sonoma coastal range.

At first I was terrified. I slept poorly, startling at every branch scratching across the skylight, frozen under the covers by the sounds of yipping coyotes. That fear shifted into deep curiosity as I familiarized myself with the terrain. I began to walk the mountain twice a day, exploring every possible corner of the property as well as the adjacent properties. As I became acquainted with the land, I experienced a transformation in my understanding of personal safety: the wildness of the mountain was not a threat to me. Each new deer trail, sloping meadow, or shady nook by a creek held the potential for amazement and awe. Some days I’d take my book and a water bottle and try to get lost, finding new spots where I could read or nap. Other days I’d walk further, exploring neighboring properties, seeing how far I could travel before I got too tired or nervous about finding my way back.

I was alone, but not lonely.

A list of the plants and insects and birds I was thinking about…and a plan for a project I was making/going to make for my neighbors on the mountain, Julie and Judy (beloved friends who are dead now. RIP).

Little Black Mountain was the domain of my discovery. I was 24-years-old, and I was learning about who I was separate from my family, friends, and partner. My days were filled with hiking, making art, gardening, reading, and daydreaming. It was complete and total bliss. Eventually I ran out of money and had to get a job—actually, a few jobs—but for the first months, I simply lived up on that mountain. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t excited for Andy’s returns, or grateful for Tim’s companionship, but I was also ok with the solitude. I learned to be quiet and to listen to myself, ways of knowing that I am leaning back into as I arc into this new chapter of my life. Once again I am often alone. But again, I am not lonely.

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and he asked me point blank if I was feeling lonely. This is what I told him:

I believe that one of the loneliest places is inside a relationship, when you long for understanding, togetherness, and companionship, but cannot actually find each other in any of it. And that’s where I’ve been for a while; alone inside of partnership. It makes me teary to write that, as it hurts to admit that estrangement can develop inside of a relationship filled with so much love. But sometimes, love is not enough.

Just when I think I’m beginning something new, I look back at an old sketchbook or journal and realize I’ve been marinating on the same images and ideas for years. I don’t know what I was trying to communicate with this drawing of a mandrake growing a heart and lungs, but I think I like it.

I don’t know if I romanticize that year on Little Black too much. I think I knew what I had when I was there, my journal and my letters and emails tell a story of a kind of astonishment at my good fortune. Maybe it was because I was aware that the experience would end—that Jacob and Melissa would move back to the cabin and Andy and I would decamp—that made the year that much more special. And maybe it was the returns to the mountain after we’d moved away that brought the experience into such sharp relief. Every time I’d start walking on that land I’d feel a sense of connection and deep attuning that I didn’t feel elsewhere. Or maybe it was one of those specific moments in a life when we come more fully into ourselves and grow at an exponential rate. I was a different person when I packed my meager belongings back into that little Subaru and drove away. I knew that I wanted to make art and grow gardens and spend this life in close relationship with the people I love. And I did all those things. I still do.

In two weeks I will return to Mexico for school and I will learn to die. I will hopefully shed more of my ego, the identities I cling to out of fear, and sink more fully into a new version of myself. Through the grief, and dislocation, and challenges of navigating this complex moment for my family, I also recognize the parts of me that know how to do this. How to live fully with no plan—with no version of the future mapped out—and with the sensitivity for the present that opens doors to remembering why we are all here. I do not have 600 acres to roam, but I do have today, which is also a wilderness if you really get down into it.

I don’t know what’s next, but I do know how to listen—and how to belong to myself, completely.

So that’s where I leave you, dear reader.

I noticed this week that there are now 500 of you subscribing, many of whom are helping to support me by contributing money. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for sticking with me, continuing to read these little dispatches, and for all of the incredible feedback and love I’ve received. What a strange medium for storytelling and disclosure this is…and yet, I still want to do it.

Thank you for your patience as I figure out ways to write about things that mostly resist tidy narratives and feel too tender to release out into the world. I’ve been struggling to get my ass in a chair and simply write, mostly because it hurts to dig deeply right now. And sometimes I just want life to not hurt so much. So, that is my call to go back into the garden and water the seedlings.

Sending love, xoxo,

Belle

No Hot Links this time around. But, here is an abbreviated list of some of the books I read that year, according to my journal:

The Bell Jar (2x), Sylvia Plath; Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut; The Jaguar Smile, Salman Rushdie; Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo, Hayden Herrera; Blindness, Jose Saramago; Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon; A Year with Swollen Appendices (2x), Brian Eno; Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie; Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck; East of Eden, John Steinbeck; How to Be Good, Nick Hornby; Exile, Blake Nelson; The Quiet American, Graham Greene; Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl; In the Time of Butterflies, Julia Alvarez, Brave New World, Aldus Huxley; High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver, A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, David Eggers; Life of Pi, Yann Martel; Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehnereich; Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Copeland; Memoirs, Pablo Neruda; Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman; An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks; The Count of Monte Christo, Alexandre Dumas; Narcissus and Goldmund, Herman Hesse; Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen; Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold; Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami; Straight Man, Richard Russo; Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux

A few of these books are still some of my all-time favorites: Brian Eno’s memoir/journal: A Year with Swollen Appendices, East of Eden, Blindness, and The Bell Jar. And really, it looks like I read so many great books that year! Not enough women, less non-fiction than I do these days, and notably no poetry, but still, it wasn’t all Danielle Steel.