Grounds for Sanity

by Laurie Glover

I drove myself to Napa. I had decided that I didn’t need to wait for someone to hike with me. It would be a kind of declarative hike: I can do this. So I bought a trail guide to Skyline Wilderness Park and put myself in the car. I also arranged to meet my mom, who lives nearby, for dinner. She would know if I didn’t return.

When I’d hiked in Southern California, it had always been with a man—boyfriend, husband, illicit lover. I believed women should be competent, should be able to go into wilderness alone, but I was too fearful—or perhaps too prudent—to make the attempt. So, a relationship meant that I could go out somewhere, walk a footpath, see some trees, maybe boulder-hop. The end of a relationship meant the world shrank back again.

I did walk the neighborhood streets by myself, looking at houses and gardens. In the worst period, entre les deux mariages, I walked at night. I had a crush on a guy in a local band and the vague idea that I would run into him on some side street one night, if only I walked long enough. Such was the extent of my sense of what I could do for myself.

But I saw incredible things. A plum tree in full bloom, lit from within by the street light it surrounded. A raccoon and five cubs lined up on the right fork of a live oak. Tree-shapes in moonlight making faces.

The path to the start of the Skyline Park trails is vague; I’m not sure I’m doing it right. I zigzag through an array of picnic tables and pass a series of long concrete platforms led up to by wooden steps. Then I enter a gauntlet of cyclone fences, an eight-foot-wide corridor between stretches of water lying at different levels—a two-part reservoir called Lake Camille.

The mesmerizing, diamond-patterned fence follows the curve of the upper shoreline. The water to one side stands luminous and still, except for the wake of a lone grebe. To the other side, seen through trees, the water is wine-bottle green. Nothing moves upon it, but I hear the sharp chits of a phoebe.

I move upward along a barbed wire fence, intermittently hung with small rectangles of old metal. The words have been worn away from these signs, I think, but when I crunch through dead thistles to flip one up so I can see the side that faces out: NO TRESPASSING.

I’m on the inside. I wonder who’s being warned to stay out.

The 850 acres of Skyline Wilderness Park were once part of the grounds of the Napa State Hospital, which was closed in 1991. The state wanted to sell the land to developers, but local residents formed the Skyline Park Citizens Association and secured a lease. The park is now under the jurisdiction of the Bay Area Open Space Council, and volunteer efforts keep it open.

I begin to think about an inescapable irony: The land was originally set aside as a place of refuge—and as a buffer zone—for the insane. Now, we leave the crazies on the streets, and those of us who have the resources and the leisure time come here to regain our sanity....

Laurie Glover is a lecturer in English at UC-Davis. This is her first essay in print. E-mail: lcglover@ucdavis.edu