Death Comes to Koenigstein

I wrote recently of the death of Ralph Hansen Sr. (Nymphs and Naiads). He was our neighbor. He lived at the top of the hill and was surrounded by his passion - seven water wells and an ad-hoc museum of rusting drill-rigs and sundry drill equipment. I pass by one of his abandoned efforts most Sundays when I run through our land and then cross over the bottom spit of his property heading for the road as it sweeps north along a ridge between the abandoned County road hairpin and the gorge that drops down to the old County ranch property. Ralph's house sits at the top of the hill and looks south to another hill-top aerie, the Atmore's Lazy II Ranch.

Greg Atmore and his wife were the first neighbors to greet us on Koenigstein. Seven years ago they both lived in their house with their small yapping dog who would bark everytime I wandered the hills in view of their property. Then a few years ago, his wife was incapacitated with Alzheimers and she went to live at a facility in Santa Paula. We would continue to see Greg most often when he was driving back from seeing his wife at dinner. Then a couple of weeks ago he died while undergoing back-surgery; he was writing his autobiography. His career was spent selling life insurance; I imagine his wife is now considerably richer (but she may not realize it).

The dog continued yapping for a few days after Greg died, and the American flag still flew over the property - and then the yapping and flapping was gone. The Atmore home now sits silent in the landscape, no longer a human habitation but instead a roost for birds, shade for snakes and lizards and the crawl space a sanctuary for rats safe now from the shrill bark and needleteeth of Greg's rat-catcher.

When the Egyptian royalty realized that the ostentation of the pyramids encouraged constant plundering, their kings chose the bleak and desolate hills of Thebes as their new burial grounds hoping to ascend to the sun-god Re with their funery objects - essentially the goods needed for a continued existence - unmolested by grave robbers. The natural shape and color of the Theban Hills are reminiscent of pyramids and this seemed to confirm them as likely points of ascension for the deceased Kings and Queens of the New Kingdom.

I was reminded of this when I tramped around the two deserted hilltop estates of Ralph and Greg. The Lazy II ranch sits on a peak at a crook in Koenigstein as it turns sharply north. A steep drive winds around the slope and crude terraces have been back-hoed into the land so that it appears like a mastaba or a stepped pyramid topped with a simple suburban house from the 1960's.

A little further up the road, Ralph's ranch-style house sits on a narrow defile between the road cut and a deep bowl that spans across to our property. To the west of the house a nissen hut perches at the edge of the slope and is open at one end: like funery goods, an old tractor, lawn mowers and drilling equipment sit ready for service in the after life. Entombed at the closed end is a late fifties De Soto, the up-swept wings making it a suitable vehicle, perhaps, for accompanying Re in the sun god's daily journey across the heavens.

I did not explore the closed end of the hut, and saw only the back of the car. I was unable to see whether the hood ornament was still in place. The De Soto was a Chrysler brand from 1928 to 1961 and was named after the Spanish Conquistador who blazed a trail in the south east of what is now the United States, brutalizing the native peoples as he went. He reached as far west as the Mississippi and died on its banks in 1542 (the same year that Cabrillo conducted his exploration of the California coast in search of the North West passage (An Island on the Land)). The brand's chrome hood ornaments were fashioned in De Soto's likeness.

However unlikely the link between the pyramidal landscape of the Theban Valley of the Kings in Egypt and the Topa Topa foothills it is nevertheless buttressed by the fact that in both places there existed the practice of burying funeral goods with the dead. The Chumash buried portions of tomols (canoes), effigies, deer bone whistles and beads with high status individuals. They were equipping the dead for their soul-wanderings over the earth and ocean in preparation for the heavenly journey to a paradise where the soul is nurtured and prepared for its descent back to the world to be reincarnated. (Kuta Teachings, Reincarnation Theology of the Chumash Indians of California, Dr. John Anderson, 1998).

While status was indicated by the goods buried with the body, the depth of Chumash burials was also a gauge of an individual's wealth because diggers were paid for their work in baskets which held burial soil; the more baskets a family could afford to pay the deeper the grave. There is much evidence that in Chumash funeral practices, the majority of the deceased's possessions were burned at the time of death or in an annual mourning ceremony. Grave goods were often contributed by relatives.

Greg and Ralph were dispatched, most likely, via a Santa Paula funeral home to a crematorium - their ashes scattered to the winds. Their bodies burned, their primary possessions - their hill-top estates - stand, in my mind at least, and for the moment, as their funeral goods, empty relics awaiting their owner's spectral return.

In the one, there may appear the dim glow of a computer screen where a diaphanous Greg taps away, eternally unaware that his story is over, his life insurance check cashed; and in the other, the ancient well-driller may again wander his land, his sun ravaged hands clutching his diviner's rod forever awaiting the downward twitch that signals the location of his eighth well.

Death has come to these erstwhile Kings of the Hill. Death has come to Koenigstein.

Nymphs and Naiads

Ralph Hansen, now head of the well drilling company Well-Do founded by his father Ralph Sr. (who died last year), tested a well of ours last week on an undeveloped property on Koenigstein. The previous weekend, Sarah Munster had pronounced that it would produce eleven and a half gallons a minute, after communing with the earth spirits through a crystal pendulum (The Land Speaks for Itself). The likeliest spirit, if there was one, would have been a Naiad - at least according to the Greek taxonomy of lesser divinities.

Nymphs of fresh water, whether of rivers, lakes, creeks, or wells, are known generically as Naiads. They preside over springs and are believed to inspire those who drink the waters, and the Naiads themselves are thought to be endowed with prophetic powers, and to inspire humans with the same. Our image of them often derives from the sentimental paintings of the Pre-raphaelites, and in my mind at least, are best depicted in John William Waterhouse' - Hylas and the Nymphs (1896). When not whispering to lovesick swains (viz. Hylas) or frantically trying to calculate well flow rates - all the while converting liters to gallons - they join with other gods, such as Pan, Dionysis, Hermes and their attendant Satyrs in Arcadian frolics.

I was delighted to see when I visited the well mid-test, that clear water was being pumped out at a rate of twenty gallons per minute, and to discover that it tasted pretty good. It was also warm - which should have been a dead-giveaway. As Ralph later explained we were drawing down the well at a rate of knots; from an original water height of seventeen feet below the ground surface it sunk after the test to 80 feet below with no signs of recovery. In short, we were pumping out the water that had seeped into the well over the ten years since it had been dug, and after several wet winters - which is why it was warm: it had been sitting at or near the surface for many moons. The cool clear water from the icy depths of the aquifer was not being accessed. Ralph is certain that somewhere down in the depths of Koenigstein is a sandstone aquifer producing cold, Fiji quality water in copious quantities. This certainty will not assuage the County however; from their perspective, this well is a dud.

While Sarah was trolling the land evaluating potential building sites, Les Toth, who owns another undeveloped hilltop parcel across the road, pulled up to our site on his ATV. I went over to talk to him and explained what we were up to. When I mentioned that Sarah was a dowser he told me of his experience with a piece of land he owned in New Mexico where for a case of beer and fifty bucks a local Native American had dowsed his land and located water - where Les went on to drill a well. But Les is an engineer so while this experience made him a believer in dowsing he wasn't about to embrace the full implications of Sarah as Geomancer and I said not a word about the Naiads.

There is much spring water in the area. It feeds Bear Creek and augments Sisar. Inevitably, both streams are swelled by rain and snow melt. The late winter rains from a month ago made Sisar impassable immediately above the park entrance on Sisar Road except by those willing to get their feet wet like your intrepid correspondent. When my friend Gar and I walked up Bear Canyon last week we returned down the creek (White-Out) which was still flowing well and was almost entirely above ground. Here, just below its spring source, the creek is still inclined to dip beneath the earth for a spell and reappear to continue rippling over the surface rocks. By the time it reaches Margot's property its reticence is such that its appearances above ground are to be remarked upon. The water is refreshingly cold, but not achingly so. Last winter, in a scramble along a tributary to Bear Creek, I fell flat on my back into a foot or two of water. The experience was at once shocking, humiliating and exhilarating.

Sisar Creek flows along the east side of the I50 as it dips down to Thomas Aquinas and is in view of the new 3 story studio building dba has designed for the film-maker Ethan Higbee on his property behind the Painted Pony, the small-holding and petting zoo. I went by the site on Easter Friday and the framer told me he had had a paddle in the stream at lunch time and had seen trout.

As you move down the canyon towards the confluence of the Sisar and the Santa Paula creeks, it becomes increasingly obvious why this area is called Sulphur Springs; driving out of the canyon beyond the school, the undeniable smell of sulphur assails you. Between the oil, the gas, and the elemental stew of sulphur, radon, boron, arsenic and iron the well-water hereabouts is often compromised. The creek water contains many of the same chemical elements but is also contanimated with discharges of brine from abandoned oilfields, DDT and PCBs and the newer insecticide Diazinon, which is particularly hazardous to fish and birds. But the view from Ethan's new studio is magical, a bend in the creek dappled with willows and alders; where the shallow water moves quickly over rocks and looks edenically pure.

My first memory of fresh water is being taught by my father how to cup my hands and drink from a leaking dam wall at Frensham Little Pond where my family lived when I was four. My father was repairing the leak in the dam (which was originally built in 1246 at the instruction of the Bishop of Winchester). Memories of that time include catching perch off the end of the dock and my mother cooking them for breakfast.

The Steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is a local variety of the rainbow trout and a finer eating fish than perch, but while the perch could be had with the simple expedient of dropping a line in the pond with a bead of bread on the hook, the trout in Sisar creek are few and those few are protected by Fish and Game. They were observed in many Sisar creek sites in 2005 and in 2011 by Adam, the framer at the Higbee's place. I have not seen them, and am unlikely to while my major interaction with the creek is splashing through it in winter or rock hopping over it in summer.

If I gaze wistfully into its waters like Hylar, my odds are probably greater of seeing the trout than those freshly pubescent nymphs, but at this point, I'm not sure which sighting would be the more thrilling.

The Land Speaks For Itself

Somewhere along the valley of Upper Ojai two roads run off from the highway and head towards Sulphur Mountain; there they both meet the tangle of the Arco Oil Company roads that skitter along the ridge amidst oaks and oil wells. They parallel each other for much of the way and are only about a quarter of a mile apart; each serves a scattering of houses, sheds and barns. Their names are almost identical. The western road is Awhai and the eastern is named Awhay. What's up with that?

Both names derive from ?Awha'y, the Indian village site that lies somewhere between these roads on the northern flank of the mountain. Both are pronounced ah-wah-hee. Somewhere, in the linguistic trail established by Harrington (Yuccapedia) that leads back to the Spanish missions, and beyond that to a Chumash Village, things have gone awry.


The Spanish coined the name Ojai in response to hearing the name
?Awha'y in the Ventureno Chumash dialect. It was a transliteration. A phonetic transcription of the sounds of the Indian language into eighteenth century Spanish. It meant nothing beyond the inherent meaning of the original Native American name of 'moon' (New Moon). Now, in these two road names, 'moon' has reverted to an anglicised version (or versions) of Harrington's phonetic inscription of the Chumash name.

The two road names are signs of the past. Signifiers of Indian occupation. Close by the westerly road are the remains of a Chumash burial ground presumably associated with the old village of ?Awha'y. The moldering bones are the archaeological signifiers of a way-of-life cut brutishly short by the Spanish conquest and the subsequent Native American die-off. The graves remain hidden and un-disturbed, protected by order of the State Archaeologist - thus the history of the place is signaled only by the obtuse street names.

There is a less ambiguous history enshrined by the sign at the junction of the 150, a few miles east of the ah-wah-hee's, which reads 'Koenigstein Road'. This junction is at the location of a spring which feeds Sisar Creek and was formerly the site of the hotel which served bear hunters at the turn of the century and which was named for the family who owned and ran the hostelry (Nightjars). Other street names in the Ojai area memorialize the names of those who ranched or developed the area (I am thinking of Thatcher, Montgomery, McNell, Nye Road in Casitas Springs and Osborn Road in Upper Ojai and others too numerous to mention) and of course John Meiner lent his name to Meiner's Oaks (or Mojai as the kids call it) (Mining Gravel). Indirectly, Charles Nordhoff was responsible for the naming of Ojai's precurser town.

There is a magic to naming. In many cultures, naming signifies appropriation, a bringing of something into one's world. In anthropology, place names are an area of intense study, at least since the work of Franz Boas, because they intersect three fundamental domains of social analysis: language, thought and environment - they tell us something about how people experience their world. The name ?Awha'y, now exists in four languages, the oral chumash tradition, Harrigton's phonetic transcription of the native language, Spanish and an anglicisation of Harrington's transcription. Its meaning transcends all: as I have noted (New Moon), Upper Ojai is eternally the valley of the moon.

The Chumash may have gleaned this information from a transformative incident or were merely formalizing ancient knowledge. Whether in moments of sudden exposition or in slow accretions of meaning, the land speaks for itself.

