Quick Take
Angelica Glass set out to walk every street in Santa Cruz County for exercise and stress reduction. Nearly 2,900 miles later, she’d discovered hidden beauty, unexpected wildlife, dislodged childhood memories — and a whole new way of seeing the place she'd called home for decades. Her book, “Scavenging Beauty: A Memoir in Walks,” will be available on Tuesday, and she will be talking about it at 7 p.m. that day at Bookshop Santa Cruz.
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The walking project that culminated in my book, “Scavenging Beauty: A Memoir in Walks,” started on a whim as I was trying to figure out how to manage work-related stress and incorporate more exercise into my already busy life. I landed on the idea of walking the length of every street in Santa Cruz County.
I moved to Santa Cruz from the East Bay in 1979 when I was 18 and wanted to be closer to my girlfriend at the time. Since then, I’ve set down roots to rival those of the oak trees on Enchanted Loop in Wilder Ranch State Park, one of my favorite local hiking trails. Both of my adult sons were born and raised here, and my wife, Ellen, and I recently celebrated our 28th anniversary.
When the walking project idea struck, I got straight to work crafting a tidy plan for organizing my walks. I made a list of what I expected to take with me on each trek and what I would need to keep track of my adventures — the notebooks, the running shoes, the maps, the spreadsheets, the photo albums.
From the start, I carried a camera with me on each walk with the idea that I would search out and take a snapshot of something of beauty on each street. But snapshots quickly gave way to a full-blown obsession with learning photography, adding a new dimension to the project.
Setting out, already-familiar roads became fresh as I visually scoured my surroundings. A towering heritage tree here, a whimsical chicken coop there. Crumbling headstones in the historic Evergreen Cemetery adjacent to Harvey West Park and overgrown railroad tracks between Wilder Ranch and Davenport.
I squeezed walks in before and after work and prior to dawn on weekends. I’d walk a mile or two on a lunch break, or I’d take a day off work so I could walk all day, often covering 20 miles or more. Then, over the course of 2,878 miles of crisscrossing this 600-square-mile county, something unexpected and transformative happened.
Walking became an antidote to a long‑standing sense of disconnection from my sometimes-troubled early life, helping me to remember and reconstitute the past enough to gain a fuller perspective. Photography became a nepenthe, soothing me past heartaches and patching the resulting holes with resplendent beauty.
The simple, wholesome ingredients of solitude, the lull of repetitive motion and a will toward beauty reshaped my internal landscape and left me feeling whole and at peace in a way I hadn’t experienced.
In this frame of mind, I was primed for awe.
One motionless spring morning, many months into the project, I left the house early enough to be at my starting place just before the sun rose. A hankering for a rural walk led me to Mountain Charlie Road, a winding, paved road that rises to the summit, running parallel to Highway 17. It wasn’t long before I was on a cartoonishly steep stretch, walking at an unnatural angle to avoid the feeling that gravity was going to take me down. There was no stopping to catch a breath; momentum was key. I’d walked this road before, but being here alone in the stillness of early morning, I saw it anew.
Just as I reached a more reasonable grade and worked to regulate my breathing, I made my first acquaintance with a tiny spring azure. “Blue butterfly!” I whisper‑shouted to no one. What first looked like a flake of stray ash drifted into my realm in apparent free fall until a barely perceptible flap revealed grayish underwings opening to a shock of vivid color. The azure’s presence was so startling, so captivating, that I might as well have awoken to find the full moon resting in my hand.
Mountain Charlie Road was named for an early settler in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Charles McKiernan, who built the road in the mid‑1800s. It was the first route by which wagons could travel between Santa Cruz and San Jose, about 30 miles north. McKiernan was a pioneer whose head, legend has it, was disfigured in an encounter with a grizzly bear, resulting in the need for a metal plate in his skull.
Ursus arctos horribilis, the grizzly bear, once roamed this area in numbers. I spooked myself trying to imagine looking up to see this 600‑pound giant lumbering through the redwoods toward me as he considered his lunch options.
I heard Steller’s jays bossing each other from treetops. Their squawks brought me back to camping trips I took as a child with my parents and siblings in sites throughout central and northern California, including Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park here in Santa Cruz County. We had a massive army-issue tent, and with sardine‑packing precision, my parents could fit our 10‑person family into it.
But sometimes we preferred to be out under the stars.
This is how it started. I’d be out walking and something so simple as a party of jabbering jays sent me tumbling back to childhood. I laughed aloud and something in me opened, a portal to fall into, as I watched memories braid themselves into the sights and sounds of my walk in the present.
Psychology professor Dacher Keltner defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” I might easily have gone my whole life without ever seeing a spring azure, but on this sunny day, both of us happen to be out in the world wandering and our paths crossed.
Vastness lies in the blue of the butterfly’s wings and in the very fact of wings.
Some people actively go in search of awe in places of worship, or they travel great distances to see untold billions of stars from the darkest reaches of the planet, or use hallucinogenic plants to visit different levels of consciousness. Others stumble clumsily upon it. For stumblers like me, awe is joined by joyous incredulity.
A single step out your front door, through a neighborhood park or along the ocean bluffs can be the start of something big. The spectacular biodiversity of Santa Cruz County gives us a head start on scavenging beauty.
Angelica Glass had a decadeslong career in social work in California, culminating in helping to design and direct a program that provides support and services to children and families affected by methamphetamine abuse. The mother of two grown sons, she lives with her wife in Santa Cruz. She will be talking about her book, “Scavenging Beauty,” at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Tuesday at 7 p.m.
