Things Fall Apart

In David Foster Wallace's great book, Infinite Jest, Little Brown, New York, 1996, the USA has been transmuted into ONAN - the Organization of North American Nations a post-NAFTA amalgam of America, Canada and Mexico. The great seal features an eagle wearing a sombrero with a maple leaf in its beak.

I am 400 pages into this densely footnoted, 1000 page tome which I have declared as my summer reading. I am acutely aware that Labor Day is less than a month away. But having reached the middle stages of the book it falls open more readily and I can now make good progress before, once again, the actual mechanics of holding the book become difficult. It is a good advertisement for a Kindle, Nook or i-Pad but toting the paperback to a solitary lunch in L.A. or having it lie in the front seat of the car when I am pumping gas has exposed me to members of that fraternity that have either read the book and are devoted to it or are determined to take it up 'when there's time'. There is of course no time like the present, but with a book of this heft, the present takes on historical dimensions.

While the success or failure of the European Community still hangs in the balance, it remains an example of the way that the political and economic arrangements of a continent can change in ways unthinkable half a century before. Although I broached the idea of California Succession to State Senator Shiela Kuhl some years ago at a fund-raiser I did so as a mild provocation rather than any heartfelt political belief (for the record, she was not amused and perhaps detecting my English accent, asked me whether I had ever heard of the Civil War - she turned to another conversation before I had the chance to tell her that not only had I heard of it, I had taught it's complex history to a fair number of this state's impressionable teenagers (California Dreamin' 2010-02-27)).

As a onetime teacher of history and now a reader of it (and occasionally touching on it in this blog), my approach to History is less ideological than it is tempered by a profound belief in discounting the most fervidly held shibboleths of conventional, sentimental wisdom. I am thus receptive to ideas like Wallace's that challenge the apparent immutability of these United States. I have always thought that it might make sense for the Western states, Mexico, British Columbia and Alaska to coalesce as some sort of Pacific Rim political and economic entity.

When entertaining this thought the one thing that gives me pause is the number of military bases there are in Southern California......does the federal government just hand them over to California (as happened when the USSR dissolved and constituent states were presented with nuclear missile bunkers, tank squadrons and airfields) lease them back or, Guantanamo style, retain ownership of the mosaic of defense installations?.

In this reverie I am concerned with avoiding a Fort Sumter-like situation where the Union refused to give up the fort to South Carolina, one of the seven states that originally declared secession. Its subsequent bombardment by the North began the Civil War: I am not so concerned with the ownership of the military hardware, what clouds this daydream is the thought that the vast acreage of defense lands would be threatened in some way. The fact is that the military have, without intention, become one of the great conservators of wildlands in California.

They have been, for instance, vastly more successful than the Coastal Commission in preserving wetlands. Drive by Ballona wetlands on Lincoln in Mar Vista and then Point Mugu on the PCH and you will understand my point. Mugu Lagoon into which the Calleguas creek flows, sits to the north of the one pristine wetland between L.A. and Ventura - protected by the Naval Base at Port Hueneme. The Military are landlords on a grand scale, and lacking the profit motive, are content to let vast areas of land lie fallow in the interest of perimeter security, the occasional 'exercise' or, as at China Lake, just outside of Ridgecrest, a ground zero for short-range missiles.

Earlier in the year, after presenting my new American passport to the phalanx of security at the entry to the Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS), China Lake, I visited the Navy's 1.1 million acres of land in California's upper Mojave Desert. I was headed for the high ground of the Cosos where several canyons run through the north south trending ridge and contain the largest concentration of petroglyphs in the Americas and quite possibly the world. Little Petroglyph canyon is currently the only canyon open to a tour chaperoned by retired rocket scientists - with an interest in archeology. The Rock Art is pristine with none of the graffiti that plagues smaller sites outside of this vast security compound. While sporadically littered with spent rockets the dry lake, mountains and plains are also safe from the maraudings of the 'Green' power industry who see the Mojave as prime solar and geo-thermal pickings.

Britain was forever changed after the Suppression Acts of 1536 and 1539 dissolved hundreds of monasteries, abbeys, and priories and their lands, property and wealth were taken by the crown or sold off to supporters of Henry VIII. In California, the establishment of the Ranchos - political spoils gifted at the discretion of the Mexican government after the banishment of the Franciscans - impacted the dispostion of nature and civilization, the wild and the tamed, in the entire region. With or without the development of an altered political landscape, the military, as one of the largest institutional landowners in the state, is pivotal in any consideration of wildland resources in California.

On Friday, Jodi Kasch, the photographer, came by to take pictures of the house for an article to be published in Ventana magazine in September. It turns out that she had lived for ten years or more on the Flying H ranch which in the 1980's ran on both sides of the 150 west of Happy Valley. Her then husband Taylor Kasch, taught at Happy Valley School and began the theater program there which today thrives under the direction of Scott Campbell.

She told us tales of finding metates and shells on the ranch in what were clearly Chumash village sites. Although the ranch still exists (in 2007 Arnold Schwarzenegger and Marie Shriver made an unsuccessful bid for it) much of the land was sold around the turn of the century and it is now dwarfed by its spawn, Aspen Grove Ranch and Black Mountain Ranch on either side of the 150.

Much of Upper Ojai remains locked in large estate holdings and like the military bases, the size of the acreage contributes to the continuing viability of wildland species and avian predator flyovers. On the south side of the Sulpher Mountain ridge, as it slopes down to the 126 is the Aliso Ranch, the oldest continually operating cattle ranch in Ventura County. William Dewey Hobson began running cattle in Ventura in 1859 and by 1910 the Hobson brothers made Aliso Ranch the headquarters of their operation - which later came to include the Flying H Ranch in Upper Ojai. Today, the Aliso property is lightly ranched and the 7,000 acres of oaks, hills, canyons, and chaparral provide happy hunting grounds for mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes and their prey as they roam up and over the ridge into our high valley.

While the greatest threat to California wildlands has historically been commercial and residential real estate development along with the associated infrastructure of roads and power distribution, the enduring economic down turn has eased these pressures. At the same time, the increasing fragility of the State's economic situation, the disfunction of the federal government and the changing demographics of the state make for a political and economic tinderbox. It is in this context that it is useful to consider the fate of the wiildlands in the futures with which we may be presented: while ONAN, CONAN (California Organization of North American Nations - with, inevitably, Schwarzenegger as its first President) or some barbaric fragmentation of central power may await us - what seems certain is,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

From "The Second Coming" W.B. Yeats, 1919

Chaparral Mantra

We live on the margins of the wildland; not in its depths. Here there is still the tracery of urban civilization - roads, power lines and overhead the flight paths of commercial airlines. Sometimes contrails festoon the evening sky from military jets out of Vandeburgh or Point Mugu. Looking to the south are other houses, horse corrals and barns. We can see, in the distance, the fire station (VCFD 20) and the back of the Upper Ojai market.

Not complaining, just saying. So, not truly wildland, more like mildland. But we are very much wildland adjacent, and that is the beauty of our site. Looking to the north there is nothing that stands in the way of the wildland corridor until just south of San Francisco. Moments before I sat down to write this paragraph I saw a young coyote standing sentinel on a rock twenty yards away from the back of the house. Their range can be up to a six mile radius around their den. A coyote then, of the Upper Ojai, on the edge of the wild, sniffing the wind.

We've been over-run this year with varmints. A friend in Topanga suggested that the baiting of rats has taken its toll on the top predators such as coyotes and bobcats. But yesterday morning while I was running, Lorrie was awakened by a great racket in the oaks just above the house and from the window saw three bobcats scrambling up a tree in pursuit of prey - just what she couldn't determine - but its noisy snarling and snorting and possibly her presence at the window seems to have saved it. When we looked under the oak later in the morning there was no evidence of a kill. A little later that morning I saw another coyote stroll across the meadow below the house. This summer, such sightings have been unusual.

I suspect that the mild winter, with rain through the early part of June, favored the rats, squirrels, gophers and rabbits that now animate the chaparral and that their predators, with such plentiful and easy pickings, are less inclined to venture into the wildland margins where the dangers of humans, poisons and traffic abound. The size of a bobcat's home range is similar to that of the coyote, so the three Lorrie saw are locals, but like the coyotes they seem to be spending more of their time away from our property and hunting deeper in the wild, up in Bear Canyon.

The scale of the wildland stretching north is critical. David Janzen, the noted conservation biologist, makes the point that, when it comes to saving wilderness, size matters. Only “big chunks of nature,” will survive the threats of spreading human civilization and climate change. He writes,

" the only places that are going to survive in the long run are big conserved pieces. Small pieces may be very pretty, but they die, just because of insularity. They turn into islands. And we all know what happens on islands. Islands never have high species richness. And even when they do, like Hawaii did when people got there, [they are] very, very fragile, very susceptible to human perturbation."

A Pioneering Biologist Discusses The Keys to Forest Conservation, Caroline Fraser, Yale Environment 360, March 23, 2010

Jantzen's solutions, like the major threats, are two-fold. One is his idea of 'gardenification' whereby the world's remaining wildlands are integrated into the human genome. We have so thoroughly infiltrated the planet he argues, "to survive, a non-human species must be too diffuse to be thoroughly captured, too trivial to be noticed, or too immutable to be changed". Or, it can be woven into humanity's embrace and wildland conserved as garden.

The other part of his solution is education. Because right now, he says,"the planet is blind". We do not recognise bio-diversity - we are illiterate. He suggests that with a cheap pocket sized dna bar-coder we would be able to 'read' - to "identify anything, anywhere, anytime — what you ate, what bit you, what you’re sitting on, what you just picked up, what grows by the side of the road". That, he believes, will change our relationship to bio-diversity.

The notion of a universal fluency in the language of bio-diversity seems, at this point in time, a Douglas Adamsian fantasy like his Babel Fish, but I can vouch for the value of emerging literacy in 'chaparral' earned the old-fashioned way, with books and the occasional walk with the vastly knowledgable Margot. Curiosity that focuses on our natural environment, rather than on the constructed cultural (now primarily electronic) fabric of our lives seems to be waning and is only likely to further atrophy as the world becomes more highly urbanized. It is a luxury to live near the vanishing wilds, and with or without a dna-barcoder, a privilege to begin to understand them.

Franzen is working in Costa Rica and there he says, the forest is vanishing, beginning at the margins of paved roads. Like the hedgerows in England which in my youth were a standard feature of country roads and are now greatly diminished through neglect or active eradication the looming forests of Costa Rica, which once lined the roads have now retreated. His focus is on saving the parklands and he has worked to expand a small national park in northwestern Costa Rica into a 300,000-acre reserve — the Area de Conservación Guanacaste, or ACG.

Sarah Munster, my former landscape design partner, owns two and a half acres of cleared forest outside of San Ramon and is considering building a house there. The site, she tells me, has classic views of smoking volcanoes and cloud forests. Meanwhile, she must visit annually to prevent the villagers from moving their animals onto the property. Despite a large system of parks catering to eco-tourism Janzen points out that the 160 different little pieces of conserved wildlands are a patchwork still under threat from the pressures of agriculture and development.

The chaparral in California, as Rick Halsey points out is under similar threat, compounded by the frequency of anthropgenic fires - which can reduce this delicate eco-system to weed infested grassland in a generation. Like Janzen he believes that the wildland "has no value unless it is identified, has a name and is understood" (Fire, Chaparral and Survival  in Southern California, Richard Halsey, Sunbelt, San Diego, Ca., 2005)

My odyssey began with W.S. Head's little book, The California Chapparal, An Elfin Forest, Naturegraph, Happy Camp, Ca. 1972. While still in Los Angeles I would use his list of the twelve most common plants of the chaparral as a mantra while running in Will Rogers State Historical Park.

Naming the plants in the wildland is the first step in its gardenification. The second is restoration of its primal character. Around our house, planting and weeding the wildland garden are the keys to its restoration  - the way to re-integrate our fractured island property into the big, sustainable wildland on our doorstep.

Wild Thing

It is not often that we receive impromptu lunch invitations. Saved from the prospect of egg sandwiches at Rainbow Bridge, sharing a burger at Vesta or heaven forfend, munching rice crackers and almond butter alone at our desks, Lorrie and I joined Steve and Caroline for lunch at their Sulphur Mountain equestrian estate where they were entertaining our mutual friend, the production designer David Brisbin.

We arrived to find that Tim Cummings, Polixines in Theater 150's recent production of The Winter's Tale (see The Winter's Tale 2010-07-29) - who had been billeted with them for the duration of the run (which ended a week or so ago) would also join us for lunch. The six of us sat down to a Mexican feast contributed by various friends and housekeepers. Their beautiful dog, half wolf, lurked at the margins of the gathering.

David is an American ex-pat living in Vancouver with his partner Laimis. We have known him for twenty years or more. Originally trained as an architect he has had a stellar career in production design and has directed his own film Nice Hat! 5 Enigmas in the Life of Cambodia Canada/ Cambodia, 2005. Color 86 Minutes, which we saw upon its release five years ago in L.A.

