The Democratic Republic of Chaparral

While the indigenous people of California eked a living from the flora and fauna of the chaparral, we immigrants have yet to find economic value in the plants and animals of the shrublands. For this we should be eternally grateful. In the northern reaches of the state, circumstances were different.

It was a bear-hunter, Augustus Dowd, while tracking a wounded Grizzly who would be the first European to come face to face with the arboreal jackpot of Caldeveras Grove. The discovery of the giant trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) became major news on both sides of the Atlantic and by 1855 they had become a kind of botanical freak show. Their great age prompted the notion that they were contemporaries of Christ.

But although hugely charismatic as the largest living things on the planet (and for a long while, before their cumuppance by the Bristlecone pine, considered to be the most ancient) these big trees were but the guardians of a coastal strip of far greater riches, a swathe, rarely more than 25 miles wide from south of Monterey to Southern Oregon where moderate temperatures, heavy winter rains and fog drip nourished the coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) - a vestigial or relict stand of the tree family Taxodiaceae that established itself throughout the northern hemisphere from the very beginnings of the Jurassic period on (200 MYA).

The giant (drive-thru!) trees became synonymous with both the scenic grandeur and the unique historical destiny of the United States (at a time when that destiny was most in peril); their smaller girthed cousins with the prodigious natural bounty of the land. The United States have survived, the redwood forests of California, barely. Fully 96 % of the old growth forests that existed in 1850 have been clear cut. Our old single wall house in Santa Monica Canyon which dated to the very early years of the 20th century was entirely crafted of this old growth wood and was impervious to termites and dry-rot. The mud sills were like iron and had endured their almost 100 years of service in much batter shape than the concrete foundations on which they sat. Our house was an exception: very little of that bonanza of millennial timber remains in service locally - most has long ago been sent to landfills across the western United States and beyond, but in the 1960's through the early 80's vast amounts of old growth timber were exported to Japan and there, I like to think, at least some of it has been used in their exquisite craft traditions and will become a part of their national cultural storehouse (Wolf Oak )

The aggressive harvesting of old growth wood through the first three quarters of the twentieth century opened up space for commercial stands of redwood and Douglas fir: but the young growth redwood available at your local lumber yard, looking something like slabs of streaky bacon with sections of sap wood set against coarse grained rapid growth heartwood is a parody of the deep red, tight-grained wood of times past.

The Pacific Northwest timberlands represent a cash crop rivaled only by the illicit growing of marijuana which competes for space amidst the remnants of old growth forests. In Central and Southern California, the dominant ecosystem has been cleared, burnt and invaded by exotic species but never harvested on a commercial basis. It is the light in which this ecosystem is bathed that is the key to the development of the region.

If endless dry days with azure skies were good for making motion pictures they also were attractive to those seeking a healthy environment in the dark days of consumption and other bronchial infections exacerbated by damp, cold and occluded environments. San Diego, Pasadena, Palm Springs, Ojai and Santa Barbara are all erstwhile resort towns that depended, in the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, on their healthful climate.

Charles Nordhoff was an influential journalist who promoted California in his 1873 book, California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence. He wrote glowingly about his trip across the country (less than four years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad), and settling in Ojai went on to become California’s (and Ojai's) biggest fan.

That this land oozed black-gold was a bonus and has proven a more long-lasting economic bonanza than the real thing that initially prompted San Francisco's meteroic rise. Redistribution of water on a scale not attempted since the Roman Empire has resulted in vast agricultural acreages and population densities undreamt of by the land's original, indigenous peoples.

All of this exists in a dominant ecology that, unlike the giant redwoods of the north, goes largely unnoticed. I first saw it rendered on TV's MASH - the chaparral covered hills of Malibu back-country doubling for Korea and set to the thrumming of chopper rotors and Johnny Mandel's theme song, Suicide is Painless.

There is one plant however, in the mostly democratic republic of chaparral that tends to lord it over all others. One of its common names is, in fact, Our Lord's candle; another is Spanish bayonet. These two names perfectly reflect the yin and yang of the Spanish occupation: the seraphic beauty of the mission churches gilded with heavenly voices reverberating from the old-growth redwood rafters and the blood curdling ferocity of the de facto genocide of their native subjects. The names also reflect the nature of the plant at either end: at the ground is a dense basal rosette of bayonet leaves with needle like points (and used as such by the Chumash to inscribe their flesh with crude tattoos) while atop the long, single stalk there is, in season, a cloud-like inflorescence of creamy white flowers. The flowers can be seen sticking up above the surrounding chaparral like the proverbial tall poppies of Australia, which in this reflexively democratic society suggests that such preening attention-getting be rewarded with the first cut of the scythe.

The Chumash called it pokh, the Spanish meguey, mescal or quiote. Amidst the pervasive self-effacement of the low woody plants that make the thorny entanglements of the shrublands, stands this showy, etiolated member of the lily family: the chaparral yucca (Yucca whipplei).

Bad Dreams

Something begins to stir along the north coast of California, reaches inward across the west facing Sierras and moves northward to Alaska: it may be the flapping of Raven’s wings, the beating heart of Gaia (Scrim of Mist) or, quite simply, the metastasis of biomass.

Malignant or not, this metastasis results in an explosion of cellulose upon which the Timber Industry feeds. As David Lynch's Radio announcer says at the start of Blue Velvet: "It's a sunny, woodsy day in Lumberton, so get those chainsaws out...."

In the early nineties, we looked to buy, with friends, a few hundred acres of timber-land about ten miles east of Yachats on the Oregon coast. When we were trying to put an offer together I stayed at a motel along the Yachats River estuary and one evening watched an episode of Twin Peaks. David Lynch created that TV series to reflect the same vision of reality that is at the core of all his work: in everyday life there are things happening beneath the surface that swim into your awareness but escape your understanding.

Such was the case with our appreciation of the Timber property. We loved its apparent wildness, its forest. What we did not understand was that the land, although for sale, was firmly in the maw of Timber interests and it would take more than its imminent sale for the industry to disgorge it. Thus it was that when we returned to view the property with another potential partner we found great swathes of hillside had been clearcut. The long cycle of timber contracts held on the land existed on a parallel legal plane to its freehold, and like the mineral rights to our property in Upper Ojai do not change ownership with the sale of the land. Although one of our partners had grown up in Oregon, we were naive: our romantic vision of the land as virgin forest was hopelessly at odds with its commercial reality.

A few years earlier we looked seriously at a property in the Wainiha Valley, on Kauai, HI. It was off of Wainiha Powerhouse Road that winds into the foothills alongside of the Wainiha River which flows down from the Central Highlands. The valley is patchworked with taro fields and streams, and is home to families that have been in the area for hundreds of years. The property we looked at was being subdivided from an estate owned by an American surfer whose tin-roofed home sparked visions of building a pole house that would reverberate with the sound of rain on corrugated steel while the river coursed beneath the open-planked floor - because (of course) the entire property was both in the flood plain and vulnerable to tsunamis.

What were described as Hawaiian walking trail easements ran across the access to the property. This turned out to be local code for the fact that the ancient Hawaiian families in the neighborhood still considered the land to be theirs and probably maintained rights to grow taro up to the haole's front door. Then there was the question of who owned the bridge over the Wainiha River. Here the undercurrents of Hawaiian custom and latent hostility to newcomers quickly submerged our conventional understanding of real-estate and we retreated, chastened by the realization that in the remoter parts of Kauai, at least, Hawaii is a foreign land.

It probably didn't help that our real estate agent was Dick Brewer, the legendary big wave surfer and shaper of a series of revolutionary surfboards in the 1960's that essentially defined the modern sport. While he has maintained his relevance into this century by working with the new generation of tow-in surfers such as Laird Hamilton, he continues to dabble in Real Estate and the property he tried to sell us is, I believe, still available!

When Lorrie and I first drove up Koenigstein Road in the mid 1980's we were very aware of the oil drilling activity in the area and although there was land for sale - perhaps the 160 acres that Jim Exxon ended up purchasing and developing - I recall being spooked by this overlay of mineral extraction on otherwise pristine land. Years later, with the oil industry by now more discreet in its activities, we purchase our property.

Yet there continues to be an undercurrent of oil industry activity that occasionally barges into our consciousness with gas flares (Flare-up) or drilling to freshen existing wells. The commercial calculus of oil drilling is entirely alien to us refugees from the west side of Los Angeles who have found value instead, in the natural beauty of the canyons, hills and streams of the Topa Topa foothills.

On the ridge-line of Sulphur Mountain directly across from us I noticed drill scaffolding a couple of weeks ago. Usually they do their work and are gone in a few days. And such was the case, but Stephen and Clarissa, whose property backs up to the Arco oil lease, have been noticed that they will be back - with scaffolding twice as high and lights to enable drilling 24/7 - right through the holiday season. This threatens to turn our vague awareness of an energy industry undercurrent into an in-your-face affront to our sensibilities, haunting us like a grotesquely phallic Lynchian dream sequence in which our wildland is ravaged by Arco. Merry Christmas.

This is a price we pay for laissez faire County Planning where the rights of corporations and wild-catters transcend those of residential property owners. An alternative is the highly controlled environment maintained by, for instance, The Sea Ranch Corporation. In our quest for a homestead outside of the City we looked long and hard at buying property on this piece of the Sonoma coast.

In 1963 Castle and Cooke, the Hawaiian based developers, purchased Rancho del Mar (the future Sea Ranch) which since the original Mexican Land Grant (one of the last in California) was deeded to Ernesto Rufus in 1846 had been a cattle ranch, a timber property and finally a sheep ranch. The 5200 acres included the coastal meadows and the second growth red woods that forested the west face of the inland ridge.

The Pomo, the indigenous Native American inhabitants of the area, had elected to live behind this ridge where they were protected from the ocean winds; they made seasonal treks to the coast to gather kelp, seaweed, and shell fish. The meadows are an ecological adaptation to the salt winds that lash the gently rising bluffs but grazing has eliminated most of the native grasses. The wind-bent dwarfed trees that almost certainly established themselves have long been cleared away leaving the romantically wind-blown grasses often swathed in fog-drip or drenched in coastal showers that are now, along with the myrtle hedges introduced by Lawrence Halprin the landscape architect, the signature Sea Ranch vegetation.

As noted in Scrim of Mist , the architectural firm MLTW (Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, and Richard Whitaker) developed the design guidelines for the community of homes. We were entranced. I had been familiar with the project while an architecture student in Sydney and later had an opportunity to study with Charles Moore at UCLA. All that was left was to pick the right lot.

Many a Northern California vacation was devoted to just that until we understood that the undercurrent that flowed through our Sonoma dreams was the nagging concern that while still firmly entrenched in Los Angeles, with children in school and busy professional lives, a second home six and a half hours away made little sense.

The desirability of vacation homes was part of the larger fantasy that was the real estate bubble: a fantasy that we have now seen transmogrified into a nightmare beyond even David Lynch's lurid imagination.

Scrim of Mist

In my previous piece, Gaia Nation, I mentioned that

"Northwestern California, ... the coastal strip, valleys and mountains from Petrolia northward and east to Mount Shasta, stand apart from the rest of the state. Here, the intense rainfall and dense coniferous forests generated cultural patterns more in common with the Native traditions of the Pacific Northwest."

What we are talking about here is another confluence of bioregion and Native American cultural area: called the North Coast by the California Biodiversity council, it is no respecter of states or nations and sprawls across the coasts of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. As David M. Buerge writes in Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest: An Introduction,

"This is the world of Raven, powerful and immense, resplendent in sunlight, but more often hidden in mist and shadowed by gigantic forests".

A couple of weeks ago, while spending a weekend with my eldest son Edward in East Vancover, I tromped over the second growth forests of Bowen Island, in Howe sound: I was in the land of potlatches, totem poles and Raven at the southern terminus of the Inside Passage between Vancouver Island and the mainland, in the Salish Sea.

The skeletal stumps of the old growth cedars - pock marked with spring board notches from which loggers could get above the snow or to a point where the trunk emerges from its basal swelling and is thus easier to fell - lay amongst the lush new growth. Lorrie and I were on the island to visit Jeffray, Daphne and Kamile (Saturday Night Special) who live in one of the original cottages built by George H. Cowan as a summer community on the southeastern part of Bowen Island in the early twentieth century.

Wealthy Vancouver families who summered on the island in Cowan's cottages were fed from his garden, dairy, herd of sheep and chickens while his wife organized bucolic entertainments such as moonlight bathing, picnics and nature-walks amidst the towering coniferous forest and along the rocky shore.

The land at Cowan Point is now mostly in the hands of developers whose bucolic vision goes no further then golf courses; amidst serial bankruptcies, the land has been a hard sell - the middle class, its intended market, having vanished in the interim (Thinking MYA ). Jeffray's place, which he has owned since the 1980's is an oasis that harks back to those earlier halcyon days. He has artfully re-modeled the original log cabin and built decks to take advantage of ocean views. Daphne has created gardens around the house but they are under constant siege from deer. Cultivated land (and a trout pond) quickly give way to the enveloping trees.

On the south west corner of the island a new sub-division of raw land, The Cape on Bowen, is firmly targeted at the super-rich and it was here that we tromped with the selling agent, a friend of Jeffray's.

Featuring fourteen ocean front properties with a public trail cutting through the 10 acre lots, each has a narrow beach or sea-cliff frontage and stretches back into the second growth forest of alder, coast douglas-fir, western hemlock, pine, wester red cedar and sitka spruce with an under story of arbutus, ferns and lichens. It was wet, muddy and slippery. The developer (a consortium backed with Chinese money) has done an exemplary job of building infrastructure - beautifully executed roads, drainage channels, culverts and hydro-seeded grass verges and their intention is to bring underground electricity to each lot. The soil is intensely rocky; the rocks unearthed through the road grading process are all crushed on site into gravel for road base. Such attention to detail marks it as a model for the creation of wildland-urban interface property and puts the low-budget development of the seven lots along Koenigstein Road in Upper Ojai to shame. But this is a development of real scale and vast potential financial reward. At The Cape on Bowen, lots are are projected to sell in the low seven figures, and the entire development, of which the sea-front property is but the first stage, is two-thirds the size of Stanley Park and approaches the size of Sea Ranch, in Sonoma County.