The issue is: who is prepared to listen? We had dinner with three such on Saturday evening: Sarah, my erstwhile Architecture and Gardens landscape partner is an old hand at listening to the land (Dowsing); neighbor Margot, although a scientist, is acutely attuned to the natural world and makes space in her work as a native landscape restoration ecologist to commune directly with it; and Mary Ann, a new Ojai friend, e-mailed me after our dinner and relayed her listening to trees experience at Big Sur. She writes,

"On the tree listening subject, this morning I pulled out my notes from a trip Stuart and I made into the redwoods near Big Sur a few years ago. We walked around and I was in a sort of trance, just feeling the presence of the trees, trying to pay attention. Here is what the trees said to me then:

1. You are in everything and everything is in you.

2. The patterns of the smallest are also the patterns of the greatest.

3. You are in no way incomplete. You are whole and fully connected to the universe, to all that is.

4. Is/was/will be to all time, through and beyond all time, you permeate being and being permeates you. Everything is alive.

This seems so simple and obvious and yet it was profound. It was just so evident that the trees and I were connected, united even, and that we belonged to each other and to a huge matrix of life. I had this feeling of intimacy, of interpenetration, of deep recognition, even though it was my first time there. I was so aware of their consciousness, of the trees paying attention to me. Their voices were clear and direct and kind -- as though they knew this was how I needed to be spoken to."

On Sunday, Sarah dowsed some land on Koenigstein which we are considering developing as a house site. She asked general questions of the land using coat-hanger dowsing rods and a crystal pendulum. She identified energy vortices on parts of the north facing meadow slope and found propitious sites for the buildings. She confirmed that the well, which has lain dormant since it was drilled eight years ago, stands ready to disgorge eleven and a half gallons of water a minute.

In my interactions with the land hereabouts I have intuited its desire for an end to the roiling and turmoil of back-hoe and excavator, of the unearthing of its rocks and the invasions of weeds at its broken edges which agitate and distress its enduring rhythms. Its voice is shadowy, it speaks to me in "elegant adumbrations of sacred truth"; I have yet to achieve the clarity of communication given to our three dinner guests; but I am increasingly aware of the insistent ebb and flow of its conversation: I am prepared to listen.

New Moon

Sometimes truth arrives in a plain brown wrapper. Unannounced. Given our temporal location in the second decade of the twenty first century in this instance the truth actually arrived buried on an unmarked CD which I opened on my trusty PC.

It was in a PDF document amongst many that related to disclosures on a parcel of land in which we have an interest across the street from us on Koenigstein. In the archealogical reconnaissance conducted on the 144 acres which the Trexon corporation (Jim Exon and David Trudeau) subdivided into seven 20 acre parcels, was the news (to me) that,

"?Awha'y, meaning "moon", was the name of the principle rancheria (Chumash village) of what is the upper Ojai Valley, and from which the modern name Ojai is derived."

I had read that same document seven years ago when it was bundled in the disclosures given to us when we were in the process of purchasing our original Koenigstein parcel. But its 'truth" did not resonate at the time, namely that we are living in an area that has an historical connection to a place-name with roots sunk deep in pre-history, in the traditions of its indigenous people.

The moon is remarkable in this high valley. When I left for my run a few days ago the quarter moon was just rising above the hill that shelters the house to the east, the shadowy full moon from two weeks ago was in its arms and its horn seemingly ripped at the ragged edge of the skyline. By the time I was up on the mesa above Sisar it had risen to become a sliver in the brightening sky. We missed its full glory, for we are seeing now the waning of what was the brightest moon in eighteen years. The full moon of March 20, 2011 - a so-called supermoon - was obscured in Ojai by dense cloud and rain.

Elsewhere it was experienced as bigger and brighter because the moon was closer to the earth than it had been since 1993. The moon follows an elliptical orbit with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee): according to NASA, nearby perigee moons are about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the moon's orbit. The coincidence of a full moon with the extreme perigee condition renders it a supermoon.

The moon was used as a calendar by the Chumash, the thirteen lunar cycles keeping in reasonable sync with the earth's annual orbit of the sun. Like the Iroquois who named moons (in spring it was the Moon called Day Will Become Longer) the Chumash likely identified the thirteen cycles with other natural events; but the moon was also understood to be a protagonist in the heavenly wars that the Chumash observed as having direct influence on their lives and in which they could have some small influence by their appropriate ritual behavior.

John Peabody Harrington (Yuccapedia) is our link to the sky-watcher cult of 'antap in which the astrologers were known as 'alchuklash. He interviewed Chumash survivors at the beginning of the twentieth century and recorded their tales of the heavenly wars in which the moon acted as a referee. Local Native American astronomical records survive in the form, most notably, of rock paintings and Chumash solstice rituals are survived by sun-stick and feathered sun-pole paraphernalia.

So, we have Upper Ojai pre-existing back into the mists of time as
?Awha'y and the name of what is now known as Ojai (or, as Jeffray Fargher called it, L'ojai) dating back to the First World War when it was no longer convenient to have a German-sounding name like Nordhoff. Nordhoff too, originated as a flag of convenience. The nineteenth century village in the lower valley was named in 1874 to take advantage of Charles Nordhoff's guide book, California for Health, Wealth and Residence, published in 1872. Subsidized by the railroad, Nordhoff championed the settlement of Southern California and his book was carried by most of its tourists. He did not visit Nordhoff until 1881 and in a subsequent issue of his guide, wrote glowingly of the valley's salubrious climate. In 1917, the name was unceremoniously changed to Ojai.

In 1914 the glass magnate Edward Drummond Libbey hired a San Diego architect, Richard S. Requa to design a new downtown for the ramshackle western town. The Spanish Colonial arcade, post office campanile and Libbey park pergola were styled to take advantage of the Mission Myth - single handedly propogated by Helen Hunt jackson in her best selling novel Ramona, 1884 (California Dreamin'). Thus for a third time, the town of Ojai (nee Nordhoff) adopted a brand makeover based on contemporaneous popular taste or prejudice.

Richard B. Applegate, in a paper titled Chumash Placenames published in the Journal of California Anthropology, 1974 categorizes the place-name    ?Awha'y as originating in a specific incident. Perhaps it was the rising of a supermoon over the Santa Paula ridge which, from a Chumash vantage point on the northern slope of Sulphur Mountain may have identified this place with ?Awha'y, the moon. In the late summer of 2008 when our house was framed in shiny metal studs we visited the site in twilight with friends and watched as a full moon rose over the east hill and the carcass of the house, its ribs gleaming, came alive in the moonlight. The moon is capable of a strange magic: tomorrow I will watch for the crescent of the new moon which will be briefly visible to the south west, before it sinks behind Kahus (The Bear), the Chumash name for Black Mountain, the hill below Sulphur Mountain, between Soule Park and Lion Creek.

This morning as I left the house at the first sign of dawn a great inland sea lay before me: the marine layer was densely settled in the valley and washing up the slopes of Sulphur Mountain while Kahus rose out of the sea, an island in this ghostly ocean. As the sky lightened the high clouds to the north west were dappled in a deep pink, reflecting the blush of the awakening sun. We live in a supernaturally-charged valley: we live in the valley of the moon, ?Awha'y.

Nightjars

When I came across the lines from Seamus Hearney writing of Dane-myths which "sweep in off the moors" and come to us, "down through the mist-bands of Anglo-Saxon England" (Saxon Hall) I was reminded of the mytho-poetic tradition that has Landscape as its object. Landscape has meaning quite apart from its morphological, botanical and geological significance, and it is here, at the edge of history and anthropology and in the murk of romance, superstition and legend that I imagine the wallows and the rises of the land through a mythic home-spun.

Walking down Koenigstein Road on the weekend, Sunday afternoon: low clouds describing a curtailed valley spread below, weed patch at roadside trending to chaparral beyond: there is a pathos in the rough marks of man that one hundred and fifty years of Euro-American occupation have made on the land. Specifically, the crude pragmatism of the development of 20 acre parcels along a road (that originally served a hunting lodge at the opening to Bear Canyon) where plastic piping rises vertically in places from the bush marking lot lines or lies broken on the ground turning brittle in the sun and tumbled sandstone rip-rap emerges bright yellow in the even light from the darkening brush. The detritus of a developer's dreams being slowly obliterated by the primal energy of the earth; the hunting lodge lost in a long ago fire.

Worked at long and wisely enough a kind of symbiosis can develop between the landscape and human settlement. It's called civilization. It is not the place I have chosen to live.

Classical civilization has, as Simon Schama notes in Landscape and Memory, 1995, always "defined itself against the primeval woods". Likewise, the east coast of the United States - with its Jeffersonian, neo-classical overtones, establishes its identity in part in opposition to the left coast, the barbaric frontier of California. Latter-day warriors arrived in the Upper Ojai valley weilding not clubs and spears but back hoes, chain saws and oil drilling rigs. Oaklands were turned into rough fields of alien grasses and chaparral into weed patches. Looking down the valley there are horse properties, mac-mansions rubbing shoulders with manufactured homes and the occasional well-sited house at ease in the landscape. Mostly it's the marks of raw accommodation between immediate, un-restrained human appetites and the natural world - this afternoon edged by low clouds that threaten soon to smother them.

Perhaps because I grew up in the velvety Surrey countryside where moss and lichen quickly soften the edges of road and building and even the railway cuttings seemed ancient like Offa's dyke (the great earthwork built by the Saxon King of Mercia to discourage attack from the Welsh people of Powys) I have ended up in places where nature is yet to be submerged, or co-opted by the blandishments of multi-layered civilizations. I have chosen the raw and the newly desecrated. I have repaired, as Tacitus writes of Germania, to "region(s) hideous and rude". Here I find the rough energy of ancient landscapes brushing against arriviste civilization. The chaparral and the Australian bush - both so recently home to aboriginal peoples bound to the land and where lingers still a spiritual imprint - are landscapes that tell stories barely dimmed by the ravages of the barbarian horde (and count me amongst their number).

In Kangaroo, his one Australian novel, D.H. Lawrence writes,

"The soft, blue, humanless sky of Australia, the pale, white unwritten atmosphere of Australia. Tabula rasa. The world a new leaf. And on the new leaf, nothing. The white clarity of the Australian, fragile atmosphere. Without a mark, without a record."

And here, it's still morning in California, the dew has not yet quite left the land and faint vibrations remain of a spiritual vision that saw all the living things of the world fully enfolded within the cosmos. There is a scale to the natural world at the edges of the Upper Ojai valley where chaparral or oak woodland begin to dominate the urban/wildland dyad. Mystery and myth begin at these edges. There is separation between the sublime and the prosaic. In older cultures, in Europe, this separation is less obvious - there is a co-mingling of the two, a symbiosis that perhaps vitiates the power of both.

Magical things still happen in these places of comfortable accommodation between the built and the wild environments. As a child I believed in fairies at the bottom of the garden, and circles of mushrooms, or pixie rings that I would come across in the suburban woods confirmed my faith. Later, riding pillion on my father's motorcycle through the South Downs, he would point out (shouting through the noise of the tiny 125cc engine and the flapping of scarves and macintoshes) the bronze-age burial mounds (tumuli) that dot the soft de-forested hills.These signs of death amidst ancient life fascinated me and gave the landscape a gothic tension, a frisson of the macabre. The hills had long been brought into the agricultural realm, cleared of their woodlands some 6,000 years previously as the stone-age people abandoned their hunting and gathering existence and developed grazing for domestic stock and fields for crops. The truly wild, in England at least, is best imagined, for there are precious few acres of untrammeled land.

Venturing into un-touched chaparral up on the mesa between Koenigstein and Sisar, land marred only by a crudely drawn bulldozed trail, there is a sense of entering a primeval realm. One early morning last week, fully dark with my head light illuminating the path, I saw a bright light close to the ground just up ahead. My first thought was that it was a firefly. As I approached the light rose into the air and fluttered away. I saw a second light and was still going with the firefly theory. When I saw the third, I was close enough to see that it was a bird which rose from the ground - with a firefly in its beak perhaps? As the lights continued to appear before me, my senses fully alert, I realized that it was the bird's eyes that burned with this fierce light (reflecting my head lamp) and that I was disturbing a flock of ground-roosting Nightjars.

Sometimes known as Goatsuckers (in the mistaken belief that they feed at the teats of goats) these crepuscular birds have large round eyes - like their nocturnal brethren the owl. What I saw, according to my bird guide, were Lesser Nighthawks ( Chordeiles acutipennis) - what I experienced was fluttering fairy-lights in a mythic landscape.

Saxon Hall

Robert Venturi, in his seminal 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas developed an architectural typology that includes only 'ducks' - buildings that are shaped in a way to reflect their purpose (named for a Long Island poultry restaurant literally shaped like a duck) and 'decorated sheds' - prosaic structures that are adorned with symbols or signage that identify their business.

I arrived in Los Angeles in 1980 and shortly thereafter got to know Jim Heimann who had written the definitive work on Los Angeles 'ducks'. His book was called California Crazy, 1981, and depicted road side vernacular architecture - often restaurants and mostly from the 1930's and 40's - that, like Venturi's 'duck', were shaped in ways that reflected the morphology of the meals they served (think Chili-bowl). Jim's abiding interest was not architecture per se, but the use of buildings as marketing iconography. Trained as a graphic designer, he saw the urban fabric as text - as existing as a kind of three dimensional advertising copy. I was briefly interested, in the late 70's and early 1980's, in this kind of literal architecture, but by then the world had moved on from Venturi's approach and embraced the sophisticated sheen of European post-structuralism. We were no longer interested in 'ducks' and 'decorated sheds' but in semiotics and my architectural messages were not about commerce but presumed to be social critiques.

