I woke on a Wednesday morning in early November with an odd feeling that, like Alice, I had stepped through the looking glass into a strange alternate reality. It was an uneasy feeling, but one for which I knew the perfect tonic: getting out.
Any discussion of Henry W. Coe State Park quickly turns to its immense size, which suggests that a meaningful visit must cover many miles of trails. I have been a volunteer at Coe Park for 26 years. No place enchants me more than Eric’s Bench on the very top of Pine Ridge, and it is only a 15 minute walk from the visitor center.
In the summer of 1988, 26 year old Morgan Hill resident Eric David May and his friend Fred King had just summited Mount Shasta by a technical route. They were descending along the edge of a glacier when suddenly, Eric was gone. He fell 500 feet into a crevasse near the west headwall of Hotlum Glacier. It took an hour for Fred to reach his friend, but it was too late. The bench is a tribute to Eric’s memory. According to Fred, “When Eric died, the world really lost a friend of the earth.”
When I arrived at the park, there were just a handful of cars parked near the visitor center and not a soul around. After a quarter-mile climb up the Monument Trail, I turned left onto the Ponderosa Trail, and in a flash, I was at Eric’s Bench. It was one of those autumn days so still you would almost call it sleepy. The silence was complete.
When you reach the area around Eric’s Bench, right away you recognize it is special. I must be hours from home, certainly not just minutes. Ponderosa pines are common in the Sierra foothills, but they are a surprise here. And they are not some timid pretenders of the grand mountain specimens. Huge ponderosas dot the broad grassy knob around Eric’s Bench.
And over there—what an oak tree! If you have been there, you know the one I mean. If you haven’t been there, you won’t miss it when you go. It is a massive sprawling beast, one of those trees that I’d like to buy a beer and listen to its stories. Barry Breckling, the retired park ranger who spent thirty years at Coe, thinks this tree is a hybrid of a blue oak and a valley oak. But it really doesn’t matter. It is magnificent.
I sat on a patch of grass, leaned against a ponderosa, and continued my quest to learn to draw. Down below, all the TV chatter and post election claptrap seemed as though from another planet. This is what the area around Eric’s Bench is good for.
I don’t know what happens when we cross over, but I hope some bit of Eric May’s spirit resides near his bench. It seems an ideal place to spend eternity. I know it is a perfect place to spend an afternoon.