It was the development of Sea Ranch that led, after protests from concerned locals wishing to maintain access to the beach along the miles of Sonoma coastline over which it spreads, to the establishment of the California Coastal Commission. Here landscaping is regulated by a design manual which prohibits perimeter fences and limits non-indigenous plants to screened courtyards. A herd of sheep is used to keep grass cut low to the ground to reduce the threat of fire during the summer months. Architecture is similarly regulated which has resulted in congeries of greying, shed-roofed, cedar shingled wood framed houses that appear to have been shaped by the fierce ocean winds and rise up out of the wind-blown meadows like ancient stelae. It was originally designed by Charles Moore, William Turnbull and the landscape architect Joseph Halprin and it continues to set the standard for sensitive landscape and architectural development in areas of high scenic value. Primal wildland it is not: a century or more of grazing has pushed the red wood forest to the north of Pacific Coast Highway where logging has stripped the woods of their old growth timbers.

Logging began on Bowen Island in the 1890's and now a cemetery of old growth stumps memorializes the aboriginal forest. At The Cape, second and third growth passes for wilderness, and for the moment, it is reasonably convincing. Unlike Sea Ranch, however, no architectural or landscape regulations are planned and with development of up to 16,000 feet of building per lot the development is unlikely to retain intimations of the wildland once the coastal lots are built out.

The Coast Salish did not colonize Bowen: they used it as summer hunting grounds for deer and salmon. On the mainland they built split-plank redwood longhouses that in some cases exceeded the square footage allowed at The Cape on Bowen lots, measuring up to 30,000 square feet. These were not, however, single family dwellings but contained many families allied with a chief, along with their slaves.

Something beats in the dark green world of the Pacific Northwest that is perhaps the heart of Gaia - mother earth - and prompted the native people to respond with imagery that is eerily unique in the strength and fluidity of its line whether carved or painted on redwood. There appears to be absolutely no room for human hesitation or doubt in this graphic communication of spiritual impetus and even when reduced to the size of a smoked salmon box-top has an other-worldly aspect. The people of the mist spread along this 2,000 mile long swathe of dripping forest and rock jumbled ocean's edge were very close to the originating power of the universe. Confronting their art or getting some sense of the natural environment in which they lived, is, for me, a profoundly disturbing experience and marks this bioregion as a kind of area 51, a black site where knowledge beyond the bounds of customary human sentience was transmitted.

Salish longhouses were symbolic representations of this universe - their corner posts serving as the cardinal directions of the world and their rich interior depiction of totemic animals filled that world with stories of its creation, warnings of its dangers and celebrations of its benificence. Rained out for days or weeks at at time the Salish and others along the bioregion found a world of light within their longhouses, darkened though they were by the somber hue of the split sequoia patinated by errant wood smoke.

Theirs was an interior life - spooked by the powerful presence of the giant trees but having ample salmon, bear and deer to hunt as well as plentiful berries and nuts at forest edge - they channelled their art through the thumping rhythms of the universe: for Gaia here is covered by the merest scrim of mist.

Gaia Nation

If you allow that environmentalism may be the new nationalism then bioregions are the new nations.

Nationalism - the invented histories and myths that go to support the notion of a particular chosen people - is the essential precurser to the making of nations. We tend to forget how recent was the invention of these 'old' nations: the United States was an early adopter of the concept in the late 1700's but most countries embraced the idea of nationhood in the nineteenth century. Germany, a late adopter, delayed until the waning years of the 1800's before embracing this new organizing principle and used the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 to solidify its newfound sense of national unity much as the United States had done with the War of 1812 (1812-1815).

As soon as one is freed from the idea that nations are somehow a natural god-given way of classifying societies their fragility becomes apparent. Towards the end of the last century we saw how easy it is for erstwhile nations to fracture and re-assemble along revised ethnic, language, religious or geographic fault lines and this process continues today.

I identify as a Californian and a chaparralian. As a Californian I live, according to the California Biodiversity Council, in the far south of the Central Coast bioregion that stretches north to Santa Cruz and which sits atop the South Coast bioregion that extends to the Mexican Border. As a chapparalian, I have a wider ambit. Chaparral exists in every county in California (Sacramento has the least, San Diego the most) and snakes beyond the borders into Baja and north into Oregon.

Regional identity (arguably bioregional identity) handily pre-dates national allegiance. Throughout the world, historic regions tended to generate unique traditions, crafts and farming practices that were relevant to the bioregion in which they were situated and today we celebrate their drinks, cooking and produce as expressions of the essence of localism; in this country, this is the ethos that has driven Edible Ojai  to become a country-wide collection of magazines celebrating the local - but these are limited, solipsistic views of the power of region focused on human appetites and consumption.

In the past, in England, allegiance was owed to the dales, the downs, the fens or the moors - as much as to County or Country: a sense of belonging to the environmental and physiographic characteristics of place was twinned with a connection to it as a source of food and shelter. The unique spirit of place (or genius loci) can transcend its prosaic function of nurture.

The ancient mosaic of Native American bands, languages and customs reflects the broader pattern of ecosystems and terrain as they type-shift over the landscape. The accepted anthropological regions of California echo those of the State Biodiversity Council: Ojai exists at the southern edge of Central California which is the largest cultural zone running from the north of the Central Valley south to the northern fringes of Los Angeles and east to the crest of the Sierra Nevada. The Chumash represented the apogee of California culture, for this was the resource-richest area of the state, generated largely by the teeming fisheries of the Santa Barbara Channel. The center of their cosmos, however, was located not along the coast or islands of their world but in the looming land form of Mount Pinos.

The Great Basin region is dominated by the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, some of the harshest environments on the planet and their Numic speaking inhabitants roamed more widely than the relatively sedentary bands to the north and west. But as is indicated in the rock art of the Painted Rock (a metaphoric land form) on the Carrizo Plain, there was social and trade interaction between the Chumash and Yokuts of the Central California region and the Shoshone of the Great Basin area (Cave and Rock). Northwestern California, however,  the coastal strip, valleys and mountains from Petrolia northward and east to Mount Shasta, stands apart from the rest of the state. Here, the intense rainfall and dense coniferous forests generated cultural patterns more in common with the Native traditions of the Pacific Northwest.

As a chaparralian then, my roots are in the Central and South Coast bioregions promulgated by the State and which coincide, broadly, with the westerly portions of the Great Basin and Central California Native American cultural areas - a land of valleys, basins and coastal ranges where chaparral predominates.

The environmental concerns that I have are typical of the times and several have been expressed in this deeply local and bioregional blog; they include preservation of the existing wildlands, enhancing the connectivity between wildland islands to extend wild animal rangelands, preserving the ocean shore line,  dunes and wetlands and reducing the levels of pollution in our air and water while using solar energy (wind and sun) to substantially power the region.

At a more broadly conceptual level I favor urban 'intensification' and wildland 'sanctification' - the anthem, if you like, of a brand of environmentalism that seeks greater urban density, dramatic reduction in commuter traffic, the establishment of city wide car-free zones and the gradual reduction of the suburban and exurban footprint along side of a greater protection for expanding swathes of wildland preserved for their own sake rather than for our recreational pursuits.

These are the themes of an interest in the environment that does not necessarily rise to the level of my being an 'environmentalist' but have guided me to an emphatic post-nationalist position: to identify with a particular bioregion and the planet rather than the nation.

I share in a growing holistic awareness of the universe that incorporates the local and the global and attempts to reach beyond the narrow interests of humankind. The first institutional evidence of the existence of such a global, or gaia consciousness can be observed in the attempts to forge international environmental agreements including, most conspicuously, those on climate change.

The timidity of these agreements and their sometimes outright failure, along with this country's unconscionable foot-dragging should not conceal the significance of the effort. They are the pale reflection beamed back at the world by the 'old' nations of a vibrant, bright and shining environmentalism that seems, increasingly to be a core value of young and old.

We are hearing the strains of a new hymn to the glory of the universe: it will, I believe, eventually result in a radical rethinking of the way we organize societies and my guess is that this will have a lot more to do with bioregions than with the false agglomerations of coerced affiliation that we currently call nations.

Data Streams

One of the reasons to live at the wildland-urban interface is to exchange, or at least augment the urban information stream with the wildland one. We are mostly comfortable with the urban data stream but our ability to decode the messages of the wild has atrophied: we stare unseeing, listen un-hearing and the scents of the chaparral elude our understanding; we are aware only of the grossest disturbances to the natural environment rather than the complex nuances that provide the context for decision making where the wild things are.

This evening, at dusk, Lorrie alerted me to the shaking branches of a toyon to which a cooper's hawk had retreated after a failed attempt to snag a rabbit in the deer weed beyond the pool. We watched, noses pressed up against the window waiting for a repeat performance. Didn't happen. Darkness began to animate the window glass not with wildland glimpses but looming reflections of our house interiors - dinner fixings and a vase of sunflowers on the limestone counter floating in the blackness.

Closer to the glass again, and with a cupped hand to shield the room's light, the silhouette of the ridgeline was still visible. The sky, less dark than the land, is flecked with grey but in moments is fully dark, and our thoughts turn inward, away from the enveloping wildland and we seek stimulus from within, where the bright light from T-5 fluorescents and the MR-16 halogens bounce off whitewalls creating our peripersonal space - space within our grasp and containing the controls to our media lives.

Since January 17, 1994, when our bootlegged cable connection snapped in the Northridge earthquake, I have watched no television; (I am one of the few people on the planet who has not seen the 9/11 Twin Towers footage). But the withdrawal from TV began even before then. Will, our older son, started Kindergarten at a Waldorf School in Northridge in 1989. He stayed through third grade and one of the tenets of this system of education is that you should kill your TV. We tried. Then Nature intervened.

In our Rural Loft in Upper Ojai, we have no need of television, having lost the habit. For sometime, in Los Angeles, during the Blockbuster years we would watch movies with the children, occasionally Lorrie and I together and now here, the kids gone, in this the age of Netflix, Lorrie mostly watches alone. The evenings for me are short. For most of the year I'm up at 5 and since I like to get eight hours sleep bedtime is around 9. I do not have the patience for the freneticism of most movies.

The sensory areas of my cerebral cortex enjoy the quiet laying down of information line by line, word by word in a slow accretion. And it was ever thus. Having finally learnt to read a little after my ninth birthday (which in my village school in sleepy Surrey, England, marked me as precocious) I was for the rest of my school days rarely without a paper-back novel stuck in my blazer pocket.

By the time I was sixteen or seventeen I was ready to tackle what is perhaps the most epic of the various eighteenth century contenders for the title of the first English novel, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, London, 1749. I toted a hard-bound edition around for six months or more and can still remember its heft in my hands: thus began a fat-book fetish that continues to this day. It weighed in at well over a thousand pages. My recent, summer conquest was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Little Brown, New York, 1996, packing 1079 pages and I am currently reading William T. Vollman's Fathers and Crows, Viking, New York, 1992 - whose pagination clocks in a tick under four figures at 988. Next up? Perhaps the same author's Imperial (1296 pages) Viking, New York, 2009. This work, about California's Imperial Valley is blurbed as follows:

"Known for his penetrating meditations on poverty and violence, Vollmann has spent ten years doggedly investigating every facet of this binational locus, raiding archives, exploring polluted rivers, guarded factories, and Chinese tunnels, talking with everyone from farmers to border patrolmen in his search for the fading American dream and its Mexican equivalent."

I find deep satisfaction in scaling these mountains of words, of living on their slopes for weeks at a time, getting successively dizzier as I ascend the page ladder towards the peak. There is, quite simply, a physical as well as cerebral joy in the process; and the controls are deeply familiar: the simple flip of the page.

A couple of weeks ago, the gnats mercifully absent, we sat outside at dusk looking across the pool and up-slope with the Topa Topas rising (majestically) beyond and two bobcats - barely more than bobkittens - emerged from behind a rock perhaps 25 yards away from us and proceeded to frolic on a warm ledge of sandstone, occasionally pausing to cast a fixed stare in our direction. Beautiful creatures, their feral presentness was an astringent antidote to the mediated experiences that awaited us that evening -whether by the turn of a page or the click of a mouse.

When darkness descends the wildland views fall away replaced by the soft scrim of linen curtains or the jet hard reflections of the window glass. Through the un-curtained kitchen windows a few lights are visible across on Sulphur Mountain and the glow of Santa Paula and beyond suffuses the night sky. It is not truly dark. The urban part of the urbanwildland is ever present. But so too is the constant buzz of cicadas and deep in the night often the mewling of coyotes. Early mornings are sometimes punctuated by the fog drip that runs off the un-guttered eaves into the gravel surround. The squeak of ground squirrels and the three-noted calls of quail fill out the orchestration of our mornings.

The windows are opened after the warmth of the day passes and later the cool night air flows over our bed. The creaking of metal studs and air movement across our faces echoes the diurnal arc of shifting temperatures and in the early morning chill around 4 a.m. the HVAC compressor sometimes kicks on in reverse-cycle to push warm air into the room - a signal to close the windows and shut off the heat.

But despite this data from the world beyond, we are essentially cloistered - we live on the edge of the wildland but within a container that is designed to filter out the wildness and the weather - purposed to maintain our access to the urban information stream and allow only edited, sanitized access to the wildland.

It's a fine line: I would spend less time with the urban media if I could more fully engage our surroundings - day and night. It seems to me that the wildland is a book with pages beyond number - it may be the ultimate read.

Brand 'X'

The meadow which runs along the driveway in front of the house slopes towards the confluence of Bear creek and the nameless seasonal stream that runs to the east of the property. Closest to the house is a flat area where the septic leach field is installed and the rocks that were excavated during its construction are tumbled down below it except around the meadow's lone tree: a wolf oak.

Wolf trees are unusual in nature. It stands to reason: where one specimen succeeds other trees might reasonably follow, generated most likely, by the seed of the first. Loneliness is a condition nature abhors and attempts mightily to mitigate. Thus when we come across a singular tree it is reasonable to implicate the hand of man.

When I first met our neighbor Margot and visited her house across the street I marveled at the way it had been sited with an oak at each of its corners. It took a little while for the Duh..... moment to arrive (and I mean several weeks) when I understood that these four oaks were all that remained of a grove which had been unceremoniously destroyed to build the house.

The coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia), is not truly a part of the chaparral plant community. At a dinner the other night, someone visiting from Baltimore asked me what the word chaparral meant. I burbled on about it being a plant community adapted to the mediterranean climate zone which is characterized by long dry summers and wet winters - and how summer is really winter for the chaparral - and that things were starting to green up right now in what is Fall for the east coast - but I fear she is returning to Maryland with no clear picture of what this plant community is all about. I need a sound-bite for such occasions. But the oak, which is really a part of the southern oak woodland, is an example of how sound-bite-resistant this ecology is.

