Skimmer

Enough beating about the bush. Enough of the Euro-blogs. I have traveled in the land of the Cathars, the Visigoths, the Merovingians and the Catalans (born of the Proto-Celtic Urnfield people, the Phoenicians,  Carthaginians and the Romans; once ruled by Charlemagne and, unforgettably, Wilfred the Hairy). Now I am back in Upper Ojai where human history is recent but the primal energies of the land run deep. I have been toying with these questions for far too long: what constitutes a mystical landscape and just how soulful is Ojai?

I am working, first raking the detritus of this spring's clover from beneath bunch grasses and deerweed, collecting the skeletal stalks and grey seed balls into soft piles of kapok - then across the meadow, I pull out laurel sumac stems from the dark, dead carcasses of the trees that were cut down a couple of years ago. The stumps are dead but the roots, sometimes as much as twenty feet deep into the ground are alive and well and, having supported a tree fifteen to twenty feet high have all the energy in the world to send out shoots and saplings with trunks as much as an inch thick in a frenzied attempt to re-colonize their patch of chaparral. I cut them back, push over the bigger stems with my foot, which often snap, and if they do not, a tug pulls them, and bits of white root (blushed with red at the base of the stalk), clean out of the ground.

It is about ninety degrees farenheit. Today is cooler than usual, hence the opportunity to do a little work. I attack the task with manic rushes of energy and then fall back and rest a while on a rock. Rocks are everywhere and laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) likes nothing better than to emerge from beneath, within and around these great, fractured sandstone boulders. The tree is relentless, its life-force is awesome. Around me, the wind is caught in my flapping shirt and drying my sweat. Above the Topatopas rolling cumulus clouds are massing, puffy, bright and white against darker smoke-like vapor. A storm is brewing, at around 6,000 feet. All I experience is the ariel sturm und drang and the gathering wind: the sun is hidden for a while and by about five, the temperature has dropped into the low eighties. Later, there is a stunning sunset with washes of grey and orange like some improbable, amateurish water color.

This land is raucous, loud with elemental energy, fierce in its beauty and pungent in its scents; yes, but is it mystical? I get back to the house reeking of laurel sumac. I shed my heavy Carhartt denim work trousers and damp shirt and go for a swim. The water is dark from the brooding sky. Sky Bowl, Lorenz calls it. This is a site that is only partly of Ojai, it transcends its locale: it speaks of some universal wildness, it resonates with the raw beauty of primitive places. Living here affords the opportunity to wrestle with the chaparral's intense life-force, and then slip into the pool and shake off its dust, its smells, its hard, spikey, sclerophyllitic leaves and wrap oneself in the sensuality of crystalline water. These are not the conditions for evaluating mystical content - this is the life of a sybarite rather than an anchorite.

Laurel sumac sucks the oxygen out of its room - few other plants even consider setting up shop anywhere near the dirt floor where this priapic root system shoots off its sap quickened stalks. But in clearing the plant from the landscape around the house - it is notoriously flammable - I was aware, this year, that sawtooth goldenbush (Hazardia squarrosa) appears to be a companion plant, happy enough, at least, to lurk beneath laurel sumac and eke out an existence in its shadow. It flowers in the late summer. When not flowering it looks a lot like a dwarf coyote brush (Baccharis Pilularis) and for some time I also confused it with California brickellbrush (Brickellia californica). Margot set me straight.

Early this morning a woodland kerfuffle woke Lorrie; the open doors of our bedroom give onto the oak grove that sits up on a rocky knoll above the east end of the house. Still half asleep she came into the kitchen where I had closed the windows and doors against the morning chill. She invited me to contribute an analysis of what the heck was going on 'out there'. We opened the sliding door and listened. Somewhere in the mix was a great horned owl hoo-hooing, and what sounded like a cat-like mewl. Triumphant owl and cowering bobcat? Peterson's Field Guide to Western North American Birds 4th. ed., New York, 2010 was a likelier source of explanation than yours truly, and so it was. We were hearing a young owl begging its mother for a share of her kill, vocalized as a plaintive squawk or mewl. When it was light I walked up to the trees to see if there was any evidence of this domestic drama but there was none. Across the seasonal creek were the piles of laurel sumac I cut yesterday. I could still smell the sap. The leaves have already begun to pucker. The goldenbush appeared alone and altogether heedless of the chlorophyllic carnage that lay about it.