Laimis is a Lithuanian Geographer whose field of study is his home town Vilnius - that historically embattled, culturally marbled city at the heart of the European maelstrom. Together, these global citizens live in Vancouver at the western edge of the Canadian Universe where 'niceness' and 'friendliness' masks the usual dark North American history of genocide. Their respective fields of study (David's is avocational) concern places with thick, tangled histories that are intensely stratified - each uncovered layer revealing new strands of profound complexity.

Their home is an isthmus of bright blue-glass sky-scrapers, pacific north west cuisine, runners, ultimate players and sequestered remnants of rain-forest that sit like an arboreal ghetto at the far end of Stanley Park. It's cultural heritage is encapsulated in the crisp, hard planes of Arthur Erickson's Museum of Anthropology on the UBC campus. Only the relentless influx of asian immigrants threatens the placid contentment of the Canucks and their Britannic triumphalism. We visited them in their English Bay apartment a few years ago.

There is, in California a very different sense of destiny. It is not race based, or even historically founded. It is, instead, something that springs out of the 'being present' nature of the place. It is willfully a-historical, willfully spiritual and at the same time, willfully materialistic. At lunch, we spontaneously toasted the news that Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s had struck down Prop. 8 - California’s ban on same-sex marriages. After lunch, we trekked down to the horse-barn where there was a new born foal, Lilly the Filly. Barely a week old its mother Eve, an exquisite black pony pivoted to protect her tiny offspring from our inquisitive gaze.

Outside the barn, talk turned to feral cats with a taste for rats and the acquisition thereof. We are all under seige currently from wood rats. They are hiding behind the newly installed fire-doors at Margot's, living under our entry deck and whooping it up in the pool equipment corral. We need cats! I spoke with Lorenz and he is on the look-out for likely felines. They are assured a healthy diet of Neutoma muridae - the signature animal of mature chaparral.

Until recently, our thoughts had been on dogs. Derek died nine months ago and we still miss him. He was a profound presence in our lives. I first set eyes on him when I was working for an architectural firm in West Hollywood. The two principals of the firm would have their hair cut by an itinerant hairdresser who was also in the business of rescuing dogs. So it came about that Derek accompanied her on her visit to the office and she parked him in the basement, where I had my desk, while she cut hair. It was empathy at first sight. Derek was suffering from acute post traumatic stress disorder, but over a few weeks of visits to the dog rescuer's house, and slowly introducing him to the family it became evident that despite his damage, he was the dog for us.

Over the years and with the intense involvement of our two sons, Derek became a wonderful house-dog. A couple of years after our taking him in he was spooked by fireworks one fall evening and ran away into the chaparral north of Sunset Blvd. in the Pacific Palisades. After a month's absence we were ready to give up, "if that which is lost be not found".

Then, miraculously, late one night we received a call from a security guard who had seen an emaciated dog behind a building site in the Palisades Highlands - connected that with our lost dog posters - and called us. Early the next morning, with a jingle of keys and raw hamburger meat Derek was finally lured from the bush. Covered in ticks and having lost 20 pounds he was days away from from being taken by coyotes. Derek was home for Christmas - a heartwarming winters tale that seemed to further embed him into our family.

While in Pittsburgh recently for the Brown family meeting a cousin of Lorrie's was selling her sister's recently published book, The Sacred Path Beyond Trauma - Reaching the Divine Through Nature's Healing Symbols, Ellen B. Macfarland, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, Ca., 2008. Reading the book I realized that while we had healed Derek, the process had been mutual - he had had a healing influence on me and perhaps the entire family.

Ellen maintained a private psychotherapy practice in Milwaukee for twenty years before getting her Phd in Jungian depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. She now lives in Big Sky, Montana - close to Bozeman.

As she would have it, Derek was healed through his embodiment in the life of our family. But she would also suggest that Derek was bestowed to us by the universe to heal us and help us claim our full family potential. She describes the healing power of dolphins, horses and trees. These material beings, these wild things, also exist as imaginal symbols always present to serve in the communication between soul and conscious awareness.

Nature provides us with symbols to salve the soul. Our inner harmony, she suggests, can be facilitated by an engagement with the natural world. She made the decision to move to the wildland/urban interface with this benefit in mind.

The Talmud tells us that the dog has no soul. Marc Sirinsky, an old friend and for many years now a rabbi in Ashland, Or., explained to me that a reasonable interpretation of this would be that the dog has given its collective soul to mankind. Ellen is now working with the wolf nation - a member like the dog, of the Canidae family - whose plight in Montana is well known. Wolves she writes, "seemed to take over my dreams, and I experienced soulful connections to these animals that were impossible to ignore." By listening to the symbols that call to us from the wild, and finding solace in their imaginal presence, we can perhaps find space to harmonize our relationship with the natural environment.

The work of this century is to re-establish the necessary synaptic connections between spirit, soul and matter - towards a re-integration of the universal soul. That's my kind of Globalism. Perhaps it can be achieved one dog at a time, or one tree at a time. Those of us fortunate to live in the wildland have a particular responsibility to move this project forward.

I have taken on the care of the chaparral in my little neck of the woods - time will tell whether it will reciprocate as my spirit helper.

Dogtrot

I visited Roger Conrad, a neighbor across the way on Sulphur Mountain, on Sunday morning and toured his new dogtrot house that he has been building for a year or more. It's closed up and awaits stucco.

On Saturday evening I chatted with Leon Berg at a reception at The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts for The Rangoli Dance Company. Leon is the expediter-cum-project manager for the Besant Hill School Pool project which includes boys and girls changing rooms. Originally designed as a butterfly roof structure the changing rooms were split asunder in order to skirt the County's fire-sprinkler requirement - the two buildings being less than the minimum size requiring sprinklers. The two shed roofed structures are now designed to be 10' apart providing a kind of dogtrot-like breezeway between them.

Roger's house is a variation on the Shotgun typolgy: a long thin house type popularized in New Orleans and originating under a tax code that was based on a building's frontage. Minimising the width and extending the length was thus the most efficient strategy in terms of tax liabilty. Avoiding the installation of an expensive sprinkler system has been the driver for the bifurcation of the dressing rooms into two separate pavilions.

Thus it is that design develops as a direct result of tax-policy, legislation or municipal codes. Constraints are good for design. I have often credited the California Building Code as my co-designer - not entirely in jest. Certainly the energy provisions under Title 24 have a dramatic influence on the design of fenestration, and shear wall requirements - made more restrictive after the 1994 Northridge earthquake - can provide a major design impetus.

The two issues that prompted Roger's design were the need to provide natural cooling (as an off-the-grid project utilizing a limited photo-voltaic array Roger could not afford the energy use of air-conditioning) and audio privacy between both ends of a small house. Roger's wife Ruthie Marks, the crochet designer, is a great baseball fan and Roger is allergic to the 'soundtrack to summer' provided by Vince Scully and others. As a child I loved listening to Test Match cricket with soothing voices of John Arlott, Richie Benaud and Brian Johnston. In Australia I enjoyed listening to Rugby League with the incomparable Frank Hyde (1916-2007) providing the commentary. I even enjoy listening to Vince Scully on occasions, but quite understand Roger's aversion.

The screen porch which divides the kitchen living and dining end of the house from the two bedrooms/offices solves both these design constraints and does so in a way that has the imprimatur of tradition - always a useful ally in architectural design- and makes his house typical of the dogtrot typology.

We met early on Sunday because Roger was driving down to Malibu for a re-union with Peter Jon Pearce and their colleagues. Pearce had headed up a major design and engineering firm (Pearce Structures) in the latter part of the twentieth century and was involved in many mega-structure projects throughout the world most notably perhaps, the design of the superstructure for the Biosphere II. Bits and pieces of prototype glazing systems still litter Roger's yard from his time on that project.

Pearce is now focused on his own 'Ecohouse' the prototype of which he plans to build on a few acres in Malibu. Ultimately he envisages a community of 'Ecohouses'. Later that morning, having looked at Pearce's web-site it was fascinating to consider Pearce's contribution to the genre in light of my own house and my visit to Roger's new home - both after all could claim to be eco-houses. Pearce suggests that his Ecohouse "takes solar design, green design, green architecture and pre-fab building beyond green, beyond pre-fab."

But first he needs to design the tooling for the space frame struts and knuckles that will form the armature for the 'Climate Management Canopy' that "intercepts solar radiation...and incorporates solar panels and solar thermal collectors''. Roger and I utilized a climate management canopy in our eco-houses, but we refer to them as walls and a roof. Pearce uses his exo-skeleton to shade what is essentially a glass box which assures abundant natural light and ventilation. We used windows.

Pearce suggests that his project "comprises a paradigm shift, which is intended to further the goal of contributing to the sustainability of the built environment through the implementation of a high performance design ethic". The pay-off for Pearce's Ecohouse is "a carbon-netral footprint by means of a net-zero energy use on an annualized basis". We just achieved that with our grid-tied photo-votaics and Roger has been living 'off-the-grid' these many years without recourse to Edison's help or accounting.

I should point out that the cynicism with which I view Pearce's endeavor is all mine. Roger told me of the projected Malibu Ecohouse in order to share his enthusiasm for a bravura engineering exercise and to touch on his own background as an engineer.

On a more prosiac level, Roger has achieved the great feat of persuading Ventura County to sign-off on an 'off-the-grid' residential project. His engineering background has been put to solid use designing his photo-votaic array and storage system as well as the water systems to support sprinklers, a draft hydrant and domestic supply. Constrained by budget and lacking any vestige of architectural ego or bombast he has (with designer Jane Carroll's able assistance) devised a modest but supremely 'green' house.

The Winter's Tale

It's winter in the chaparral.The subversion of the customary seasons is a typical characteristic of the Mediterranean climate which rules southern California and, in total, less than three percent of the earth's land surface. Fall arrives in June and Spring in November. The hot months of drought are winter for the  chaparral plant community.

This year's California summer has been uncharacteristically cool while the East coast broils. But arriving back from our sojourn in Pennsylvania and Ontario in the middle two weeks of July I could see that the season's first sustained period of heat (which we missed) had fried the mimulus and browned the tops of the creamy chamise blossoms. The heart-leaved penstemon which still sported red blossoms when we left has lost its battle with the heat and its leaves are burnt an orangey-brown. The black sage and buck wheat sport dried buttons of seed. Only the laurel sumac, drawing its moisture from 20 feet and more into the soil remains apparently impervious to the season - its fruited blossom bracts still looking like the rarest caviar swirled with cream.

The bio-mass is now in a crouched defensive posture - waiting out the heat, playing rope-a-dope with the sun. A sanguinary flush has suffused the deer weed, the green long gone its yellow blossoms a memory, its stems are now brown, orange and carmine: the bowl behind the house a field of rust. The tar-weed is dessicated, its skeleton fragile but still with a fringe of yellow flowers. The bunch grasses on the front lawn: plugs of thinning straw hair on a dry, over-tanned scalp. Eeuww.

The season has its charms. On the morning after our late night return from the East coast, I was coming back from my run and at the top of the rise above the house site, having just passed through the oak grove which serves as the property's northern portal, I breathed deeply of the resinous perfume of the chaparral - it is a scent like no other, sage, sumac and chamise with top notes of toyon - or so I imagined. It was good to be back!

Later in the week we saw The Winter's Tale - Theater 150's attempt at reviving the Ojai tradition of Shakespeare in the Park. It's a perennially problematic play that is weirdly bifurcated by a sixteen year time lapse at its core. The tone of the play shifts from tragedy to pastoral comedy and then to magic realism. There have been many attempts to imbue the play with meaning beyond the story-line of its pilfered narrative (it is based on an earlier romance, Pandosto or TheTriumph of Time, Richard Greene, 1588). The director, Cal Arts grad Jessica Kubzansky decided that it really is about the nature of time and the time-keeper chorus figure is given dramatic centrality. This conceit was elaborated by the score which features ticking clocks and the stage rendered as an astrolabe cum sun-dial.

It seems to me that it is as least as much about Winter - the meaning hiding in plain sight, in the title, all this time. At the opening of the play, summer is alluded to in the boyhood friendship of Leontes and Polixines before fall descends in the form of a livid jealousy when Leontes, certain that he has been cuckolded by his old friend, imprisons his wife where she dies (or not), their young son Maximilimus wastes away for love of his mother and the newborn Perdita is banished to Bohemia for a long winter of sixteen years.

Scholarship has established that it is upon the Mediterranean coast that Shakespeare imagines Perdita to be cast out and her protracted winter of estrangement from her family becomes, in the play, a pastoral interlude of shepherds and cut-purses, princes and paupers: a time of endless Mediterranean summer (botanically winter) contrasting (or aligning) across the water in Sicilia, with a bitter (emotional) winter for Leontes and gang. Seasonal confusion thus replaces the more usual sexual misaprehensions of Shakespearean schtick. I could go on.... but here was The Winter's Tale performed mid-summer in the depths of the chaparral winter (in the grounds of Chaparral High School).

The chaparralian winter is an interegnum where fruits like coffee berry and holly leafed cherries mature, the feathered seed plumes of the mountain mahogany shroud it in a soft veil of fecundity, the solanum berries darken and ceonothus seed capsules crack open in the dry air - a kind of winter of early morning mists and mellow fruitfulness alongside dessication and blazing heat. The chaparral may die a little above ground but much of its bio-mass exists below the soil. As Rick Halsey points out, the stuff we see is mostly plant sex organs.