We look across at the north facing slopes of Sulphur Mountain, and there southern oak woodland predominates. It's comparatively damp across the way and the oaks need moisture; but while usually out-competed in riparian woodlands by sycamores, bays, willows, alders and cottonwoods they also thrive in areas of seasonal streams, even on south facing meadow slopes like ours.

The oak of the chaparral is the scrub oak (Quercus dumosa) and in this tree lies the origin of the name for Southern California's signature plant community or, as Rick Halsey proposes "California's State Ecosystem". In Mexican Spanish, chapparo, literally means short or squat, but also refers to a grove of scrub oaks, or more generally to the dry scrub of Baja. A small step, then, to the American word chaparral. (The Spanish quickly realized that specialized clothing was required while riding through these nigh-on impenetrable thickets: hence chaparejos or chaparreras and their American diminutive, chaps.)

All of that is way too verbose for dinner conversation - you have to eat after all - and would rightly be dismissed as TMI (too much information). A short plant list might include, chamise, ceonothus, mountain mahogany, holly leaved cherry, laurel sumac, toyon (with a brief nod to the fact that Hollywood is named for this bush whose berries resemble those of English holly) and scrub oak (segue to etymology).

I remember that I did mention holly-leaved cherry and actually recalled the latin name Prunus ilicifolia when she quizzed me as to whether it was a truly a holly or a cherry (both old world species). This was apparently familiar territory, but ceonothus stopped her in her tracks although various varieties have long been sold around the world as decorative shrubs.

Rick Halsey produced a Public TV show about chaparral and a little while later Huell Howser called him up and gushed (cue Texas accent) "I've been all over this state filming our show the last few months and you know what I've seen? Chaparral! I had no idea. It's everywhere!"(Fire, Chapparal and Survival in Southern California, Richard Halsey, Sunbelt Publications, San Diego, 2005).

We were eating at Monte Grappa, on Signal - had it been light I probably could have skipped the exposition and been more effective by pointing in the general direction of the hills above; the chaparral starts directly beyond Shelf Road. In Ojai, it truly is everywhere above the irrigated valley floor (Citrus Belt ).

I like Rick's notion that we should re-name the Los Padres National Forest (and So Cal's three other National Forests) National Shrublands (good luck with that); but I believe much effort and expense could be saved by inserting the word Elfin on existing signage, with a caret perhaps, so that we get 'National Elfin Forest'. This is a nod, of course, to W.S.Head (Chaparral - Got to go through it) , and could be attempted as a guerilla stencil campaign (the results of which might last for a few hours or days at least).

The U.S. Department of Agriculture notes that, "Coast live oak occurs in a mediterranean climate characterized by mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers" - which while true, does not separate them from chaparral, or riparian habitats. Our meadow wolf oak is a single-trunked specimen and thus less romantically spreading than the multi-trunked oaks that result from the root crown sprouting after a fire. The trees around Margot's house are multi-trunk and they all exhibit fire scarring subsequent to this re-sprouting. Our property too, has many such examples, but along the spine between east and west meadows there are several young single trunk oaks. The meadow specimen is older, but not old. Sited below the leach field it has grown perceptibly since we purchased the property almost three years ago.

Fire is not the only threat an oak faces: as seedlings and young trees they are susceptible to drought and browsing herbivores (primarily deer). Of the many oak seedlings that sprouted after our wet winter, few survived the summer. Those that did are often shaded by rocks (and rocks too, can deter deer) or nurse crops amongst which the USDA lists California chamise, coyote bush (Baccharis pilularis), purple sage (Salvia leucophylla), bush monkeyflower (Mimulus brevipes), bush lupine (Lupinus logifolius), California sagebrush (Artemisia californica) and poison-oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) - a mix of coastal sage scrub and chaparral species all to be commonly found on our property.

There's a healthy 24" tall oak (shaded by deer weed and artemesia) within spitting distance of the wolf tree. Once grown, the new oak's canopy will link one with the other and then beyond to the sentry oaks along the spine as a resurgent grove.

The meadow will then be restored in part as (if anyone asks) southern oak woodland, verging on coastal sage scrub and then tending, as you move east, to chaparral. Yes, it's everywhere: but look closely and it is ever-changing: elevation, directional exposure, latitude, soil type, available moisture and fire history all impact the mix and type of plant communities.

I am not a chaparral ecologist - nor do I play one when when seated next to an out-of-state guest at dinner - but I do spend a lot of time observing (and weeding): I'm a chaparralian, an independent enthusiast and now I'm looking for a simple way to convey the glorious complexity of our eco-system.

God help me, I want to brand it!

Wolf Oak

Tetsuro Yoshida notes in his The Japanese House and Garden, The Architectural Press, London, 1955,

“The Buddhist religion, which is such an intimate part of the Japanese, teaches the transience of life, that this world is only a temporary home. Hence the inclination to trust fate rather than go in search of happiness. It is quite possible that this pessimistic Buddhist doctrine has also had a share in determining the peculiar attitude of the Japanese to his home, and so he accepts as inevitable its ultimate decay or destruction by fire.”

We know that the thirteenth century Buddhist hermit, Kamo-no-Chomei, believed that it is superficial or even sinful to live a materialistic and princely life or to care if one’s house is consumed by flames. He is after all, an ascetic (Primitive Hut). But as I discussed in Phantom Dwelling, the Japanese, historically, had a trick or two up their voluminous sleeves.

Despite frequent and devastating fires, the kura or storehouse tradition has resulted in Japan having an extraordinarily intact history of cultural artifacts. As far back as the eighth century, kura were constructed by Buddhist and Shinto temples to store their religious treasures and sutras. Later they were built by noble families, the warrior class and tea-masters, and from the seventeenth century on, they proliferated as status symbols of the merchant class. All the while, the public and private dwellings of those with access to a storehouse were presented as sparsely furnished spaces of a refined and minimalist sensibility – their chodo, or stuff safely tucked away in the kura, a museum quality, fire-resistive building where both humidity and temperature were passively controlled.

Kura also functioned as pre-industrial warehouses, factories and storehouses for pawn-brokers. These commercial kura were collectively known as doso or dozo – literally clay storehouses – the most fire-proof of all. (Kura, Design and Tradition of the Japanese Storehouse, Teiji Itoh, Tankosha Ltd., Kyoto, 1973)

Dotted through the cities, towns and villages of Japan these buildings with their minimal openings, heavy shutters and thick walls presented a forbidding appearance. Their function was quite simply to keep their contents safe from moisture, rats, fire, theft and earthquakes – your typical concerns of the Southern California wildland/urban interface dweller!

The closed, affectless facades of these buildings, battened down as they were to fend off environmental and societal dangers led to their becoming associated with mysterious and sinister events: many were considered to be haunted. Truth-to-tell, the Japanese like their material possessions as much as anyone and they are often reluctant to let go of them even after death.

In the Buddhist tradition, the mind takes over after death and travels through the world in the ‘mental body’. This is the Bardo of Becoming, a way station on the path to re-incarnation. Sogyal Rinpoche writes in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1994,

“……We do not realize we are dead. We return home to be with our loved ones. Fruitlessly we try to make use of our belongings…….”

And,

“…the mental body is ceaselessly on the move. It can go wherever it wishes unobstructedly, just by thinking. Because the mental body has no physical basis, it can pass through solid barriers such as walls…”

Some claim to see these spectral beings or feel their presence lurking during their 49 days (and occasionally longer) of the Bardo of Becoming, and the folk tradition seems to suggest that the kura is a favorite place for those days in limbo. They are the haunted houses of Japan (obake yashiki). During the midsummer Buddhist festival of Obon the souls of dead ancestors are supposed to return home for three days, some to rummage through their erstwhile possessions in kura.

I was enthralled by ghost stories as a young teenager, and consumed anthologies of the same: one I remember in particular was called (as I believed) The Man who Loved Trees, by Algernon Blackwood. On finding it on the web, I discovered that its true title is The Man whom Trees Loved – a fabulous man-bites-dog turnabout with the title immediately telegraphing the theme of vegetal sentience (how, you ask, could I have forgotten?)

On re-reading it, it is apparent that it is a contender for being the first of a now popular genre, Eco-Horror. It was published in 1912. An old married couple lives at the wilderness/urban interface, in a cottage abutting England’s New Forest. She is a devout Christian; he is enamored of the forest and is called into the woods where his soul merges with the tree spirits –he makes a cosmic biological connection with the wildlands (initiated by the trees) while she stares into the abyss of loss, loneliness and spiritual doubt.

Blackwood came of age during that late nineteenth and early twentieth century resurgence of spiritualism and interest in the occult, of which Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Annie Besant and her protégé Krishnamurti were also products and was a member, along with W.B. Yeats of the secret society, The Golden Dawn. The Man whom Trees Loved, however, draws both on Celtic Druidism and the roughly contemporaneous traditions of animism exhibited in Japan’s nature religion Shinto which predates Buddhism in that country by about a thousand years.

Shinto gods are called kami. They are sacred spirits which take the form of natural elements such as wind, rain, mountains, trees, rivers and life processes such as fertility. Humans become kami after they die and are revered by their families as ancestral kami. The Japanese are adept at juggling the alternative theologies of Buddhism and Shinto and each is honored in their everyday lives.

If transcience is the Buddhist conceptual contribution to the feather-light, flammable tradition of historic Japanese houses, then it is Shinto that animates much of their interior spaces and their relationship to the garden – which serves as an idealized representation of nature in the raw; a humanized vision of the wilderness. The Japanese garden tradition pays homage to the picturesque grotesqueries of the natural world. It celebrates the individual genius of each plant, rock, faux stream-bed and fallen leaf and in such gardens the Shinto spirits can play and radiate their beneficence toward the human soul.

In Blackwood’s tale, it is the elemental, raw primal power of the wild that casts its spell: a character muses,

"behind a great forest, for instance, may stand a rather splendid Entity that manifests through all the thousand individual trees—some huge collective life, quite as minutely and delicately organized as our own. It might merge and blend with ours under certain conditions, so that we could understand it by being it, for a time at least. It might even engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its own vast dreaming life. The pull of a big forest on a man can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming."

This is the impact of The New Forest on Blackwood’s protagonist, David Bittacy. Around the house he views “the prim garden with its formal beds of flowers as an impertinence”. He is drawn to “the great encircling mass of gloom”. It is ultimately, perhaps, a Druidic vision - dark, dependent on density, on an entanglement of trunks and an engulfing canopy of leaves. In this primal forest he believes,

“Evil tends to separation, dissolution, death. The comradeship of trees, their instinct to run together, is a vital symbol. Trees in a mass are good; alone, you may take it generally, are--well, dangerous.”

Come Samhain (the Druidic precursor to Halloween), Beware the Wolf Oak…………

Phantom Dwelling

With a set up like this...

“....few worshipers visit the shrine, and it’s very solemn and still. Beside it is an abandoned hut with a rush door. Brambles and bamboo grass overgrow the eaves, the roof leaks, the plaster has fallen from the walls, and foxes and raccoons make their den there. It is called the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling.”

...I’m hooked. This is Matsuo Basho, writing in seventeenth century Japan of the hut he stumbles across close by a Buddhist statue in the hills above Lake Biwa, close to Kyoto - and not very far from the site of Chomei’s hojo (Primitive Hut).

He fixes it up, and four months later moves in for the rest of the year. But he is, at heart, a social creature and enjoys the company of the odd pilgrim and the local villagers. In the evening, he writes,

“I sit quietly waiting for the moon so I may have my shadow for company, or light a lamp and discuss right and wrong with my silhouette”.

He signs off the short piece, Record of the Hut of the Phantom Dwelling, 1690 with,

‘..we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling?”

And, as a coda, inserts a haiku,

                             Among these summer trees

                             a pasania -

                             something to count on

A pasania is a Japanese evergreen tree. Basho, for much of his career an itinerant poet, struggled with the Buddhist notion of the transience of life - exemplified in the haiku by those fickle deciduous trees!

Born into a samurai family he rejected that world and became a wanderer, studying Zen, history, and classical Chinese poetry. He lived in comparative poverty supported only by his students. When he felt the need for solitude, he withdrew to his basho-an, a hut made of plantain leaves (basho) - hence his pseudonym.

Like Chomei, he recognizes the inevitable impermanence of both human life and the shelters we inhabit. Both make the latter explicit in their choice of huts - Chomei’s is a demountable affair that “would be no trouble at all to take it apart and put it back together again”, and Basho’s perhaps is even more transitory such that the Hut of the Phantom dwelling represents a certain permanence.

This characteristic of architectural transience in historical Japan has a real world parallel to its poetic expression. It was, at least in part, a function of the fires that regularly swept through dense urban neighborhoods. This was also the reason for the development of two separate architectural traditions: one for human shelter and one for stuff. The Japanese call the latter chodo, and this term essentially covered the acoutrements of their way of life. Chodo were stored in kura, or storehouses which were built considerably more robustly than the typical residence. Many were designed to be substantially fireproof and government edicts sometimes covered their location, such that they should be separate from other buildings to reduce the chance of fire.

We thus have a tradition where interior domestic space was thought of as nothingness - and infinitely transmutable according to season, festivity, guests and general circumstance when animated by the furniture, screens, scrolls and accessories selectively brought from the kura. In addition, the house was expected to burn (in event of a fire), while the kura was elaborately protected both by its means of construction and location.

Hmmmm. A couple of weeks ago I attended the SAFE Landscapes presentation spearheaded by the University of California Cooperative Extension along with a number of agencies including the Ojai Fire Safe Council and VCFD. Here the focus was on eternal human life and the transience of stuff. Having just watched the unpacking of the Limoge china service given to Lorrie’s grandmother on the occasion of her 1906 wedding I am inclined to question this premise.

Ready-Set-Go, the VCFD’s Personal wildfire action plan is predicated on leaving your chodo behind - save for those few items you can fit in the trunk of a Prius - to be potentially consumed by the flames, or perhaps, have it extensively water and smoke damaged.

Historically, the Japanese were ahead of the game on two counts: at any one time, their house was sparsely furnished with the bulk of their goods fire-safely stored in a kura; and because of all the to and fro’ their goods were all designed to be easily transportable by hand cart. Their stuff - including the furniture - was light and often made of hinoki (Chamaecyparis obtusa) or sugi (Cupressus japonica). I seem to remember seeing nineteenth century Ukiyo-e prints of people escaping fires - each pushing a handcart full of their chodo. We need a pantechnicon and a crew of super-sized movers to shift our stuff.

