Hi all,

I have been missing in action for the last few months and I would like to sincerely apologise to the Simply Wild readers, writers and potential writers.

An extremely demanding day job and important responsibilities in my young family has meant I have not had the time to dedicate to the publication over the last few months.

I have made the difficult decision to close the publication (for now) to new stories and writer requests. I may reopen the publication at a later date if my current responsibilities allow me the time to properly dedicate to the publication.

Thank You

I’d like to thank all the amazing people who have made the publication what it is (or was).

To the readers – thank you for your time in reading, liking, and sharing our stories.

To our wonderful writers – thank you for your amazing contributions to the publication. I am beyond proud of the stories we published – you have all added your own threads to the rich tapestry of the publication.

Thank you,

Warren

I’m Sorry - Simply Wild Closing For Now was originally published in Simply Wild on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My early life passed in the shadow of a mountain. Saddleback, on the eastern edge of Orange County, California, hardly measures up in size or scenic appeal to the mountains I have known, but it dominates the local landscape. Many of the county’s residents, however, scarcely notice it. The ocean and its famous beaches get more of their attention.

But I noticed. Its distant silhouette gave stability and assurance to my otherwise bewildering childhood. Whatever traumas my youthful days presented, I could trust that the sun would rise again over Saddleback Mountain. Its twin peaks, Santiago and Modjeska, framed the hope of a new day surging with possibility.

The drama and chaos I experienced early in life paralleled the upheaval of a changing landscape. My childhood witnessed the demise of Orange County’s agrarian heritage. One after another, hundreds of orange groves succumbed to the profit-hungry forces that turned orchards into housing tracts. With dismay and sadness, I watched bulldozers push acres of orange trees into towering piles to be set aflame in enormous bonfires. In their place, gaudy homes sprouted on crowded cul-de-sacs of suburban pavement. A few undeveloped acres remained here and there, awaiting their fate as future construction sites.

Saddleback, though, stood beyond the reach of progress and development. Its presence was a promise and reminder that some remnant of wildness persists beyond the tract homes, freeways, and strip malls that lined the boundaries of my young life.

Grandmother mountain

In the fanciful ponderings of adolescence, I envisioned Saddleback as a shadowy matriarch overseeing her errant offspring. I would sometimes confide in the mountain my innermost fears, imagining it as a wise, empathetic grandmother offering encouragement from the far edge of my homeland.

This sort of fantasizing, I now realize, domesticates the landscape with a selfish disregard for its wildness. Despite how I imagined it, the reality of Saddleback remained what it has always been: a wrinkled bulge in the earth’s wild surface. Daydreams and wishful fantasies could not alter it.

Through all sorts of transformations, conflicts, and pressures exerted on the coastal plain below, Saddleback remained constant. Off-limits to private development, it weathered fierce winter storms blowing in from the ocean and long summer months of searing heat. Occasionally, I saw the summit topped in snow, but not often and never lasting. Most of the year, it stayed cloaked in a grayish brown. Winter added a splash of bright green for a few weeks following the rains. Always, Saddleback Mountain remained a steadfast presence in the background of my youth.

The view from below

On a visit to Orange County some years ago, I caught sight of Saddleback’s subtle magnificence from behind parallel strands of barbed-wire fencing. The rusting wires guarded an uncultivated, undeveloped field. I could see a neighborhood of densely treed rows of houses between the field and the mountain.

My gaze shifted from the mountain to the houses on the far side of the field. What goes on in those homes? How many quietly desperate occupants cling to ambitious hopes that will never materialize? Which dwellings hide the cruelties of bitter men exercising daily acts of violence on those with no one else to love? Who has found refuge behind the sturdy walls where kindness and affection reside? Those homes and tens of thousands of others shelter a myriad of human potentials, foibles, loves, and cruelties beneath a barely noticed mountain.

From the ocean, the low line of a coastal ridge eclipses Saddleback’s silhouette. Along the terraced slope, the sprawling ranch houses of a Newport Beach neighborhood face seaward. Their occupants cannot see the mountain’s distant form pressing the inland horizon. The restless expanse of the Pacific Ocean suits their temperament better than the saddled patience of the inland heights.