The simple fact is that almost all buildings are freighted with meaning beyond their functional manifestation. In Hoop Dreams I wrote about a disinherited people who developed a new identity out of the Ghost Dance; for most of their existence, native peoples' identity was established by geography, kinship and band affiliation. Certainly in California, home was the local village and the surrounding environment; it was, as Peter Nabakov and Robert Easton point out in Native American Architecture, 1989, the central place, the source of identity. In building a house in the urban wildland, I have adopted some of that geocentrism and derive some of my new Ojai identity from the chaparral and the house we built in it.

Nabakov and Eastman note that part of a band's collective identity was the village's house type. This could only be significant if the band was aware of other building types. We know that California was rich in Native American house forms, and that trading routes criss-crossed the area - Chumash shell money has been found as far away as the Great Basin.

Even amongst the Chumash (who, it should be noted, were not a homogenous people but a loose collection of bands that anthropologists have aggregated through language families and dialect groups) there was an array of house forms including their dome shaped thatched huts (Edge Times), sweat lodges, which were sunk into the ground then thatched over with deerweed (Lotus scoparius) and ceremonial enclosures similar to those described in Burn Notice. It can be presumed that there were also storage buildings and perhaps menstral retreats. We also know that shamans had a predeliction for rock shelters, and the Santa Monica and Topa Topa-San Rafael mountain ranges are studded with caves that at one time or another may have became retreats for those out-of-body experiences favored by Chumash medicine men. This variety of shelters underwent subtle transformation from Southern to Northern California such that regional groups could find identity in the particulars of their building stock.

We Euro-Americans share certain house-forms that support our sense of identity, well being and connection to our archetypal notions of shelter. Levi Strauss suggested that mythologies around the world shared fundamental similarities in structure - hence the school of thought he helped found, Structuralism. Something similar, I believe, exists in house forms. Modern buildings are at least partly shaped by wind loads and seismic factors, but all buildings through time have been shaped by vertical loads - the tyranny of the earth's gravitational pull. Within these constraints a set of primal shapes seem to appear in culture after culture.

We still find identity in certain house forms that resonate with our present sense of cultural heritage and more profoundly, with the shelter archetypes we carry with us in our unconscious. Lorrie and I set out to create a barn on the meadow. In our innocence we called it a barn: I am now coming to realize that we may have been accessing, deep from within our memory banks: he, the Saxon hall; she, the Viking long-house. Our imaginations are entwined in the long tail of human memory.

In Cave and Rock I made the distinction between an architecture of object (a rock) and of anthropology (a cave). This comes close to Venturi's typology, the rock being roughly analogous to his 'duck', an object;  and the cave his 'decorated shed' - where there is at least a hint of architectural space-making. I was, I think, beginning to make the argument that the envelopment of space is critical to the way we 'feel' buildings and thus I was suggesting that a cave, with its primal sheltering aspect resonates in our sub-conscious in an entirely different way than an architecture that relies for effect on its exterior form. However, as Venturi taught us, it's not 'either/or' it is 'both/and'. Thus the rock can contain a cave and indeed, be an indicator or a sign of it.

As an object in the landscape, our barn-like home resonates with an ancient notion of human habitation. Although completed less than two years ago, it advertises our long tenancy on planet earth. As the wattle and thatch hovels of the Anglo-Saxon invaders fifteen hundred years ago evolved into the great Saxon Halls built in Britain at the end of the first millennium (pre-figured in the epic poem Beowulf that told of the Dane-halls of Heorot and King Hrothgar) their purpose remained constant. It was to protect their inhabitants from the threats of an enveloping wilderness.

We are not threatened by monsters, but we do contend with reptile infested rocks and the tough sclerophytic leaves of the chaparral that, like dragon scales, protect the ancient earth crust. In Beowulf resides the myth-memory of the Danes, but as Seamus Hearney writes, these myths continue to live through time: they "sweep in off the moors, down through the mist-bands of Anglo-Saxon England, forward into the global village of the third millennium".

Hoop Dreams

Throughout the nineteenth century native peoples confronted the establishment of a hegemonic alien culture on their ancestral homelands and, in a paroxysm of grief, they called forth a stream of visions, phophecies, apocalyptic forecasts and dreams that coalesced into a spiritual revival known as the Ghost Dance. For cultures that understood time as a recursive, seasonal phenomenon, prophecies took the shape of changing worlds; for native Americans the nineteenth century was truly the winter of their discontent and prophecies inevitably involved the coming of spring, the disappearance of Euro-Americans and the return of all the living things which the newcomers had destroyed. This was not a cultural renaissance (Edge Times) but instead a loose aggregation of stress symptoms masquerading as a spiritual awakening. It spoke of desperation, disintegration and disenchantment. It elicited a reaction of fear and hysteria from the European settlers ending famously in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

This was a movement that thrived best in relocation camps - the Indian Reservations - and had a significant Western incarnation, notably amongst the Northern Shoshone and Paiute. In South Dakota it is said that the Lakota people gave all their waking hours to the Ghost Dance and there was an attempt by a government agent to introduce baseball as a competing attraction. The Ghost Dance, based on the familiar round or circle dance, accompanied by wild exhortations and prophesying and interspersed with lengthy periods of trance, won out. Both rituals have become central to the building of their respective national identity.

Late in the nineteenth century the Chumash were a barely surviving relict population scattered to the four winds. They took no part in this last flowering of pan-American native revolutionary spirituality. Their cycle of time had ended in deepest winter.

It was through the Ghost Dance that many tribes forged new social identities that would become critical in their survival as a people. It was one of the key experiences that fostered an Indian identity relevant to the native peoples' coexistence with what was essentially a colonizing power. As Gregory E. Smoak writes in Ghost Dances and Identity, U.C. Press, 2008, "in the late eighteenth century, European colonists along the eastern seaboard of North America, invented a nation and began to invent a national identity". In the nineteenth century, Native Americans began to respond by "developing an Indian identity both as a way of incorporating the newcomers and positioning themselves in the new order".

As I have pointed out previously, such identities are not immutable, they are often shaped by circumstance (Things fall Apart). Pre-contact, native peoples did not possess a shared identity, the essential foundation for social organization was the village or kinship ties; for the Chumash, this foundation was destroyed by the missionization pogrom, and never re-made. For other native peoples, the Ghost Dance was a means for re-establishing identity in a radically changed world while continuing to access their cultural practices and religious beliefs (Smoak).

The Chumash as an ethnically cohesive band, no longer exist. Their blood lines and their kinship ties have been dissipated over the last one hundred and seventy years and only crudely patched together since 1988 to take advantage of the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA). Yet the idea of the Chumash lives on (not least in this blog) and not just as a source of spiritual plunder for new agers eager to appropriate native American spiritual beliefs and warp them to their own ends (Peace Walk). They are the poster-tribe of Southern California.

So when Barbara Kingsolver reviews T.C. Boyle's 'rollicking' new novel, When the Killing's Done, Viking, 2011 which describes a battle between the originalist National Park Service, attempting to restore the Channel Islands to a pristine, pre-contact state and an animal lover rushing to the aid of the sheep, goats and rats that are being removed as invasive species, they are her (and perhaps his) go-to tribe in describing the islands' fishing camps as "dating back to the Chumash"; as if they define the ne plus ultra of ancient habitation.

The Chumash are a fixture of our imaginative conception of the pre-contact, edenic Southern California. But as I indicated in Bobcat Magic, they are far from the 'First People' of California. In a moment of ethnogenetic alchemy the Euro-Asians that followed the kelp road and landed on Santa Rosa became the first Californians thirteen thousand years ago. Absent a living tradition that links back to this point of origination, however tenuously, we are left with a scant archaeological record and the syncretized mythologies of a missing tribe.

The Chumash origin myth concerns Hutash, the earth goddess who populated Santa Cruz island with people conjured from magic seeds. Later, her husband the Sky Snake sent lightning bolts down to the island and thus gave them fire. They prospered to such an extent that the island became crowded and the noise of their gatherings began to annoy Hutash. To alleviate the overcrowding, she created a rainbow bridge across which they could journey to the un-populated mainland. The bridge, high above the ocean gave many of the travelers vertigo and they fell into the sea. Hutash was concerned that she had caused them to drown so she turned them into dolphins, creating a kinship between the marine mammals and the Chumash people.

Rainbows and dolphins are staples of the New Age sensibility and it is hard to imagine that these prototypical feel-good symbols would have survived unchanged in the crucible of revolutionary spirituality that informed the Ghost Dancers - invincible in their white ghost shirts and convinced that change was a comin'.

The great white ghost-bird of Chumash legend that wheeled in the sky and swooped low to investigate a cooking-fire and, charred by the flames, became the coal-black condor might have emerged as a symbol of survival against all odds. Perhaps in that still center of the circle of time, in the middle of the hoop, a prophesy linking their survival to that of Gymnogyps californianus might have galvanized the Chumash people; and perhaps the condor's unlikely survival should give us pause in writing a final epitaph to this lost tribe.

Bobcat Magic

The house is wreathed in bobcat energy. I looked up from my breakfast the other morning to see a small bob-kitten moving through the rocks, deer weed and poison oak at the side of the bowl that rises up beyond the pool terrace. Too young, it struck me, to be entirely without supervision, its mother never showed itself and I assumed the parental role and watched over it for a few minutes. But this fanciful assumption may have run counter to the true nature of my relationship to this wild thing: was it watching over me?

Note the narcissistic tone here: either way it's all about me. In our collective unconscious are housed the archetypes of all creation (if we are to believe Jung) and an animal's physical manifestation, in certain circumstances (Ellen Macfarland), can trigger the free-flow of unconscious archetype to conscious understanding. Perhaps our relationship was bi-lateral; each aware of the other's physical presence (I moved close to the window and I think that we made eye contact) each triggering within ourselves a connection to each others archetype.

We inhabit a world of ideograms which are hard-wired in our brains and these patterns limit (or structure) the pathways of both our thoughts and our creative constructs (Levi Strauss). This bobcat, and others in its family, have laid a web of their archetypal energy over this house and us: we are conjoined, for we have similarly entered into the animals' conscious and unconscious understanding of their surroundings.

The cat represents an atavism, a reprise of our genesis on the savannah (Cave and Rock) - an element in our earliest racial memories. We twenty-first century Americans spend precious little time connecting across the millennia to the 'time before history', as ColinTudge calls it; to the time of our continental wanderings as we emerged from the grasslands of Africa to conquer the planet somewhere between 50 -100,000 years ago - as fully modern homo sapiens.

Our arrival on this continent was comparatively recent. The coastal migration theory (or the Kelp Road) is now widely accepted in debates about the peopling of the Americas and it is believed that Paleo-indian peoples settled the Channel Islands about 13,000 years ago (An Island on the Land). Evidence of this initial landfall on the Americas has been reinforced by the discovery of a Clovis-like fluted point on the coastal plain of Hollister Ranch which suggests Paleo-indians roamed the area using large flint-tipped spears to hunt ice-age mega-fauna - an activity previously believed to have been confined to areas around the land route from Beringia (the so-called land bridge continent) down through the retreating ice-flows into the heart of North America.

This afternoon, with time to kill in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles, I walked over to the La Brea Tar Pits. Here the observation pit, set aside from the more than one hundred excavations that have been dug since 1915, has been left to show the bones of animals as they originally appeared to the researchers mired in a sticky trap of tar and oil. In what appears to be something like a giant's midden, bones of mastodon, sloth and sabre-toothed tiger are scattered amongst skeletons of the dire wolf, western horse, camel and bison. Elsewhere on the site, the bones of extant species such as the bobcat, coyote, fox and badger have been un-earthed from this fabulous store of ice age fauna dating from 10,000 to 40,000 BP. It is not entirely coincidental that the larger, more lumbering fauna experienced a precipitous decline and finally extinction right about the time that man appeared on the scene. 

Perhaps as a reaction to the die-off of these easy prey, around 9,000 years ago a new adaptation emerged locally, characterized by a seed grinding technology (hence Milling Stone peoples);  settlement along the coastal plain and foothills of the central coast became sedentary and focused on seed gathering and the collection of shellfish. About 6,000 years ago a new hunting people emerged archeologically evidenced by small projectile points and animal bone middens of antelope, big-horn sheep and mule deer; and then, by three to four thousand years ago a recognizably Chumash culture had developed characterized by a diversified material culture, the use of acorn flour and a sophisticated political and religious infrastructure. But the larger Chumash coastal settlements that may once have housed up to a thousand inhabitants were mostly abandoned by the early 1800's as missionization decimated the Chumash people and undermined their economic and sociopolitical systems.

