I thought that would be a good theme for my walk today.

I don’t usually walk with a theme, but today I decided I would go in a different direction and see what I hadn’t seen before.

Kristina said, “If you go over that way and down at the fork, you’ll see some nice houses.”

So I packed up and set off.

I didn’t get very far before I noticed a nice house. It was our house.

I saw it with eyes attuned to notice new, and I took some pictures.

There in the yard was a large stump. I think it must be the old maple tree that Kristina and Chaz hired a tree expert to remove. I watched the tree experts remove a huge Monterey Pine from the backyard of our Kensington house, and when the cut chunks of wood fell to the ground after being carefully cut by the acrobatic arborists, the ground shook. Thump! Whump! Thud!

Shirley used to say, “You could sleep through an earthquake.” I would say, “Well, it shakes, and then it stops.”

But that’s another story.

And just out of the edge of the stump in the yard growing straight up was a young tree trunk with a tree looking several years old already.

It must have been there before, because it couldn’t grow like that overnight. I paused to contemplate. You know, the kind of thoughts you think when you’re being philosophical or waxing poetic. Life and death and nature and what endures yada yada yada.

So I took my picture, maybe for a blog like this one, and walked a few feet further up the hill, angled my perspective, and took another picture, as if I was a shutter junkie.

I wasn’t getting very far on my walk. I went up to the corner where the fence ends and the creek begins and took another picture.

Then I turned left and passed the house and yard on the upper side and took another picture of this our beautiful house in its own forest.

Then a few feet further, and a picture of the lower patio for barbeques, and steps leading up to a landing with a table and chairs for a backyard picnic with a view.

“Enough pictures for now,” I said to myself, and walked to the house next door.

I must have driven by it before, but it opened on the higher road ninety degrees from our street, so it was new to me enough, and I looked down into the neighbor yard.

We’re on a hill, the street our house is on is an up street, perpendicular parallel to the up hill. The street on the corner is lateral and takes off along the hill. It goes over to the next street which is a down street.

This is the top street of the hill below the freeway, which has more hill on the other side.

I was looking down on houses and lush yards going down to a lateral road, then crossing the street down through more green and forest with houses, then another lateral street, so it was like levels of stepping down to the bottom of what must be a valley, which I couldn’t see for the trees.

But of course I naturally started to think about levels.

I had once begun working out my thoughts about levels of light, how we live in them, and now I thought about levels of living.

I had noticed, and even somewhat written about, the levels in the Bay Area and the Berkeley Hills. How, with some exceptions, the cliché is nonetheless true. The lower levels at the bottom of the hill had smaller houses crowded together with smaller yards.

When you have more money, you can move up. The houses get bigger, the yards spread out.

At the top of the hill, they build the money mansions in estates that look over everything with the biggest view.

Dunsmuir isn’t like that.

All the houses are nice. All the yards are big. Every house is different. There are no cookie-cutter tracts, no high-rises.

That means that every house is unique and the people who live there can be themselves.

Some have yard ornaments, sculptures, potted plants. Some have saints and Buddhas and garden gnomes. One features a rusted bicycle.

All the houses are built for the weather. The roofs slant. Most are metal, often with grooved runways, because, you know, snow.

Most houses have an entry, usually with steps up, most with a second story with windows which must be bedrooms. Most have a lower level with its own entrance with rooms and storage and maybe a furnace because, you know, snow. But most have fireplaces with chimneys because, you know, snow.

So I walked and walked, and rested a bit, and took a down street to the next lower level lateral street back the other way, then over and down and over, zig zagging the hill.

I noticed driveways. How people drive in to access their house. On the up side of the lateral street, there are a lot of little garages dug into the hill like hobbit holes, many concrete, looking forlorn, derelict, long abandoned with layers of moss, because the people take the easier way and just park on the street.

Sometimes the little garages have little doors in the back that probably once led somewhere, maybe from the days of prohibition and bootleggers, maybe a way to get into the house out of the weather.

Houses on the upside have up steps leading to the entrance and often to level after level of yard, little terraces held in place by rock walls to keep the hill back from sliding down.

Sometimes there is a patio on the roof of the garage.

And those houses on the upside of the hill usually have stairways leading to further upper levels out back, where they have patios and garden patches.

I passed one such house where I heard a ball bouncing. I looked up, and there above a wall of greenery, a basketball flew into the air, then down, and I heard the bounce, then up in the air again.

There must have been kids playing on their upper basketball court. If they looked down, they might see me on the street, but I couldn’t see them, only the ball flying up and down and hearing the invisible bounce. I tried to see a flurry of movement through the bushes, but I wasn’t able to, though I knew they were there.

So many things in life remain unseen.

I walked on, and a car passed me. So there was traffic. Now and then. Mostly then.

I saw a red fire hydrant by the road and I thought of stopping to rest a bit and take off my jacket and tie it around my waist because I was working up a sweat, a little one.