All across the lowlands, from the Newport Beach shoreline to the crowded hillsides of Yorba Linda, Saddleback appears as a moral contrast to human aspirations gone astray. Unlike the palatial homes decorated with exotic plantings of palm trees and tropical flowers lined along wide curving suburban streets, or ranch-style stucco dwellings stacked noisily in the urban chaos between shopping malls, or sprawling complexes of garden apartments pushed hard against railroad tracks, the mountain’s unmoving summit quietly demonstrates a more enduring truth: the prideful pursuit of personal ambitions may bring a temporary gratification, but ultimately the dynamic balances of a more humble natural order will prevail. Hubris eventually must give way to humility.

My last encounter

I last saw the mountain a decade ago. It stood much the same as I remembered it from my childhood: silent, motionless, stoic above the fray of frantic, superficial California. In the pre-dawn light, its silhouette appeared as a silent, dark outline against the brightening sky.

I wondered if the mountain would still recognize me. I had left that land decades ago, returning rarely for the briefest of stays. This last visit included a tour of the wild lands that surround Saddleback’s slopes. It was as close as I ever came to touching the mountain.

I came in the latter days of autumn to walk among the variegated shadings of browns and the dark green of California live oaks crowding Saddleback’s arroyos. The late afternoon shadows highlighted the textures of the terrain. As I wandered its foothills, the mountain appeared much larger and more intricate than it looks from a distance, less a single twin-peaked summit and more a complex system of intersecting ridges and drainages curving downward to the coastal plain. Up close, it’s impossible to say where the mountain ends and where the rest of the world begins.

That afternoon, I realized Saddleback is more than just a distinctive geological feature of the Orange County landscape. The mountain’s slopes and ravines are home to a surviving ecology of the Southern California past. Rabbits and a variety of rodents provide ample nourishment for the foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and mountain lions that haunt its ridges and canyons. Overhead, hawks circle as they seek the promise of a meal moving nervously through the chaparral. Vultures glide to carcasses rotting in the hot sun. Standing above the densely populated dream state of the California fantasies that inhabit the flatlands, the mountain has kept its wildness.

From afar, Saddleback appears as a two-dimensional backdrop to all the dramas and everyday happenings of the suburban lives occupying the plains. But up close, it becomes a three-dimensional entanglement of thriving life. A thin squiggle of switchback lines crisscrosses up its slopes to the summit, an access road for the antennas placed on its lower peak. However, few humans reach the mountaintop besides the occasional service crew who go about their routine duties.

A mountain of wisdom

I never reached the summit, but for me, conquering a mountain is no great achievement compared to learning from its wisdom. I saw Saddleback nearly every day of my early years, and so much of my youth happened in its shadow. I learned to walk and talk, read and write, ride a bicycle and drive a car. My first kiss, my first sex, in love and out of love, all played out under its unchanging presence. Serenity and restlessness were both my companions as I made my way toward adulthood. Through the heavy air of stifling summer days and the cold dark of winter storms, I became who I am beneath the constancy of Saddleback.

I learned to sing by watching the mountain. Something in its ancient patterns sparked a deep song buried in my soul. In time, my singing impulse gave way to lesser aspirations, and eventually, the song ended as the melody ceased to be the gift that gave life to my days. Music no longer seemed enough to feed the ambitious striving toward an elusive success and prosperity.

Ultimately, I left the shadow of Saddleback, and somehow the mountain and its lessons left me. I sought new places and other means to satisfy my ambitious undertakings. My eyes closed to the magic, the stillness, the song of a wild land. And soon enough, its music faded altogether from my soul.

I had good reason to abandon the places of my youth — too much pain there, too many hard memories in the house of my childhood. But long after I left Orange County, Saddleback continued offering wisdom to new generations of youth pondering its distant silhouette.

Sadly, too few curious souls seek its wisdom, and fewer still hear its music. Saddleback sings in registers unheard by human ears. Its harmonies are not meant to save humanity. It has no need to change the world or destroy it. Without pity or judgment, it remains as it has always been: a quiet stillness in a tumultuous world.

Storms sweep in from the ocean, dry winds rush down from arid deserts, and heavy rains soak Saddleback’s undulating slopes. Through it all, the mountain abides.

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Songs of Saddleback Mountain was originally published in Simply Wild on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.