Standing at my kitchen sink, I can look past my backyard fence
and between the two houses behind mine and see the Diablo Range
towering over our county.
Standing at my kitchen sink, I can look past my backyard fence and between the two houses behind mine and see the Diablo Range towering over our county.
It is always there, but at times it surprises me as if it left for a while and suddenly returned.
This is a view that was obscured until recently by the leaves of a tree that had to be felled due to disease. In the 1970s and ’80s, the mountains disappeared during the spring and summer behind the walnut orchard that occupied the space that is now a neighborhood.
Botanist John Muir marveled as he traversed Pacheco Pass as it cut through the mountains: “It resounded with crystal waters, and the loud shouts of thousands of California quails. … Through a considerable portion of the pass the road bends and mazes along the groves of a stream, or down in its pebbly bed, leading one now deep in the shadows of dogwoods and alders, then out in the light, through dry chaparral, over green carex meadows banked with violets and ferns, and dry, plantless flood-beds of gravel and sand.”
And you just thought it was the casa of Casa de Fruta.
The Diablo Range changes its countenance throughout the year. It is brown and dull in the late summer, at times obscured by haze. Then there are days when the fog builds against it, closing in eastward to meet the fog bank spilling over the Gabilan Range near San Juan Bautista, eventually blanketing Hollister.
There are mornings when we wake up and see it sprinkled with snow, briefly making us forget that we are less than an hour from the ocean.
Coming back from vacation, I always know I’m getting close to home when the Diablo Range comes into view as I head south on Highway 101 in southern Santa Clara County.
When I worked in Santa Clara County, like so many thousands of locals still do, the world changed on the way home after I exited 101 and joined the parade toward home on Highway 25.
The mountains east of town were the marker for where I was headed. Find the peak and look west, and there was Hollister – and home.
With such scant development of the range, it is dark at night, except when the full moon rises from behind it and illuminates its peaks.
The point of all this is that after we take some time to stop and smell the roses every now and then, we should stop and look east to the Diablo Range. It is not as imposing as the Sierra or as green as the Gabilans, but it is our frame, our border, our skyline.
On a partly cloudy day, it comes alive as the shadows of passing clouds dance on its slopes. On a clear day it shines as it basks in the sun. The range is almost always in sight, but we don’t often see it.
Its balance of natural simplicity and grandeur give us Reason No. 865 why this is such a great place to live. Look eastward.
Adam Breen teaches journalism and yearbook at San Benito High School. He is former editor of The Free Lance.