Come November, the first winter rains will have greened things up a little and spring will presage the growing season - the wet months of winter. The wild cucumber (Marah macrocarpus) is an early indicator of spring as it sends long tendrils up over and around the shrubland. The western slope of the enfolding hills to the east of the house are draped in these ragged fringes of bright green as the chaparral emerges from hibernation. The cucumber survives the heat by virtue of its massive storage tuber, a characteristic that has given rise to its other common name, man-root. We rely on a fridge well stocked with Pellegrino, ice and pomegranate juice and the pool.

When we first bought land in Ojai six years ago Jerry Michaels, our real estate agent, extolled the climate but mentioned that August and September were best spent at the beach. I knew then that the months to spend by the waves were October and November when the autumn swells roll up from Baja. Jerry is not of the surfing fraternity. But his advice reflects a common view in Ojai.

I arrived in California  in September, thirty years ago, directly from Sydney's winter. My stay in the antipodes had begun in October eleven years before and in 1969-70 I thus enjoyed a full year of summer. I began my time in California, 1980-81 with almost a full year of winter. I remember the beautiful Topanga days of September and October before, quite suddenly, it seemed, I was back in winter. Seasonal Confusion Disorder comes naturally to me. My dyslexia embraces it.

A love of the wild storms of Sydney's winter stays with me. August and September were beauts - as the Aussies would put it. With minor mental adjustments here too, in the chaparral winter, these two maligned months can entrance.......and spring is right around the corner!

Thinking MYA

In a piece called What the Earth Knows in the summer 2010 issue of The American Scholar, Robert Laughlin, a Nobel laureate and Stanford physicist argues for an understanding of the difference between energy use and climate change in terms of temporal sweep, the significance of humankind in its development (anthropogenics), and scale.

He demonstrates that the two issues, inextricably linked in the popular imagination, are separated by a vast gulf in the metrics of their scientific analysis. Energy use - ultimately the conversion or burning - of all the earth's fossil fuels and their subsequent conversion into carbon dioxide (etc.) will be resolved by the dissolving of the gas in the ocean and, more slowly into the rocks beneath the seas. In Geologic time this will be accomplished in the twinkling of an eye. The impact on the climate of this one-time event, while significant from a human perspective, is trivial when set against the longer term (100,000 year) cycle of glacial episodes.

I was alerted to his perspective, to be enshrined in a book on the future of fossil fuels to be published next year, in an op-ed column by Neil Reynolds in Toronto's Globe and Mail.

On our annual binge of fossil fuels, blown out the twin engines of an airbus A320, we were in Pittsburgh for a family re-union, then Toronto to visit friends and finally, a few days on a group of three islands (called The Ideals) in the Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. Carooming through airports and rubbing shoulders (and shoulder strapped computer cases) with vacationers and business warriors was to be reminded that the world revolves around an ethos startlingly different than that which some of us, as bourgeois dilettantes perhaps, are embracing in the rareified enclaves of Ojai.

At the same time, on the same trip, I was exposed to the more attenuated geologic time scale: visiting Andrew Carnegie's museum of natural history in Pittsburgh that houses his great stash of dinosaur bones and then the scarified rocks of the pre-cambrian shield in the Georgian Bay, wiped clean of their erstwhile sedimentary mantle by glacial activity and now exposed as the oldest stone in North America and perhaps the world.

The Great Lakes are glacial - their vast reserves of fresh water coming from the last glacial melting, around 15,000 years ago. The underlying rock, including the group of three islands owned by our friend Gar Smith, is much older and may have been created between half a billion and four billion years ago. The age of Dinosaurs, by such standards, is comparatively recent, spanning between 65 and 245 MYA (million years ago).

There are 30,000 areas of rock that rise out of the Georgian Bay varying in size from a few hundred square feet to the largest fresh water island on the planet, Manitoulin, which totals several hundred square miles. Gar's lithic trinity totals barely an acre and the Township of the Archipelago, the local governing body, has denied him the right to build on it. He had camped on one of the rocks for many years and had assumed it to be Crown land until the summer of 1989 when he saw a 'For Sale' sign wedged between boulders; he subsequently purchased the land and thus acquired his own piece of the Canadian Dream.

Despite lying more than 150 mile north of Toronto the islands of the bay function as a vacation-land annex to the big city; the area is known as Cottage Country and for the two or perhaps three months of the year when the weather is clement these islands of ease host the harried (but wealthy) workers of the metropolis. In this respect they serve a similar function to the ocean islands of Penobscot Bay in Maine where we have vacationed on North Haven in three of the past five years and which have traditionally catered to the Boston brahmins during the months of July and August. We Californians are outliers in either location.

Port au Baril, the entrepot from which vacationers make their final leap into the serene (but barely navigable) waters of the bay is a raw, bare bones kind of place more at ease perhaps, under several feet of snow and echoing with the sound of snowmobiles. But for brief halcyon days of summer it hosts a couple of marinas from which power boats zip back and forth to said summer cottages. I must have skirted this burgh when I hitch-hiked, one cold November night 43 years ago, from Windsor (on the Canadian side of Detroit) to Sault Ste. Marie on what was then two-lane black top.

King's Highway 400 is now a velvety macadamed six-lane super-highway that rolls over farm country before cutting through, in the interests of maintaining its relentless northern bearing and minimizing elevational disturbances, the primordial rocks of the pre-cambrian shield. This is the first leg of the armature that has transformed the bay islands from sparsely vegetated wind battered scraps of the Northern Ontario hinterland into (for two months) out-islands of Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville; the second is a jouncing power boat ride through the treacherous channels of the shallow bay.

While most of the islands of any size sport summer cottages, screened porches, pump houses and docks, Gar's islands have the raffish air of being inhabited by cast-aways sheltering under brightly colored scraps of nylon tenting. The Canadian flag flutters over many of the islands while The Ideals float in the channel under one of Garfield's 'Seven Colored Flags'. The Grey, Blue and Pink standards were variously flown when we were in residence.

Gar's islands are, of course, less a vacation-land than an art-work in the making. Although he has relinquished his former profession of Canadian Artist, he remains an agent of manifestation - to which his three islands will eventually succumb.

The country house, certainly from the time of Palladio, has traditionally served as a sink hole for the excess resources of the mercantile class. But for a brief moment in the second half of the twentieth century wealth had been re-distributed in the west to the extent that a rising middle class could also afford a cabin by the lake, a caravan at the seaside - or, in America, an RV or Airstream trailer to roam, for a couple of weeks a year, the nation's great natural wonderlands. Nickel miners from Sudbury, Ontario bought starter-cottages in the Georgian Bay and prosperous Los Angelenos, ensconced in their Case-Study modern houses could start to dream of a weekend retreat in Ojai or at Lake Arrowhead with some hope of its reaching fruition.

That moment was perhaps a high point in Western civilization - at least in those nations enjoying some semblance of social democracy - from which we are now in full retreat. We now experience the vertiginous kinetic energies thrown off by the regression of an emerging egalitarianism into an era that echoes the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, where the then wealthiest man in the world, Andrew Carnegie, raised in the slums of Pittsburgh achieved his prodigious wealth on the backs of his steel workers who remained trapped in the urban hovels of his own youth.

The coal that contributed to Pittsburgh's wealth through the conversion of iron ore into steel was laid down in the Carboniferous geologic era, from 354-290 MYA an age further separated, in America, into the Mississippian (Lower Carboniferous) and the Pennsylvanian (Upper Carboniferous). The latter, mostly covered now by a grassy mantle, awaits the end-times of coal mining when its value exceeds the economic, environmental, social and political costs of its extraction.

Similarly, the shale reserves of Texas and Alberta and the natural gas of - like, everywhere - await their call to arms.The slick connections between urban concentration and far-flung holiday hideaways continue to hasten the day. Even on vacation there is a limit to the intellectual comfort I can gain from thinking in the broad vistas of geologic time.

Independence Day

In Apercu 2010-06-12, I noted that insights gleaned from casual reading can sometimes rise to the level of epiphanies. Glancing at the CD booklet for A Choir of Angels - Mission Music performed by the vocal ensemble Zephyr, Civic Records, 1997 I read the following paragraph by William John Summers Ph.D., a historical musicologist and Professor at Dartmouth College,

".....California was named by Hernan Cortez (ca. 1536) after the mythical island paradise described by Garci Roderiguez de Montalvo in Las sergas de Esplandian, Seville, 1508. Upper or Alta California, which included the entire west coast of the United States, British Columbia and Alaska was ignored by the Spanish crown until 1768 when King Carlos III ordered Jose de Galvez (Visitador General of new Spain) to begin the colonization of this region to forestall Russian colonial encroachment upon the west coast of North America. In 1769, under Gaspar de Portola, Governor of Baja California, expeditions were sent north from Baja, one by sea and one by land."

I covered much of this story in Blowback, 2010-01-14; and in Mission Creep 02-22-10, I explored the shortcomings of the History curriculum in both grade and high school: here I thought, was a paragraph that should be tattooed (in Spanish, perhaps) on the wrist of every nine-year old in the state which is when, in Fourth Grade, California deems its children should learn its history.

It situates California in a global context that has very little to do with the founding of the United States in 1776 and makes Independence Day sublimely peripheral to our true origin story. While important to the thirteen east coast colonies, the War of Independence was an after-shock of the power struggle that had erupted amongst the European powers in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The founding of the United States - an event, as it would prove, of huge historical significance - was an unintended consequence of this skirmish except for those few who understood the opportunity that the distracted George III presented to them.

The mythical status of California as an island continued to have profound resonance during the storied days of the Nation's founding. The event of real consequence in California in 1776, was the founding of the seventh mission by Fr. Junipero Serra in San Juan Capistrano - as Spain continued to tighten its grip on California through the work of the Franciscans and their military protectors, the Spanish army. Four Presidios functioned as the army's military base. The last to be built, in 1782, was in Santa Barbara and its detachment oversaw security from the Los Angeles Pueblo to just south of San Luis Obispo.

Last Thursday, Lorrie and I were in Santa Barbara for an exhibit organized by the California Central Coast Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council and which featured drawings of our Upper Ojai house. We parked on Anacapa Street and walked though the newly restored Presidio. The beautiful, massively thick white washed adobe walls and a mission tile roof supported on old growth red wood timbers presented the romantic ideal of old California, complete with a decomposed granite courtyard dotted with a few gnarled olive trees. This glorious vision of Spanish provincial architecture was curiously at odds with the grim historical reality of its function as regional base to an occupying army protecting cadres of religious zealots that terrorized the indigenous population.

The parade in Ojai celebrating the birth of a nation, was held Saturday on Juy 3rd, in deference, apparently to the church-going habits of the local citizenry; I suspect it was very similar to last year's parade which we attended, the highlights of which, for me, were the Danza Azteca Cuauhtemoc, a troupe of indigenous dancers and drummers; the Mexican dancing horses and the Mexican American vaqueros, their high waisted suits and their steeds dripping in tooled silver as they paraded under the shade of the rider's broad sombreros: here were celebrations of our pre-Columbian, Spanish and Mexican heritage that balanced the endless parading of U.S. war veterans and the waving of the Flag of Empire, the stars and stripes.

California was, of course, home to vibrant native cultures before the Spanish arrived, and then part of Mexico after they left, briefly an independent republic (under the Bear Flag) and then, as part of the slave/free-state Congressional compromise, granted statehood in 1850.

Yesterday, as Lorrie and I weeded the last stand of now brittle thistles on the west bank of the seasonal stream four single propellor airplanes, perhaps of World War II vintage, flew over us in formation - following their sweep over the parade route on Ojai Avenue.

Today, we are celebrating by taking a hike up Bear Canyon and perhaps this evening we will enjoy, what the vaqueros, anglo-cowboys and african-american cow-punchers worked so hard for - a barbecue of cheap beef; and we will drink a California red in rememberance of the first planting of grapes at San Juan Capistrano Mission in 1779, ten years after the arrival of the Franciscans in California - and of their first Californian vintage in 1782.

In Search of a Shaman's Lair

The day after Lorrie's birthday party Doug Brotherton came over for brunch. He is a friend and colleague at the UCLA Rock Art Archive headed up by Jo Anne Van Tilberg and housed in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, next to the Fowler Museum. He introduced me to the Rock Art group some two or three years ago and his knowledge of Native American archaeology far exceeds mine, but since moving to Ojai I have been interested in the possibility of finding traces of the local Chumash culture in the local trails, rocks and creek beds.

The rock art that we have focused on in our work at UCLA relates to an area in the Mojave deep in Shoshone cultural territory. Living in Santa Monica Canyon, where a neighbor found a massive store of obsidian in his back yard, and Gabrieleno sites were scattered on the beach headlands and creeksides of the canyon I was also, effectively, in Shoshone territory - the local tribes having been re-named by the Spanish after the local missions. Coastal Shoshone used the Lakic branch of the broad Uto-Aztecan language family, while their desert brethren used Numic, and bands closer to the Sierras, Tubatulabalic. The Shoshone held sway over a wide swathe of Southern California, from the coast east to Death Valley, the Mojave and the Colorado River.