I thought I’d sit on the fire hydrant to rest, but as I got closer, I saw a nob on top and decided against it. So I leaned on the fire hydrant and tied my jacket, and noticed a utility vehicle parked at the top of the down street. A workman in a uniform came up, crossed the street, got in his vehicle and waved at me as he drove away.

There are friendly people wherever you go.

On the upper levels, I didn’t see people, except for one woman who came out to check her mailbox, then went back inside. So there is life in some of the houses after all.

I didn’t see dogs running around the streets or yards, but as I was passing one house on the left, a dog started barking with a high little dog voice, and then another little dog joined in, and the bark ran through the neighborhood like a chorus from those houses with dogs, but I kept walking and the dogs gave up and the bark died away, as if to say they had done their job.

Houses after houses, and I had my phone camera, and thought of taking a few pictures of some houses that were really nice or unusual, but I didn’t, because people might think I was casing the joint and might sneak back later.

I went down a block, went back the other way on the level, then down a block, and back again. I was re-tracing my stops a block apart, and looked for a shady spot with a wall where I could sit and rest a bit.

I was walking downhill on one street and there was a big tree on the left, all hanging down pink flowers like maybe the tropics or down south, and I took a picture. And then, just next door, the next house down had a rival tree all white blossoms, and between the two, another tree trying to be white blossoms half way, and I thought, the white is spreading like a plague and has infected the half white tree, but the pink tree stopped the epidemic like vaccine.

At the corner crossroads there was a wall and a chunk of shade. I sat, leaned my poles, pulled out my phone to check the time. There was almost enough to justify my walk for exercise, so I sat awhile in my bit of shade and looked around.

Two big carry trucks, open and empty, the kind you could carry a pile in like coal or loose potatoes, followed each other around the lower corner, and I thought, “You don’t see that every day.”

One big house at the corner of the next street where the trucks had turned, was showing me its side, two story brown wood. I admired the roof supports. I also admired the big rock chimney. Some chimneys are brick, some are rock. This one was rock, wide at the bottom, probably for the living room fireplace, then narrower for the upstairs bedroom, then narrower for the third iteration that soared above the roof with its own cap like a crown to look over the houses and chimneys lower down.

So houses live in levels too, like the people inside, but in Dunsmuir it isn’t hierarchy or elitism. It’s democracy of the hill, and people like houses are as good as anybody else.

That’s one of the things I like about Dunsmuir.

So I sat on my bit of wall in my bit of shade, and rehearsed a blog, this blog, talking to myself like preparing a lecture for the public.

If anyone in any of the houses was home and noticed me, they didn’t seem to mind, because apparently there was no 911 call, “What’s your emergency?” “There’s this old man on the corner talking to himself,” and then the police would show up with a net and drag me off to the funny farm.

But that never happened.

And I wasn’t very loud anyway, and didn’t talk all the time. It’s just that sometimes I need to hear the sound of the words before I get around to writing them down, just to see if I got them approximately right. The way a painter may reach out his arm and look at his thumb to get perspective.

Then down the street a woman came out of her house and got in her car and drove past me up the street. She didn’t look my way or turn her head.

To some people, I’m invisible.

Then four people, kids, teenagers, came around the lower corner and started up the street on the other side. Three girls and one boy. The girls dressed short with more leg showing, the boy in bermudas showing less leg.

They seemed to know each other. They talked and sometimes laughed. They acted like they just got out of school. That would be high school, but that was the other way higher up the hill on the other side of the main road. This was just another one of those mysteries of life, young people, how they got from there to here.

Then they disappeared, because there were parked cars on the street, and then they re-appeared past the cars, but now in groups of two, so probably eventually they were going in different directions.

I remembered again that I wanted to drop by the high school to visit as colleague to colleague.

Then my phone rang. I dug it out and fumbled it open and slid the symbol and pushed the speaker button and Kristina said, “Do you need me to come get you?” and I said, “No, it’s only a few more blocks,” sounding like a martyr.

So I heaved myself up off my wall in the shade, grabbed my poles, walked down to the corner and turned left, opposite the house I had been admiring.

There was water running down the gutter like a stream, disappearing into a grate. There were leaves and debris blocking one end of the grate, but most of it was clear and the water disappeared unhindered. I briefly thought I would be a good citizen and reach down and clear away the end of the grate. But I didn’t, partly because it wouldn’t be so easy for me to bend that far down, and where would I put the debris? And the grate was clear enough for now. So I compromised myself to adequacy, and kept on up the hill, which was one of the level parallels but with a slight incline.

And immediately on my left I heard water. It was a stream right there, with rocks and everything, streaming down hill through people’s yards. I wondered if it was related to my stream at our house, did a quick mental geography, and concluded it was the same stream, just farther down and over one.

So I went to the end of the block expecting to walk up our street, but read the sign which said it wasn’t, and I went another block and it was all familiar and I was already half way up the hill because I hadn’t gone all the way down, and I was relieved, and rested a bit in the shade, walked up a little more and rested in the shade because, you know, hill.

And I got home and Kristina said, “Did you have adventures?”

And I said, “Nothing in particular. I just noticed some levels.”