There is in England an outfit called Research into Lost Knowledge Organization or RILKO. Here is collected many of the geomantic fringe-dwellers and tenured academics dabbling in out-of-area arcana in one foundation dedicated to the meeting of mind and topography, of land and soul. One of its founders is Keith Critchlow, a respected academic specializing in sacred space and associated both with Prince Charles' failed school of 'traditional' architecture and now his Foundation for the support of same. They should know something about mystical landscapes. A leading luminary, Paul Devereux, writes,

“The approach to the forgotten knowledge of the past must involve the most comprehensive and inclusive attitudes of which we are capable. There is room for all approaches, orthodox archaeologists, geometers, mathematicians, folklorists, occultists and geomancers. All these approaches can provide valuable perspectives on ancient understanding".

I have conducted a very light gloss on the shamanic practices of the Chumash; Sarah Munster has done a little dowsing over the land while I have remained alert to faery's, will o' the whisps’ and woodland elementals but none have appeared before me. I have spoken to bobcats, called to coyotes and cursed at bears, whispered to screech-owls in the night and cooed to quail in the morning but none have answered me. I have searched the land for ancient painted rocks but know it is highly unlikely that I will find them. I have not experienced that 'flood of ancestral memory' that Alfred Watkins experienced when looking at an Ordnance Survey map of Herefordshire and realized that there were a series of alignments between ancient monuments, burial mounds, cross-roads and pre-historic earthworks - what he called straight tracks and later became known as ley lines (Stoned). I have written of old Chumash spirit paths, and I believe, run on them, but have not mapped them or established their beginnings and ends.

What I should be doing (apparently) as Devereux urges, is

"exploring a wide range of topics based in and around archaeology and anthropology, such as archaeoastronomy, archaeoacoustics, sensory archaeology, the prehistory of mind, modern discoveries of mind-body interaction with sacred places, ritual, magic, shamanism, rock art, folklore, mythology, ethnobotany, the phenomenology of landscape and of time, and more".

Instead, I swim in the shallow pools of the present, I am beguiled by the now, I am, God help me, fascinated by the new. Is it any wonder that the 'doors of perception' remain mostly closed to me? Oh, and I do not ingest Datura. I dabble in chaparral, in archaeology and rock art. I refer to my book on Chumash ethnobotany and have Milt Mc Auley's Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains on the breakfast table at all times. I return from runs with pockets of hastily picked botanical specimens. These, perhaps, are eccentricities enough. I write my blog. Parsing mystical (or not) landscapes is, as they say, above my pay grade.

Richard Leviton, author of Geomythic Earth. Readings and Field Notes in Planet Geomancy, iUniverse, Lincoln, NE, 2006) and the founder of The Blue Room Consortium (A Cosmic Mysteries Think Tank for Earth Energies, Mapping and Interaction) in Sante Fe writes,

"Pilgrimage destinations, holy places, power points are all names given to places of heightened presence, or quite simply, sacred sites....I use the term 'visionary geography' to describe a planet filled with geomantic nodes"

He travels the world seeking geomantic engagement and penetration of the Earth and its mysteries. I walk, or run the surface - I survey the mantle - rock, dirt, water and bio-mass. I lift my head to the sky and study the vaporous canopy. But I penetrate neither. I am unable to plumb the soulful depths.

I skim.

RV III

Ojai, spiritual hot-spot (Stoned, Albion, Red Soil): Krishnamurti sitting beneath his Peruvian pepper tree in the East End, mainlining enlightenment (and meeting, on the astral plane, Maitreya - the Buddha's second coming, and Koot Hoomi, the trans-Himalayan, ascendant Mahatma). Recto verso. Here in the Languedoc, on the other side of the page, there is a kind of wee-fee (the charming French way with wi-fi) hot-spot that links directly with the mysteries at the center of the Universe.

Elizabeth Van Buren, scion of the eighth President, the one-term, 'Martin Van Ruin', 1833-1837, who succeeded Jackson and had the misfortune to preside over an economic depression, has installed herself here and become a leading light in the cottage industry (industrie artisinale) that feeds on the ancient riddles surrounding Rennes-le-Chateau, Rennes-le-Bain and Mount Bugarach. The latter, a limestone lump that, we are given to understand, resonates with the etheric fourth and perhaps even the fifth dimension.

