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which all Californian distances and directions were once formally triangulated and measured—and are still computed, by some, to this day. It was a mountain that everyone in the north of the state could see (at least they could before the invention of the haze-making automobile ruined so many Californian views), and from its summit, it was said, just about all of the north of the state could be seen in return, along with tantalizing glimpses of parts of Oregon and Nevada, too.
    I decided I would spend the night there, making my final miles to San Francisco in the morning. I was in no particular hurry, and besides, I had never seen my destination city from afar. From up there, or so it appeared from the map, in the morning I ought to have a spectacular view.
    I turned off the freeway and made my way through the corona of newly built bungalows sprouting around the mountain’s flanks—settlements like Clayton, Concord, and Walnut Creek, large and quite respectable Starbucks-and-Saks suburbs these days, but rather more sparse outposts back then. I threaded my way through a maze of back lanes, and soon the houses thinned and the road became red earth. I saw a gate and beyond it a small hut, from which stepped a ranger, all freshly pressed khaki, with a peaked hat and a gun. He issued me a ticket and a yellow chit that allowed me to pitch my tent. He asked if I might like to buy some firewood, which the state park authorized him to sell. He told me I was the last one in for the day. But then hestepped back into his hut and riffled through his log. In fact not just the last, he said; I was the only person staying on the mountain that night. It was a Wednesday, and in the middle of the week few people bothered to stay. So now he’d be closing the gate and going home. I’d be all alone on Devil’s Mountain, with no risk of anyone disturbing my sleep until the park opened again at dawn. Plenty of animals, though, he added. Most of them friendly enough. But it would be peaceful, that’d be for sure.
    The road wound steeply up the north side of the mountain, and, with the sun sinking fast behind the low ranges of the distant coast, the sycamores and the pines, the junipers and the great old oaks, were cast into sharp relief, their shadows ever lengthening on the meadows and, as I climbed higher, against the canyon walls. By the time I had found somewhere to set up camp, in a glade floored with a carpet ofsoft pine needles, well above the 3,000-foot line—the mountain’s summit is 3,850 feet above sea level—the night had entirely closed in, and I had to use the car’s headlights to show me where I could hammer in the tent and lay the fire for dinner and tea. While I was cooking, a small battalion of raccoons marched in out of the night, their eyes blazing; I lobbed a stone at one of them to stop him from stealing what little food I had left. It hit him square on the nose, and he left howling. Neither he nor his friends returned.
    I turned in early and found it difficult to sleep. I may have been fretting over the vengeful potential of members of the raccoon family. Might they come in angry droves and try to hound me from their turf? But whatever it was that kept me awake that night, I do not remember minding much. I had a canvas bag of books with me, and a gas lantern. It seems to me today, so many years later, that much of what would eventually come to fascinate me about California—its extraordinary history, its phenomenal wealth, its lyrically complex topography and geology, and its transcendent loveliness—was learned that night or seen the next morning, things that were concentrated, as tinctures of experience and reality, into those few square miles of rugged upland around this very remarkable mountain.
    THE NAMING OF MOUNT DIABLO, for example, has a much more curious complexity about it than might be supposed. Naturally it begins with the Spanish, who in the sixteenth century had