There was one brief spark of resistance to their seemingly inevitable extinction. In 1824, after the vicious beating of an Indian at Mission Santa Ines, the Chumash were galvanized into open rebellion at Santa Ines, La Purisima and Santa Barbara missions. The revolt was harshly supressed and many of those who had fled to the back-country elected not to return to the missions (Phantom Dwelling). But worse was to follow: Mexico, having gained control of California from the Spanish, secularized the missions in 1834, which abandoned, then fell into disrepair. The Chumash survivors were dispersed into a foreign society where they attempted to take jobs in towns or on ranches. By the 1880's it is estimated that there were fewer than 300 Chumash still living and of those a handful were eventually relocated to the Santa Ynez reservation, established in 1901. (Jon Erlandson)

Bobcat, fox and coyote have outlasted the indigenous peoples who, millenia ago, contributed to the demise of the mega-fauna; small, fast and cunning these animals eluded spears, clubs and later, arrows, in sufficient numbers to avoid extinction. Instead, they went on to become intimates of the native peoples in myth and magic - as spirit helpers, jokers, talismans and totems.

We are shunned by the coyotes who roam Koenigstein and howl in the Bear Creek gorge to the east of our neighbor Margot's property; foxes are ghost-like - appearing like phantasms in the gloaming at road's edge but never showing themselves close to the house. Only the bobcats' have chosen to include us in their lives. A review of the collected internet wisdom on the role of the bobcat as a shaman's spirit helper seems to suggest that they are a useful adjunct in the transcendance of time and space - a particular obsession with Chumash shaman whose schtick primarily comprised altered states of consciousness (Mining Gravel). They assist (we are told by such as animalspirits.com) in understanding psychic knowledge and ancient mysteries. The animal shows itself, it seems, to those on the path of developing natural internal power and psychic abilities.

What was it that made me trek today to the ancient buried bones of family Felidae? Bobcat magic? You decide.

Edge Times

The interesting stuff happens at the edges, in space and time, at the area or moment of separation between two states. It happens in plant communities, at elevational changes, in the relationship of sun to horizon and in patterns of human habitation.

Wind is generated in between areas of different barometric pressure and in this distended edge-space fierce gales blew overnight on Tuesday. The winds continued through the morning and returning from my run, up Los Osos Lane, I watched a flock of quail swooping in the charging air: rising up they were illuminated by the sun which had just crested Santa Paula Ridge and, dropping low as if to perch amidst the elfin forest they disappeared into the shadows. Twenty or thirty birds in perfect synchronicity, wheeling in the air, playing in the boundaries of sun and shade, probing the edges as the rising tide of light slowly sunk over the land, from mountain top to canyon bottom.

The winds blow down Koenigstein and in the lower reaches, where there is still trash pick up by Harrison, the plastic cans, just emptied, are wind-strewn across the street. Further up, empty beer cans, tossed perhaps, by the callow students of St Thomas Aquinas joy-riding of a weekend, are tumbled down the gutters.

These were north easters, Santa Anas blowing in cold from the desert. The gusty cleansing winds may have been the reason the El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, established in 1781, was laid out at a 45 degree angle to the usual Spanish practice of aligning streets along the cardinal directions. Carey McWilliams suggests that this was to take advantage of the scouring effect of the Santa Anas; in any event, now the City of Los Angeles follows this skewed grid in the Mission district and on these windy days fast-food wrappers and drink cups skuttle down Main, Broadway and Grand until Martin Luther King Boulevard, more or less the southern border of the old Pueblo, where the grid gets religion and reverts to orthodoxy. To the north, the skewed grid comes to rest somewhere around the wilds of Elysian Park. Thus the extent of this apostasy reflects the original boundaries of the Pueblo - which was designed to extend a league, or about two and one half miles, in each direction.

This original settlement at Los Angeles, a primarily secular undertaking, (the Mission was in San Gabriel) was located to take advantage of the pittance of a river (for it flowed best in subterranean aquifers) but was laid out, we can presume, to funnel the howling Santa Anas. These winds are a connection to the deserts beyond the mountains, their fierce dryness a reminder that most of us in Southern California live in a state of hydrated grace.

In continental terms most Southern Californians are edge-dwellers, clinging to that broad ecotone between the mountains and the sea; protected from the aridity of the Great Basin by the San Jacinto, San Bernadino, San Gabriel and Topa Topa - San Rafael mountains that trend north west across the lower part of the State. It is here, on what is essentially a flood plain, that our weather happens. Like California's first people (An Island on the Land), the weather comes (when it comes) from the North Pacific sweeping down from the Gulf of Alaska and, in wet years, it makes it to the Mexican border.

In this La Niña year, it mostly stays north. December was the exception - high pressure in the north Pacific diverted storms south into California, but January saw a reversion to the typical La Niña pattern, with less than an inch of rain and thus far in February not a drop.

Wet or dry, warm or cold, calm or windy, the Southern California basins, flood-plains and canyons that run from the barrier mountains out to the ocean south of the Tehachapi (The Citrus Belt) have offered a reasonably temperate environment for the 13,000 years of human habitation. The Chumash occupation, which accounts for about half that span, occurred at some distance from the retreat of the ice-age, and they enjoyed a substantially settled existence. Already at the westernmost edge of a vast continent they further sought the areas where ecologies were in tension, at marsh, creek, ocean, forest, grassland and chaparral's edge - for it was here that the richest opportunities for sustenance existed.

Despite their varied locations but largely because of the prevailing temperate climate their architectural response to the environment was consistent: circular, framed, domed thatched huts holding as many as fifty people. Using sycamore or willow poles up to twenty feet high planted in a circle of fifteen or twenty feet in diameter they were lashed at the top then connected with thinner horizontal stringers. This space frame was then thatched with giant rye (Leymus condensatus) or, closer to estuarial marshes, California bulrush (Scirpus californicus). Willow bark was used as a lashing material and thatching needles were fashioned of laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) twigs. For their sweat lodges they used deerweed (Lotus scoparius) thatch because it is fire-resistant. Woven Tule (bulrush) was used for door flaps and interior partitions. Floors were hardened by pounding and a ditch surrounding the hut carried away roof drainage.

We know much of this because John P. Harrington (Yuccapedia) encouraged his Chumash consultants to build a traditional thatched house for the 1924 Ventura County Fair, (Jan Timbrook). Harrington understood his opportunity as an ethnographer in the first third of the twentieth century: to record the vanishing life of the Californian natives before their final decline.

This tragic edge, towards which the Chumash culture was nudged after the voyage of Cabrillo became, after the overland arrival of the Spanish in 1769 (Bingo), a precipice. The culture was then summarily dispatched over this cliff by the first wave of European settlers from the eastern states. This flux, this edge-time, seems to have produced, however, little in the way of creative efflorescence.

On the contrary, it has, it seems to me, laid a pall of sadness over the land that is intensified the closer one comes to understanding the natural environment. It is a psychic wound that resides deep in the mountains, creeks, meadows and beaches: a disjunction of human habitation that ultimately diminishes what it is to be Californian.

Personal Entombment

"I keep my temperature at 74 when I'm at the crib
And 79 in the winter time, that's just how I live"

Tech N9ne

In winter, the local ectotherms, snakes and lizards, are torpid. Their blood temperature has cooled and they are, quite literally, chilling. Holed up in a burrow, under a rock or rotting tree trunk their metabolisms have slowed to the point where they no longer need to forage for food. I still tread carefully through the chaparral but I haven't seen a snake for months; but today is warm and the lizards have stirred - one is skittering on the terrace as I write. Ectotherms are animals that warm their bodies by absorbing heat from their surroundings. We endotherms work the other way round. We give warmth to our environment - and this winter, at the house, one of our donors is missing. Griffin, our youngest son, left for art college last fall.

Our linear house is binary in respect to southern glazing - repetitive sixteen foot bays are either fully glazed to the south or not. Griffin's room and my office (two bays) are not and have shaded glazing to the west and east respectively and eight foot ceilings beneath an attic space packed with an air handler, ducting, a photo-voltaic inverter and solar panel piping (carrying glycol) to the hot water tank heat exchanger below. While they do not have the advantage of solar gain the rooms also suffer little or no solar loss at night. They represent the warm heart of the house.

Solar gain is convected to these spaces from both ends of the house and there it is trapped under the low ceiling providing a temperature of five or six degrees warmer than the more glassy ends. Griffin and his machines - TV, computer and powered speakers - added to the warmth of his room and he was pretty snug. "79 in the winter time that's just how I live" had some reality in his life.

Michelle Addington, a systems engineer and materials scientist at the Yale School of Architecture, makes the point that the energy consuming devices, primarily lighting, heating and cooling (HVAC) that exist in a building are all intended to serve the comfort of the human body: but conventional systems attempt to do this by servicing the building rather than the body - we heat and cool entire volumes; we provide standard lighting levels throughout a room. Only when we are sleeping do we focus intently on the body rather than the room because the space we occupy is rigidly prescribed - twin, double, Queen or King.

As homes have become larger, smaller and smaller percentages of the systems that treat the entire space actually impinge on the inhabitants. She notes that, "the body’s heat exchanges occur within a zone of a few centimeters around it, and the eye intercepts only a tiny fraction of the light in a room. Our conventional systems provide ambient conditions in a building—a steady seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit or a constant forty foot-candles".

Everything that exists in a building has a thermal boundary layer - a thin, tight sphere of thermal influence that is then transmitted through convection currents. Griffin managed his boundary layer quite efficiently. He stayed in his room (mostly) and was never known to turn off an electronic appliance - their boundary layers convected to his and all was right with his thermal world. I conducted a long and in the end losing battle with him trying to have him not eat in his room - given his druthers he would have had a toaster oven and micro-fridge in his room so that he could simulate the dorm living that he had so enjoyed in his sophomore year at Besant Hill School.

His room has two 50 w MR-16's down-lights on dimmers and he used a single task light with a compact flourescent when drawing. He lived in about 250 square feet (including his bathroom) and it was we who insisted that he share his meals with us in the larger high ceilinged spaces of the house - otherwise he was ready willing and able to conduct all of his life processes in his man-cave.

Sadly Griffin no longer contributes his warmth to the center of the house. I notice when I go into my home-office first thing in the morning, before dawn, that sometimes the ducts are pumping warm air into the spaces making up for his endothermic contribution. (Yes, we do miss him in other ways....)

Our children live in a world explicated both through real-world visual, aural, tactile and kinetic inputs and social interaction and their electronically simulated equivalents. The latter constitute their primary home or crib connections. While there is a clear separation between the real and the imaged (or texted), the electronic stimulus is convincing enough to demand an architectural container which supports the verisimilitude of these connections. Shadowy light levels, tightly contained space that amplifies the resonance of powered speakers and, in winter, the fug of electric resistance in appliances all contribute to a profoundly energy efficient environment where space is personal.

Buildings continue to be treated as autonomous entities that we almost incidentally inhabit. Thus the house is net-zero-energy, or sustainable or green (whatever) on a stand alone basis rather than as an intimate wrapper to our particular activities. Griffin treated his space as a personal enabler of his relationships with his body (primarily its need for rest, thermal comfort, aural and intellectual stimulation and, kinetic stimulation (video-games): localized lighting and an intimate relationship with the thermal boundary layers of small appliances served these personal interactions.

It is his model that represents the future of energy efficient design. The new social and entertainment media have expanded our 'at-home' worlds. Our need for theatrical space where the kinetic experience of volume and visually stimulating effects - like a view - are paramount has been replaced by the 52" HD screen and the i-pad. This virtual experiential expansion can now reasonably be housed (or shrink-wrapped) in a smaller, better fitting architectural expression where energy inputs are carefully calibrated to the convection currents of the persons and appliances that inhabit the spaces.

In short, to be truly energy efficient, we need to act more like teenagers (or ectotherms), absorbing energy from our (electronic) environment and savoring the shadowy spaces of personal entombment.

An Island on the Land

Long, long ago it was Vineland, then in 1776 it was branded by the founding fathers as the United States of America. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an explosion of branded territories - henceforth known as nations: briefly, California was one such.

William B. Ide issued a proclamation of independence on June 15, 1846, it read in part:

"The Commander in Chief of the Troops assembled at the Fortress of Sonoma gives his inviolable pledge to all persons in California not found under arms that they shall not be disturbed in their persons, their property or social relations one to another by men under his command.....
........He further declares that he believes that a Government to be prosperous and happyfying in its tendency must originate with its people who are friendly to its existence. That its Citizens are its Guardians, its officers are its Servants, and its Glory their reward."

Thus was born the Republic of California. It lasted twenty five days.

California's coast was first populated more than 13,000 years ago. Daisy Cave (official site designation CA-SMI-26) is a rock shelter on the former Chumash burial grounds of San Miguel, the western most island of the four in the Channel Island chain that stretches out off the coast of Ventura (Anacapa, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa are the other three). Here Jon Erlandson of Oregon University has discovered evidence of a kind of kelp culture that could have sustained the first human arrivals. He writes,

"By about 16,000 years ago, the North Pacific Coast offered a linear migration route, essentially unobstructed and entirely at sea level, from northeast Asia into the Americas....With reduced wave energy, holdfasts for boats, and productive fishing, these linear kelp forest ecosystems may have provided a kind of kelp highway for early maritime peoples colonizing the New World."

At Daisy Cave, Erlandson found evidence of human occupations extending from ca.12,000 to 700 Before Present. The oldest artifacts include the remains of kelp resources and small quantities of chipped stone artifacts and marine shells all of which indicate, he suggests, an occupation by an early maritime people during the terminal Pleistocene.