Lorrie and I made the decision to live in the storehouse. Our house is our kura. We believe it is substantially fire-safe. But the alternative, historical Japanese model has an an intriguing relevance to living at the wildland/urban interface. Why not strip down the living space and furnish according to the season? Avoid Ikea at all costs - their particle board technology is inherently heavy and brittle. In contrast, our old wrecks of nineteenth century storage chests (tansu), which we have collected over the years, have survived because they are both easy to move and although flimsy are easily repaired.

A strategy for the wildland/urban interface might be to build a kura on site - of concrete block, metal roof and fire and spark baffled vents - and erect a much lighter, transient structure close by that serves as the living pavilion - lightly furnished (in both senses) and appropriate to the seasons. Ready-Set-Go would then involve moving the light furnishings and acoutrement from pavilion to storehouse and then leaving. In the event of fire the pavilion would be sacrificed, but perhaps the slab and utility hookups could be designed to survive a typical fast-moving chaparral blaze. With an average cycle of thirty years between fires this might prove to be a highly economical approach - most particularly in terms of the cost of firefighting. It would also ensure that the Limoge would survive for another century.

Yet, despite heroic efforts to pretend otherwise we all live, as Basho notes, in a phantom dwelling. The transience of our lives is not to be denied. Our cultures too, are only slightly less evanescent. Contemporary Japanese architecture is heavy on the poured concrete and light on the shoji screens (see Tadao Ando). Kura are now prized for their remodeling potential amongst the haute bourgeoisie of Tokyo.

I have no haiku to end with, but instead a reminiscence of Chumash culture at the dying of the light.

Georgia Lee, Jo-anne van Tilberg’s predecessor at UCLA’s Rock Art Institute (In Search of a Shaman’s Lair) in describing the Chumash rock art in a cave close by Mount Pinos, the spiritual heart of the Chumash universe, notes that in the 1824 Chumash rebellion against their Spanish oppressors, the cave was the last refuge of the beleaguered rebels. Here a few remaining Native American souls had to confront both the primal energy of the wilderness, the danger - particularly to these non-shaman - of the cave as portal to the spirit world and the Spanish soldiers eager to make an example of their insurrection. This lithic retreat became both a Phantom Dwelling and a dwelling of phantoms - the last stand of these La Purisima missionized Indians cowering in a cave that once was a wellspring of their culture.

Primitive Hut

If you live at the wildland/urban interface then you have to make a decision, either actively of by default, as to the most appropriate demeanor to adopt as a creature confronting a substantially alien environment. Broadly speaking, you can stand apart or attempt to be a part. Similarly, that carapace we call home can be designed to either confront or acquiesce to, the primal energy of the wilderness.

As I point out in Bingo, we are now and forever discontinuous with our aboriginal environment - having been well and truly cast out of the Garden of Eden - but as Joseph Rywkwert notes in his book, On Adam's House in Paradise: the Idea of the primitive Hut in Architectural History, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 1971, “Paradise is a promise as well as a memory," and, he argues, humankind’s quest for the archetypal dwelling has, historically, been most often resolved as a Hut which...

“....in some way resembled or commemorated those which ancestors or heroes had built at some remote and important time in the life of the tribe. ... And in every case they incarnate some shadow or memory of that perfect building which was before time began: when man was quite at home in his house, and his houses as right as nature itself.”

We took the barn as our archetypal model and situated it in a clearing. I like to think of it as an extruded hut. It is notionally open to the landscape and our conceit is that the land flows, like the canyon breezes, through the short axis of the building.

Although Rykwert focuses on the Western tradition, it is the Japanese custom of the simple life lived in a simple dwelling that speaks to me more insistently and it is my sons William and Griffin, who were the first victims of my pursuit of this elegant ideal - in 1998 they were each immured in a ten-foot square ‘hut’ or hojo on our property in Santa Monica Canyon.

Kamo-no-Chomei’s Hojoki or Record of the Ten-foot-Square Hut, Kyoto, 1212, is an undisputed masterpiece of Japanese literature, and its opening lines are known by every school-age child in that country,

“The river flows on ever changing, on the still pool foam appears and disappears, and so it is with the people and houses of this world....”

Rereading the translation by Burton Watson in his Four Huts - Asian Writings on the Simple Life, Shambala, Boston, 1994, I noticed my inscription on the flyleaf, “For William, Enjoy your New Hut, Love Dad, 1998”. Will was 13, his brother Griffin 7. They were to be sequestered each night in the hojo for the next five years until Will went to college, and then Griffin alone with Derek, our dog (Wild Thing) for a further four until he went away to board at Happy Valley School.

The word hojo has developed over the centuries to mean a Buddhist monk’s cell with an integrated garden. Our hojo functioned as a pair of 10’ x 10’ huts - in the original limited meaning - and in the later sense as novice monk’s quarters, for both rooms opened out to the south to a small sunken courtyard garden. The hojo was the only new structure in a compound that included two single-wall craftsman buildings from about 1915, and its simplicity informed the design of our Koenigstein house.

Kamo-no-Chomei wrote Hojoki at the beginning of the Kamakura Period, at a time of great political uncertainty and it records his retreat to the north of Kyoto where he lived in his simple dirt-floored and thatch-roofed hut in the forest - where the deer have no fear of him and trailing boughs of wisteria frame his views. There are obvious parallels with Thoreau: both Walden and Hojoki are examples of pastoral or hermit literature and Chomei has been called "the Japanese Thoreau".

Thoreau's cabin and Chomei's hojo are both huts and both exist at the wildland/urban interface: on Mt. Hino beyond Kyoto and Walden pond outside of Concord, MA. Thoreau and Chomei were, in varying degrees, political refugees and attempted to establish a cosmic-biological connection to their surrounding landscape.

Many years ago Lorrie and I stayed in a ryokan at Ohara for a month while studying the temples and gardens of Kyoto. Chomei writes, “five years I spent in the clouds of the Ohara Hills, though I have little to show for it”, and it was here, failing to find enlightenment, that he decided to build his hut on Mt. Hino further to the south. We had an altogether more positive experience. It was in Ohara that I fell in love with Japanese minka, the traditional farmhouse - in its simplest form not much more than a hut - and Lorrie was entranced with a traditional Japanese style of architectural drawing that ‘folds out’ elevations from the plan and in that style she drew Sanzen-in, a buddhist temple which dates back, through several iterations, to 788 and was across the street from our inn.

Chomei’s signature hut, the hojo, went on to influence the form of the tea house as well as suggesting the basic form of the monk’s cell. Such elemental buildings occur all over the world and here in Ventura County the Chumash built their version of the primitive hut.

I was looking at an 1853 map of Ventura recently and Indian territory was indicated either side of the mouth of the Ventura River - in that wedge of land between what is now the 33 Highway and Taylor Ranch Road which runs to the north below the hills that rise up beyond the delta. This was after missionization had run its course and it was a dispirited people that hung on in the littoral. But even at this stage they were still building their domed grass houses because as late as 1924, a Chumash man by the name of Jose Romero built a version at the Ventura County Fair. Their structure is thus well documented.

Willow and sycamore were used to erect a framed hemisphere approximately twenty feet in diameter and ten feet high. Tule (bulrush, Scirpus spp). was used to thatch the exterior and provide matting for the interior. Even the door was made of bulrushes and tule mats were also used as partitions in these huts that would house up to fifty people. There is still a tule marsh at the mouth of the Ventura River. Although more famous for their plank canoes, the Chumash also made so called balsa canoes of bundled bulrushes (Jan Timbrook).

The Chumash huts were typically clustered quite close together in villages and such social congeries of buildings belong in a quite separate category to the kind of eremitic tradition of Chomei and Thoreau. Similarly, many wildland/urban interface dwellers live in areas of suburban-like density pushed up against the wildland. But many of us in Upper Ojai have crossed over that line - we are not hermits, and not all of us live in huts, but we have deliberately spurned the social proximities of the suburb and embraced the primal energy of the wilderness and seek a cosmic-biological connection with our environment.

Bingo

Prior to 1769, on that day before California, the Chumash population is estimated at around 20,000 (The Day Before America, William MacLeish, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1994). Although there had been sporadic contact with Europeans since 1542 when Cabrillo arrived on the scene, their complex hunter gatherer society remained intact until the eighteenth century apocalypse of disease and missionization. By the early 20th century they numbered less than 200. They had been decimated and then decimated again in the literal meaning of the word. Remarkably, a group of people now thrive in the State who identify themselves ethnically with the Chumash and in some cases are direct descendants of that small band of holocaust survivors.

A week ago Lorrie and I traveled down the Chumash Highway (154) to visit one of the four towns of the Santa Ynez valley and I was quietly pleased that the highway’s name reflected the fact that it followed the path of the old Chumash trade route between the Chumash villages of Syuxtun in Santa Barbara to Soxtonokmu and Kalawashaq in the Santa Ynez valley via the San Marcos pass. My pleasure derived, in part, from a conception that there was - in part of Sacramento’s bureaucratic machinery housed in some musty wood paneled office on the fourth floor of an Italianate pile from the 1920’s (serviced by a rickety elevator) - a wizened and bespectacled bureaucrat who had made the naming decision on the suggestion, perhaps, of the Santa Barbara Archaeological Society. This notion was founded on a childish faith in the benign intent of an entirely mythical, paternalistic (and comfortably autocratic) government.

The naming rights to State Highway 154, I now learn, were bought and paid for by the Casino Industry by way of political contributions to Assemblymen up and down the State. The highway’s name reflects the fact that the Chumash Casino, in Santa Ynez, is now the preeminent cultural institution of the Chumash people.

On the way back to Santa Barbara, we stopped at the Painted Cave, in the foothills above the coastal plain, inland from Goleta. This tiny State Park is marked by a small sign at the road where there is room for a couple of cars to pull off to the side of the narrow road. A set of steep rock steps takes you above the road, past a shallow sandstone cave and then to a larger cave opening securely barred with steel gates.

Between the bands of steel we shone our flashlights and illuminated the amazingly vibrant iconography of the Chumash shamans - limned in red ochres, grey, black and white set against the buff colored rock of the cave. Rattle snakes (guardians of the spirit world), a centipede (representing death) and sun-like circles are depicted as well as a black disc which is thought to represent an eclipse from the late seventeenth century. In pristine condition, the work is reputed to be the finest example of rock art paint in the western United States. More significantly, it stands as testament to the intrepid work of the shaman - who broached pathways to the spirit world by the simple act of entering the cave and then recorded his findings on the rock wall. Absent such human conduit to the spirits of the Chumash world it is doubtful if their culture can now, in any sense, be considered intact.

Yet their casino does, in an ironic and perverted way, represent a kind of cultural continuity. For the Chumash people had a highly developed economic system in which shell beads were used as currency. Their mint was located on the Channel Islands and plank canoes, or tomols were the means by which goods were exchanged between the mainland and the islands. The demand for the currency from large population centers near the coast as well as more isolated groups of villages (such as those clustered around Ojai) served as an impetus for this intensive bead making industry. In turn, the currency provided a mechanism by which food and other commodities could be exchanged between communities. These currency beads have been located as far afield as the Great Basin and the Southwest. (The Chumash World at European Contact, Lynn H. Gamble, U.C. Press, Los Angeles, 2008). Chumash society, pre-contact, represented a peak of neolithic achievement.

Despite their proto-modernity, the Chumash retained, like all Native peoples of the Americas, some sense of a cosmic-biological connection to their landscape. And it is to this sense that we continually return in our romanticization of their ancient lifeways. They were fully sentient: we are domesticated creatures forever alienated from our environment. As MacLeish puts it, “Environmentalism signifies a concern for one’s surroundings, and early Americans seem to have had little sense of being surrounded. They were part not apart.”

Lorrie reminded me over dinner this evening that it was Farley Mowatt in his autobigraphical study, Never Cry Wolf, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1963, who claimed to have eaten wood rats to more fully understand the nature of the wolves he was tracking. He wanted to ingest what they ingested - to be part, not apart.

While the Chumash were heirs to the Neothermal - that post ice-age warming trend that we still enjoy and that made agriculture possible - their agricultural practices were confined to low-level environmental interventions such as fire to encourage grass seed yield, or sometimes to drive out rabbits. Jan Timbrook notes that the Southern Californian Cahuilla people burned stands of chia to improve their productivity and the Chumash may well have done the same.

But here in the chaparral, acorns, cherry, toyon, elderberry, chia and grass seeds were in ample supply while rabbits, bobcats, mule deer, grey squirrels, ground squirrels and foxes provided furs and meat. The Chumash lived off the landscape and therefore fully lived in it. Their bead currency allowed for societal savings - to purchase a hatful of acorns or chia in lean times. Alternatively one commodity might be traded for another such that one hatful of chia was worth five of acorns (Timbrook).

That connection to the landscape is now lost. The remnant, contemporary Chumash are truly apart from the natural world living, instead, off the netherworld of gambling where Blackjack, Let-it-Ride, 3, 4, and 5-card Poker, Ultimate Texas Hold’em, Omaha High/Low, Slots and Bingo provide a kind of sustenance.

Peace Walk

Traditions rarely develop without some political or religious impulse. This originating impulse, if lost in the mists of time, is sometimes replaced with a new idealogy: the gravitas of the past appropriated by the shallow presumptions of the present.

Originally a fall feast tradition of the Wompanoag - gatecrashed by the Pilgrims in 1621 - the Thanksgiving Holiday had fallen into disuse until Sarah Josepha Hale (author of the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb) suggested to Lincoln that this hi-jacked Native American festival might become a celebration of national unity. The President subsequently issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863. Similarly, if less beningly, leaders of the National Socialist German Workers Party appropriated mystical traditions, symbols and pageantry from ancient aryan traditions. The conflation of Christian celebrations with pre-existing pagan observances is well known.

At the Walk of Peace, a celebration of the UN International Day of Peace, a joint production of Meditation Mount and the Ojai Foundation the organizers elaborated the send-off rally, and its celebratory ending, with a variety of purloined traditions. In between, the walk was held in silence save for the occasional striking of a Buddhist meditation awakening bell. In another nod to the Buddhist tradition, saffron scarves were tied to branches along the way.

