There's a wonderful wilderness park within five hundred meters of my front door. O'Neill, as it is known for a prominent Orange County landowner, is a long dagger of land stretching almost down to the Pacific. Barely 400 meters wide in some places, its main feature is a valley riven by a single stream that goes dry for much of the year. One stretch of the creek is almost prehistoric in its utter wilderness. Rattlesnakes, deer, hawks. Scorpions, tarantulas. Last week, on the same day, I saw the tiniest blue bird and a Golden Eagle — the Great Danes of the bird world. Mountain lions live in O'Neill's lower sections, though I have heard their mewl from the folds of the more rugged hilly regions where cactus and dry grass camouflage pretty much every living thing that wants to stay hidden.
O'Neill is a place of old oak trees and towering pines, meandering dirt trails, a campground where the air smells of bacon on Saturday mornings. It is that connection between suburbia and the wild that sees hardcore trail users and women pushing baby strollers. Much less eloquently, it is the type of public wilderness where answering the call of nature is better done in the public restrooms. The trail might feel completely private, but there's always someone biking or hiking around the bend when you least want to see anyone.
So that's O'Neill. It got popular during Covid, when people were so eager to get out of the house that entire families would drag coolers down to the stream. The kids would build dams out of smooth gray stones and sit in the cool clear water rolling down off Saddleback Mountain. Adults would pull up lawn chairs and party. It wasn't Hawaii, but when Hawaii is off limits, any beach will have to do.
Electric bikes have kept O'Neill humming ever since, though I do wish people would at least make an attempt to turn the pedals as they power up a steep trail. Horse people and bikes and hikers coexist in a friendly coalition, though each of us seems to think we have more right to the trail. The Boy Scouts were there last week for their annual day camp, perhaps the only group that I really dislike when it comes to using the park. They take the place over, guided by the spirit of Lord Baden-Powell, adult volunteers in green uniform shorts playing the part of trail sheriff, blocking access and yelling at cars on the park's lone road to slow down.
Last week, a car somehow veered off Alicia Parkway, burst through a barbed wire fence, and plunged sixty feet down an embankment into a dense section of O'Neill, coming to a halt in thick vegetation that hasn't been touched by human hands in perhaps forever. The kind of tangled place you'd never enter in the dark, where things that kill people hide during the light of day. I went to take a look at the phenomenon a day later, once the sheriffs and firetrucks pulled the car and driver out. The sidewalk leapt by the car was a border: modern life on one side, pure wilderness on the other.
I go into O'Neill four to five times a week, though through a much different entrance. Mike the homeless guy, who is kind when he is stoned and profane in extremis when he is off his meds, watches over one of the park's four gates. I drop down the trail known as Twisted Tire and make the decision over whether a day is a running day or a hiking day, or a little of both. Sometimes I listen to podcasts, sometimes to nature, and sometimes the thoughts filling my head. I like O'Neill best when the trails are completely empty but I always wave hello if I run into another trail user.
This morning was the first day of cross country practice and I sent my runners for sixty easy minutes on the trails, telling them to keep it conversational. I want them to notice the pink and yellow flowers blooming on the cactus, the electric green algae blooming in the creek as the sun heats the water, the canopy of those aging scrub oaks and the bright new thickets of red poison oak that will make their skin itch and swell if they rub against it.
Usually, when people ask where I write my books, I tell them about my office. Bookshelves, desk, chair. Simple and utilitarian, a sanctuary.
But O'Neill is where I breathe words and fix sentences and where I outlined an entire novel in my head during a couple hours alone last week. It's a place of prayer and solitude. A place of solace when my chest can't bear anymore of worry's crushing pressure.
We all need an O'Neill.