European interest in the lands emerged in the sixteenth century when Spain dubbed their south western and west coast holdings in New Spain as Las Californias, but what is now called California remained an island in cartographers imaginations until 1705 when the Jesuit Missionary, Father Kino, by walking from New Mexico to the California Pacific coast, confirmed that California was indeed part of the North American mainland, but it was not until 1747, that King Ferdinand VII of Spain finally decreed that California was not an island.

Still under this mythic spell, Cabrillo's quest in 1542 was to discover the north-west passage - the imagined link between the Atlantic and the Pacific which would allow Spain direct ocean access to the riches of the Orient - a geographical miscalculation that was the motivation for much of the exploration of the New World on both sides of the continent.

San Miguel re-entered the history of California when Cabrillo broke his arm there while exploring the island. He continued his voyage and reached as far as Point Reyes in what is now Marin County but was forced to return by heavy weather and his gangrenous wound. On the return voyage he again put in at San Miguel where he died and was subsequently buried on the nearby island of Santa Rosa in 1543.

Later in the century, in 1577,  Francis Drake ventured up the coast reaching the present state of Washington; on his return he too put in at Point Reyes for repairs to his ship the Golden Hinde, and took the opportunity to claim the land he called Nova Albion (New England) for his Queen, Elizabeth I.

Despite Spain's interest in developing a west coast port as a lay-over on the arduous voyage from Mexico (Acupulco) to the Phillipines and further sporadic, exploration, California remained safely in the hands of its indigenous people until 1769 when threats of Russian encroachment spurred Spain to establish its military and religious presence (Blowback).

California continued, during the Mission period and through its annexation to a newly independent Mexico in 1824 to be both explored and peopled along a north-south axis, with settlers arriving either overland or by sea. Voyagers along the Kelp Highway had originally arrived from the north; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Russians followed this maritime route from their established settlements in Alaska and by 1808 were hunting and trading in Bodega Bay - a few miles north of Drakes Bay at Point Reyes.

California then, if not an island, was most certainly a land of the Pacific littoral connected with Mexico but entirely separate from the historical development of the United States until moments after its brief incarnation as the Bear Flag Republic.

Successive waves of migration from the east then fell upon the land (initially drawn by the lure of gold) and in short order the Grizzly and the indigenous peoples were gone, so too were much of the coastal wetlands, dunes, and sage scrub. The kelp survives in relict stands around the Channel Islands; in the cool currents of Catalina they support a unique marine eco-system (and the glass-bottomed boat tourist industry).

But in this month when the blossoming ceanothus veils the hillsides and its honeyed scent lies heavy in the air, I am reminded that the one inviolable connection to our pre-human history is The Democratic Republic of Chaparral. Fractured, disjunct and absent from the public imagination until it burns, chaparral remains the defining characteristic of the land we now call California and renders it, in an echo of how it was long imagined, An Island on the Land (Mission Creep).

Pitch Perfect

We may still associate Beginnings, Middles and Ends with fairy tales and the human span, but life all around us argues for a less linear view of the Universe. This second year of weeding I have abandoned my Cartesian mindset, embraced the recursive and transcended the lessons of Sisyphus. Along the way I have learnt to recognize California goosefoot (Chenopodium californicum).

The west meadow runs parallel to the gentle slope upon which our house now sits; at the top of the rise is an oak grove and at the bottom the confluence of Bear Creek and the eastern seasonal stream. When we purchased the site, the asphalt driveway ran safely over the seasonal stream via an Arizona crossing, past the Edison pole that brought power to the well and then stopped short, with obvious intentions - but no County requirement - to continue up-slope. Just before its termination, there was a path that headed west creating a fork with the incipient driveway acting as the eastern branch.

The driveway now continues to the house and the path has been further established by both the truck trips to the compost pile (Sinology) and the scattering of chipped laurel sumac along its length. Midway to the top is a flat area where our 200 tons of rocks - unearthed from the benching excavation that created the house terrace - were stored and later removed (Stoned). To the west of this area is a band of chaparral that then descends steeply to a riparian habitat along Bear Creek. To the east is the path and beyond that sage scrub, then a slope up to the rocky chaparral covered spine which runs between meadows. When the rocks were removed we were left with a reasonably level area of dirt, scraped clean of vegetation: a petrie dish awaiting the germination of post-1769 non-natives!

For that short period when the bare soil had been greened but the true horror of the weed infestation had yet to be realized I thought of that patch of dirt as my cricket pitch. There are 22 yards (a chain) between the wickets of a cricket pitch and while the outfield would be uneven in width it was more than adequate for a game of bush-cricket. The pitch (I imagined) would run east west because although I liked to think the area was flat the prevailing slope was very definitely in the north-south direction and a pitch with the same orientation would give a wicked advantage to a down-slope bowler and cruel handicap to the chap toiling up-hill; but before the summer had truly arrived the cricket field disappeared under a mantle of mustards and thistles.

Over the summer the weeds dried, shed their seeds and became a dense thicket of canes. Last weekend was spent in raking, hoeing and pulaskiing my way through the brittle thistle stalks, the re-leafing mustards and dried grasses and dumping the airy mass on the dense, dark, warm stew of last spring's weeds that is now the compost pile - situated just to the north of the erstwhile, imagined cricket field.

It was exhilarating to reveal the natives amidst the dross: great drifts of deer weed (Lotus scoparius) are emerging that presage the revival of Sage Scrub; poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) is beginning to leaf out; wild cucumber (Marah macrocarpus) is vining promiscuously and at the edges of the disturbed soil, California goosefoot has established itself.

Lorrie, anxious to begin her program of domesticating the chaparral close to the house cleared the mixed border (the east face of the spine closest to the house) of dead twigs and grasses and then moved onto the banks of the seasonal stream where ferns face east and the bright green foliage of California everlasting dot the west facing slope. Lurking at the ready, close to the ground, are the serrated, basal leaves of the dreaded thistles - still a little too young to yank from the ground.

Up slope, a little east of the stream, she trimmed back the toyon and holly-leaved cherry and hacked away at the dead branches of......three scrub oaks (Quercus dumosa) that had been hiding in plain sight; awaiting, apparently, the kind ministrations of an elf (or its earthly minion, Lorrie) bearing a pair of loppers. They form a small grove and are delightful to behold - the typical oak (in Spanish, chapporo) of the chaparral almost at our doorstep. Towering above them to the west is the magisterial grouping of oaks (Quercus agrifolia) that seem now crass in comparison with these delicate multi-trunked, tiny leafed denizens of the Elfin Forest (Brand 'X').

A close reader of this blog may have discerned in its author a level of enthusiasm for California and its 'signature eco-system', chaparral (Richard W, Halsey). I was pre-sold on this native wilderness long before we built a house in its midst. Annie Proulx (Brokeback Mountain, Shipping News) had long written about Wyoming before deciding to build her dream home in 670 acres of wetland-grassland-shrublands where prowl elk, mountain lion and, apparently, the neighbor's cattle. She began building her house in 2003, just a year before we bought our first land on Koenigstein, and her experience has not been a happy one.

After two years of construction with recalcitrant builders, seemingly constant 70-100 mph winds and massive cost overuns she stayed just one year in the completed project driven out of her home by the discovery that the road into town was not plowed - rendering her a prisoner of the snowy wastes for five months of the year. Despite her love of the land she came to understand that this place she called Bird Cloud, sited atop a precipitous cliff overlooking the North Platte River "never could be the final home of which I had dreamed". (Bird Cloud, Scribner, 2010)

Building in the wildlands has a degree of difficulty that we in no way approached with construction of our house in the Ojai hinterlands. We built at the Wildland/Urban interface - where we have a foot in both worlds and access to a broad, and broadly competitive range of trades and services. If there are similarities between Bird Cloud and the project we sometimes call Rock Fall they exist in the attempt of both endeavours to replace a whole range of Urban experiences, social propinquities and opportunities for diversion with the compelling presence of the natural world. That presence demands a high level of tolerance for the cyclical nature of being. It offers not a linear experience of progress, moving ever forward, but a glimpse instead, into the eternal verities of the natural and spiritual worlds.

Like the snows of Wyoming the weeds will surely return: the mark of our spiritual progress - if there can be such a thing - is the extent to which we abandon notions of ultimate triumph but nevertheless enjoin in yearly battle confident that we can, at the margins, make a difference.

Burn Notice

The Missions in California represented one side of a distinctly asymmetrical culture war with the native peoples of the region - the Chumash world was changed forever while the interaction left barely a mark on the Church.

Little has changed in this equation. Despite being built on the site of the ancient Chumash village of Sisa, the architecture of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, Thomas Aquinas College (Woman of the Apocalypse) primarily reflects the classical past of the old world. While it makes an almost imperceptible nod to the Mission tradition there is no gesture whatsoever to the form or symbol-making traditions of the people who were its first Californian converts.

While hybrid religions have proliferated throughout the world blending traditions from Asia, Africa, New World and Old, Roman Catholicism has remained largely immutable since its own hybridized development out of an ancient Middle Eastern monotheism (viz. The Old Testament) via the pagan traditions that flourished throughout the Roman Empire. Vatican II, 1962-65, however, opened the way for the inculturation of the Roman Catholic liturgy. Pope John Paul II explains in his encyclical #52, (1990) that "By inculturation, the Church makes the Gospel incarnate in different cultures and at the same time introduces peoples, together with their cultures, into her own community".

In the eighteenth century, the number of baptisms performed on the Chumash people was the measure of the Missions' success (and is one of the few records against which the size of the native population can be gauged) but it was achieved not by making concessions to the local culture but by Franciscan zeal and Spanish military hegemony.

Only the original adobe bell tower and Mission bell survived from the St. Bartholomew’s Chapel on the Luiseño Rincon reservation after the Poomacha Fire in North San Diego County in 2007, but remarkably, a new Chapel has been built on the site of the old that incorporates both Native American and Catholic symbols and metaphors.

Fires pose a near constant threat to Southern California's wildlands. Rick Halsey points out that their frequency has undergone a dramatic increase over the past century and that nearly all fires in the region are caused by human activity (Fire, Chaparral and Survival In Southern California, Sunbelt Publications, San Diego, 2008). The Poomacha fire started as an anthropogenic structure fire on the La Jolla Indian Reservation and spread, over the next days, throughout the Pauma valley on the edge of the Cleveland National Forest fueled by 100 mile per hour Santa Ana winds.

The Luiseño did not have contact with the Spanish until the expedition of Gaspar De Portola in 1769. Three decades later, their culture was terminally impacted by the establishment of the San Luis Rey Mission in what is now Oceanside. As head of the Franciscan Mission, Fr. Peyri allowed the Luiseño to remain in their traditional villages visiting them in situ to perform baptisms, mass and marriages. Times were harder after the secularization of the Missions in 1834, but they were not finally displaced from their lands until 1848 at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and the transfer of California to the United States. In 1875, however, the Luiseño La Jolla Reservation was established by executive order of Ulysses S. Grant.

There are now twin Luiseño reservations, La Jolla and Rincon. Both were ravaged by the fire but their ability to recover has been fundamentally shaped by their gambling interests. The Rincon reservation is funded by royalty payments from Harrah's Casino and Hotel built on reservation land. To the east, The San Diego Union-Tribune (November 5, 2007) reported that the La Jolla reservation must rely on state, federal, and insurance funds to effect renewal. The reservation's chairman is quoted as saying, "We are a non-gaming tribe". Not for the want of trying.

The North County Times reported on August 26, 2010 that the La Jolla Band of Mission Indians is proposing to build a casino and hotel on its Palomar Mountain reservation with a projected completion date of 2012. This comes after an aborted attempt in 2004, to build a 35,000-square-foot casino with 500 slot machines, a restaurant and 150-room hotel. In 2002, the band successfully opened, but later closed, a 30-machine slot arcade in a convenience store next to Highway 76. The new proposal calls for a 480,000-square-foot gambling and hotel facility with 200 rooms with six separate villa suites and a parking structure. Nice.

In the metaphorical shadow of their casino (undamaged in the fire), and without apparent concern for irony, the Rincon Luiseño ordered up a new chapel that would reconnect with the spirit of traditional Indian culture: of living lightly on the land. The Chapel utilizes a significant amount of site harvested building materials; the signature element being the massive rammed earth walls that flank the sanctuary, each nearly 60 feet long, 18 feet tall, and two feet thick. Symbolically important, these walls are built of 120 tons of sacred reservation soil. A local three ton boulder was crafted into the baptismal font and slabs of wood hewn from reservation oaks are used in furniture pieces. A thin film Solar PV system, high thermal mass construction, carefully oriented glazing and deep overhangs contribute to the Chapel's sustainable credibility. It is expected to earn LEED gold certification.