The UN General Assembly, in resolution 55/282, of 7 September 2001, decided that, beginning in 2002, the International Day of Peace should be observed on 21 September each year. This was a reaffirmation of an early resolution in 1988 that established the opening day of the The General Assembly in New York as Peace Day. The change to a fixed date echoes FDR’s jiggering with the Thanksgiving date - Lincoln established Thanksgiving as the last Thursday in November but outraged shopkeepers concerned at the shrinking Christmas sales season when that Thursday fell on the last day of the month in 1939 persuaded Roosevelt to declare that the Day be the third Thursday of the month. After that date was widely reviled as ‘Franksgiving’ it was settled that the holiday be observed on the fourth Thursday of the month.

The UN Day of Peace is observed as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence, an invitation to all nations and people to honour a cessation of hostilities during the Day. The International Peace Garden at Meditation Mount is dedicated to strengthening the capacity of its visitors to lead more peaceful, purposeful and compassionate lives that are a real force for good in the world; as such it is the perfect venue for mobilizing a Peace March.

The secondary agenda of the event was to establish a physical link between the Mount and the Ojai Foundation by inaugrating a trail that connects the two. Thirdly it was about establishing a nexus between two nodes in Ojai, the Peace Garden promontory overlooking the Ojai valley to the west and and a knoll that rises above the Foundation which sits on Annie Besant’s Happy Valley both of which are considered places of particular earth energy - known as power spots or vortices. A connection between the two would therefore qualify as a ley-line (Stoned) although these are traditionally straight and our route through precipitous avocado fields, the meandering creek bottom and the switchback climb up the north eastern flank of of a diminishing Black Mountain, was anything but.

We walked between places of similar mystique and elevation - the so called ‘Power Point’ set in reasonably undisturbed chaparral above the Foundation buildings is about 200 feet higher and it was there we gathered in the gloaming for a circle around a fire-pit into which were thrown the sprigs of white sage that we had been given upon our departure. In the billowing herbal smoke, the occasional flash of a camera, the steady beating of a small conga drum and the drone of a didgerdoo we achieved the apotheosis of borrowed tradition, conflated spiritual practices and the miscegenation of folk instruments from different hemispheres. My deepest regret is that I could not accompany this witches brew with my wobble board (a home-made skiffle instrument popularized by the Australian musician Rolf Harris). The chant-along was concluded with a collective ommmm.

The event was held two days before today’s full moon and in the normal course of events our evening walk would have ended under the light of the rising moon. As it was, the marine layer drifted in half an hour after we started and we finally clambered down to our car at the Ojai Foundation in full darkness. The opening ceremony had been held in bright sunshine in the Peace Garden at the Mount and here was initiated the macedoine of ancient rituals - but heavy on the Native American.

Laura Whitney of the Ojai Foundation shared with us her vision for the connection between the two Ojai institutions which by ley line, are less than a mile apart. She mentioned that there are over a hundred miles of trails in Ojai and her ultimate dream is for these to be linked together. Most of the trails in Ojai, other than those in the Sespe, are profoundly discontinuous and linkage, when possible, is achieved through privately held land. Our short Peace March was dependent on the good graces of the owner of High Winds Ranch. Upper Ojai, as I outlined in Things Fall Apart is mostly a mess of privately held ranches, oil properties and institutional holdings.

Eric Baumgartner provided an opening prayer - a generic Plains Indian paen to the four cardinal directions given on what we were told was Chumash sacred land. Each obeisance to a cardinal direction culminated in affirmation by the crowd by way of the call, ‘aho’ originally a Lakhota expression of agreement, but borrowed into many other North American languages as a result of inter-tribal pow-wows in the 20th century.

Even within the Plains Indian tradition of directions and the colors associated with them, there are many variations. This cosmology was sculpturally expressed in the medicine wheel - earth art used for various spiritual, ritual and healing purposes. Most medicine wheels have a basic pattern - a central stone cairn with spokes radiating to an outer ring of stone - surviving examples have been dated back at least 5,000 years on the Great Plains of the United States and southern Canada.

On a Native American discussion forum ThunderDreamers.com, there were dark warnings of mixing traditions: “You never know what the outcome may be, and someone could get hurt, have a problem with their health, their family, or their home”. What I wonder, might be the result of of declaiming the prayers of the buffalo hunters on Chumash sacred ground? I demurred from shouting ‘aho’, and perhaps I wil be spared misfortune.

As a small act of compassion on our return to Meditation Mount, I slowed the car to pass someone walking down the dirt track from the Foundation out to highway 150, and Lorrie enquired if he would like a lift. He got in and we drove him almost to the end of Mc Nell, a good 5 miles, which apparently he had been willing to walk on-top-of his Walk of Peace.

I reflected that I had been surrounded on the walk by such good and resolute souls: believers in peace, lovers of nature, trusting in the power of community (and mostly convinced that there are telluric currents that energize all of life). I was with them, one of them: but next time perhaps, the organizers will hold the faux Native American spirituality - it diminishes us and the traditions we filch.

Q&A

I was introduced to the art of the Japanese Zen garden while I was at Sydney University School of Architecture in the late 1970’s. Zen Buddhist priests began creating gardens for meditation in the middle of the Kamakura period (1185-1392) and these typically included stones, water and evergreens, remaining visually constant, apart from a mantle snow in the winter, throughout the seasons. This minimalist approach was further developed in the Muromachi and Higashiyama periods (1392-1573) when gardens contained only stones, a style that reached its apotheosis with Ryoanji in the late 15th. century.

The Ryoanji temple serves the Rinzai branch of Zen Buddhism which emphasizes the use of koans in meditation. When I sat on the temple engawa (porch) at Ryoanji in 1982, during a semester abroad with UCLA School of Architecture, I pondered the raked gravel around the rocks and wondered what mind-teaser the monk had wrestled with while he created the flowing field.

When I was a kid I would enjoy short circuiting my brain by trying to think of nothing. By the time I got to an image of a black void I would call foul because void suggests that it is surrounded by non-void - at which point the synaptic fireworks would provide a pleasant buzz. Hey, it was healthier than sniffing model-airplane glue.

A friend asked me the other day how the weeding was going. “Fine”, I said. I didn’t have the heart to explain that it is winter in the chaparral and apart from mustard, pretty much everything calls it quits by the beginning of July. All my son Griffin and I have been doing for the last three months or so is raking.

We weeded all winter and then weed wacked for six weeks or so and now we rake. What’s taking so long? Shouldn’t we be sitting back in our lawn chairs by now and enjoying the parched land? The fact is that no one really likes to rake in the hot weather. So we catch a few hours at the end of the day, and then not every day. My son was charged with raking to earn a few bucks for college. He would do a few hours most days and there’s a pile of grasses, thistles and clover on the west meadow that attests to his efforts. I call it a compost pile, but it looks a lot more like a hay stack and is the size of a small house. I wish he had done more, but it really is soul destroying work and I was limited in my motivational resources.

In Haiiti, to make a zombie, a voodoo priest administers pufferfish poison to the intended victim. Exhibiting the usual signs of death the incipient zombie is buried, then, at the voodoo priest’s leisure the victim is dug-up, revived and, in his neurologically damaged state becomes a pliant slave in the sugarcane fields. There is some evidence that in 1918 a gang of zombie laborers was ‘employed’ by the American Sugar Corporation.

The novitiate Zen-monks of fifteenth century Japan underwent a more humane neurological intervention: they were set to work at jobs of mind-numbing boredom armed only with a koan. 

The Machiguenga Indians who live on the foothills of the Andes in southeastern Peru at a base elevation of around 2300 feet cultivate maize, manioc and other root crops in their steeply sloping gardens. They also hunt and collect wild food 2,000 feet up steep forest trails that run further into the foothills. Research has demonstrated that their work rate is beneficially impacted by their habit of chewing coca leaves.

Work on our acreage is conducted at a similar elevation and in similar sloping conditions to the gardens of the Machiguenga; the degree of difficulty in raking dried thistles approaches that of sugar-cane work and the boredom quotient compares (I suspect) with the leaf and gravel raking tasks undertaken by Zen monks. 

But Griffin’s labor was underpinned only by the lure of ten bucks an hour and that was clearly not sufficient to get the job done. I’m ending up doing a great deal of it. I understand, however, that I get a lot more satisfaction out of the work than my son ever could. At times I almost enjoy it - it’s the ultimate recursive activity. Seeds and straw fly through the rake tines away from the gathering pile so you rake again until, at last, you figure that the quail will take care of those last clover, rye, thistle and broome seeds and the wind will blow the errant straw away or perhaps it will be plucked to make a nest.

Griffin would mutter darkly that all this raking was asking for major erosion come the first rains of winter. I was seeing that after the birds did their work, the rains would gather the last remaining weed seeds and wash them down to Bear Creek. We have startlingly different world views vis a vis the little bit of scrub that we own. Let’s face it: I’m working on a vision that is not widely shared, even within my own family.

Lorrie tolerates my approach, but she’ll be wanting to see results by the first quarter of 2011. I tell her it’s a five year plan, that the idea is to rid the meadows and margins of weeds and allow the chaparral to grow back in and that our success is initially signalled by deer weed - the first plant in the chaparral succession. And look at that - the artemesia is growing in, and elderberry and walnut and chamise. She sees rocks and thistles.

She has profound doubts that I know what I’m doing. In this she is fulfilling the traditional role of the distaff side. She is right to have doubts. I am bouyed by my vision not my technical expertise. But my vision is based on observation, and that provides me with an unimpeachable guide.

We have raked down to the bare crust. I wish it were the 30,000 year-old soil crust of typical chaparral but we are working with disturbed soil, ravaged by excavators and back-hoes for nigh-on a decade. The accepted theory is that Chaparral succession is unique in that it succeeds itself rather than being preceded by other vegetative types. My experience is that severely disturbed soils, particularly at the wildland/urban interface come back as weed patches, then soft chaparral (coastal sage scrub) and then finally hard or classic chaparral.

The weeding/weed wacking/raking protocol is designed to hasten this process and also to facilitate seeding of select areas come the rains. Now according to Chaparral 101,

“Immediately after a disturbance the herbs and forbs initially dominate because of their sheer numbers and showy flowers. Within 2 - 5 years the seedlings of chaparral plants and the shrubs resprouting from their crown roots or burls take over. Their more aggressive root systems exploit deeper water reserves and they will eventually shade out the forbs and grasses and replace them.”

Santa Barbara City College Biological Sciences, Introduction to Chaparral.

the operative word in the above is, as Manuel the Spanish waiter in John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers would so affectively say, eeventuaarly.................

Our raking is in service to expediting the process. With Griffin gone, I now have two tools at my disposal, the rake and the koan. I know the intention. I know the answer to the koan must be ‘Chaparral’ - emerging flickeringly at first and then less faintly from the deepest recesses of the Zen beginner’s mind, echoing the emergence of the indigenous eco-system from the traumatized land. I’m still working on the question.

Saturday Night Special

This evening I hopped on my bicycle and rode to the Stagecoach market at the Summit in Upper Ojai. I picked up a quart of milk and a can of peaches. I had to wait in line. There were two check-out cashiers. At least two people in front of me were purchasing lottery tickets. Glittery spools of tickets hung above the cash register. Someone asked for one of the new and one of the old - like some currency that had been devalued, apparently the date of issue is now relevant to the lottery. I am abysmally ignorant of the mechanics of what I have always, somewhat condescendingly, considered a tax on the poor. Time to learn....

There are five different games, Winning Numbers, Mega Millions, SuperLotto Plus, Fantasy 5 and something called Callottery Replay (your second chance to win!). Then there’s the Scratchers - that come in four flavors, $1, $2, $3 and $5. (The first four prime numbers.....). Nine ways to support California Schools. To be fair, the State returns about half the income in prize money, gives about 35% to the Schools and the rest is swallowed up in retailer rewards, marketing and overhead.

There is some evidence that selling lottery tickets reduces revenues at convenience stores due to dimiished food sales and an increased incidence of shop-lifting while cashiers are focused on selling tickets. Nationally, about 40% of gambling addicts are Lottery ‘users’. Active marketing by State lottery agencies essentially recriuts addicts many of whom it later has to support with social welfare services.

At the Stagecoach Market, the rolls of lottery tickets are fully stocked, and the beer fridge is bulging. Food is a little thin on the ground. Today there was no fresh produce. I bought the solitary can of peaches.

Their idiosyncratic wine selection appears to be gathering dust, although I did notice that they had added a few bottles of Boccalli’s Topa Topa 2008 Syrah at $22 a pop, “handcrafted in the scenic Upper Ojai valley”. I didn’t like the label and I had the frightening thought that their wine may be no better than their pizza.

In any case I doubt that it is half as good as Ojai Winery’s 2005 Syrah Bien Nacido Special Bottling which Adam Tolmach claims tastes,

“like a California version of a French Hermitage. It reveals this vineyard’s graphite/lead pencil-like character as well as lots of blackberry, cassis, licorice, plum, and incense aromas. As the wine sits in the glass, notions of smoke and earth also emerge. Dense and full-bodied, this 2005 should evolve for 15+ years.”

Robert Parker gave it 95 points. A wine for a special occasion. Thanksgiving perhaps. Absolutely worth ten $5 Scratchers, I suspect.

During 2009, first living in Ojai while we were building, and then after we moved into our Upper Ojai house we were served (and entertained) by Jeffray and Daphne Fargher, their young daughter Kamile and Jeffray’s grown daughter Brittany at the Upper Ojai Market. Jeffray had the lease for a year after the Market had opened a couple of years previously.

The store is a useful asset to the local community - the next closest convenience market is seven miles heading south to Santa Paula (the cryptically signed, ChhinaMkt) or eight to the Westridge market in Ojai but during Jeffray’s tenure it briefly threatened to become something more than a market - a real community locus, a place where upper, Upper Ojai could come together.

The Summit at around 1575’ is truly that, the high point on the Ojai-Santa Paula Road before it begins it’s dip down to Sulphur Springs. In that brief moment in time when stagecoaches ruled the road, it was indeed a stop on the Los Angeles-Santa Barbara trail. The next stop west was the Little Tower Ranch at the bottom of the grade - the one-room tower, which still stands, originally serving as a waiting room for coach passengers.

There is no remaining stage infrastructure at the Summit but the developers of the new store created a board and batten barn to reflect their idea, perhaps, of a stagecoach station. The stage lines came from (and returned to) Los Angeles via the Simi, Conejo and Santa Clara Valleys and then travelled out to Ventura through the Ojai Valley and up the coast to Santa Barbara. Initiated in the 1860’s it was replaced, less than twenty years later by a branch line of the Southern Pacific Railway that ran from Los Angeles through Saugus to Ventura (along the route of the 126).

