41 Lizards
I love lizards. All they do is scurry around and bask in the sun and play endless games of hide and seek with whatever children happen to spot them. I say children, but if I’m being honest I’ve never seen a lizard I didn’t want to snatch.
One of the first nights we were in California, we hiked to the top of Mt. Tamalpais and stayed at West Point Inn. Of all the things we did on the road trip, this was probably the one that I thought out the least. Planning this trip became kind of an obsession, so not knowing every detail felt weird, but it led to one of my favorite nights. Mt. Tamalpais or Mt Tam as the locals and people who want to feel cool (me) call it is a small, by west coast standards, peak outside of San Francisco. Declan had a ton of relatives in the area, and nearly all of them recommended our stay at West Point Inn. Declan’s uncle reserved a spot for us, and all I knew was what I had heard from him: We would hike a few miles and stay in a small rustic cabin with no electricity at the top of the mountain with the best view of the bay area you can get. I pictured a teetering building alone at the peak with a key under the mat and a place to put our blankets, and I was excited to experience that by itself, but when we reached the top I was blown away by what we found. We followed old railroad grade through groves of trees that I’d never seen and passed the miles by counting lizards and taking pictures that would never do justice to the view. On the way up I decided that someone, maybe me, needed to invent an app sort of like google maps, but with an information button that you could press to find out what type of tree you were looking at, what kind of lizard you were chasing, or what mountain was off to the left. Imagine how fun inventing that app would be. You could just travel around, figure out every interesting or significant thing about the place and make voice recordings that users could listen to. Imagine interactive maps but with a “tourist mode”.
West Point Inn was originally a stop on the Mill Valley and Mt. Tamalpais Scenic Railway, back when steam-powered trains used to climb the mountain. When the railroad stopped running through, the inn was set to be torn down, but with the work of people who had come to love the peaceful mountain top, the inn was saved and turned into a haven for hikers and mountain bikers. Today, it is completely volunteer-run, and not just a cabin in the woods like I had pictured. There is a huge main lodge with cozy fireplaces, a piano, guitars, regal red couches, a board game stash, and a communal kitchen stocked every piece of cookware you could ever need. I looked around in awe for a while before getting a little too excited about the spice collection. Outside of the main lodge, there is a string of cabins with porches that overlook the bay area. The cabins are chock-full of beds fit with handmade quilts, fluffy blankets and pillows, and in our case, already occupied by a scaley blue-tailed lizard friend. I was amazed by the friendliness of the other people staying there. We sat at a huge table and talked about where everyone was from. There were three women who said this was their fifth year in a row staying at West Point, and they reminded me of my two best friends and I thought about how much I wanted to take them there. I remember thinking that if the rest of the world disappeared, I would have been happy to stay there forever.
I always try to go into unknown and exciting situations with no expectations, because I’ve learned that if you have high expectations, you’re more likely to get disappointed. It was impossible for me not to anticipate every part of the road trip except for this. I didn’t even know what we needed to bring or where the trailhead was until 11:00 the night before. I went from nervous about not knowing the plan, or even really where to find the trailhead, to scheming on how to get everyone I know to visit Mt. Tam. Even if I had known what the view, community and adorable cabins would be like, I would have had an amazing time, but because I had no expectations, I was stunned with new excitement at every turn.
By the way, when we made it down the mountain the next day, we had counted 41 lizards.