The Chumash established their dominion from what is now Malibu (ethnographically Maliwu, original meaning: sound of crashing waves) north to San Louis Obispo and east to where the 5 now bifurcates the state. This small, coastal influenced territory, wedged between the Pacific (but including the Channel Islands of Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel) and the Shoshonean, Yokuts and Salinan cultural areas, has been home to the Chumash for perhaps 6,000 years ( See Class of 2010, 10-06-01) and here they developed perhaps the most advanced material culture in Native California.

'So Doug', I asked, 'is it true that all Chumash rock art uses paint?' I didn't get a definitive answer; there may be none. Versions of the universal pit and groove motif exist in Chumash territory, most notably at the inland village of Soxtonocmu, close to S&S seeds in the eastern Santa Ynez Valley (Where Native Meadows Come From 2010-04-14) where cupules and incised grooves may have been part of a fertilty ritual (Georgia Lee, Journal of California & Great Basin Anthropology, vol.3 no. 1, 1981). But certainly the most well known Chumash rock art sites feature painted motifs. My interest is parochial; I want to find pecked or painted rock art somewhere in all this great mess of boulders and rock outcroppings that are the Topa Topa foothills. Paint is inevitably ephemeral, but pecked motifs can date back 10,000 years or more, and in this area, that would take us beyond the Chumash to the Oak Grove people of the milling stone horizon.

Doug suggested that given the significance of the Topa Topa rock face to the Chumash a rigorous archaeological mapping might be undertaken from the base of the spalled face on up. Somewhere, he suggested, there must be a Chumash trail leading to a shaman's lair. I told him that in these foothills there is reputed to be a vast field of chia, the remarkable grain that sustained super human efforts of endurance running amongst Native Americans. Talk turned to the Tarahumara (more properly, the Raramuri -the running people), natives of Copper Canyon in Chihuahua, Mexico, who use chia to fuel their epic runs through the rocky canyon bottom.

A year ago I attended a talk at The Santa Barbara Archeological Society with Jay Fikes showing the BBC documentary, Tales from the Jungle: Carlos Castaneda, 2007, which featured both him and local archaeologist Richard De Mille (yes, son of Cecil B.) debunking the validity of Castenada's work. Much of their complaints centered on doubts of Don Juan's native identity. Castaneda suggests that Don Juan is Yaqui, and his seminal work The Teachings of Don Juan, UC Press, Los Angeles, 1968  is subtitled A Yaqui way of Knowledge, for which he was awarded a PhD by the UCLA School of Archaeology. But hiding out in Mexico for months and years while his wife waited in Westwood, Castaneda had reason to obsfucate his whereabouts. The recent book Born to Run, Christopher McDougall, Knopf, New York 2009, suggests that he may have been hanging out with the Tarahumara in Copper Canyon, where the drug fueled partying that is intrinsic to their societal structure would have suited Castaneda, a philanderer not averse to altered states of consciousness.

I had a date marked in my calender in the spring of 1998, to go see Carlos Castaneda at Local Hero in the arcade where Feast now is (in the good old days when there were two independent book stores in Ojai) but this engagement was cancelled a couple of weeks before the day and a little while later the world learnt that he had died of liver cancer on 27 April 1998.

On the Monday after seeing Doug - without aid of chia, but instead a small cup of green tea for me and a glass of water for my son Will, he and I ran up the Sisar trail to the ridge-line fire road seven miles distant. From there we were some way west of the Topa Topa face and, at around 6,000 feet the impression was that we were almost looking down on its rugged imperfections off in the distance. A marine layer swirled along the coast far beyond us, but Point Mugu was visible as a spine emerging from the fog bank. At that elevation the Manzanita is dwarfed and dominates the scrubland, but scattered under it was sometimes the beautiful piinkish red Turkish Rugging (Chorizanthe staticoides), yellow Mariposa Lilies (Calochortus plummerea), and Blue Larkspur (Delphinium parryi). Here it is still spring, and the Manzanita has yet to flower.

It would be a long run, albeit slightly down-hill to the base of the Topa Topas, and that day we had no intention of taking it: instead, we returned to White Ledge Camp and then back to the Sisar trail head. A more direct route from Koenigstein would be up Bear Canyon, but I have yet to find a trail beyond the spring tributary which feeds the year-round creek.

But perhaps a Chumash Shaman continued on, clambering directly up the rocky gorge carved deep into the canyon by winter rains. Perhaps he ran up it, and perhaps he was barefoot, like the Raramuri and, then perhaps, he pecked at the sandstone base of the Topa Topas with a palm sized chunk of quartz he had carried in his medicine bag and immortalized his entoptic vision.

Twilight

In my previous post, Palimpsest, 2010-06-22 I wrote that "working at brush clearance I am made aware that the property is a palimpsest - of faded pasts drawn in paths, fences and rock piles". While I wrote a largely conjectural piece, I gave short shrift to the rock piles - the most concrete evidence of 'faded pasts'.

We are the agents, on our parcel, of the most recent rock piles. The local grading contractor Paul Hofmeister is responsible (following the direction of Jim Exon and David Trudeau developers of the twenty acre +/- home sites) for much of the rest. Before that? We are back in the realm of conjecture.

I have never subscribed to the 'Great Man' theory of history, whereby an individual, through his or her force of will can turn events on a grand scale. However, sometimes personal history can impact public action. Paul's dad owned much of Upper Ojai before the IRS took it away from him in lieu of taxes owed. Paul's particular relationship to this high valley is inevitably colored by his family history. He was to the Manor born, now he is a vassal of it's developers and the new, L.A. real estate-rich owners of boutique parcels.

In an effort, perhaps, to revive the family fortune, he has made a lucrative business of selling rocks, grubbed from home site excavations, road grading and pool digging. These he purchases for the price of their removal and sells to the County, Cal Trans, Landscapers and other home-owners. He has been active on the parcel west of ours, owned by two real estate agents from Los Angeles, who charged him with clearing the site of rocks. This he has pursued diligently and now the few stream-side acres that are the putative home-site are scraped clean and re-graded by Paul as two dirt terraces.

Were it not for the fact that I have been witness to the amazing regenerative powers of coastal sage scrub and chaparral I might be more alarmed. As it is, I expect the scraped dirt to sprout thistles and mustard next season (for he has concluded his program of lithic larceny) and then slowly revert - if not further disturbed - to native scrub.

Paul is also responsible for the very necessary roadside brush clearance along del Osos, west of our neighbor (which splits their twenty acres into the home site and a chaparral acreage west of the drive). The tractor drawn brush-hog which he uses has its place in the arsenal of bio-mass reduction - or, as the fire department thinks of it, minimizing cellulosic material. It is however, undiscriminating in its destruction. These pull-behind devices have a spiral blade-shaft powered through a tractor's PTO (power take-off) and many are capable of chewing through 6" to 10" trees - enough to handle most of the roadside shrubland. Lorenz, Margot's estate manager and myself are perhaps the last holdouts against the use of this kind of equipment in our brush clearance endeavors, both of us preferring the editorial accuracy of light weight weed wackers, pulaskis, loppers, secaturs and occasionally, a chain-saw.

But, back to rock piles: as I have noted in Stoned 2010-05-28, most of the two hundred tons or more of boulders removed after excavation of our building pad were trucked to the west meadow for the duration of construction. Tagged by the County as un-compacted fill, it was necessary to have the rocks removed before we could get their final approval on grading. Spread out on a broad flat area in a pile some 100 feet long, 25 wide and ten high they resembled a fresh drift of moraine that had somehow arrived directly from the spalled face of the Topa Topas.

Their journey had in fact been marked by a hiatus of many thousands and probably millions of years with the rocks sleeping beneath the valley soil crust in millenial cycles of heat and ice. The boulders were sandstone, golden or straw in color, while the smaller fractured rocks, siltstone and claystone, ranged from grey through black to a dark red. All were originally a part of a geological stratum composed of landslide deposits formed, perhaps a few million years ago (late pleistocene) and which has been in a constant process of spalling.

Some seismic event caused the emblematic fracturing of the south face of the Topa Topas and this process, aided by mud and debris flows and roiling, rolling rock canyon streams added to the rubble accretions strewn throughout the alluvial valley floor. It was part of this collection that we (mostly) relocated from the gently sloping uplands of our site to a broad flat meadow to the west.

Some of the larger stones were positioned around the site with an excavator while we also took the opportunity to cover a dell above the newly excavated bowl, which in Paul Hofmeister's time, had been used as a dump for brush grubbed from other potential house sites. Laid on top of slowly decaying shrubbery the stone now appears in the landscape like a rock pond, with oaks struggling to emerge between the boulders and thistles rampant. These rocks remain, like the signature boulders strategically set, as lithic evidence of our recent past - of our crude re-shaping of the land.

The faux moraine drift was disassembled and removed by an excavator feeding a fleet of trucks. Paul Hofmeister was not involved. He prefers long term agreements whereby the property owner warehouses the rocks and Paul removes them as he finds buyers. This, I believe, is the arrangement he maintains with Rick Baxter whose scarp-top home to our west is accessed by a road maintained by Paul extending from Verner Farm Road and which I think of as the Paul Hofmeister Expressway. He has recently brush-hogged the steep track.

The flat area, once liberated from the dead weight of rocks, was for a brief moment, barren. Now, a year later it is full of thistles, mustards and alien grasses. But sprinkled throughout are the vestiges of the old coastal sage scrub - peonies, soap plant, elderberry and deer weed. A brush hog destroys all: I plan the excision of alien material and, by the careful wielding of my weapons of botanic destruction listed above, ensure the survival of the base plants of the coastal sage scrub revival. Brush hogging would enslave me to its perennial use as the razed landscape would encourage only the growth of endless iterations of weeds thriving on annually disturbed soil.

I believe that we are returning the site to something resembling its historically natural state. I am not unaware, however, that these efforts are undertaken within an intellectual construct that privileges the pre-Columbian botanical catalog. As I work at the editorial process in my brush clearance, I sometimes reflect on the fact that I am, ultimately, just another botanical fashion victim. But this fashion, which could be broadly defined as localism is significant. It is the emerging counter trend to the expansionary imperial ethos with which we have been living for at least the last 500 years and has, as its apotheosis, Globalism. This latter trend is sustained by our reserves of stored solar power. We all know where that is headed. Localism is the future, but I recognize that for now, and perhaps for many more decades, it will remain nothing more than a bright filament of hope threaded through the twilight of fossil fuels.

Palimpsest

In Mending Wall, Robert Frost writes,

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

His neighbor has a fetish for separation and demands an annual ritual of mending the dry stack wall that divides them. Frost darkly intones,

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Frost is, as they say, cool with that, but the nameless neighbor insists on keeping the wall in good repair despite the poet's contention that

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.

No frozen-ground-swell here in Upper Ojai (although the pipes from water tank to pump froze in early December last year and a couple of years ago a reporting station on Sisar recorded zero degrees farenheit) but oxidation, dry rot, termites, gophers and deer can play havoc with fencing. We have no need of it; but working at brush clearance I am made aware that the property is a palimpsest - of faded pasts drawn in paths, fences and rock piles.

The margins of the plot's chaparral have not been truly wildland for perhaps a hundred years and there was, over time, a fencing in and fencing out. Here time is the something that doesn't love a wall (or fence) and the physical, chemical and animal processes of the environment ensure its eventual demise.

There is for instance, the post and rail fence that, in parts, runs along the northern property line where we abut the Whitman property, Rancho del Osos, which was developed as a guest ranch in the mid 1920's. This fence may date back to that era, but it is now in terminal decay and its useful life -whatever it was keeping in or keeping out - is over. There is a gap even Griffin's 1977 C-10 Chevy can pass through - and occasionally does, for this is a back exit from the property linking up with the last gasp of the Whitman's driveway as it crosses over Bear Creek, and connecting with the nameless spit that branches off Koenigstein (although some locals call it del Osos since the ranch was its original and then only destination).

The oak grove which sits on a broad ledge between the hills to the east and the steep banks of Bear Creek is on our side of the fence and it is a place of dappled shade, monumental lichen splattered rocks and the spreading oaks themselves. This year it is also littered with oak seedlings. I cleared it of thistles and in the process was entangled, more than once, in rusting barbed wire. In places, too, there were old sheets of tin and, a little way down the Creek bank I retrieved a round straight-sided container which was circled with half-inch round perforations. I was reminded of John Meiner running his pigs in oak meadows to the east of Ojai (Mining Gravel, 2010-01-30) and, a world away, of the farmland, replete with the agricultural junk of an earlier age upon which our house stood in England and which we slowly turned into a garden (The Scythians, 2010-06-04).

Cattle still range in the Topa Topa foothills and the original 160 acre ranch from which our parcel and six others were cut almost certainly ran cattle, and the broad meadows either side of the spine which runs from north to south down our property may have provided reasonable grazing. There's barbed wire along a portion of the eastern hills and its purpose, perhaps, was to keep the cattle out of the chaparral thickets and accessible for the occasional round-up.