Using the notion of inculturation, the architect Kevin De Freitas incorporates a specific element of Luiseño iconology, the Wamkish, into the plan.  Wamkish were the traditional ceremonial enclosures of the Luiseño built in the form of semi-circular enclosures woven from thicket. The distinction between being inside or outside the enclosure was a key feature of the ceremonies. In St Bartholomew, an abstracted Wamkish in white stone forms the north and south (liturgical east and west) walls of the church. These wall sections define two significant moments of the church: the entrance moving from convex to concave, relating to the traditional ritual use of the Wamkish, and the concave enclosure of the sanctuary on which hangs the corpus, or representation of the crucified body of Christ. (Locus Iste)

In Luiseño culture the Wamkish was used for the most critical rites of passage, in particular, boys' and girls' puberty ceremonies. In The Religion of the Luiseño Indians of Southern California, 1908, the anthropologist, Constance Goddard DuBois, describes it thus,

"In the main place the sacred enclosure of brush, the wamkish, is built in a circle to about the height of a man. On the ground inside are placed the sacred ceremonial objects: the tamyush or sacred stone, toloache (jimson-weed, Datura meteloides), bowls, feather head-dresses and eagle-feather skirts; and the paviut, the sacred sticks (wands) with flint (crystals) in the end."

Typically, after several weeks of drug-fueled ceremonies the Wamkish, made of willow twigs and other chaparral brush, was ritually burned.

The old St Bartholomew's Chapel was un-ceremoniously burnt to the ground during the Poomacha chaparral fire of 2007. A new chapel has arisen on the site of the old: but by invoking the spirit of the Wamkish in its design it is inviting its sacred destruction by fire - an act to be initiated not by a Luiseño shaman but by the next cycle of chaparral fires that swirl through the Pauma valley - an inculturation not wholly anticipated, perhaps, by the Councils of Vatican II and Pope John Paul II.

Woman of the Apocalypse

Situated just a little west of the confluence of the Sisar and Little Santa Paula Creeks, Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, rises up out of the campus but viewed from the road (as it most often is) appears to be set deep in chaparral. It offers a remarkable vision.

The site, as I noted in Mining Gravel, has a storied past. In 1929, oil baron Edward Doheny' s wife commissioned a 9,000 square foot mission-style hacienda designed by Wallace Neff. It was reputedly built in six weeks as a country retreat for her husband who was reeling from his involvement in the lawsuits surrounding the Teapot Dome scandal and the murder of his only son in 1928 at the Greystone estate in Beverly Hills. The college purchased the site - where once sat the Chumash village, Sisa - in 1975 and the adobe house now serves as the president's residence. 

The college and the chapel represent a contemporary manifestation of Catholicism - as did the missions following the expansion of Spanish influence in Alta California in 1769. The linkage between these two expressions of the Church is made more explicit by the intentions of the founding fathers of the college who wanted it to return to "the kind of academic excellence that flourished in ancient Greece or in the great medieval universities in Europe. Simply put, they wanted to return not to the 1950s, but to the 1350s". (Thomas Aquinas College)

Similarly, the chapel represents a conservative ethos: drawing upon two millennia of Catholic architecture, Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel embraces the Church's Early Christian, Renaissance, and Spanish Mission heritage. But it is a high-style mash-up; with none of the primal primitivism that enlivens the missions and that is spectacularly in evidence at Santa Barbara and La Purisma. Instead, there is the curious, ahistorical combination of a cruciform building, a dome over the crossing, columns and arches - like some kind of mutant basilica frozen in the moment of transformation. Ultimately it represents a discontinuity with the indigenous Mission tradition and a misunderstanding of classical antecedents: as such, for all its bravura formalism this $25 million pile is profoundly provincial.

More important, perhaps, than its architectural provenance, the chapel's 135-foot-high bell tower reliably rings out the Angelus three times each day, evoking California's Mission history and tolling, in part, for the ghosts of the departed California Natives.

The Chumash were essentially animists - they understood themselves to be part of the natural world in a way that we can barely comprehend. The Missions were established by Franciscans who professed a similarly inclusivist attitude to the sentience of other creatures - animals are brothers and sisters - and all things are considered symbols and bearers of Christ, the firstborn brother of every creature. In this pantheist spirit, Francis might well have found the Chumash to be soul brothers and sisters. His purported followers, not so much.

Francis treated objects as beings endowed with reason and spoke to them as if he were speaking to human beings. His outlook is diametrically opposed to the idea of humanity's absolute dominion over the physical world and to its thoughtless exploitation. He was an animist and a biophiliac first and a Christian mystic second (or third). 

However, the structure of the Church is such that its mysteries are conventionally revealed not in the natural world but within the liturgy of the mass - consecrated within the physical container of a church rather than, as Francis might have preferred, in the wildlands. Thus it is that the Missions, like the churches of medieval Europe had to compete with the natural world in capturing the spiritual imaginations of their audience.

I visited the chapel for a midnight mass on Christmas eve, in part, to remind myself of how they achieved this unlikely feat. I had, for weeks, been listening to A Choir of Angels II: California Mission Music, performed by Zephry with Paul Gibson, conducting, a haunting, otherworldly collection of early California music. The CD was given to me by Richard Lyons, who with his wife Laurie, lives above Thomas Aquinas College and whose company Civic Classics Records recorded and released the music. The 24 tracks became part of our Christmas mix this year along with Bob Dylan's gravelly voiced renditions of seasonal songs and Annie Lennox's new album, Christmas Cornucopia. The live choral and organ music that emanated from the chapel's choir balcony and floated over the congregation in the nave below was beautifully performed but it failed to raise the kind of goose bumps that the recorded Mission music regularly induced.

We (Lorrie, Griffin and I) gazed at the bronze solomonic columned baldochinno while the music played on. This altar canopy is a rendition of the tent that Yahweh commanded the Israelites to erect over the Ark of the Covenant (Ex. 25-27) and arrives here, in this chapel in Sulphur Springs deep in the California chaparral, via the baroque stylings of Bernini's St. Peter's Basilica. The Ark itself is either long gone or, according to the 1981 Spielberg movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is sitting in some C.I.A. depository in the north east corridor never again to clear the path of the righteous by spewing burning snakes, scorpions, and thorns via jets of flame that reputedly shot from its underside (T. VaYakhel, 7).

The canopy's effulgence and the slatherings of marble on the nave columns and floor conjured, even to my jaded eyes, visions of heavenly opulence. My spiritual imagination had been tempted by both sight and sound but when the priest finally arrived in procession with his acolytes, one of whom wielded a censor, the burning tree resins frankincense and myrrh failed to waft through the space. Perhaps on this chilly evening the incense had stopped burning. I reflected that the scents of the chaparral are more reliably up-lifting.

The builders of the chapel were explicit in their goals: their vision incorporated four distinguishing marks - beauty, grandeur, permanence and tradition; these qualities are linked with truth, transcendence, the eternal and wisdom. Their captive audience of Catholic students and locals who come to the faith through family affiliation undoubtedly are susceptible to this symbolism and find it faith affirming. As an interloper intent on the casual frisson afforded by spiritually inflected music and the bravura caperings of an ecclesiastical architect (Duncan G. Stroik) and whose vision of Christmas owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas, it is unreasonable to expect transcendence. 

We can only guess what proportions of gilded beauty, edificial grandeur, transcendent music, moral suasion and brute force were required to Christianize the Chumash. They arrived at the Missions as a devastated population wrenched wholesale from their own universe of affirmation: the complex fabric of a society tightly woven into the rhythms of the natural world. Missionized they were but it was, as they say, a Pyrrhic victory.

While the Chumash barely survive as a relict community the Church still fishes for souls using its medieval trappings - Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel being a particularly elaborate piece of this religious schtick. Sitting in its dell on the old Fernwood Ranch, with Wallace Neff's gate house still standing as the campus entry and the chapel's bell tower and dome floating over the chaparral that rises up and over Santa Paula Peak (oil derricks scattered along its flanks) Thomas Aquinas College stands as a living reminder of California's heartrending history - more potent than the dead shells of Missions strung along the 101 and infinitely more edifying than the living remnant of Chumash culture, the Santa Ynez Chumash Casino and Resort (Bingo).

Wild and Free

Friday: I drove home yesterday in the twilight with the Topa Topas wreathed in cloud. There had been patchy cloud in the morning, but as I left the property around ten the sun briefly made an appearance. That was it for the day. No rain, just low, soft clouds drifting through the landscape or occasionally swirling around hill tops or submerging the crowns of oaks. In short, a cloudy day.

This morning I awoke to light rain falling on the roof - barely audible, and its shedding, in soft drips, from eave to gravel. It cleared briefly around daybreak, enough to tempt me into taking my morning run but by the time I was on Sisar Road the rain returned. Now, mid morning, it continues.

The big aesthetic pay-off on a rainy day, for me at least, comes in the darkening of tree trunks. Close by, the green of the oaks is shinier, made more intense by the rain; beyond, the grey undertones and the sage grey-greens recede into a smudged chaparral monochrome; but it is the chaparral tree trunks and their filigreed branches - that the wet turns to charcoal - that give the chaparral its rainy-day oomph, its graphic amplification.

A flock of yellow rumped warblers (Dendroica coronata) are fluttering, close to the ground, swooping and jinking and providing low level animation to the scene. Flashes of white at their grey-black wings and breasts are like ice-shards fallen from the sky while puffs of yellow at their throats and rumps punctuate their plumage (their common name is Butter butt).

 The luminosity of the sky, such as it is on this grey day, is reflected on the horizontal faceting of the newly unearthed yellow-wet sandstone rocks that scatter the site: absent new back-hoe turmoil these will slowly patinate with rock varnish (the fusion of eons of dust onto the rock surface) and be embroidered with lichen. Over time their color palette will slowly recede into somber chaparral tones.

Meanwhile, under a ledge of exposed rock, still mostly yellow and brown, in the slope below the cluster of oaks near the house, a bobcat has settled in for the morning sheltered from the worst of the rain. Almost motionless, it is magnificently camouflaged. It stares intently at Lorrie and me, then when Lorrie checks on it later in the morning, its eye-lids are heavy and it is nodding off for a snooze. Around lunchtime it leaves, sauntering up-slope through the deer weed (Lotus scoparius) where Lorrie catches glimpses of it until it is over the crest of the hill.

I left for Los Angeles mid-morning in light rain and my thoughts turned from the sphinx-like bobcat to the watershed upon which our house is perched. We are a part of the Santa Paula Creek watershed, at its western edge. Somewhere a little west of the Summit, perhaps around Hall's apricot ranch, the land tips away and surface drainage contributes to the Ventura River. Sisar Creek is on the cusp and at one time contributed to the westerly river. Now it receives tribute from Bear Creek then, at St. Thomas Aquinas, it links up with Little Santa Paula and they together become Santa Paula Creek which joins the mighty Santa Clara River just east and south of Santa Paula Airport.

Wild and free, the river continues west towards the ocean and disgorges south of the Ventura Harbor. Predictably, Juan Batista de Anza (The Sage Gatherer) and his expedition camped on its banks in February 1776 on their way north and observed 'geese, ducks, cranes, and other fowl'; in this detail at least, not much has changed. I followed its course for a while on the 126 before heading south on the 118 to Saticoy and then jumped on the 101 to Las Posas. This maneuver takes you from the northern edge of the Oxnard plane to its southern termination against the tail end of the Santa Monica Mountains where their north face and the flatlands drain into Calleguas Creek (Camarillo Brio).

On Las Posas, where it seems, room for the road is only reluctantly given up by farmers who plant almost to its edge and where, in the wet, mud quickly migrates from edge to road, the rain, mud, road and sky merge into a leaden scrim. It's a bleak scene: farm-worker's cars parked on the verge are painted brown by waves of muddy spray from passing traffic; off in a field there is a fuzz of white thrown off by sprinklers ironically adding to the sodden mess. The water will find its way to the creek, slip beneath the P.C.H., flow on to Mugu lagoon and then inject a brown plume into the ocean.

To the south and running all the way to the Seebees' rifle range, north of Mugu Rock, is a wetland: part of a classic ocean, beach, dune and wetland succession running a half mile or more to the west flanks of the Santa Monica mountains and disturbed only by the ribbon of road. On this day, as on many others over the years, I pull off the highway and take a pee next to the barbed wire fence which protects the wetland, and watch the muddy rivulets twine amidst the sedges and saltbrush.

For nearly twenty years I lived on a street named for a prodigous pouring of concrete by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930's. The naming of West Channel Road memorialized the encapsulation of the creek that runs out of Will Roger's State Historical Park and into the ocean at the northern tip of Santa Monica. Our house was built on an erstwhile delta - the point at which the creek would have widened during winter into a tangle of rivulets meandering over the flat bottom of the canyon, each finding its way to the ocean, digging through the low dunes in concert and then depositing their silt, rocks and debris a few hundred yards out into the ocean creating, over the ages, a beautiful fish reef and surf break.

All that ended with the WPA channel project - putting bread on the table for some but finally destroying a beautiful canyon, the fish reef and surf. All that is left of its pristine past are the fine gravel soil (Mining Gravel) a few sycamores and the watercress which still grows in the concrete creek bottom.

Sunday: Now, on a property that this wet weekend is contributing inches of rain (about 6 so far) over its twenty seven acres, to the Santa Clara River - via Bear Creek and its eastern tributary (which, when I checked this morning is flowing lustily for the first time this year) I am happy to contemplate the water's unhindered voyage to the ocean in creeks and river, mostly, still, wild and free.