The community that has sprung up around the Summit is spread over a few blocks of suburban development between Topa Lane and Sisar Road which themselves lie between the Elementary School and the Summit Cafe. Watts, Chumash and Tree Ranch are outlier roads to the west and Koenigstein and Osborn to the east. All this is to the north of the 150 but there is also sporadic residential development to the south amidst the oil properties.

As you leave the Summit cafe heading east, the fire station, VCFD #20,  comes first on the left, and then as you dip down the hill Rancho Tierra Bella, a distinctly redolent goat and horse property. Further down is the Ojai Oil company property which runs between Topa lane and Koenigstein and there, just above the turn-off to Koenigstein is an old stone cottage with a nodding donkey oil pump between it and the road - like a lawn ornament.

At the corner of the 150 and Koenigstein, deeper in the oaks and above a murky pond is an old and mutch patched corrugated sheet metal cottage. This last is a foreshadowing of the community along Osborne road which runs off into the chaparral beyond - a heavily oaked, fenced and rustic looking settlement with a fine collection of rotting trucks dating back to the 1940’s scattered between mostly ramshackle houses.

All-in-all, a community large and diverse enough, you’d think, (along with the weekend tourist traffic) to support a store. The beer and wine license finally came through a month or so after Jeffray’s lease was terminated but from casual observation it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to business. Most often the store is empty except, apparently, for the Saturday evening lottery ticket rush.

 Jeffray imbued the store with enormous energy and charm while Daphne made it relevant, to us at least, by stocking wonderful produce and her preserves. The market has certainly ceded any notion of being at the center of Upper Ojai. That ambition reverts to the cafe, which the Los Angeles Times claimed back in 2003,

“...exudes all the ambience of a '50s Dairy Queen -- is more than the community's sole restaurant....(it) also functions as town hall, infirmary, library, lonely hearts club, homework center, kennel and -- occasionally -- massage parlor. The place and its owner, Kathleen Weedon, are the center of Upper Ojai.....”

We used the small enclosed dining room  for our early morning meetings with the contactor when we were building. It’s a funky little space with a small library and an oil-drum wood-burning stove. The cafe opens early and serves breakfast. So yes, it briefly served as our Upper Ojai office, and we’ve eaten our share of burgers there, but that did not make it, for us, the center of Upper Ojai.

Upper Ojai is state of mind, a gestalt, a deeply individual cocktail of resonances that is unlikely to coalesce in a market or a cafe. Our houses are our individual ‘centers’; ours, like many others, is sustained by an internet connection, provisioned, by Trader Joe’s and Costco and animated by its connection to the landscape. Yes, it would be nice to have a great little restaurant and a gourmet market......but what really establishes the Summit as a place are its institutional book-ends, the Elementary School and the Fire Station; ours are the mostly dimly lit, dark-sky-observant homesteads that exist in the gravitational field of this locus. 

Localore

We don’t often get to talk about cold weather in September. Having just posted a piece extolling the Indian Summers of Southern California, I feel somehow responsible (The Citrus Belt).

As the National Weather Service, Scientific Forcaster Discussion puts it for September 8th., “surprisingly strong cold front for this time of year moving through central California today. And highs ... are again shattering low maximum records in the valleys where it's been mainly in the 60s so far...”.  Let me tell you, that front rolled on through Upper Ojai and turned September into March.

It will warm up over the weekend and the summer will resume. It’s not so much that I dislike the cold, it is more that I resent the intrusion of weather into our placid lives: Southern California, as Carey McWilliams pointed out, has Climate not Weather!

In Britain, where Weather triumphs over Climate, the atmosphere oozes moisture. The phrase Scotch mist is perhaps the best, understated, description of the prevailing humidity - and is used to deny the actual phenomenum of rainfall by substituting the more benign notion of swirling vapor. I still use the term to describe any rain falling at a rate less than an inch an hour. In Upper Ojai it is debatable whether the term oil-seep comes from the same Scottish tradition of understatement: but here, it is the ground not the air that customarily oozes.

Interest in these oil seeps began, for European settlers, in 1854 when surface oil from Sulpher Mountain was collected and then refined for oil lamps. By the 1860’s, tunnels were dug into the mountain and became, for that era, highly productive generating up to 20 barrels a day. They continued in production for almost a century and a half. The last Sulphur Mountain oil tunnel was only plugged and abandoned in 1997.

Cabrillo made use of the asphaltum from seeps to caulk his flagship San Miguel on the eponymous Channel Island off Ventura in the 1540’s and it is here that he later died and is puportedly buried - although his grave has not been found. The explorers had seen the Chumash use the sticky oil to caulk their ocean-going Tomols as well as making woven baskets waterproof.

The first commercially productive well in California was in Rancho Ojai just down the Ojai Road as it heads to Santa Paula along side of Sisar creek and just north of the oil-seeping Sulphur Mountain. It was drilled to a depth of 550 feet in 1866 and produced 15-20 barrels a day.

California’s first gusher was located close by in Adam’s Canyon which winds up from the Santa Clara flood plain a little west of the 150 towards the Sulphur Mountain ridge. This blew in 1892 and 40,000 barrels ran down the canyon into the river below and were washed out to sea just south of Ventura harbor before it was capped. There were no video cameras to record the environmental damage and this, the first major oil spill in the United States, has passed quietly into History. In 1910 the greatest gusher of them all was unleashed in the Midway-Sunset field 2 miles north of Maricopa which ran unchecked for eighteen months and spilled over 8 million barrels.

Santa Barbara’s oil fields were discovered towards the end of the nineteenth century and in 1896 the County’s first off-shore well was sunk off of Summerland. The 1969, 100,000 barrel off-shore spill in the County’s Dos Cuadros field focused world-wide attention on the environmental havoc wrought by the pursuit of oil and is the event that spurred the creation of the first Earth Day, and arguably began the modern environmental movement.

This summer’s Gulf spill, at around a total of five million barrels was smaller than the Maricopa leak but occured in a far more environmentally sensitive area. Both wells are estimated to have produced, at their peak, around 100,000 barrels a day. BP’s well was finally capped in July after a three month gush.

Exactly a hundred years separates the Maricopa and the BP Deepwater Horizon spills: both were historic gushers, both, for their time, were deep wells. Maricopa reached 2,225 feet before it became productive. BP drilled over two miles into the earth’s crust to unleash their gusher (after passing through a mile of water). Clearly, the earth’s supply of oil is finite, but our technical ability to access it, by this one very rough measure, has kept pace with its increasing scarcity.

Which brings us, of course, to the Peak Oil hypothesis which is driving at least one global movement to prepare for the apocalypse (Transition). My position is, as Peter Maass suggests in his Crude World - The Violent Twilight of Oil, Knopf, New York, 2009, that we are going to keep on grubbing for fossil fuels for as long as they remain the high density/low cost energy source (Cosmic Futility). Furthermore, I would expect the eventual tapering off in oil production (it is currently increasing at quite a clip) to be exactly equalled by the increase in solar production and reductions in energy use across the transportation, industrial, shelter, appliance and communications spectra. Demand is currently around 85 M barrels a day and is growing, according to the International Energy Agency at one M barrels per day per year so that by 2030 global consumption will reach 105 M barrels per day. Fear that said barrellage will not be forthcoming is driving the Peak Oil hysteria.

Over the years I have looked forward to the impending apocalypse with all the fervid anticipation of someone brought up in a caste system genuinely believing that any revolution would most likely advance their relative position in the world. Having arrived at the realisation that by any measurement I am now in the fortunate half of the world (and fair-dibs, always was) such topsy-turvydom has inevitably less appeal. Age then, has fostered conservatism but also, I hope, an historical clear-sightedness: every century battles impending doom, be it Malthusian hunger, depopulation or the scourge of witchcraft. We have arrived at a time when, in the popular imagination, environmental despoilation, global warming and peak oil have formed the perfect doomsday trifecta.

All three are powerful notions that are shaping our world and making it less likely that we will succumb to their worst impacts. Which is to say that a little honest-to-god terror is a good thing. But if we are not quite at the point espoused by Charles Mackay, in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Richard Bentley, London, 1841, it’s certainly time for a little historical perspective.

As a localore (a local-historian), I am delighted that the above examples were so geographically close at hand; as a chaparralian I am not entirely happy to be living in the oil-lands. Any debate on energy in Ojai must take account of our unique historical role in the development of the industry. It is not an abstract concern that can be dealt with by the application of the appropriate bumper-sticker. Oil is as close to the heart of Ojai as Citrus, and may well outlive it as a source of local wealth.

The Citrus Belt

The Labor Day weekend marks the traditional end of summer. When my older son Will worked as a Lifeguard for Los Angeles County, the holiday Monday was his last day of work. The beaches are crowded, the ocean warm, and then on Tuesday, quite suddenly, they are deserted until Memorial Day rolls around the following year. In the interim they are left to the surfers, the gulls and the patrolling porpoises.

Inevitably, when I lived near the beach, in Sydney or Los Angeles, winter was my favorite time of the year. Or, taking a late summer vacation in Maine, I would be exhilerated by the first chill winds of autumn. In the Southern Californian chaparral an Indian summer is the norm. Some of the warmest weather of the year arrives in September and October.

This year, according to the seasonal outlook from the US Forest Service, (A Change in the Wind) the developing La Niña will bring warm temperatures and an increased possibility of Santa Ana winds to SoCal in the next two months. La Niña, which influences the course of the Pacific jetstream, tends to bring heat, wind, and dryness to SoCal, but cooler, wetter conditions to NorCal, above I-80 that slices through the state from San Francisco to Sacramento (then continues east to Salt Lake City and beyond to New York).

But there is another dividing line that more truly reflects what we understand as Southern California. Carey McWilliams describes it in his classic, Southern California: An Island in the Land, Gibbs Smith, Utah, 1946: we are walled off from the great Central Valley by the transverse Tehachapi range that spans between the Sierra Nevadas and the coastal ranges. To the east we “are rescued from the desert” by the San Bernadinos and the San Jacintos which mark the inland extent of this coastal strip, where soft air, warm breezes and light tempered by a faint scrim of moisture define the SoCal experience.

In a week or two, we can expect the first Santa Ana winds of fall. These hot desert winds bring threat of fires, frayed tempers and the final dessication of the already dry and brittle chaparral. Below us, in Ojai, where there is a constructed landscape of citrus, olives, and avocados on the agricultural tracts of the east end and irrigated lawns and exotic plantings in the residential areas to the west, the humidity remains considerably higher. Lake Casitas, which was filled between 1958-1978 also tempers the Ojai Climate. While the marine layer pushes into Upper Ojai on many mornings just as often it reaches no further than the Ojai valley floor and on those days that it is entirely absent Ojai is often shrouded in a light morning haze of humidity.

We visited two houses deep in the Ojai citrus and avoacado belt over the weekend. Pamela Burton and Richard Hertz have owned a wonderful 1929 stone cottage for twenty five years and are surrounded by Sunkist orchards. The setting is old-world mediterranean with glorious views to the west of the valley and the coastal range. The property drifts gently down at a consistent 7% slope east to Reeves Road and looking beyond to the slopes of the Black mountain ridge as it peters out into the Topa Topa massif, I was aware of how close it is to Upper Ojai - but distinctly separated by the Grade, elevation and land use.

Almost due North, off of Thatcher Road, Joan Churchill’s family home is a part of the Pierpont designed enclave that included the old Nordhoff Hotel built in the 1890’s (and Ojai’s first hotel) until 2001, when it was lost in a fire. The Churchill house, built in 1905, shares a view of the Twin Peaks in the Nordhoff range with Pamela Burton’s house and while still in the Citrus belt it is separated by its own charming garden of mediterranean plantings from the serried rows of orange and avocado beyond.

These houses set in citrus, avocado and now olive groves are typical of the east-end where agriculture remains the dominant land-use; it is this agricultural element that makes it such an attractive place to live where orchards and sometimes vineyards create a profound old-world allure.

This layer of European agricultural tradition dominates the Ojai valley and is in marked contrast to the wildland fringes of Upper Ojai where the cultural touchstones are the Chumash and the people of the Milling Stone Horizon. The Spanish Missions forever stamped California with an Iberian impress of citrus, grapes, rice and wheat; but where the oaks were too thick, the ground too rocky or the chaparral too impenetrable for  agricultural purposes, the native spirits survive in the rocks, creeks, and shrublands of the indigenous landscape.

Father Junipero Serra planted the first citrus seeds in California in 1769, but it wasn't until William Wolfskill, a northern European frontiersman, planted oranges and lemons in what is now downtown Los Angeles in 1840 that the commercial potential of the crop was realized. The development of the naval orange from cuttings in Brazil popularized California citrus in the 1870's and the completion of the trans-continental railroad later in the decade assured its distribution throughout the country. By 1893, a cooperative of growers was formed known as Sunkist, and at about the same time Annie and William Friend planted the first acreage of oranges in Ojai.

As the town grew up around the early homesteaders, the oil industry and citrus growers it was given a Spanish colonial veneer with Edward Libbey's building of the downtown arcade and the Post Office tower along East Ojai avenue and the Ojai Valley Inn. Upper Ojai remained apart, and here the landscape bends to the Seasons rather than to the cultural atavisms of the Spanish Conquest.

In the chaparral, the bio-mass links directly back to the last ice age: its preservation ensures a continuity with the time before human culture. The land has not been broken: it has suffered drought, flood and fire but the shrubland is adapted to these cyclical hardships, it endures. The chaparral is an ecosystem unimaginably older than European agricultural traditions of citrus and olive, of grape and pomegranate. Older still than the garden tradition of Cyrus the Great and older than the oldest human footprint on the continent.

The new, re-made lands of Ojai are a delightful place to visit, they are redolent with history, but I want to live in a land before History, a land shaped before human culture and a land that is adapted to a climate un-mediated by sprinklers, smudge-pots and wind-machines.

Three Wheeling

Chugging up the Grade in our 1977 Chevy C-10 short bed with a yard and a half of Ojai Lumber’s finest top-soil in the back, I heard a god-awful grinding and sensed the truck leaning awkwardly towards the center of the road.

I was on one of those Grade curves that turns left but provides a generous turn-out to the right - which is where I headed. I got out of the cab in time to see the back left wheel taking off down the hill. It had sheared off the axle and the truck traveled its last few yards on three wheels and a brake hub. I retrieved the wheel which came to rest against the cliff wall on the inside of the curve and collected the wheel nuts that were scattered across the road.