My only experience of cattle ranching was in Australia at a friend's ranch outside of Canberra and there the favored round-up mount was the motorcycle - which would be hurled around the bush by the rider (my friend Lachie) grazing brush and rock in frenetic attempts to corral beasts that had scant respect for a small Japanese motorcycle buzzing at their hoofs. I rode the bike over the range but never in anger. Enraged by a particularly egregious example of bovine stupidity Lachie would rev up the bike, its back wheel grappling for grip, spewing rock and sandy soil and, as man and machine melded into a pirouetting dust devil, herd the beast away from whatever danger its dull brain had lumbered it into.

Liveried four-wheelers are the round up vehicle of choice at Black Mountain, the impeccable ranch in Upper Ojai's west end but on our parcel, I like to think, as cattle roamed the meadows, man and horse (and a little barbed wire) maintained the integrity of the herd.

More domestic signs of past occupation exist at the southern end of the site where the seasonal stream is now channeled under the wet and dry (or Arizona) crossing which was installed by the developers of the parcels in the early 2000's. Previously this winter stream meandered unfettered on its way down slope to meet Bear Creek just before it passes under Koenigstein and drops down into Margot's property. Perhaps, at this muddy confluence there was once a cattle wallow. Above it and beyond the oak that rises out of the broadened stream to the west of the culvert are pathways lined in rocks now half buried by the shrubland.

To the east of the culvert, as the stream bed climbs sharply into dense chaparral someone placed a cast iron tub and shower from which, in season, a bather would enjoy a view of the stream cascading down a series of small waterfalls. This view, wet or dry, must have made quite an impression because flexible plumbing was rigged a hundred yards or so to the year round waters of Bear Creek. Of what pumped the water up to the tub there is now no evidence. Were the stone lined paths above Bear Creek a part of this appropriated landscape? Margot tells me that there were people living under the bridge on Koenigstein when she first moved to her property some seven years ago.

Our past, on this property where we have built, stretches back to the fall of 2007 when we made the fateful decision to buy it and sell the parcel just over the hill to the East which we had purchased in the Spring of 2004. So here our past is un-faded, the marks of our making still somewhat fresh and surficial. Even so, it's now nearly two years since we began grading and trenching, and this blog has largely been about our attempts to let the natural, native vegetation draw a veil over the recent depredations of back hoe and excavator.

We are encouraging the chaparral to write over those original broad strokes and in the process are creating a new layering of the landscape, a new map on the scarred surface of the old.

Bowls

Last Sunday, we went to the final concert at the Ojai Music Festival and saw the preening George Benjamin conduct his own composition, At First Light, which represented, I thought, a tediously conventional view of the day's dawning: all squawks and squeaks of the avian dawn chorus and thunderous drum rolls announcing the rising of the sun accompanied by the mechanical cacophany of the waking industrial world. As an expert in first light - watching the sun rise most mornings on my run, the creeping luminescence of the dawn is at once profoundly lyrical and prosaic - the sun rarely rises, at least in this part of the world, with tympanic drama but more usually insinuates itself slowly washing away the darkness; the day is almost fully light before the sun bothers to actually drag itself out-of-bed and over the horizon. Its first rays may sometimes be worthy of a trumpet fanfare but usually, in the moist atmosphere of early morning its rising is quietly marked by a yellow cast over the heavy dawn grey. Benjamin I suspect, whose white hair frames a moon face, is a night owl - sleeping through mid-morning. The closing performance of Olivier Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques was a considerably more successful metaphoric piece, and went some way in salvaging the concert.

Friday, the start of the Festival weekend, we attended a delightful pre-concert party given by Bruce and Marie Botnick. I finally met Pamela Burton, the Landscape Architect whom Lorrie had known a little in Santa Monica when she was our neighbor in the Canyon. We had been promising to visit each others houses in Ojai for six months or more and on Friday evening we agreed that she would visit, with Michael Webb, the architectural journalist, on Saturday morning. Michael checked out the house and pool while Pamela reviewed the natives that surround the house - it was gratifying to show the grounds to someone who fully understood what we were doing. Pamela has just finished her pool although she and Richard have had their weekend house on Grant for 25 years; while I have designed eight pools she, no doubt, has designed dozens and presumably her own, like ours, is a distillation of everything learnt over the years.

The bunch grasses on the tilted plane - the front lawn - are drying out. We have removed the erodium and clover which surrounded them. The sparse stands of needlegrass (Nassella Sp.) can still be provoked to wave in a heavy breeze, but absent wind the field has a bald look with dried plugs of bunch grasses and splotches of green and yellow - deer weed (Lotus scoparius) - looking like some punk dye-job. We still love it, for it is our child, but I do not expect a lot of respect from friends and neighbors - or the Fire Department.

The latter came by Wednesday arriving in a full-sized rig (the pick up truck, apparently, was otherwise engaged). I was in L.A., but Lorrie tells me they would like at least some of the grass clipped. Similarly they want the deer weed on the 'back bowl' to be thinned. We'll leave it all as-is until Lorrie's Birthday Party (the night of the full moon, the 26th) and then set to it. The thinning of the deer weed actually allows for individual plants to spread fountain-like and makes for a beautiful, lacey show. They seemed comfortable with the yellow and green splotches up front. The tarweed (Deinandra fasciculata) is spectacular right now, and is colonizing the edges of the 'lawn', even popping up in the shoulders of the chip-seal driveway. All in all, their suggestions were reasonable and we can accommodate them while retaining the 'big idea' of natural landscape bumping up to the gravel terraces.

This has been a difficult spring for brush clearance and weed control. The El Nino rains continued well into May and mustard, thistles and erodium are still emerging sprightly and green. We did not approach the 50 inches that Ojai received in the record El Nino years of 1997-1998 and 2004-2005; but according to the Ventura County Watershed district tally The Summit received 29 inches against an annual average of a little over 23" and last years abysmal (but ideal for building!) 13.65 inches. My experience of exceptionally wet winters in Ojai covers both the recent big storm years.

In the winter of 2004-2005, Casitas Dam and the city of Ojai received more than 50 inches of rain and Nordhoff Peak drenched in more than 80 inches. My most vivid memory of that winter, the first after we had purchased property on Koenigstein Road, was of driving up the PCH, with the family, including my eldest son Edward down from Vancouver to spend a few days with us between Christmas and New Year's, crossing over the Calleguas Creek bridge at Point Mugu and seeing the water almost level with the road lapping at the curb which supports the guard rail on the eastern edge as it rushed towards Mugu Lagoon and the Pacific Ocean. Onward we drove, despite Lorrie's deep misgivings (levels of testosterone were high in the cramped cockpit of the Audi allroad) up through Santa Paula before we were finally turned around by an Edison Emergency crew at the reservoir just north of Bridge Road who told us that the road had washed out beyond Steckel Park. (That would have been at St Thomas Aquinas where still you can see the tangled wreckage of a car that washed into the creek). That was also the year that I planted 50 acorns on the property - to no apparent effect. Flood damage to the 150 between Santa Paula and Ojai has, just this last month, finally been repaired.

Earlier, in 1998 my last year teaching at Oak Grove, I was driving up to Meiner's Oaks from Santa Monica Canyon three times a week in the Mercury Sable wagon that we had bought at the beginning of the decade to car-pool with. Alone in a seven seater (there was a rearward facing seat at the back of the cargo hold) sunk deeply into a velour seat that was sagging with age I battled the winter storms from January until May. That year the PCH was ravaged by the rain and high surf, crumbling at the edges in that deleriously winding section from County Line to Point Mugu. Sometimes it was closed. One morning I was turned back at Neptunes Net on others I followed Cal Trans as they cleared rock slides in front of me. Over the years since, the road has been serially improved and suffered no damage in the 2004-5 El Nino event.

The correlation of El Nino years to heavy winter rains is not a simple one. But certainly two of the recent strong El Nino's produced record rains. This winter's weak event bumped the average rainfall by 25% and significantly, perhaps, stretched the rainy season to a full seven and a half months. It started with a bang with well over five inches in October (12-15) and ended with a whimper, but by my calculation, still over an inch in May (26-28).

The Music Festival, as far as I know has always enjoyed fair weather. The fate of its re-building efforts however, as of this writing, has hit a stormy patch in the shape of Ojai City Council's intransigence. They are demanding further assurances that the funds are guaranteed despite the Festival Committee having secured pledges sufficient to cover the projected budget. As one of those pledging on a 'five year plan' I feel personally impugned by the council's refusal to OK the planned reconstruction of Ojai's signature Bowl!

Wood Pile

I was weeding down by the wood pile, pulling star thistles and snipping at the doughtier stalks with secaturs when I saw the tail end of a snake. I was, perhaps, 12" or 15" inches away from a pale straw colored almost translucent rattle. When the reality of my predicament dawned, I was not engulfed in fear, but slowly straightened out from my crouch and looked down at the snake curled in the crook of a log that sat on an old 3 x 8 board. Its end was draped on the ground, its body and head curled on the warmth of the wood. It did not move except for a few probing flicks of its forked tongue. I stood admiring it for a few moments and realized that I had been fortunate in stumbling on a very chill member of the rattlesnake family (Crotalus viridis).

Fully adult, its philosophical demeanor suggested that this was Old Man Rattlesnake: not some callow juvenile or hyped up adult that took seriously its National Audubon Society Nature Guide description as "Excitable and agressive". Later in the day I spoke with Ethan Wylie, amateur heptoligist and Zappa fan, who was visiting for the Music Festival. He and Ellary had had a confrontation with a more aggressive rattlesnake the previous weekend in the foothills of the San Gabriels that, at the same sort of close quarters that I had experienced, had rattled (a warning before striking) and essentially barred their way on a narrow single track. They retreated back up the hill.

Perhaps because of the openness of the flat terrain my snake clearly did not feel threatened and having observed me for a few minutes as I worked my way through the thistle patch decided that I was not worth scaring half to death with a shake of its rattle. In the evening we made the pilgrimage to the Libbey Bowl and heard The Ensemble Modern play a selection of Frank Zappa's orchestral pieces along with a few Edward Varese compositions - the latter having been Zappa's symphonic inspiration. The night's music had a portentious nervous energy that seemed in keeping with both these unsettled times and the impending demolition of the venue - and was at odds with the centered gravitas of the rattlesnake who, it seemed, was confident that "God's in His Heaven, All's Right With the World".

Early the next morning as I was scrambling along a dry creek bottom in a canyon west of Bear Creek I disturbed a great horned owl (Bubo virginianus) which took flight from an oak and I watched its wide spread wings and mottled grey brown underside as it flew to a further tree.

It's been a quiet few months for wildlife sightings. No more strolls around the pool from our local bobcat, and very few deer after Peter Jump's coonhounds chased a frightened doe across the property early this spring. But we have been seeing rabbits hopping along the gravel border to the house, and a week ago we met two of the Gopher snakes (Pituophis malanoleucus) that we long knew ruled the rocks beneath the cluster of oaks just above and to the east of the house (New Moon 2010 04-21). I was working on the border to the gravel pool terrace and saw a smallish gopher snake writhing its way under a rock. Lorrie was working above, under the oaks. A few minutes later she saw a much larger, fatter snake, perhaps 6 or 7 feet long and perhaps the parent to the snake below.

On Saturday afternoon we drove down the PCH to L.A. amidst beach traffic and, looking over the beaches and beyond to the 2-3 foot swell I was less than usually mournful that I have lost my connection with the Pacific which made up such a large part of my life for almost forty years. Summers were never my favorite beach time, and yesterday it seemed that the cars, crowds and the murky waters of the Bay rendered dismal the entire enterprise of surfing in L.A. When I lived in Manly at the dawn of the seventies, and later Whale Beach and Narrabeen (beach suburbs of Sydney, Australia) I could walk down to the beach. I chose work that gave me time to surf. In my early days in L.A. I lived in Echo Park and wide open freeways on Sundays meant that Topanga was little more than half an hour away. Later in Venice and then Santa Monica Canyon, Topanga remained 'my beach' but the crowd slowly increased over the years and it was always a trade-off of poor surf enjoyed in comparative isolation or good waves jostling with the multitude. At the beginning of this century, after a couple of winters of mediocre surf and my increasing enjoyment of running, I called it quits. Somewhere in there, when I taught at Oak Grove in Meiners Oaks, I enjoyed a few memorable winters surfing at Emma Woods when I stayed over at Besant House, or County Line on my drive back to L.A.

In Upper Ojai, although a good 40 minutes from the beach we do enjoy the marine layer rolling up the valley and few sights are as majestic as an early morning viewing, at around 2500 feet just above Sisar, of a white blanket of mist laying along the 150 with a slim strip of Sulphur Mountain peaking above it.

Like the walk to the beach, a run at my doorstep is important to me. The mediation of a drive besmirches the primal experience of getting on my toes and trotting into the wild. I keep an eye out for snakes, but with the sun barely up and a chill in the air I suspect most reptiles are curled deep under a rock or lurking in a wood pile - like my store of firewood or the detritus of the self-pruning chaparral thickets.

Apercu

Harry Kreisler suggests in his introduction to Talking To Michael Pollan, CounterPunch, May 1-15, 2010, that Pollan writes "about places where the human and natural worlds intersect: agriculture, gardens, drugs and architecture."