Oil and Trouble

Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Shakespeare: Macbeth Act 4, scene 1, 10-11

We are under siege. The machines of war surround us. Guy wires support the hundred feet high scaffolding necessary to re-drill old wells - their leases expiring in 2018, and primary production a thing of the past, the oil reservoirs have begun to lose pressure and perhaps the injection of water or steam, or a deeper well can revive productivity. These oil derricks have sprung up like mushrooms on both sides of our high valley. Some stay for weeks and run 24-7 (Bad Dreams) others disappear, work complete, after a few days. Some are lit at night, others are stark silhouettes by day and then melt away into the darkness.

There is talk that the oil companies may have found a way to access the vast off-shore reserves from high on Sulphur Mountain where, on a clear day you can see down to the channel between Ventura and Santa Cruz where lie the Santa Clara and Sockeye off-shore oil fields. A decade or so ago slant drilling was a new development in oil well technology, now horizontal drilling is commonplace.

Steam injection is also being used to squeeze ever more oil from the rock in which it resides. According to the Ventura County Star (06-26-2010),

"Bakersfield-based Tri-Valley Corp. has drilled seven horizontal wells in its Oxnard fields to get at the heavy oil there. These wells are drilled down vertically and over horizontally. It then pumps steam into those wells and pumps oil out. The steam reduces the viscosity of the oil so it becomes thinner and moves into the lower well. The heated oil and water is then pumped to the surface and separated, with the water being cleaned and reused for new steam generation. These types of wells can get up to 60 percent of oil from a deposit."

Schwarzenegger's moratorium on further offshore drilling in California, along with the rising price of oil, is putting greater pressure on the oil fields of Ventura County where 63 idle wells were returned to production in 2009.

It's a dirty business but it is also a staple of the County's economy. I am reminded of the old British, north country saying, 'where there's muck there's brass (money)'; but the wells, the pumps, the pipes and now the drill derricks are, in Upper Ojai, affronts to its residents' mostly lyrical sensibility.

They threaten our cocoon of domesticity: we privilege the aesthetic qualities of the land over its worth to farmers and oil companies. This is at the heart of the practice of land-use zoning: different constituents require distinct guarantees of their rights to use the land in different ways. Oil well infrastructure has few aesthetic champions (although I enjoy my runs through the post-apocalyptical landscape of the Silver Thread oil leases that cover the hills to the west of St. Thomas Aquinas and continue to Osborne Road off the 150).

There is a ranch to the east of Koenigstein on the high plain that is mostly used as cattle grazing that has a gas flare pipe at the entry to its driveway that I covet; and in Saturday Night Special I mention the oil well as lawn ornament in front of the old stone house on the bend below the Summit; but no one is seriously suggesting that oil wells can offer amenity to residential development in the way that citrus groves, golf courses, trout streams and of course, chaparral can.

Some kinds of farming have greater aesthetic value than others. Ojai benefits, a couple of times a year, from the great drifts of orange blossom perfume that rise up from the East End's groves (The Citrus Belt). Citrus can be reasonably well integrated into sporadic residential development, and the fields of lavendar, olives and pixie tangerines at the Evendon's Upper Ojai New Oak Ranch are a delightful complement to the rough charm of the chaparral above them and their neighbor's newly planted vines strike deeply mellifluous old-world notes. More generally however, economic imperatives cut across such fairy tale notions of mixed-use.

Words establish seams of meaning that run through time: each generation transects the seam mostly oblivious to the reservoirs of implication that lie deep in the past. The oil derrick was named after a type of gallows used in the 16th century, which were named for an English executioner, Thomas Derrick. (Wikipedia). On a field near Godalming in Surrey, close by where I grew up, winter rains would manifest a circle of perhaps 100 feet at its interior diameter and 40' wide that appeared as a moat. The depression had been caused by centuries of trampling by townspeople gathered to watch unfortunates hanging from the local gibbet. In Upper Ojai, we are the less than willing spectators to the last rites of a dying industry, watching helplessly as it frantically sucks the last barrels of fossil fuel from the land beneath our feet.

Sinology

Apercu, epiphany or simply a realization long-past-due, the un-lived last third of my life offers up an opportunity: God willing, to continue in the process of opening up to the universe (and maybe figuring out what the hell that means); establishing my place in the tribe and preparing for a good death. This braided journey requires psychic and physical space; both can benefit from an anchoring: a sense of place.

When we were bringing up the two boys in Santa Monica Canyon, their mother and I would sometimes talk about how important it was for them to feel grounded, possess a rootedness, belong.

Very few of us get to go back to the places of our childhood and make a living in them. One such is Adam Tolmach, the local winemaker who after studying at U.C. Davis returned to his mother's Ojai estate to make wine (Where Native Meadows Come From). Many more of us fail, through frequent moves or finding ourselves in desultory environments, to even make an initial connection that might hold out the lure of return.

While I spent the ages of five to eighteen in one spot in a corner of Surrey, England my attachment was to our garden rather than the wider environment (The Scythians). The Heritage Industry had already made our local villages into death masks - preserving a hideous rictus grin on the presumed glories of their medieval past while the bodies rotted away within. Young people left. Local families were priced out of the housing market and wealthy young urban professionals, with half-an-eye on London, moved in to their 'places-in-the-country'.

A sense of place is not a given where economic opportunity rarely coincides with either birth-place or geographic predilection: gone are the days when local knowledge, learnt from family or won by dint of observation could be routinely leveraged into a livelihood. Instead, we cast around for environmental attachment wherever we can find it. Some of us, like those Londoners long ago who moved (and today still move) to quaint Surrey villages and retain economic ties to the 'big smoke' be it London or Los Angeles, cultivate hastily made traditions in their adopted 'places' - such as Upper Ojai.

Griffin, our younger son, has returned to Los Angeles to attend Otis College of Art and Design - while Will, our older boy remains in New York three and a half years after finishing college there. What we taught them, perhaps, was not attachment to a particular place, but the means to establish a relationship to both the built and natural worlds so that wherever they are there is a chance for a connection, a conversation with the physical environment along side of the media chatter that threatens to engulf us all.

We are oriented in the world in ways that depend on our lived experience of it and our imaginative conjuring of those places we have never visited. Within this constructed world of the real and the imagined, places can be transformed. They can become. Take China. I visited the other day. Or felt that I had.

While Lorrie and I walked across the parking lot in Oxnard towards the front door of Bed Bath and Beyond that hitherto I had only seen from the backside, as an illuminated sign stuck on the back of a big (stucco) box as I whizzed along the 101, she regaled me with the story of the time our friend Andy Dintenfass, erstwhile cinematographer, now art-dealer and a man of exquisite aesthetic sensitivities, had been lured into BB&B's Manhattan store by his wife Ann to buy towels. Andy was pole-axed. He consequently had to lie, like a concussion victim, in a dark room for several days while he nursed the massive hematoma to the right side of his brain - seat of his artistic sensibility - inflicted by the seemingly endless displays of razzle-dazzle end-of-days tawdriness - the chromed plastic, plush, crystal and glitter that lined the store's shelves.

I am made from coarser stuff, and I made it into the store without fainting away. I was however, transported out of my accustomed world: a stranger in a strange land (Exodus 2: 21-22 via Heinlein). Strange it may have been, but not entirely unrecognizable; I had the strongest sense that I was in a depository, a storehouse from Cathay, filled not with cultural treasures from the Orient (Wolf Oak) but with the outpourings of countless first, second and third-world, back-yard, high-tech or sweated labor shops from China, this latter-day 'land of a thousand trades'. This moniker was first appended (like a piece of the cheap jewelry that was one of its signature manufactures) to Birmingham which, in 1791, Arthur Young had described as “the first manufacturing town in the world.” By the mid-nineteenth century it was commonly known as 'the workshop to the world'.

But here and now, I was confronted with an epiphany: the Beyond in BB & B was the long sought after passage to the East. Through the plate glass curtain wall entry there was an enfilade straight into the belly of the manufacturing beast, to the treasures (or trinkets) of the orient, to the raison d'etre for this continent's subversion by Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. We left the store with half a dozen small purchases and sure enough all had been manufactured in China except for the taper candles which were made in that ancient Chinese dependency, Thailand.

Now, we see China in everything. Our imaginations have been subsumed by the Middle Kingdom. One recent Friday I spent a few hours with an old friend, Dennis Whelan, a planner for UCSB, touring the campus. Although our focus was on the many buildings created during Dennis's twenty year tenure, the subtext, for me, was provided by the walking experience along the broad paseos which reach through the campus in search of the views beyond: mountains to the north and ocean to the south. Like the fabled terminus of the central north-south axis of the Forbidden City, it is not hard to imagine in the soft Santa Barbara light and warm breezes, that Xanadu lies just beyond.

Of the fourteen thousand students, faculty and staff that bicycle to the UCSB campus everyday most, it seems, use their bikes during the day to navigate the campus. Jostling fixies, ancient ten-speeds, cruisers, mountain bikes, single speeds and sit-up-and-begs streamed by and alongside, there was the antic weaving of skateboarders who wove along on a parallel path. For decades, China was known as the 'bicycle kingdom'. There was a time when Beijing had four million bicycles - now there are four million cars and their numbers are expanding at a dizzying rate. As China adopts the car, on this campus at least, California adopts the bicycle. Cars are restricted to a ring road and the only viable way to navigate the sprawling campus is on a bike or board.

We still walk our property: the loop takes us down the drive, turning past the wood piles, along the trail to the west meadow, past the compost, past the walnuts, elderberries, oaks and laurel sumac, through the sage; skirting the oak grove at the top of the meadow we make a sharp turn up the shoulder of the spine that runs between the meadows then down the path, past the rock pond, past toyon, ceonothus and chamise then into the deerweed and down to the house. Each loop taken embeds memories of seasons, scents, of sun and shadow. Each loop taken makes surer this sense of place.

Nocturne

Quinn and Keeley, in their Introduction to California Chaparral, U.C. Press, Berkeley, 2006, blithely note that wood rats (Neotoma macrotis) are the signature animal of mature chaparral. Who knew?

Certainly not the casual observers of chaparral from car windows, or even day-hikers; I ran on trails in the Will Rogers State Historical park which backs up to the Topanga State Park for ten years, often in the early morning dark, and never saw a wood rat. I also never knowingly came across a wood rat nest - which can be five feet high and and ten feet in diameter.

Now I live amongst them in my metal stud, stucco and sheetrock box, they in their elaborately woven twig-stacks. They're everywhere. Morbidly afraid of the light (they even shy away from moonlight) they hide behind the fire-doors and live under our ipe hardwood entry deck. They live in the pool cover vault and gnaw at the deck framing above it. They carouse in the pool equipment corral and eat the the brooms, brushes and the plastic netting on our pool leaf rake. Or did. Until we got two feral cats.

They built nests in our cars. They ate the hosing of the air suspension system in our Land Rover LR3 (causing the air-compressor to burn out and the suspension to fail catastrophically). They made a nest in the heater hose of the car, where they died and the smell of dead rats suffused the champagne cow-hide, brushed aluminum and wilton-carpeted interior.

They are ubiquitous and highly industrious. One night, after having the car repaired from its latest evisceration by the rats, we forgot to garage it. The next morning we popped the hood to find the beginnings of a nest sitting on top of the engine. In the night they had eaten the wiring harness - eaten, digested and disappeared the wiring harness. That's when we called our local feral cat procurer.

Caroline, a writer, owns an equestrian estate low on the north slope of Sulphur Mountain (Wild Thing). Rats are a problem in stables where they share the horses' bedding, shelter and food and are not above nibbling on their hooves. Although there are a number of dogs who are 'ratters', of which perhaps the Jack Russell Terrier is the best known, Caroline has solved her problem with serial populations of feral cats. They are lower maintenance than dogs but also more transitory, at least in these urbanwildland parts, where they can quickly be caught up in the food chain. She imports them in bulk - mostly from the vacant lots of the Los Angeles netherworld - where a lawyer and wild cat fancier captures them, has them neutered and innoculated and sends them to rustic homesteads in the shrublands where they will have their fill of rats as long as they can evade the jaws of bobcats and coyotes.

The City of Los Angeles has dealt with urban feral cat populations using a policy of Trap, Neuter and Return - the theory being that these sterile communities will eventually die out of their own accord, but researchers have shown that 70–90% of cats must be sterilized before cat populations decline thus the theory depends on the thoroughness of the plan's execution. Late last year, six conservation groups won a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and its Department of Animal Services to stop the practice of encouraging feral cat colonies until the legally required environmental impact reviews are performed. (Ammoland)

Ted Williams, in the Audobon Magazine Blog, writes that

"The American Bird Conservancy estimates that 150 million free-ranging cats kill 500 million birds a year in the United States. And according to a peer-reviewed study published February 24, 2009, in Conservation Biology, TNR causes “hyperpredation,” in which well-fed cats continue to prey on bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian populations so depressed they can no longer sustain native predators".

Margot, our biologist neighbor warned us darkly that we should be prepared for our own silent spring by introducing feral cats which would decimate the surrounding bird and lizard populations. She sits on the Los Angeles Audubon board and is thus a party to the lawsuit restraining Los Angeles from its TNR policy. She has threatened to shoot our cats should they encroach on her property and I am in complete sympathy with her right to do so. But thus far, the score for the indigenous wild life (excluding rats) versus the exotic, introduced species, is one-zip.