The potential injurious or deadly scenarios that this mechanical malfunction could have created are too numerous to catalog. Simply put, the accident (and my demise) could by now have been memorialized by a simple white roadside cross rather than my writing about it on this blog.

This is the second time that this truck has shed a wheel. The first being about eighteen months ago while my son Griffin was driving home (when we were living in Ojai) from Happy Valley around nine at night. He had just crossed over Lion Canyon Creek and was headed up towards Dennison Park. He too found a convenient turn-out and retrieved the wheel - and got on the phone. (The white-cross comments above apply equally to this drama). We drove up to the scene, called Triple A and had the vehicle towed to CJ’s automotive on the corner of Bryant and East Ojai Avenue.

Doubly-lucky then, given the strange propensity of the truck’s wide mag wheels to become un-tethered. CJ is perplexed, but blames the cheesy mag wheels that, for my son, were a big attraction when we purchased the truck.

The latest misadventure was concluded when: Abbott’s towing schlepped the truck down to CJ’s; Kim Maxwell happened by just when the truck had been successfully hoisted behind the tow-truck and drove me home; and this morning I picked up the truck with a loaner wheel attached and successfully delivered the soil to our house on Koenigstein. From Ojai Lumber the trip took about 45 hours.

This evening I wheel-barrowed the soil from truck to planter-bed. Eighteen barrow loads. The planter is now full (I had already dumped about 6” of dirt and wood chips in the bottom).

Griffin and I dry-laid concrete block on a gravel bed foundation with gopher wire beneath the bottom block across the width of the planter, it is two blocks high with a 2” cap, we grouted every other cell. We bagged it with a self-colored stucco (an Australian technique whereby a skim coat of stucco is applied with a piece of hessian - hence bagging). Four foot by sixteen. It now awaits seed.

This is a token gesture towards grow-your-own. My version of Back-Yard Romance (2010-05-13). I understand that I’m not saving the world, more like a few bucks every Sunday avoiding the more rapacious sellers at the Ojai Farmer’s Market.

We live in straitened times. A dollar saved is a dollar earned. But first we have to make back the hundred bucks spent on soil, and the two hundred and fify for block, wire and cement. Twenty bucks for seed. Say four hundred with truck repairs, gas etc. Our water costs what we consume in electricity to pump it. In time I hope to set up a 1000 gallon corrugated tank which will be fed from the pool cover pump. But at $1500 plus the cost of installation I do not expect to live long enough to recoup the outlay - but you cannot put a price on the feeling of self-righteous satisfaction that I wil have every time I water the raised bed with harvested rain water.

More immediately, I hope that the garden produces say $25 of vegetables and herbs a week. So we can offset the $400 in 4 months. The tank must be amortised against the cost of pumping water from the well. A few bucks a week, maybe 100 or so a year. I take it back: goddam it, barring white-cross events and mountain lion maulings I will too live to make back the cost of the tank and enjoy it for a further fifteen or twenty years before I or it rusts out. The well pump, by the way, is metered separately from the house and is thus not part of our grid-tied PV system. Ideally, we could make back enough from Edison to pay for that bill too. The pool cover pump runs on our house power so theoretically comes under our net zero-energy equation.

We were about $700 shy of reaching our goal last year but there were extenuating circumstances (Are We Green Yet  08-24-25), Dirty PV’s and insufficiently seasoned fire-wood for the Rais Wood Burning Stove are a part of the explanation. We were also not using the clothes drying hoist for the full year. We installed it sometime towards the end of last summer.

This last energy saver is critical. The original rotary clothes line was developed and marketed by an Australian, Lance Hill in 1945 and finally patented in1956. The Hill’s Hoist is as emblematic of the suburban Australian backyard as the barbie - at least when I was there during the 1970’s. There are now more sophisticated lighter versions than the original steel contraption and we chose to install a Swiss aluminum model manufactured by Stewi. Because the house is all-electric, clothes drying is otherwise an energy expensive proposition using the Whirlpool electric dryer.

Lorrie is now atuned to the advantages of line-drying. I grew up in a culture where the linear clothes line (usually hoisted high with a forked clothes prop), with clothes attached with rustic pegs sold door to door by gypsies, was the norm. In summer, clothes customarily went through an extra rinse cycle on the line courtesy of the endemic English ‘showers’. Timing was everything. In winter, they could go through days of thaw and freeze cycles before the perfect moment arrived for their retrieval - having achieved a state that my mother called ‘rough-dry’. Further days in the ‘airing cabinet’, a cupboard warmed by the chimney, would result in clothes that if not dry, were not actually moist to the touch.

If Tehachapi is the windiest place in the world (Dreaming 2010-09-01) then Upper Ojai in summer must rank as one of the fastest clothes drying venues on the planet. But here too, timing is important. Clothes must be retrieved before the evening chill sets in, otherwise it’s an extra day on the line.

Hot days and chill nights are the perfect prescription for a passive solar strategy with regard to interior thermal comfort. And mostly it works, but our house has too much glass to operate without a little Air Conditioning. AC is inherently inefficient - operating at about 10% of the theoretical optimum energy exchange. The only efficient air conditioner is the one that’s turned off. We try.

There is a profound connection between frugality and sustainability. We are where we are because of excessive personal consumption accross the board: Clothing, Food, Water, Energy, Transportation, Entertainment and Security. As our collective revenue streams diminish the theoretical practice of sustainability becomes financially compelling. Being ‘Green’ is a lot like practising for your retirement - getting by with less.

Our generation has put this delicious spin on genteel poverty - it has made the worn-out, the recycled, the old bicycle, the vegetable patch in the back yard and the AC set at 85 degrees - chic. And the old truck?

The Chevy doesn’t get such great mileage, but it exists in the world and will, perhaps for another twenty years. It’s a work-horse. Like Christine, the psychopathic-killer-car from the mind of Stephen King (Viking, New York, 1983), it’s had a couple of tries at decimating the family. I think it just wants respectable wheels again. CJ is on the look-out for an old set of steel rims.

Dreaming

Our house has six terraria. Most of the time they are empty except for the living diorama in the three facing south, of meadow, middle distance oaks and the distant ridge-line of Sulphur Mountain; and in the three facing north, of the deer weed bowl, oaks to the east and west and the distant Topa Topas holding up the sky.

A few weeks ago we had a specimen - a tarantula (Aphonopelma eutylenum) - in the middle north terrarium. Then a similar creature in the middle south and yesterday, a four foot long, fat, rattle snake (Crotalus viridis). Each terrarium is formed by our floor to ceiling inset glazing that provides a three-sided view of the concrete porches that are their floors. Initially draped along the east (short) wall of glazing the rattler then moved to the south west terrarium - lured perhaps by the smell of my running shoes - and then repulsed, returned to the middle bay. There the snake coiled itself neatly on the doormat taking no more room than a dinner plate, tight against the glass door, where it snoozed. We locked the door from the inside and let it be.

I went into Ojai and when I returned later in the afternoon, Lorrie told me that the snake had slithered off down the gravel precinct and returned to the meadow. Now is the time of maximum activity for snakes, it is a little cooler and they need to stock up on rodents before they become torpid in the colder months. In Southern California they do not truly hibernate.

Our specimen had 11 rattles and was of a size to handle a small rabbit. Rabbits are very susceptible little creatures and I imagine a short rattle from this venerable snake could put a bunny into paralytic shock - no venom necessary. There is no shortage of rabbit meat roaming the front meadow. We escaped a return visit from the Fire Department so our bunch grass remains longer than VCFD regulation - and the rabbits (Sylvilagus audubonii) are now systematically felling the dried stalks and discarding them after a nibble or two. Having been brought up on Beatrix Potter's  The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Frederick Warne & Co., London, 1902 and then living through the Myxomatosis holocaust in England I am willing to give them a pass.

Myxomatosis is a disease first identified in South America and introduced into Australia in 1950 in an attempt to control the six hundred million European rabbits whose ancestors were introduced as game animals in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the disease wiped out 99% of the population, the remaining six million developed resistance and by the late 1950's their numbers had rebounded somewhat. The disease spread to England and the Surrey countryside was littered, during my childhood, with dead and dying rabbits.The cotton-tail of the American south west like the original host of the disease the South American forest rabbit or tapiti (Sylvilagus brasiliensis) is immune, but only their bunny hop can save them from rattlers.

The disease was, from the point of view of Australian farmers, a highly successful government intervention and it remains one of the few examples of successful biological control of a pest animal. It happened at a time when there was a greater acceptance of the benefits of Government science, technology and infrastructure - whether it was the development of the hydrogen bomb (in which Australia was complicit by providing test ranges for the program); neurosurgery (State mental hospitals were veritable production lines of 'ice-pick' frontal lobotomies until the mid-1950's) or the building of the interstate freeway system - which cut through ancient wildlife corridors and continues to threaten the wildlands by turning them into a mosaic of wildlife islands. (Chaparral Mantra 2010-8-11).

There is a tangle of freeway overpasses that run above Riverside Drive on the edge of Frog Town just east of Echo Park in Los Angeles where Algerian ivy (Hedera canariensis) has envined the supporting columns, reached up into the freeway side-rails 40 feet in the air and now cascades down so that it trails over vehicles passing below on the surface street. Such heroic vegetal striving has always inspired in me the hope that nature would somehow re-colonize the concrete freeways, crack, rend and turn them into a sort of chunky vermiculite to mix with the native soils below.

Thus it is I am very conflicted by a blizzard of reports lately about solar roads. Do we really want to further utilize an interstate network that balkanizes our states and partitions our country? The greatest transportation success story in America is the private car; next perhaps, the air-lines, then the interstate trucking business and on down through the railroads, buses and light rail. In any kind of green future all, with the exception perhaps, of light rail, are due for a profound overhaul. It seems to me that some of the 1.7% of the continental land mass devoted to roads could be better utilized as high-speed rail - that could then replace interstate vehicular traffic and most domestic air routes.

We denizens of the wildlife/urban interface are the outliers of the twenty first century. The planet is moving towards greater urban density, not increased numbers of fringe-dwellers in the mildlands. In such a world, narrow rail corridors (with appropriate wildlife underpasses) can link widely dispersed, but supremely dense centers of urban life. Within cities, light rail, electric buses, taxis, share cars (Zipcar) and bicycles can prevail.

The appeal of solar roads lies, I think, in the pleasing paradox of the solution. It's like a vaccine - you manipulate the virus and create a substance that instead of promoting sickness generates antibodies and confers immunity. The great evil that has soaked up a trillion barrels of oil now becomes benign and powers America. Except that you are left with the infrastructure of the disease - you are left with the roads and by implication the (electric) cars that run (still quite slowly) on them, thus air travel remains an appealing alternative. Ah, you say, we can still have high-speed rail (France's Train à Grande Vitesse top speed is 357m.p.h.). Keep dreaming: political reality says that any great leap forward is highly contingent, and a multi-directional leap virtually impossible.

PV embedded in roads would also represent a diffuse grid - with much of the power generated needing to travel great distances to its end-users. California is blessed with vast solar (sun and wind ) resources and centralized production is now located reasonably close to population centers.

Just 100 miles from Los Angeles, Tehachapi represents the world's largest aggregation of wind farms. The wind turbines were originally installed in the area thirty years ago. I remember first seeing wind turbines in the San Gorgonio Pass in the early eighties just beyond Hadley’s on the ten and just before our destination at Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs (Where Native Meadows Come From 2010-04-14).  Road trips to San Francisco in that same era were enlivened by the sulptural presence of Altamont’s wind farm in the Diablo Range between the Central and Livermore valleys. Tracy, the closest town, has a special place in my memory as the issuing precinct for a speeding ticket I received one very wet night while driving our Mercury Sable wagon to a conference in San Francisco.

But of the three major Californian sites Tehachapi is considered the best and is one of the windiest places in the world. Todays turbines stand about 400-500 feet tall and produce about 1-2.4 megawatts each. The Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project (TRTP) now under construction and slated for completion in 2012, will result in a high-voltage transmission system delivering 4,500 MW of clean energy into Los Angeles drawing power from 50 square miles of wind-farms in the Tehachapi area. Inevitably, there is an environmental cost and the recent success of the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) breeding program has resulted in concerns about this endangered species expanding into the Tehachapi Wind Resource Area. Although larger turbines that produce more energy means fewer machines per acre and fewer access roads per MW, the threat remains and such projects will likely push deeper into the Mojave.

But perhaps these environmental threats can be offset. How long I wonder, would it take the desert sands, the sidewinders (Crotalus cerastes) and desert tortoises (Gopherus agassizi) to re-colonize the interstate? And, with the abandonment of our 1950's infrastructure the blight of the strip development along its flanks would melt away and the steel armature stubbornly resisting oxidization in the dry desert air would provide perches for the Condor.

You can dream: but it is I think, useful to dream the right dream.

Are We Green Yet?

Last weekend I washed down our thin-film photovoltaic array for the second time this summer. It's a matter of climbing an aluminum step ladder and squirting water at the blue black material stuck to the sheet metal roof between the standing seams. Muddy water slowly becomes clear and the film emerges to convert solar energy to electricity through its amorphous silicon cells at full efficiency once more.

Summer is dry and dusty in Upper Ojai. Last year the situation was exacerbated because our driveway had not been sealed and we were building the pool. Our suspicion is that we lost a great deal of PV efficiency through the months of June through September with the film caked in a layer of dirt. On October 12 last year it began raining and continued, on and off, for five days. Five or six inches of rain later, the PV was clean for the winter.

This summer we knew better. Topher Blunt Of Ojai Solar Electric who installed our PV (and the Shucco solar thermal panels for the hot water tank) now has a lucrative side-line in cleaning the solar arrays that he builds. He has the contract for washing down the 235 kW array at Santa Barbara City College he installed last year. Like selling razors at a loss to make money on replacement blades, his business model may subtly change to reflect this new service component. I suggested to someone at a dinner party, whose job it was to find 'Green' careers for ex-cons, that cleaning PV arrays might be a viable option. In any case, newly conscious of this maintenance aspect I did the first cleaning in July.

The PV effect was discovered in 1954, when scientists at Bell Telephone found that silicon created an electric charge when exposed to sunlight. Up until the I980's solar cells were being used primarily to power space satellites and smaller items like calculators and watches, although they had some agricultural and 'back-woods' applications since they could be used to re-charge 12V battery packs for lighting and small appliances.