Epiphany has been overworked of late, apercu anyone? This is why we read: for glimmers of discernment. And we never know when they'll strike. When they do (strike, that is) bells chime and fireworks flare. Never mind the drugs, my world is centered precisely on the human interaction with the natural world, gardens and architecture. The Wildland/Urban interface is one facet of this interaction; how we buffer our architecture from the wild or the urban (and the sub- and ex- versions of it) with gardens is another.

As Pollan points out, "traditionally in America, if you wanted to explore your relationship to nature, you'd go to the wilderness, you'd do the Thoreau thing, the Emerson thing, the Melville thing". Pollan did the garden thing, his first book was called Second Nature : A Gardener's Education, Atlantic Monthly, New York, 1991. Now I have the opportunity to do the Wildland/urban interface thing. (Of late Pollan has been exploring our relationship with food - and re-aligning the author with the activity - we could call it the Pollan thing).

Much of my exploration of chaparral has to do with developing an appreciation of it such that I do not need to hold it a distance - so that I can literally welcome it into my front (and back) yards. My relationship with the wild has to do with developing an aesthetic appreciation for the apparent wildland chaos such that it makes sense - and is not somehow lacking because it does not adhere precisely to our western precepts of beauty. Properly understood, Southern California wildland can become both a model and a foil for architecture - such that a chaparral building is fire adapted, is miserly with water and takes all of its energy needs from the sun and is aesthetically enhanced by its setting in the brush.

In the English village in which I grew up, and attended primary (grade) school there were the locals, the local grandees, (mostly farmers) and newcomers like my parents who had come to the country after being evacuated from London during the war or who wanted the country life but one where a main train-line to London ensured a reasonable commute to the 'big smoke'. I lived, as I grew to understand, both in a government mandated 'green belt' and a socially desirable 'stockbroker belt'.

The local parish school that sat next to the nineteenth century gothic revival church (once was not enough for the effete etiolations of that sand drip architecture?) conducted an annual wild flower competition. I won three years on the trot (a threepeat, as it would now be called). Scouring first our garden, then hedgerows and verges I would collect, often with my mother and father, a compendious selection of wildflowers with names like foxglove, ragged robin, bluebell, cowslip and jack-in-the-pulpit.

Lady So-and-so would adjudicate; wife to a local Squire this was perhaps, a part of her outreach to the great 'unwashed'. By and large, we were just that, certainly by American standards of hygiene, but to varying degrees. I am not sure if I stank, but there were several coteries of kids at the school who certainly did, with a deep medieval stink that permeated clothes and flesh and radiated from them in a miasmic cloud of rot. Opportunities to bathe were constrained by limited supplies of hot water, produced solely in our house and many others, by a back-boiler, a tank located behind the firebrick of a coal burning fire-place. We of course, lived in a modern house by the standards of the day - many of my classmate's only source of hot water was the kettle.

It was coal that contributed to the great London Smogs of the 1950's. My aunt who spent her entire working life in the City, died a decade ago from lung-cancer which was probably a result of breathing that noxious atmosphere.Those of less robust constitution succumbed in the streets leading the tabloids to screech, 'Killer Smog!'. It was to London's great book store of the time, Foyle's that I would sometimes repair with my book token - the prize awarded for the best collection (and the most named) wildflowers, and these visits to the City are marked in my memory by the blackness of it all - only in the last two or three decades has a vigorous program of cleaning resulted in the Portland stone of the great eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century facades glowing in the watery sunlight again.

All of this is prelude to the recollection of an amble down Bear Canyon last weekend (after a scramble up Bear Creek) as a peak wildflower experience. After the verdant monochrome of the creek, all mugwort, blackberry, poison oak and berried ceonothus overhanging and above, sycamore, big leaf maples, oak and california bay the parallel path just to the east featured great drifts of chalky blue Yerba Santa (Eriodyctilon crassifolium), Blue Larkspur (Delphinium parryi), Foothill Penstemon (Penstemon heterophyllus), Prickly Phlox (Leptodactylon californicum), Purple Clarkia (Clarkia purperea), mauve Perezia (Acourtia microcephala), creamy Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and the brilliant yellow of Buck Wheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum). With such a painterly palette underfoot and the vestiges of a path (maintained solely, I think, by my infrequent trampling) it is easy, as one human intersects with the natural world, to fall in love with the California wildland.

The Scythians

I have been weed-wacking in the back 27. The 'weed-wacker' is known in England as a Strimmer, a contraction of String Trimmer. S'truth. If personified, strimmer is a word that would wear a navy blazer with heraldically embossed brass buttons and cavalry twill slacks (trousers). Come the Revolution, this mode of dress will trigger, so to speak, under the newly minted Terms of Engagement, both Section 4 subsection (ii) para.(c) "Shoot at will" and 4,(iv)(f) "Do not attempt to take alive".

In Australia they call the implement a 'whipper snipper' which has a sort of droll charm. I have been wielding the weed wacker (an American locution of startling clarity) through fields of thistles - in an act of atavistic regression - like a scythe. Describing a shallow arc, forward and back, the machine cuts on both strokes unlike the traditional reaper. Our quarter acre in England, farmland until the house was built in 1952, was for many years after we moved in, tall grasses and weeds until the neighbors, busy cultivating their crops, demanded that we limit the blizzard of weed seed that drifted across their carefully tended gardens. My father decided that the scythe was an appropriately bucolic implement with which to tame our prairie.

At some point I was instructed in its use although, vertically challenged by my young age, I was never a match for its steely lethality. This Scythian idyll lasted a few seasons and then in a radical volte-face my father was the first on our street to purchase a power rotary mower. A Villiers two-stroke drove the steel disc with sub-tended free swinging blades at the perimeter which was housed in a cast-metal shroud luridly painted in red and silver. This machine not only cut grass but over the years of its use flattened out bumps, propelled flint and sandstone into the neighbors yard and chewed remnant barbed wire, ancient rusty horse shoes and other agricultural detritus into a fine mulch. I learnt, during my years as its chief operator, everything there is to know about blowing out fuel lines and cleaning fouled spark plugs. I retain a fondness for two-strokes although the little motor that powers the weed-wacker is distinctly lacking in personality (and for that I am grateful).

In an earlier piece (A Note From Joan,  2010 01-18) I noted that,

'In the seclusion of this kind of rural life – where the nearest neighbors are coyotes, rattle snakes, spiders, quail and hawks –the home has a particularly intimate connection to its inhabitants. It is the first and last line of defense against the rigors of the wild environment – there is no sheltering community of similar buildings as in a suburb, no carapace of urban environment as in a town, not even the protection of surrounding yards, fields and out-buildings as in a farm.'

A garden usually represents a zone of civilization around a house. Historically, gardens have functioned as a buffer between the wild and the domestic. We have made the decision to forgo even that transition. We bump up against the wild.

And yet, recently when talking to Lorrie about our plans for the property I surprised myself by saying, "Of course, I want a beautiful garden". What's that all about? I think I have finally internalized the notion that with selective pruning and clearing of the chaparral as it edges towards the house it can have many of the elements of a traditional garden in terms of color, scale, texture and massing. While I have held fast to the intellectual idea of living in a purely native environment it has been Lorrie's insistence that we 'shape and select' that finally has me realizing that the chaparral can be, to some extent, domesticated.

Around the time the scythe was developed by the Scythians (for harvesting hemp), Cyrus the Great was building his palace garden at Pasargadae just north of Shiraz in Iran. The scythe was eventually adopted by the Europeans in the 12th and 13th centuries. Medieval gardens of that time may have been directly influenced by elements in Cyrus' garden which included a geometric plan, stone watercourses, water rills, shade-giving pavilions and groves of cypress, pomegranate and cherry underplanted with lilies and roses. The Persian garden tradition began with Cyrus in 550 B.C. and was born as a retreat from the harsh Persian landscape. This idea of creating a paradisical haven from the encroaching wildlands is an essential aspect of all subsequent garden design.

We have created a built context for our garden: the house, the geometric gravel surround, the gravel pool terrace and the sculptural element of the pool (see New Moon 2010-04-21).The non-native plant material encroaches Triffid-like. We wack at it with swingeing delight.

Class of 2010

On Saturday May 29, 2010 Besant Hill School of Happy Valley held its Commencement. On Memorial Day we attended a barbecue lunch at one of the Pierpoint cottages in the East End that was the home for many years of Guido Ferrando, one of the three founders (along with Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley) of the school. Our son Griffin is in the class of 2010.

Happy Valley is 500 acres of prime Upper Ojai real estate and was identified in 1927 by Annie Besant as the "setting for the New Civilization in America" quoted in The Story of Happy Valley, Radha Rajagopal Sloss, The Happy Valley Foundation, 1998. This 'New Civilization' was to be founded by a community under the guidance of the World Teacher who she had already identified as Krishnamurti and who was a part of the entourage that made the muddy journey up the grade to the Tucker walnut farm. In the event, K (as he was known to his acolytes) had other ideas.

Annie Besant was what we would now call an activist. Originally a Fabian Socialist and friend of George Bernard Shaw, she came under the influence of H.P. (Madame) Blavatsky a Russian noblewoman who claimed to have infiltrated the secrets of Tibetan Bhuddhism and who in 1878, became the first Russian woman to be granted U.S. citizenship. HPB (as her adepts called her), was a spiritualist, mystic, voyager on the astral plane and the co-founder (along with Colonel Olcott, an American military officer) of the Theosophical Society. Annie joined the Society in 1889 and by 1908 was its leader.

This Society was already well established in Ojai at the Krotona Institute, when Annie Besant arrived to shop real estate. The original purchase of the 300 acre walnut farm was augmented over the next 20 years with a further 200 acres and in 1946, Happy Valley School was opened - as a manifestation of the special purpose with which the land had originally been imbued by Annie Besant, who had died in India in 1933.

This is a heavy legacy for the class of 2010, but a little ignorance goes a long way and it falls lightly on them.

Traditions hung in the air on this Saturday morning and after the Procession of 25 graduates trooped onto the lawn we were treated to a mystical 'Blessing of the Land'. Madame Blavatsky's spirituality drew from an eclectic range of beliefs including Tartar shamanism, Egyptian hermeticism, the kabbalah, Masonry, Rosicrucianism, Christianity, paganism and Tibetan Buddhism. We were treated to a simple pastiche of native American traditions.

These included tobacco in an abalone shell scattered on the lawn, water from a 'sacred' spring (in a plastic bottle) sprinkled from a hand broom made up of rosemary and lavender and a brief whirring of the bull-roarer, a serrated wood paddle swung around the head of the professional chumash elder, Julie Tumamait.

In her blessing she claimed kinship with the Chumash people going back over 13,000 years. Amateur students of archeology in the audience were aghast (for surely I was not the only one). It is generally accepted that the Chumash have been around for about 7,000 years and the flowering of their culture only occurred about 1000 B.C. Before that, the Oak Grove People of the Milling Stone Horizon (an artifact complex dominated by handstones, millingslabs, and crude stone tools most frequently associated with the early Holocene in Southern California) held sway - these were a people who shared a time and a technology with the makers of the skin scrapers, hand axes and arrow heads that we collected in Surrey (see Stoned 2010-05-28).

The opportunities for intellectual angst were not over. Karen Brown gave the Commencement address and it was a wonderfully funny, poignant and wise speech. While the headmaster, Paul Amadio had lost his notes and was unable to regale us, in his introduction, with her curriculum vitae, I was aware that she worked for an outfit dedicated to the 'greening' of schools. It turns out that Karen is the creative director for The Center for Ecoliteracy 'a leader in the green schooling movement'.

As Kermit reminds us, "it's not easy being green". Glomming ecological awareness onto schools fundamentally dedicated to continuing the untenable approaches of re-invention, creativity and enterprise  is, it seems to me,  merely masking this gnawing cancer that infects our education system.

Progress, growth and improvement are the benchmarks of our societal aims for the education of our children. These values are inherently un-green - they run counter to the basic life processes that are in fact recursive, slow to change (or evolve) and conservative of energy, effort and enterprise. Our liberal education model could not have been designed more perfectly to ensure the continued and potentially fatal friction between the planet and its people.

The fact is that traditional societies with deeply conservative values passed on from generation to generation do a lot better job of living in harmony with the planet than those where an education model places an emphasis on creativity, invention and, above all, originality. These characteristics have for the last 600 hundred years, and at an increased pace since the Enlightenment, vastly increased our energy footprint and effectively doomed our co-existence with the earth.

It happened first in that primeval solar energy sink, the forest. Robert Pogue Harrison writes in Forest, University of Chicago, 1992 that Descartes notion of mastery and possession of nature through the scientific method led directly to the "rise of forest management during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...where forests are apprehended in terms of wood volume ..and resource management". In other words a multi-valent wilderness that was sanctuary to some, offered hunting and grazing lands for others and constituted a parallel world of spirits and totems to all was traded for an energy and construction resource that existed as an appendix to the City.

In searching for a time when Americans used energy at a sustainable rate Saul Griffith (see Cosmic Futility 2010-05-24) found that even in 1800, we were burning New England forests at a rate double the energy use of the average global citizen in 2010. That average reflects excessive energy use, broadly, by the North leavened in the South by societies untainted by notions of liberal democracy and where tradition has helped maintain a balance between people and environment.