Cue the Topatopas: mysterious escarpment towards which the feet of Native Americans were pointed when buried and upon whose flanks (the mountain's that is) shaman perched, inhaling the perfumed smoke of the local brugmansia, the seriously phsychotropic Datura and upon whose sandstone was painted cryptic records of their astral voyaging. (In Search of a Shaman's Lair).

The density of myth, rumour and mystery surrounding this spalled rock face does not approach that of the impenetrable stew of arcana which pertains to Bugarach (and the two Rennes), and for that we should be grateful. Locally, the south west facing Topatopas are known primarily for the 'pink moment', which describes the few minutes when the evening sun dips towards the horizon and their textured face is flushed with the orange-reds of sunset. One local realtor promotes herself by proclaiming suggestively that you let her find your 'pink moment'...no talk here about geomantic pentagrams, Argatha (see below), or etheric temples in time that are a part of the lingua franca of the new-age pilgrims who flock to Languedoc-Rousillon. I could do without the crassness of the rosaceous apellation - it is a phenomenon that is often more golden than pink - but the effect is of sufficient amplitude to warrant much scrutiny were it to occur in this south west corner of France where for instance, the reflections from stained glass windows are intensely parsed. Sitting beneath the Topatopas, the rock-face reflection is but a pleasant side-dish to the spectacular sunsets that dissolve the blue sfumato into pinks, reds and oranges on an almost nightly basis.

The brooding cone of Mount Bugarach is the gateway to the Corbières, a region notable for its limestone outcroppings and lowland garigue, a Mediterranean plant community akin to Catalonia's monte bajo and California's chapparal. At higher elevations the garigue gives way to more heavily wooded areas that surround the peaks, which, like Bugarach are often topped with natural spires of rock almost indistinguishable from the now crumbling ruins of visigoth fortresses built amongst these lonely pinnacles.

The labyrinthine limestone caverns and smoldering internal fires of this hulking volcanic mountain fuel both the hot springs of Rennes-les-Bains and the imaginations of visitors. Science fiction writer Jules Verne who is said to have holidayed on the volcano's flanks based The Journey to the Center of the World, Paris, 1864, on his experiences there. I bathed my feet at the old Roman hot-spring which disgorges into the river Sal - which really is salty - while the spring waters are reportedly highly radioactive. My blisters (from running in flip-flops) were soothed and they had healed by the next day. Coincidence? You decide...

While Elizabeth van Buren (thin and ever-so-slightly haunted looking on her You-Tube videos) has located her portal to the reputed secret underground city complex (known as Agartha) in the landscape zodiac she has discovered within a ten km. radius of Renne-le-Chateau, others believe, perhaps more plausibly, that it is Bugarach that holds the secret way into the underground world. Here, it is advertised, is a safe haven from the apocalypse confidently predicted for December 21st. 2012, the date upon which the Mayan calendar ends.

While I plan to take my chances in the Topatopa foothills, many of Europe's most gullible marginales are living in the gulches and ravines that thread through the Corbières and whose presence is occasionally signalled by a mail box stuck by the road in an otherwise apparently uninhabited area. The mail (presumably pension and unemployment checks) must get through. They have put their trust in Bugarach surviving the apocalypse either through its revealing its access points to the underworld or in the timely manifestation of the alien depot believed to be installed deep within the mountain - currently evidenced (it is said) by a low mountainside hum. Either way, this motley crew of end-of-the-worlders believe they are well situated to survive Armageddon.

The Topatopas do not merely loom over our particular urban wildland haven; they provide a signature rock face on the northern ridgeline that defines, along with Sulphur Mountain, the Upper Ojai valley. From the town formerly known as Nordhoff (having latterly misappropriated the name Ojai from its neighbor to the east (The Land Speaks for Itself)) it is similarly prominent and more instantly recognizable than the other mountain bowl landmarks such as Chief's Peak, Black Mountain Summit and White Ledge Peak. Travel out beyond the coastal plain to the spit of beach that protects Ventura Harbor, stand on Surfer's Knoll and look landward (north) and there is Topatopa, crowning the coastal mountains. 