There has been no evidence of bird kills and our friendly, local front-door lizard has lost a section of its tail but no more. The other day I watched it take advantage of a spall in the concrete slab and retreat inside the aluminum base window molding - entirely safe from predators.

However, walking with Lorrie up the trail towards the west meadow the other morning I saw a slim white eyeless mask with curved needle teeth sitting on the laurel sumac mulch which defines the path. I picked it up and saw it was a cat jaw that had been severed from the skull very recently: there was still the pink of the rough sandpaper palate and flesh wedged in the nose cavity. There was no sign of other cat parts, no fur to indicate whether it was the black or calico cat which had succumbed. We have seen no coyotes recently but this morning, Lorrie saw three bobcats, two juveniles and an adult, skulking around the wood pile which is about 40 yards from where we had seen the cat jaw. Bobcats tend to calmly appraise human presence before slinking off into the bush, such was the case this morning: Lorrie thinks she saw the droop shouldered demeanor of a guilty conscience as the adult ambled off.

The Big-eared Wood Rat has, as Quinn and Keeley report, "large ears, bright eyes and a pleasantly intelligent look about the face". In the normal course of events I am reasonably well disposed towards them and wish them no harm. One of my early experiences on the property was of retrieving a cardboard box which had blown off the building site during construction and lodged in a mountain mahogany on the far side of the seasonal stream.

I pulled the box out of the tree and clambered up the bank back towards the garage; when I reached level ground I realized that there was leaf litter at the bottom and I up-ended it over the ground to shake it out - the leaf litter fell to the earth followed by two rats. One scooted quickly off into the brush while the other followed more slowly dragging, as I thought, another rat along behind her. I then realized that I had disturbed the family in the process of giving birth to a baby rat. In a spasm of guilt, I gathered up the leaf litter and arranged it in a pile close to where the first rat had disappeared in the undergrowth with the thought that perhaps they could reconstitute their nest and the female, attended by her mate, could complete the birthing process.

The fate of junior has haunted me on and off ever since. At the same time, I viewed with equanimity the two baby drowned rats I fished out of the pool that were, I figured, new members of the family that had decided to nest in the pool cover vault. Furthermore, I set a trap outside the vault and eventually snagged the parents. But the sight of mother rat disturbed in her labor brought out all my instinctive love for the poor and downtrodden - I was, in a sense, the rats' landlord and had literally tipped them out of their cardboard shanty.

We are not clear at this point whether the second cat has survived or not. The last couple of days the cat bowl has remained suspiciously full of kibble. By tomorrow, if the food remains untouched, I think we can chalk up the off-ing of two exotic, feral cats to the natives. Some out there will be enormously relieved.

Cold Comfort

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

On the 18th November, I was still swimming in our un-heated pool where the water temperature hovered just below 70 degrees. Tonight, a couple of days after Thanksgiving I read that,

"Accumulating snow of up to 3 to 6 inches will be possible on the North Mountain slopes above 4000 feet from tonight through sun evening. The snow combined with gusty winds up to 60 miles per hour expected over the L.A./Ventura mountains has prompted the issuance of a Winter Storm Warning for the North Mountain slopes including the I-5 corridor above 3500 feet and the Grapevine." (Southwest California area forecast discussion, National Weather Service Los Angeles/Oxnard California 345 PM PST Sat Nov 27 2010)

My point being: I'm regretting the summer palace on the slope. Today was briefly warm - somewhere between this morning's cloud cover that rolled back to reveal blue skies mid-morning, and around two this afternoon when the first clouds marbled the sky ahead of a cold front that now, a little before five, has greyed our valley. Tonight will be cold like last night, and it will be colder still tomorrow and Monday; in the east end they will probably crank-up the smudge pots and wind-machines (The Citrus Belt ).

I know, I know, we are not talking east coast cold or heaven help us, Edmonton (Latitude 53° North), Canada cold (tonight's low, 4 degrees farenheit). Actually, New York is relatively balmy right at the moment, their night's low of 36° warmer than Ojai's 34° (29° tomorrow night); London's low (51° North) is 24°, Tokyo's low (the same latitude as Ojai, at 35° North) is a toasty (the heat island effect?) 44° and Vancouver's (49° North) is 33°. So enough already, it is cold - globally, or at least hemispherically cold (Sydney's low, 34° South, is 64°).

Psychologically, because we live in Southern California, it is very cold - a couple of weeks ago the high was 85° and two weeks before that, at the beginning of November we broke 100° on Koenigstein with the low around 60°. The truth is that that sort of weather could return anytime; 85° days in winter are not unusual. Which is why we are freezing now and not running around on a toasty radiantly heated slab. We made the call, relying on passive solar heating of the slab rather than active water or electrical coil heating and for a few days a year we suffer for it. The alternative is to have a heating system with a notorious lag time potentially overheating the house during the day just because you want a shot of warmth, say, between 7 am and 10 am.

OK, we are not freezing: last night we cranked up the Rais stove for the first time this season with beautifully seasoned oak of which we now have probably a two years supply. The oven temperature (the stove has a pizza oven at the top of the drum shaped fire chamber) reached around 150° Celsius quite quickly but that's a little shy of the 300-400° you need for actually baking a pizza in a traditional wood fired oven. But it warmed the dining room pleasantly enough and we turned the fan to a lazy whirr to bat the warmth down from the vault of the ceiling where it is wont to go.

It is now raining, and perhaps snowing on the Topa Topa peaks, and I am congratulating myself on having brought in enough fire-wood out of the weather to last us through to Christmas. Oh, and our dark secret is that in this all-electric house we use an electric heat pump to take the edge off the morning's chill.

it was my father who would intone the first line of T.S. Eliot's 1927 poem, Journey of the Magi, when we were out walking and there was the slightest nip in the air. He was mostly steeped in the great English poets of the nineteenth century but occasionally read work by writers of his own century. The wonder of it is that he read poetry at all. He rarely attributed his "lines" - they were embedded into his everyday syntax and thus, as a boy I did not recognize that his tastes also ran to at least one modernist; only that a sparkle of frost triggered "A cold coming we had of it".

The coldest night I have spent in California was in the high desert of the Mojave. Edmund C. Jaeger sensibly notes in his The California Deserts, Stanford University Press, 1933, "on the high Mojave Desert one may reasonably expect to experience a light fall of snow after the middle of November and as late as mid April.". Such was the case when my son Will and I camped along the Mojave road at around 5,000 feet in sight of the snow capped peaks of Pinto and Table Top Mountain, both well over six thousand feet. It was very early January and the evening was spent huddling around the camp fire, leaning well into it, ignoring the wood smoke and the smell of burning rubber as my feet got a little too intimate with the flames. We survived the night and the next day when we descended down towards Soda Lake the air warmed, we left the alpine vegetation behind and brilliant sunshine played over the desert vastness, punctuated only by the occasional creosote and burrobush.

In Southern California we are never far from this paradigm of the desert climate - warm days and cold nights. Sure, it is moderated at the beach: less warm days and less cold nights - but here in Ojai, we are firmly in the zone. Temperatures crash at sundown.

We live, as I have mentioned before, in prime passive-solar territory (Are We Green Yet? ). Baruch Givoni, father of modern passive solar design is an Israeli - he grew up in the desert, where the temperature conveniently trips from warm to cold at nightfall. By-pass this diode and you can achieve 365-24-7 thermal comfort: harvest the daytime warmth and dissipate it at night. Unfortunately, this only works well when you live in a place under the thrall of the desert climate paradigm - like So Cal and other desert regions of the south west.

Although in 2003, about 35,000 people died in Europe during a two-week heat wave, W. R. Keatinge, G. C. Donaldson, two British researchers note that,

"Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold. Coronary and cerebral thrombosis account for about half of the cold-related deaths and respiratory disease for about half the rest ".

Either way, thermal comfort is essential to good health. Here in Southern California we have the means to assure equitable temperatures year-round with minimal energy inputs: we aim to make of our simple barn in winter a summer palace; but if we occasionally miss the mark we will zip into a Patagonia fleece and think of Jimmy Carter.

Yuccapedia

W.S. Head writes in his slim and profoundly quirky volume, The California Chaparral, An Elfin Forest, Naturegraph, Happy Camp CA, 1972 that,

"The Yucca is known to most all Californians and especially to travelers who have passed through the Chaparral area during the blossoming period"

and,

"Even after the Yucca has completed its cycle of life; blooming, bearing fruit, and maturing seed, lifeless flower stalks continue to stand, blackened by the elements, as though resentful of relinquishing the over-seeing position held through an eventful life."

This last weekend, Lorrie and I, along with Margot Griswold our neighbor, found a way to revive both this awareness of the chaparral yucca (yucca whipplei) and to preserve something of its pre-eminence, even after death, amongst the chaparral flora. Plucked from a south facing slope along Koenigstein Road, the twelve foot bleached-blond carcass of a yucca was carefully balanced on its spiney base on our living room floor, the tip of the stalk brushing the lower reaches of the sloping ceiling. It looked, for all the world as though it had lived and died in situ, having burst through the concrete slab in all its spring-green glory just about a year ago, bloomed and then, through the late summer months, dessicated by the sun and stripped of its color it emerged - an ashen, straw-complexioned armature, its seed pods hanging like bronzed ornaments - as our Christmas Tree.

It was in this festive guise, topped with a glittering golden (plastic) star-burst that it was presented to upwards of 500 Holiday Home Look-In visitors who trouped through the house as part of the annual Ojai Music Festival fund-raiser.

The yucca anchored our (to readers of Urbanwildland, perhaps predictable) decorative theme: A Chaparral Christmas. We three were captivated by the cleverness of the conceit - our guests perhaps less so - but the opportunity to display the riches of the local ecology and indulge in a little education (both Margot and I are hopelessly addicted to didacticism) was irresistible. At the same time it was an interesting exercise in isolating the beauty of several chaparral species of dried seed heads, fresh foliage and live plants and using them as floral decoration. We provided ethno-botanical notes on all species along with a diagram illustrating their location in the house.

Margot produced an assemblage on a limestone slab (our kitchen island) which drew on her extensive knowledge of native plants, her years of collecting seed-pods, galls, leaves, stones, feathers, snakeskins, nuts and berries - and her great artistic sense. The centerpiece was a crow's nest collected after it had blown out of an oak and within which was placed a dark ceramic egg glazed with Hawaiian volcanic ash that served as the omphalos, or center of the world, for this profoundly resonant piece.

While the arrangements through the house were celebrations of the bounty of the surrounding landscape and were both aesthetically pleasing and evocative in a seasonally approriate way (the caterpillar phacelia, for instance referenced the snow laden boughs of skeletal winter trees and lent the living room a winter-wonderland aspect) the kitchen assemblage struck a deeper chord - resonating with the sustained timbre of 30,000 years of chaparral fauna and flora upon which we humans have latterly stumbled.

The ethno-botanical cheat sheet we provided for the docents of The Music Festival Women's Committee was based on Harrington's work in the early twentieth century. John Peabody Harrington (b.1884 d.1961) was a scholar of wildly taxonomic persuasion: he grew up in Santa Barbara, graduated in linguistics from Stanford and spent his life recording the nearly lost languages of the Western United States. Along the way, he collected botanical and zoological specimens. He was the most significant ethnographer and linguist working in America in the twentieth century. His research materials are still being catalogued and are housed in several major institutions throughout the United States and many more anonymous warehouses. His field notes cover more than a million pages. Copious doesn't quite capture the logorrheic nature of his work, but he could also be extremely concise: his notes on Californian botanical specimens were often attached to small, manila cardboard luggage tags.

While these contained the local Native American names (there were for instance, in Harrington's time, still six Chumashan languages) and the Spanish names it was usually left to botanist associates of the great man to provide the scientific descriptions - this work was incomplete, however, and ethno-botanists such as Jan Timbrook continue the identification of the Chumashan "voucher specimens" stored at the National Anthropological Archives located in the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Support Center in Suitland, MD. This collection forms the principal source of information for her Chumash Ethnobotany, Heyday Books, Berkeley, 2007 (as well as our cheat sheet).

While the yucca was billed as our Christmas tree and festively wrapped packages were scattered under its spiney leaves - the plant itself presented the Chumash with a variety of gifts: they roasted the basal portion of the plant (with leaves removed) and would also scoop out the white pith from the stalk (which reputedly tastes like banana); it was useful in the production of cordage, sandals and dried, the stalk made fine kindling.

When dead and skeletal, the yucca's seeds fall in a radius around the base of its spine-tipped leaves when shaken by the fall Santa Ana winds. In a wet year they will germinate and with relentless optimism continue their genetic tradition. We usurped this process to make a minimalist gesture that references a latter-day symbol of Christmas that dates back no further than nineteenth century England, when Prince Albert presented his bride Victoria with a lit tree.

Come Twelfth Night I will take the yucca down and shake it vigorously over our front bunch-grass lawn. With any luck, we will harvest our next yucca about a year from now from that slope and continue the tradition of a Chaparral Christmas. By then, the shrubland lily will be firmly established (in our minds, at least) in its new role as a yuletide symbol and thus join with its many, more traditional uses  that reach back to the Oak Grove people of the Milling Stone horizon- first settlers in the local Chaparral.