Notions of originality run directly counter to the values inherent in most traditional societies. There, people have found ways to live in balance by refining a basic societal construct over many hundreds of years or, millennia. New ideas threaten this balance and even when adopted, are required to stand the test of time (which is often thought of as exhibiting a recursive or circular character rather than the cartesian linearity with which we are familiar).

Teaching our children to think creatively is what got us into this mess. We are forever prisoners of our planet. We need to look to life processes to understand the limits of innovation. Organizations such as The Center for Ecoliteracy are enormously adept at applying (green) lipstick to the pig and as such are a hinderance to initiating the essential debate:  what should be the fundamental nature of education in societies that have been spinning out of control for over half a millennium?

Stoned

I grew up with an appreciation for stone. It didn't happen because we lived in a stone house or because there were great rocks scattered on the landscape (as there are in Upper Ojai). It happened because my father would return from digging in the garden on the weekends (for many years we grew almost all our own vegetables) with shards of flint that he told us were stone-age skin scrapers. We lived in a part of the world, southern England, where early man had begun his precarious existence some half a million years ago surrounded by mega-fauna. There was a lot of skin to scrape.

By the time I was a teen, we had quite a collection of scrapers, arrow heads and hand axes most of which, since they were retrieved at spade depth - say 12"-18" - were probably from the Mesolithic period (around 10,000 to 5500 years ago) at the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Holocene era.

Beyond this subterranean storehouse of stone-age tools, and at quite another scale, Britain has a treasure of megalithic monuments. I was fortunate to visit Stonehenge when it was still surrounded by farm-land and you could stop the car on the A344 and wander down the slope to the derilict monument and leave greasy fingerprints on the stones. Now it seems it has been privatized, and the experience is distinctly less 'hands-on' and more theme park - it has been co-opted by Britain's Heritage Industry where the authentic has given way to the branded. In the mid sixties, you could stop at villages built amidst stone circles, such as Avebury in Wiltshire, and drink at a pub while considering the wonders of neolithic construction.

These circles and henges along with barrows (tumuli or burial mounds), mounds, cairns and standing stone alignments are a part of Europe's shamanic landscape. I have already mentioned something of the Chumash spiritual geography (which includes, at least, Mount Pinos, the Painted Rock in Carrizo Plain, and the Channel Islands off of Ventura). The skein of connections that linked these and (presumably) so many other places in the Chumash world were both prosaic trade routes and spirit paths - something akin perhaps to the European notion, developed by the antiquarian and amateur archeologist Alfred Watkins (1855-1935), of ley lines.

Ley lines are straight lines between spiritual 'hot-spots' marked by stone alignments and many are undoubtedly spurious. However, the standing stones (menhirs) at Carnac in northern France, in a variety of linear alignments stretching thousands of meters, bear material witness to the power of Neolithic geometries. The Chumash paid similar obeisance to the straight line; their trade routes and trails were invariably linear, eschewing the topographical convenience of switch-backs and the like. In this they reflected the Roman roads that marched through Europe with a singular focus on the flight path of the crow, and the supposed preferences of spirits who are universally perceived as traveling in straight lines. In Chinese feng-shui landscape divination, homes and ancestral tombs had to be protected from straight roads or other linear landscape features because troublesome spirits travelled along them and would bring bad luck.

By contrast, the intimate geographies of the entranced Chumash mind laid out in cave paintings - notably at the Painted Cave east of Goleta and the Painted Rocks on the Carrizo Plain - are webbed in sinuous lines resolved into an echo of the shamans's vision.

A contemporary artist referencing both the cairns and alignments of neolithic megaliths is Andy Goldsworth and he, arguably, materializes his own 'intimate geographies' in his smaller works with twigs, bark, grasses and reeds. His fascination with stone is evidenced in his egg-like cairns as well as his work with english wallers who traditionally, have crafted dry-stone walls and folds (or pens) but under Andy's direction juxtapose their native craft with the artist's environmental insertions - tree branches trapped in walls for instance, or a boulder (or cairn) corralled within a stone fold. This art depends on an availability of local stone and craftsmen to stack it. Both are in ample supply in England's northern sheep country.

Martha's Vineyard, that miraculous island of unique climate and bio-diversity, is also home to a dry-stack stone wall tradition and on a recent visit Lorrie and I became captivated by a particular technique called lace walls where holes exist in the fabric of the wall to allow the atlantic gales to blow through and thus reduce the lateral pressure on the structures.

We had over 200 tons of rocks stockpiled on the west meadow after completion of grading for our new house. Most were between refrigerator and microwave size and they were eventually carted away for road building. Left scattered around the building site were the larger car and SUV sized boulders, unearthed but too large to move very far. We spent a day directing the operator of a CAT 320D placing the stones on the ravaged site. His skill was superlative and he manoeuvered his machine and the rocks as though he was sailing a namesake piece of equipment, the Hobie Cat - the excavator up on one track and the rock hanging out as counterbalance in the bucket. Now his work has mostly disappeared under burgeoning chaparral, flush from a wet winter but the largest of the rocks, removed from the swimming pool site was placed under an oak that sits to the south of the house. Morning glory (Calystegia macrostegia) is starting to vine over it but its buttery yellow sandstone is still prominent and it is now a grave marker too, for our dog Derek who was buried in front of it some 6 months ago.

We considered building dry-stack walls, and in one scheme the west meadow was to be divided up into several folds for fruit trees, a vegetable garden and firewood. As we discovered, over our first year, the scale of the project we had already undertaken - the restoration of chaparral and the creation of areas of native meadow over those acres of the site that had been most impacted and disturbed by the grading - it became clear that we did not have the energy (or money) to pursue large scale dry-stack wall building. It may have been, as they say, a missed opportunity but the empty raised bed at the east end of the house is a salutary reminder of our limited resources.

In any case, there are a variety of traditions in the dry stacking of stone. How to choose? There are certainly Mexican and Italian masons locally and almost certainly British or Irish wallers who were the first to bring the craft to the United States. Now we have an amazing example of the Japanese tradition close by in Ventura. The Awatas, father and son, 14th and 15th generation masons were invited, with their Japanese team, to lead in the design and construction of two ramparts set beside a stairway in Serra Cross Park overlooking the Pacific. Along with local support crews they completed the work earlier this year, which used 300 tons of local stone, in nine days.

Garfield Smith kindly forwarded me a video, Stone on Stone (in process) for which his sister Sharon provided the music, that documents the building process. Local wallers customarily select rocks with at least two flat planes and their wall building involves a minimum of cutting and splitting. The Japanese team employ a more sophisticated technique which appears to rely completely on rock splitting and chiseling and yet the finished inclined planes of the ramparts seem like an entirely natural agglomeration of rocks. Those familiar with the culture will recognize this intense investment of effort in mimicking nature as typically Japanese.

Both forward facing walls of the ramparts as they project from the slope are anchored by 'hero stones' - particularly large specimens (refrigerator to small car) that traditionally demonstrate the resources of the community who have built the fortification. We have a few such stones scattered around the site awaiting their call to heroism. Such enoblement requires an availability of disposable resources. We are currently fully invested expressing our braggadocio through brush clearance.

Cosmic Futility

Like some contraption from the steam punk genre the internet runs on coal. It's obvious really, but I had never quite internalized this basic truth with regards to our now ubiquitous interactive media machine. By all accounts the internet consumes more power, globally, than air traffic. As we all know, most electricity is created using coal.

Australia, a land of waving fields of grain and snow white sheep gamboling in grassy fields (discounting, of course, the red desert heart) when I lived there in the 1970's, is now the world's leading exporter of high-sulphur (i.e very dirty) coal. Newcastle, north of Sydney is home to the largest coal exporting facility in the world. The Hunter Valley has been ravaged by strip and pit mining. As I noted in The Planetary Mind, posted 2010-02-04 a new word, Solastalgia, has been coined to describe the psychological trauma of the local population that has seen its neighborhood transformed from verdant valleys to dark satanic mines within the span of a generation.

As Peter Maass suggests in his Crude World - The Violent Twilight of Oil, Knopf, New York, 2009, we are going to keep on grubbing for fossil fuels for as long as they remain the high density/low cost energy source. Google has committed to an initiative called Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal. One way to achieve this is to find a way to include pollution costs in the price of fossil fuels; Carbon Credits anyone?

More likely we will continue to plunder the earth until every last drop of oil, chunk of coal and fart of gas has been extracted from it in the time-honored tradition of the Easter Islanders who, after a thousand years on their island finally cut down the last tree in the early 17th century and then realized that the newly carved giant stone head and torso statues, which were literally the cultural bed-rock of their society, were forever marooned in the quarry at Rano Raraku - for tree trunk rollers were the only means of moving them.

Clive Ponting begins his A Green History of the World, Penguin, New York, 1993 with a chapter headed 'The Lesson of Easter Island'. I used this book beginning in 1996 as a core text for the tenth grade world history class at Oak Grove School in Meiners Oaks. Perhaps my students internalized the lesson, but there is absolutely no indication that current world leaders, captains of industry and the vast majority of consumers consider their fate to be twinned with the Easter Islanders, whose society went into a rapid decline and regressed to profoundly primitive conditions after the total deforestation of their land. Ponting writes,

"Without trees, and so without canoes, the islanders were trapped in their remote home, unable to escape the consequences of their self-inflicted environmental collapse."

(I now volunteer with UCLA's Rock Art Archive which is headed up by Jo Anne Van Tilburg who has, for over twenty years, been documenting the Rano Raraku statues.)

Well, perhaps those in the Transition movement have internalized the message, but they are at our society's ragged fringe and are unlikely to be effective in changing the energy calculus. More promising perhaps, are those like Google, who are attempting to change the paradigm from within the mainstream.

Nomi Morris who reviewed the Gulf Oil Disaster as part of her "Behind the Headlines" series at Theater 150 (May 10, 2010) asked the small audience whether they thought the oil spill signaled the beginning of the end for oil - more likely, it seems to me (as it did to Churchill in different circumstances), "Now this is not the end. ... But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." In any case, the spill has fallen off the news cycle and only a secondary catastrophe can ensure its re-instatement in the public eye. Effectively, we have re-calibrated the bottom line of the disaster meter from the Exxon Valdez' 11,000,000 gallon spill upwards...well who knows...perhaps ten-fold into the 100 million gallon range. The spill itself edged the 29 dead West Virginia coal miners off the front pages so many weeks ago and, more immediately, eclipsed the tragedy of the 11 incinerated oil workers on Transocean's Deepwater Horizon rig.

We have entered the era of deeper, dirtier and more desparate drilling that will forestall Peak Oil and plunge us into the 'violent twilight' of fossil fuels where coal becomes king and reckless mining, open pits, flattened mountains and scarred landscapes are tolerated in the maintenance of our cheap energy addiction. As long as growth is required for economic stability we are doomed to repeat the experience of Rapa Nui.

Alternative energy sources come with their own environmental baggage. Saul Griffith who was born in Sydney in 1974, and is the subject of a New Yorker piece, The Inventor's Dilemma by David Owen, May 17, 2010 estimates that we currently consume electricity at a more or less constant rate of sixteen terrawatts: capping green house gases such that we would limit global warming to a further rise of 2 degrees celsius would require that 13 of those 16 terrawatts be produced by clean, renewable power. Doing that would require the production, Griffith estimates, of:

"100 sq. meters of pv's; 50 sq. meters of solar-thermal reflectors, and one Olympic swimming pool of engineered algae (for biofuels) every second for the next twenty five years; one 300 foot diameter wind turbine every five minutes; one 100 megawatt geothermal plant every eight hours and one three gigawatt nuclear plant every week."

Ain't going to happen. Sierra magazine May/June 2010 reports that there are proposals for 52 solar power plants in the Mojave generating 39,000 megawatts. Each megawatt requires between 5 and 14 acres of cleared desert - say 390,000 acres. Diane Feinstein has already introduced legislation attempting to protect a million Mojave desert acres. Biofuels can use engineered algae, but a more attractive solution for loggers under the long awaited Kerry-Lieberman energy bill known as The America Power Act is to burn wood for commercial biomass electrical generation. I suppose there's a certain symmetry to clear-cutting forests for 'Green' power which can then be used to graze the farm animals required to provide the nitrogen for our organic food production (see Back-Yard Romance posted 2010-05-13).

Wind farms are inherently controversial generating fierce NIMBY reactions from even the most staunch environmentalists. We considered a wind turbine on our property (they're cheaper than PV) but were discouraged by the prospect of avian carnage. Let's not even talk about nuclear.

There really isn't a clean, scalable renewable energy alternative given our massive addiction to electricity fueled by the earth's diminishing underground store of solar energy.

Depressed? You could try sending one less e-mail tomorrow, but the futility of such a gesture is almost cosmic in magnitude.

Wedding Weeds

The weekend was fine and sunny. We were swimming, Margot was swimming and probably the Cornwell's were swimming. But as the week begins, we've had two days of intense fog drip and the occasional shower. There are puddles along the Sisar Trail beneath overhanging oaks that condense the mist.

