I woke up and crawled out of the warm blankets to the waking murmur of the pine and sequoia grove in Kings Canyon National Park, in which we were camping, with hot coffee on my mind.  The air was cool, and the patches of sky between the tree blue as I set up the camp stove, and basked in the relaxing ambiance that only mornings in the Sierras can produce.

My silent reverie was shattered with a thunderous “THUMP” as a heavy dense, spiky green Lodgepole pine cone dropped two feet from where I was working on setting up the coffee pot.  “That would have really hurt if is hit me” I thought as the last shock waves reverberated through the forest loam.  I strolled over to the pine cone,  picked it  up and was admiring it for it’s weapon-like properties when a loud “CLANG” directly behind me made me nearly jump out of my skin.  I spun around, in a heartbeat, to see another freshly dropped pine cone rolling off the steel bear box where it had just landed, inches from the camp stove.

“That is really odd” I thought as I sat down in my camp chair just a few feet where I was standing, shaking with the adrenaline (normally reserved for white knuckle drive home through Los Angeles after a relaxing camping trip in the Sierras) coursing through my body.  I pondered as to why two pine cones dropped in the space of a couple minutes as I brushed off the pine needles that were dropping on my head at an unprecedented rate, disturbing my vision, and further distracting my pre-coffee muddled thinking process.  I looked up to see what kind of stealth wind was blowing pine needles exclusively above my head, and could not get a good view through the deluge,  so I stood up to get a different angle.  Just as my butt left it’s perch, the grandaddiest pine cone of them all made a free fall into the very chair I was just occupying. The elastic nature of the seat rebounded that great big heavy pine cone right to my feet, where it glared at me with malicious intent.

I am fairly freaked out at this point, and I quickly made my way out from under the tree and into one of the small blue patches of sky I was admiring as I woke up,  and marveled at the way karma was trying to work me for tossing those pine logs into the fire with a little too much relish last evening.  I resigned myself to a long desperate trip through the trees, dodging pine cone mortars in a quest for  tree free topography which was nowhere in the vicinity.  In my glum reverie, I began to be aware of the commotion in the branches of the tree that was attacking me.  Everywhere where this commotion went, there was a chatter, and eventually I made out chubby little brown form causing the noise and commotion.  My karmic fear eased to a curiosity as I tracked the little brown form busily making its way through the lower branched of the Lodgepole pine,  inspecting each tip for a pine cone and rapidly chewing off the cones he thought worthy and dropping them to the ground. This squirrel was not part of a plot by mother nature trying to take me out, but a busy little rodent making a living.  I was not part of a cosmic plan to take my life, Mother Nature was just going about it’s business despite my intrusion.  I pulled my chair a safe distance away from the tree, and enjoyed the view while my my coffee began to percolate away.