However, there was enough buzz in the architectural community about their potential residential application that in 1981 I designed a single family house dubbed 'Ole Soleil' in a design studio at UCLA the model for which had a roof covered in a blue foil to indicate a PV material. A year later in Japan, again under the auspices of UCLA, I was attaching black wing-like elements to model robo-houses that were designed under the influence of the emerging solar power construct, samurai costumes and Gundam mecha (or robot) anime.

During the 80's and 90's solar power continued to exist in high-tech military and space applications, in small consumer electronics and kitsch items like lawn ornaments as well as on the Alternative Technology frontier where it was seen to have a potential political role in, quite literally, bringing power to the people.

By the late 1990's the architectural potential of the technology was finally realized with the first BIPV (Building Integrated PV) installation on the south and west facing curtain walls between the 37th and 43rd floors of a skyscraper in Times Square. By 2001, Home Depot was selling residential PV kits in its California stores.

But early in this century it became apparent that thin-film rather than flat-plate technology represented the way forward. Lorrie was flipping through the pages of Architectural Record in the summer of 2008 when she saw an advertisement for Uni-Solar thin-film solar adhered to a standing seam metal roof. Although the slab had already been poured for our Ojai house, and the roof specified as corrugated steel (with the expectation of installing flat-plate PV panels above it), we revised the specs and went with standing seam and in the spring of 2009 the solar fruit-leather was rolled out between the seams.

We have Stanford Ovshinsky (and his marketing team) to thank. Born in Akron, Ohio the son of a Lithuanian scrap metal dealer, he founded ECD (Energy Conversion Devices) in 1960; our thin-film PV's are manufactured (right here in the good old USA, in Greenville, Michigan) by Uni-Solar, a subsidiary. His pioneering work in the field of amorphous and disordered materials has become the enabling technology in thin-film photovoltaics.

Ironically, Suntech, one of the largest solar photovoltaics providers in the world has bet its future on old fashioned, flat-plate silicon and Wuxi, the city of 5 million that has grown up around its plants in China, now faces the prospect of becoming China's Detroit.

We narrowly avoided avoided the fate of using first generation technology at a moment in time when third generation PV using nanoparticle expertise and zinc oxide (sunblock!) is being developed at The University of Pennsylvania (Sierra, The Magazine of the Sierra Club, September/October, 2010). Green technology is a moving target. (One of the allures of passive-solar is that, give or take a heat exchanger or two, it's a timeless strategy.)

Our house is a product of its time. The Green zeitgeist of the mid-aughts mandated PV, radiant heating and geo-thermal HVAC. We adopted thin-film solar (just-in-time). We avoided the active radiant heating boondoggle (more on that another time) and decided that geo-thermal didn't really make sense if you could offset your straight-up air-source HVAC with PV generated power.

We also reached back into the the 1970's and 80's and to our education at UCLA where passive solar was king and expertly taught under Murray Milne and Baruch Givoni. Givoni's classic text,  Man, Climate, and Architecture, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 1976 was, at that time, considered the most authoritative volume in the field of building climatology - at a time when green was a color, inexperience ..... and nothing more. For a while we toyed with the idea of a Trombe wall the ne plus ultra of passive solar.

A Trombe wall is a sun-facing wall patented in 1881 by its inventor, Edward Morse, and popularized in 1964 by French engineer Félix Trombe and architect Jacques Michel. It is a massive wall separated from the outdoors by glazing and an air space, which absorbs solar energy and releases it selectively towards the interior at night (Wikipedia) It works on the green-house (meaning, back in the day, a glass structure for horticulture!) principle whereby solar radiation passes through glass but is then trapped as infra-red radiation to which the glass is opaque.

We elected, in the end, to rely on the concrete slab to absorb heat on winter days and radiate it on winter nights for our passive radiant heating. The glazing is shaded such that no sun enters the house past April and only reappears in October.

Are we green yet? I've been around long enough to find the question exasperating. What I have done for the last thirty years is apply appropriate technology to the system requirements of human habitation. Our national reliance on dirty fuel for the majority of our electricity demands that we find ways to reduce usage (Passive strategies) and maximize on-site generation opportunities (Active solar - sun and wind); diminishing water supplies require a program of rainfall capture, grey water irrigation (or no irrigation) and reduced usage; waste management is covered by reduce, re-use and recycle of which reduce is the most powerful and potentially transformative dictum.

Was the green solution to stay in our 90 year old house in Santa Monica Canyon? Perhaps, but having built a net-zero-energy, recyclable-steel framed 100 year house ( based on our fire resistant strategies) it seems to me that we may have earnt the right to offset a little of that green angst that now infects us all.

Cloudland

To look at the landscape in England is to see as much cloud as land - the vaporous scrim demands equal attention. When I was very young, perhaps four or five, I thought the swirling cumulus was another land. My sheltered imagination had decided that the sky was a place, a wildland as faraway as could be imagined: Scotland.

At the beginning of last week I called my sister in England. I had not spoken with her since last Christmas. She's a few years older than me and lives in Barton-on-Sea in Hampshire with her husband Tim; their kids are grown and they have six grandchildren. I rely on her for news of my one remaining aunt and our various cousins, nieces and nephews.

Extant Aunt Joan is my deceased father's youngest sister. Last month she celebrated her 90th birthday and there was a gathering of the clan at her home in Beaminster, Dorset. Joan, a widow now for ten years or more, has three children and all were in attendance. Her youngest, Andrew was - last time I checked - a doctor at a large Southhampton hospital. He qualified as a doctor in his twenties but almost immediately decided that he wanted, instead, to be a Vicar in the Church of England. He pursued this for many years but after being shunted around to one miserable parish after another decided that medicine might not be such a bad idea after all. Thus it was that ten or fifteen years ago he returned to doctoring.

His news at his mother's party, however, was that he had now retired and moved to a croft in the north of Scotland with his Pagan academic girlfriend. I was intrigued on all counts - Scotland, the croft and the Pagan academic.

I finally made it to the far country with two friends from the Gloucestershire College of Art driving north from Cheltenham in a 1950's Austin Somerset. It was Spring Break - April - and the car had no heater. We stayed in youth hostels and drank a lot of beer. We made it as far as Inverness and saw some glorious countryside. It snowed, we got very cold in the car, but the white mantle made the land almost cloud-like.

Meanwhile, I had read Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water, Longmans, London, 1960 and his much darker, Raven Seek Thy Brother, Harper & Row, London, 1968. Sometime in my teens I had read Eric Linklater, Compton Mackenzie and just a couple of years ago while on vacation on North Haven, Maine, I read Lillian Beckwith's The Sea for Breakfast, Hutchinson, London, 1960 - her comic novel of crofting on Skye, in the Hebrides.

Such was my preparation for receiving the news of my cousin's relocation to Scotland. My sister said that he had moved to the far-north of the Highlands, 'somewhere on the left'. A few minutes on the internet and I located him in the wildlands of Scoraig on a remote peninsula between Little Loch Broom and Loch Broom, south of Ullapool in Ross and Cromarty, Highland, Scotland. With no road access or grid-tied electricity the community relies on wind-power, solar, diesel generators and batteries; access to non-indigenous supplies and services is by boat across Little Loch Broom, the crofters' awaiting vehicles and a major road, the A832.

Originally inhabited in the first millennium, the land was divided up in the 19th century into narrow strips of agricultural holdings known as crofts to support a minimum level of subsistence for Gaelic-speaking Highlanders; the population peaked at the end of the 1800's at several hundred before slowly dwindling until by 1960 it was almost deserted. The last permanent residents left in 1964. (Wikipedia)

Today it supports English-speaking 'back-to-landers', 'good-lifers' (both British locutions) and retirees seeking an alternative, off-the-grid lifestyle like my cousin. It is an up-market version of Slab-City the ad-hoc trailer park outside of Niland on the south east margin of the Salton Sea. There, an old WWII army base demolished except for the concrete building slabs, supports an alternative living community located near an active bombing range in the Anza Borrego desert. With no grid-tied electricity, fresh water or sewage treatment, residents rely on solar panels, batteries and generators and their own waste system and share one communal shower, a concrete cistern that is fed by a hot spring 100 yards away. I have visited a couple of times and am reassured that such an anarchic, lawless community can prevail on the interstice between a major NAFTA truck route, the 111 from Mexicali, on up through Brawley, Calipatria and beyond to the 10, and the desert wildland as it backs into the Chocolate Mountains. This is the kind of end-times village that may yet contain seeds of the planet's salvation as it rushes towards global urbanization.

Scoraig may grow much of its own food, erect its own wind turbines and stack its own dry-stack walls but as noted above it remains connected to the goods and services of the EU and is economically dependent on capital brought in by newcomers, which is generally spent on building 'properties' (Wikipedia). My link to Andrew was through the company he employed to install his green roof (Green Roof Systems , UK) on a geodesic dome-roofed yurt that he's built for himself and his partner.

Ah, the partner. The Pagan Academic. As those who have been following along will understand, I profess an openess to animism, shamanism and mysticism - all isms thoroughly disavowed by the rational thinkers of the Enlightenment and after, but Academia has now opened its arms to Pagan Studies, and one of the new discipline's leading lights, Sabina Magliocco teaches at California State University at Northridge. Her background is in the disciplines of anthropology and folklore which have been fundamental in validating the embrace of Paganism and witchcraft as legitimate fields of study.

Living in an earth-roofed yurt in the wilds of Scoraig can only have sharpened Andrew's partner's appreciation and knowledge of the Spirit World. The windswept western highlands, with the smell of peat smoke in the air where gannets, eagles and razor bills (Alca torda) wheel and seals and otters slice through loch and burn must put an observer awfully close to the whirring of the cosmos.

Scoraig, a western spit in the cloudland - manifestation of my earliest imaginings - and Ojai, enmeshed in the traditions of the Chumash, are both wreathed in earth magic. In such places, the Pagan tradition, which is concerned with the ritual reanimation of the world, seems like an entirely rational response to the churning of the seasons and the antic life-force of the wildlands.

Tin

A while back John Diehl mentioned that he was interested in a piece of rusting sheet metal half buried in our oak grove at the northern property line (Palimsest, 2010-06-22). When we got around to clearing the thistles beneath the oaks, Griffin hauled the tin fully to the surface and trucked it down to John in the East End.

John makes his living as an actor but has always made art. This morning I stopped in at THE/Main Gallery and looked at the ten pieces he has on display - mostly sculpture and a few oil paintings. I suspect that his sculptural pieces have been created over a long period of time - there is none of that manic iterative process that is at the heart of creativity whereby the artists digs himself out of hole by producing piece after piece of almost non-existent difference until a new direction slowly emerges out of the sameness.

Here, instead, is work of many directions but with an abiding theme: America embodied in the matrix of family, materialism and spirituality. The best work has a primal, earthy quality - like Tabernacle - a glazed adobe box with small openings revealing an intriguing, mystical interior of black shard-like planes; Traveling Church which is quite literally a small model church on wheels and Ark, a patch-worked assemblage of wood and metal in the approximate form of an tiny diluvian boat clamped in a wood worker's vise: it appears to be in dry-dock awaiting a re-fit, awaiting the deluge. John Baldassari had signed the visitor's book with the admonition, "Keep it Real".

I was disappointed that the wrinkled, crinkled, oxidized, torn and earth-stained sheet metal we had donated to the cause was nowhere in evidence. Such found objects are, of course, capable of rising to art merely through their objectification on a gallery wall. Next show.

The gallery is neighbor to our office on East Matilija in Ojai and is run by Carl Thelander - on the ground floor of a Victorian cottage which also houses his environmental analysis and remediation practice, BioResource Consultants. Carl was a constant presence, as were we, at the Ojai Playwrights Conference which ended last weekend.

Robert Egan, the Director of OPC sets up this fascinating invitation: "to hear the voices of....playwrights who speak courageously and honestly about the world we live in". That we did, in seven shows that dealt with Palestine, Vietnam (two shows), 9-11 and its aftermath in Spain (the Madrid train bombings of 2004), the outing of a gay scout master; Big Pharma and the stunning slice of life (and suicide) from Len Jenkin, Psalm151: Heaven Have Mercy that somehow combined Runyonesque plot points (the mob and high-stakes gambling) with bleak suburban lives and even bleaker Florida senescence.

After the last performance, late afternoon Sunday - directed by a former client of mine Ron Lagomarsino - we emerged into the sunshine from the Zalk Theater on the grounds of Happy Valley reeling from our five day stint of play-watching. The political and social impacts of some of the world's thorniest issues had been expressed in terms of human drama and we engaged with them on a profound and soulful level. Lacking sets - all the plays are readings - the craft of the playwright and his or her actors, are expressed in startling clarity - and the structure of the play is witheringly exposed. Every audience member a dramaturg(e).

Such cultural festivals are reminders that we are remarkable mammals. And so young! In The Time before History - 5 million years of Human Impact, Touchstone, New York, 1997 Colin Tudge notes that Homo sapiens has been anatomically modern for some 100,000 years - but most mammals have lasted roughly a million years before they have become extinct or evolved into something else. Do we have 900,000 years to go and what, if anything, has Theater got to do with it?

Theater provides opportunities for re-invention, to establish space for emotional and intellectual reactions that we, as an audience, might not otherwise experience. Like all art forms it magnifies our existence. Artists function as shamans in our culture and they transmit their messages through their chosen medium: none is as immediate and transparent as Theater. Robert Egan uses the phrase, "the world we live in". Theater has the ability to blur the distinctions between that world and our lives such that we more fully inhabit the universe. We become of  the world rather than merely living in the world.

If our species has a future it depends on our participation in the larger cosmic-biological nature of the planet. That participation might begin with a connection to the idea of what it is to be a Palestinian in a Lebanese refugee camp (Urge For Going, Mona Mansour) or a confused adolescent (Wild Animals You Should Know, Thomas Higgins) and ultimately extend outwards to other species and even elemental features of the planet; to become part of the world in all its variety rather than apart: to eliminate the notion of environment, and establish humankind in a reciprocal relationship with all that surrounds it, except that in this process we absorb the meaning of our surroundings as the environment absorbs us, eschewing separateness.

Painting and sculpture inhabit a space where our customary ways of seeing are knocked askew. The church with wheels that John Diehl presents (Traveling Church) extends the range of the possible.

In a gallery we stand ready to receive new meaning - a piece of rusted sheet metal perhaps a portal to a deeper involvement in the cosmos.