The chaparral around the house is at its most stunningly beautiful. The bunch grasses are rimed with moisture; the deer weed, now blooming, is bent down with the weight of the dew and the oaks are green-black against the leaden sky. It's a good week for weeding.

My focus has been on mustard (Brassica species) which has re-colonized areas behind the garage and thistles (Cirsium species) which spring up wherever there is disturbed ground.

The Italian thistle (Carduus pyncocephalus), right at the moment is a beautiful thing, tall and slender, it would not be out of place on Ipenema, (but, it must be said, it is a little prickly in disposition). Crowned by a deep purple and silky soft tuft it is the belle of the ball: but die it must and there are a variety of means at one's disposal.

Its primary, and perhaps only flaw is its alien status. I would be willing to forgive its thorny nature - after all we give poison oak a pass - but as a seed stowaway aboard some (probably many) transatlantic clipper(s), secreted in straw bales or in animal feed, in clothing or in baggage it is part of a broad homogenization of the world's plants whereby the hardiest of them build a global empire of weed patches each identical to the other like a chain of vegetal McDonalds. I am committed, on my little acreage, to forstall such an occurance.

I was out weed wacking on Sunday, thistling while I worked - hitting the kill switch on the weed wacker occasionally and venturing forth to eradicate some thistles. Smaller ones can be pulled out of the ground directly with little resistance. Larger specimens require pulaskying - sometimes a series of wacks to the base of the stalk or just beneath the surface of the soil to sever the trunk. The wilier plants take advantage of the moisture that drips down a rock and wedge themselves into a lithic crevice. Here the axe side of the pulasky comes in handy and the adjacent rock becomes the strike against which the stalk is cut. The weed wacker itself is of some use for the more tender thistles. Earlier in the season I tried spraying them in particularly rocky areas with Round Up. It is hard to judge my success because it was not total.There they now are, wedged in amongst the rocks gaining territory in what at first blush seems like the least propitious of circumstances.

I spoke with Lorenz this morning and he views the rain as a beneficence (his word). He told me that he had recently observed a gopher snake backing up into its hole in the ground. Yes, snakes can slither backwards! Reconnoitering before starting work recently, I saw a Wandering Garter snake (Thamnophis elegans vagrans) in the clover meadow, beautiful in its tightly checkered green, yellow and silver skin.

Apart from mentioning our individual neighbors, and Lorenz who is Margot's estate manager, I have yet to post anything specifically about community. I haven't been avoiding that arena but truth to tell we haven't had a barn raisin' in these parts for a while. But what we did have on Saturday, while the weather was more seasonal, was a wedding.

Although not specifically an Upper Ojai event, (it was held at Libbey Bowl with a reception at the beautiful east end estate of Tom and Cathryn Krause) there were significant contributions from the upper valley community most notably Valerie Levett, who was a producer of the event and maid of honor and John Perry who sang at the reception; we were present and made a contribution to the cake, and Kit Stolz was on clean-up duty at the Bowl - a duty I imagine he was allocated in a spirit of reverse nepotism (he's married to Val, the producer).

Now in the normal course of events weddings require planners not producers, but this was no ordinary wedding: it was a full blown semi-autobiographical wedding musical with a theatrically trained Universal-Life minister who sprinkled fairy dust whenever the 'plot' needed a little juice and a talking dog as interlocutor. There were visits too, from Hermes, a mongol horde and dancing jello bowls (don't ask...). In any event the deed was done in hugely entertaining fashion.

It was, as almost all weddings are, an affecting experience; and having my emotions tugged at by the bride and groom (Deb and Chris of Theater 150) and their perilous progress towards true romance, I was perhaps in a vulnerable condition when the minister made the appropriate reference to the Great State of California under whose aegis the marriage was formally sanctioned - in any event, my heart was filled to choking with the pride, joy and thankfulness of living in this remarkable part of the world (thistles notwithstanding).

Back-Yard Romance

If you read Wordsworth's dirge, The Leech Gatherer linked in my last piece, you will know that it is pedestrian drivel enlivened only by the last two lines, which are a tribute to the Leech-Gatherer's stoicism in the face of very limited means (and would seem to apply equally well to my Sage-Gatherer). But it is sometimes salutary to read the Romantics: heaven knows, I'm still mining the vein!

Growing your own food (in 21st. century America) is a Romantic endeavor. The yearning for the simple life is understandable, but it's actually (wouldn't you know) quite complicated.

There's every reason to 'grow your own' in Upper Ojai. I visited a neighbor recently who had reclaimed some bottom land on his property on the flood plain of the Sisar Creek as it wends down the 150 to join the Santa Paula Creek and he had laid out perhaps 1000 square feet of vegetables. It was fully irrigated and clearly very productive. There is a good sized vegetable patch at Happy Valley where some of the produce is provided to the school in lieu of land rent and otherwise is operated as a csa (community supported agriculture). Margot inherited a wonderful orchard on her property where she has oranges, lemons, grapefruit and avocado; these she plans to irrigate with roof run-off via underground storage cisterns. The lay of the land is such that a gravity drip feed is feasible.

We were early adopters of the csa concept, as consumers, signing up in Los Angeles twenty years ago. This was a bio-dynamic csa and we joined because of our association with Highland Hall, a Rudolph Steiner 'Waldorf' school in the San Fernando valley. Steiner's Romanticism was of the German persuasion - he was fundamentally reactionary; his development of the bio-dynamic protocol represented a return to medieval agricultural practices and certainly the wizened rutabagas and wormy parsnips we received from the csa provided a vivid window into the gruelling subsistence of the middle ages.

More successful was and continues to be, the garden at Findhorn where direct communication with the vegetable fairies or devas along with herculean efforts at soil building have resulted in famously prolific crops. I am reminded now that the farmer at Happy Valley uses some elements of the bio-dynamic principles in the gardens at Happy Valley - at least to the point of sprinkling ground stag's horn onto the vegetable beds. The addition of animal products to the soil, in the form of manure or bone meal, gets to the heart of the organic dilemma, whether practiced in your back yard or commercially.

Organic farming, if it were to exclusively feed the world, would require both a massive die-off in the human population and a massive breeding program of farm animals to provide fertilizer. The global population has outstripped the ability of the planet to support organic-only food production.

I grew up in a small village in the south of England that was surrounded, like most of its kind, by farmland or where the soil had historically been poor, by what we called 'common' - it was just that, public land that may have served earlier as rough grazing. Much of the farmland immediately around the heart of the village belonged to a farmer who practiced market gardening - large scale growing of vegetables and flowers which he shipped by train to Covent Garden, the great produce market in London.

He believed that tractors over-compacted the soil so he retained, right through the early 1960's, a stable of shire horses that assisted in the field work; I remember their stately progress through the streets as they moved from one section of the farm to another, towering over me and seeming altogether more interesting than the motley selection of post-war english cars in the traffic parade that they led. When his sons took over, much of the operation was sold as a golf course (on the land where I had picked daffodils for 2 shillings an hour during my school's Easter Holiday) and more was developed for housing. We can all be grateful that by the time I was driving my father's car (an Austin A-40 and later a Morris 1100) through the village at break-neck speeds the streets were no longer encumbered by these elephantine animals.

Removing the internal combustion engine from the farm has a beneficial impact beyond providing ad-hoc fertilizer and retaining a friable soil. Anyone who has dropped down into the central valley from the grapevine will be familiar with the pall of smog that hangs over California's vast 'market garden' - much of it produced by farm machinery. But the efficiencies of GPS guided, auto steer tractors and laser leveled fields (using grading machinery) to prevent irrigation run-off, are a part of what ensures bountiful and cheap food.

Were all of America's croplands to go organic there would need to be a five-fold increase in cattle to provide the current levels of nitrogen fertilizer. Their grazing lands would consume much of the available land in the United States resulting in massive deforestation. In California, the impact would entirely eclipse the introduction of Iberian cattle in the eighteenth century. If Europe tried to feed itself organically most of the remaining forests in north west Europe would disappear. Now, introducing Clydesdales as the prime movers for agricultural machinery would make a small dent in the nitrogen requirements, but they too need pasture or hay.

While Ojai's horse population probably ensures an adequate supply of manure in the short term for those of us who organically grow at least some of our own food, the longer term back-yard solution is to run chickens and perhaps a goat or two to create something resembling a closed system.

An organic garden is a wonderful and Romantic goal. It is not however, going to save the world. As Robert Paarlberg points out in 'Attention Whole Foods Shoppers', Foreign Policy, May/June 2010 "..the mantra that sustainable food....must be organic local and slow...doesn't work. Africa already has such a system....and one person in three is malnourished".

We have got as far as creating a 4' x 16' concrete block raised bed (empty) with a hardware cloth gopher screen at the bottom. I am currently fully engaged in trying to meet the County Fire Department's brush clearance requirements. Once the weed wacking, grubbing and raking abates I will turn my attention to Laurel Sumac control. Then I will begin the soil building exercise....perhaps around early July. Meanwhile, I guess, we'll keep buying the cheap and bountiful food available at our local (not always organic) markets.

The Sage-Gatherer

We spent a few hours at Bates Beach last Saturday afternoon. This is the beach to the north of Rincon Point and the site of the old chumash village Shuku, renamed La Rinconada by the Spanish. Sometime early in the fall of 1775, a group of 240 soldiers, priests and settlers led by Juan Batista de Anza stopped for the night at the bluff overlooking the beach.

Last week on the way back from LA I was settling in for the drive from Trancas home when I saw a hitchhiker sitting by the road with a Peruvian chullo style knitted cap, one arm draped over a sizable pack, and the other, from elbow to thumb in fixed position jutting northward. It was an intriguing tableaux (as I flashed by) and a few seconds of thought later I pulled my Audi down to a speed at which it was plausible to do a 'u' turn (a brief glimpse of Broadbeach below) and returned to the light at Trancas Canyon Road where, with a second 'u' turn I was able to pull up just beyond the crouching form. I exited the car and she ( for it was now apparent that it was a women) stood up and shouldered her pack. She wore a hand-knit sweater and a much patched long dark skirt. Her face beneath the knit cap was deeply weather beaten and she grabbed for a stuffed brown paper grocery bag with the boney, sun-damaged hand of a field worker. Together we got the pack into the trunk and then, still clutching the paper bag she settled into the front seat.

Her name was Kim (yes, I was hoping for something less relentlessly suburban - a trail name perhaps) and she was 50 years old and had been on the road for ten years. At forty she was probably attractive, her ten years on the road had cost her her looks but she had, somewhat prematurely, achieved the clear eyed mien of wisdom that is associated with post-menopausal woman of spiritual disposition.

The setting was hardly a lonely moor but past Trancas development does thin out: thus it was that Wordsworth's quizzing of the old leech gatherer (The Leech-Gatherer or, Resolution and Independence, 1800) came to mind and I uttered some contemporary version of,

'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'

She, it turned out, was a sage-gatherer and had a number of sage smudge sticks in her paper bag left over from a day's selling along the beaches of Point Dume and Zuma. It had been a good day. She told me that she sold them by donation but that people usually gave her between ten and twenty dollars apiece. She gave me an eloquent description of the benefits of sage smoke which more or less agreed with Jan Timbrook's note that "inhaling the smoke and allowing it to waft over the body....promote spiritual balance and harmony". Kim's take was that the smoke impacted a person's aura tuning it for greater harmonic resonance with the universe.

She had recently returned from Las Cruces - a long hard trip that, she said, involved lots of walking and hunger. She knew people there. The round-trip took over two months. She was headed for County Line where she planned to spend the night. At her request I dropped her off just past Neptune's Net right across from the chumash site on the bluff overlooking the surf break. This is a flat perch above the waves where I often stopped, during my surfing days, to check conditions and I imagined Kim settling down for the night on her bed-roll, lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the surf.

From Las Cruces, on the Camino Real from Mexico City to Sante Fe (established in the late sixteenth century), she may have returned to Los Angeles along interstate ten (begun in 1956) to Tucson and then she will have followed, more or less,the Juan Batista de Anza trail which passes by County Line and Rincon on the way to San Francisco. The de Anza expedition represented the first concerted effort by the Spanish to settle Northern California.

Will, our older son is with us for a week or so from New York and so a beach visit seemed in order. I know the local beaches primarily from a surfing perspective and have an affection for Emma Woods partly because of the winter waves, partly because of the approach (a scramble down the hill from the parking spot perched above the break, across the railway lines and then across the sand) partly because it is flat-out the closest beach to Ojai and partly because the waves at the north end feel as though they are almost underneath the 101 overpass. But it has its limitations as a family beach destination so we drove up the 150 took one exit south on the 101 and ended up at Bates Beach. It was a 50 minute drive and this protracted schlepp is one small price that is paid by those of us who live in Upper Ojai. We returned on the 101 south then ducked onto the 33, took Creek Road to Montgomery and then the 150 home. It was no shorter but 101 south has the virtue of being sometimes thrillingly close to the ocean.

Will and I swam and caught a couple of waves. We saw dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) playing and feeding and brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) dropping out of the sky to dive for fish. We took a run along the beach to warm up after our dip. We had done much the same at Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica Canyon many many times in the 17 years that we lived three blocks from the beach. But this time the Topa Topas awaited our return.