Juggling Glass: Mt. Umunhum
Somewhere around the fourth or fifth hairpin, I said the name out loud to nobody. Umunhum. Hell of a name. What even is that?
Rest for the 911.
Turns out it's Ohlone. "Resting place of the hummingbird." The Amah Mutsun used to climb up here to pray, long before anyone thought to bolt a radar tower to the summit and start listening for Soviet bombers. That came later. 1958, the Cold War in full paranoid bloom, a concrete cube big enough to hold an 85-ton dish that spun around slow and steady, bleeding static into every radio and TV set within 250 miles each time it swept past. They called it the Cube. Still do. It watched the sky for twenty-two years, then got fenced off and left to rot for the better part of four decades, because nobody could agree on what to do with a Cold War relic once the Cold War was over. Didn't reopen to regular people until 2017.
Courtesy of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.
A mountain that's spent most of its adult life constantly listening and scanning for threats.
Relatable, honestly.
Hicks Road doesn't ease you into it, either. It's narrow and rough right from the start, blind corners with minimal sightlines, and there's always a cyclist somewhere you can't see them. Not a road to get ambitious on. Mt. Umunhum Road, once you turn onto it, is newer pavement and better maintained, but it's the same deal underneath: tight, switchback after switchback climbing into the Sierra Azul, just as likely to put a tourist or a rider around the next blind corner as not.
A sample route to Mt. Um.
I went up late on a summer evening, 7:30pm or so, once most of the day's traffic had cleared out. Even then I kept it at maybe 6/10ths the whole way, nothing heroic. The road doesn't reward heroism in theory. Not with that much blind terrain and that many ways for someone to be exactly where you didn't expect them. Driving like an asshole on a road like this isn't worth what it costs if you're wrong even once.
I drove up here because I needed to not be inside my own head for a while, and something about altitude and a view does that for me in a way nothing else quite does. Maybe it's the thinner air. Probably not.
On one side, the coast. On the other, Silicon Valley.
For most of my life I figured I was decent at juggling responsibilities. Jobs, relationships, the stuff that matters and the stuff that doesn't. I could keep it all moving. What I didn't notice for a long time was that some of what I was holding was rubber and some of it was glass. Rubber bounces back. Drop it, pick it up, little-to-no harm done. Glass doesn't really give you that option.
Lately everything I'm holding feels like glass. Not all of it, but more of it than ever before. Which means it doesn't feel like I can afford to drop anything. It also means I can't relax while I'm holding it, and somewhere in there the juggling itself stopped feeling like a skill and started feeling like anxiety on wheels.
"Everything is fragile" is what it feels like on a random Tuesday afternoon when my chest goes tight for no reason I can point to (that isn't at least an actual medical emergency). I've had enough of those afternoons this past year to stop calling them random.
The first one that really got me, I was at a party. Warm room, too many people, and the floor sort of tilted. I sat down before I could fall down. Told myself it was low iron or some bullshit and went and got the blood test to prove it.
It wasn't low iron.
Cutting back on caffeine has done more for my nervous system than any of my theories about it have. That's its own kind of humbling. But I fucking miss espresso.
Whatever's underneath all that, and I'm working through it with a professional, it all exists up here (I tap the side of my head as I type this, out of habit, though there's nobody around to see it). Some jobs you just don't have the tools for. This was one of them. And that’s ok.
By the time I made the summit lot the light had gone gold, that low, slanted hour where everything looks lit from the inside. I'd parked the 997 in the main lot, and sometime later a grey 944 pulled in next to me. Never saw the driver, don't know who they were. Just thought it was cool, the two of us up there catching the last of it on our flanks, like we'd both shown up early for the same reason without planning it.
I didn't spend much time at the Cube itself. Mostly hung out at the helipad that sits just off the main lot. That's where the mountain looks best. It splits your attention clean in half.
One side, the Santa Cruz Mountains stack into each other, ridge after ridge, clouds pooled low in the folds like it had somewhere better to be and gave up on the idea. On a clear enough evening you can catch a sliver of ocean past the last ridgeline, just a strip of it, silver where the light lands right.
Turn around and it's the entire South Bay, laid out flat and hazy below: Silicon Valley, or a good chunk of it, the place that's supposedly reinventing the world one AI company at a time, reduced from up here to a smear of rooftops and freeway lines. The Bay itself flattens out into something like hammered metal past all that. The whole valley down there is full of people juggling their own version of this, whether they know it or not.
I couldn't think about anything else up there. That's the part that matters to me. For thirty minutes it was only running one thing, and running it fine.
There's a lesson in that somewhere. I don't have it fully worked out yet. Something about presence not being a mood you talk yourself into. Maybe it’s a place you actually have to drive to. Something about a mountain named after a bird that never stops moving its wings just to stay in one place.