Like crowded teeth, the ranges are arrayed across the landscape one upon the other. The Santa Ynez Mountains, the Topatopa Mountains, and the Piru Mountains form the northern boundary, the Santa Susana Mountains the eastern boundary, and the Simi Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains the southern boundary. Closer in, there are the Ventura Hillsides girdled with housing developments but breaking through at their higher elevations to reveal mounding hills of unique Venturan coastal sage scrub.

What zodiac constellations might be revealed amidst these peaks and valleys, knolls and canyons, rocks and water, chaparral and coastal sage scrub? What alignments, cromlechs, ley lines and dolmens exist along their Chumash trails? What mysteries exist in the painted caves, pecked rock faces and buried grave goods of their aboriginal inhabitants? What temples of light, temples in time, or etheric domes embracing valleys forged for the gods might be conjured in the soft coastal air or the harsh thundery climes of the inland valleys? What mysteries are encoded in this densely configured landscape? Who, at last, will be our Elizabeth van Buren?

Count me out. The Chumash possessed powerful esoteric knowledge (Space and Practice II) derived from millenia of close observation of the natural world out of which they constructed a supernatural cosmos that melded the prosaic and temporal universe to an explicated past and a fully fathomed future. Our only first-hand conduit to that knowledge, John P. Harrington (Yuccapedia), secreted his notes in a thousand boxes of data many of which still sit mouldering in warehouses and storage depots waiting to be deciphered. His data remains, perhaps, our best hope for understanding these mysteries, but it presents a tedious academic challenge unlikely to appeal to new-agers impatient to address their need for answers NOW - or at the vary latest, by December 21st. 2012.

Red Soil

In 1875 in New York City, Helena (Madame) Blavatsky, H.S. Olcott and a few other fin de siecle occultists founded the Theosophical Society to promote a synthesis of spiritualism, Masonic lore, eastern religious mysticism and a belief in the 'Mahatmas', time travelling wise-ones with whom adepts could comunicate on the astral plane and to whom the leadership hierarchy of the movement ultimately paid obeisance. This organization has been the central reason for Ojai's reputation as a spiritual center. It can be debated, of course, whether there was (and is) is some innate spiritual resonance in the area to which the Theosophists were drawn.

Certainly the three important early twentieth century Theosophical colonies in California were all situated in areas of profound natural beauty: Lomaland, a collection of grandiose structures that made up the 'White City', founded by Katherine Tingley as a center of Theosophical belief, was located on the long, windswept finger of land that points south to Mexico and protects the bay on which San Diego sits. Here, at the extreme southwestern point of the United States, Tingley created a community that blended New World confidence, Victorian morality, a love of antiquity, Indian spirituality, occultism and a featured a mash-up of Greco-Mughal architectural styles. Frances LaDue, a.k.a. Blue Star, founded the idyllic Theosophical community just south of Pismo beach, called Halcyon. Her partner, Dr. Dower, established a hospital and sanitarium, which, along with The Temple of the People (triangular, domed and colonnaded), formed the institutional core of this idealist village set in beautiful Arroyo Grande overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

In 1889, Annie Besant (Class of 2010), was converted to Theosophy upon a single reading of Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine. Two years later the cigar-chomping Russian mystic was dead and Besant quickly assumed a leading role in the Esoteric Section. She accompanied Charles Leadbetter, the Society's intellectual muscle and noted pedarast, to India in 1909 and there they 'discovered' Jiddu Krishnamurti (K), a 14 year old brahmin, son of a family living in genteel poverty and thus amenable to seeing Jiddu annointed as the 'salvation of mankind' and taken, with his brother Nitya, to perform on the now global Theosophical stage. In the early 1920's and afforded some independence from his handlers, Krishnamurti took his beloved brother, deathly ill from tuberculosis, to Ojai where, in the warm dry climate that Charles Nordhoff had promoted in the second edition of California for Health, Pleasure and Residence, he hoped for a cure (Hotel California).

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, the oldest of California's Theosophical colonies had been established in the Hollywood hills by Albert Warrington between 1911 and 1919 and many of the Moorish influenced buildings still stand. Warrington, a colleague of both Olcott and Leadbetter had, as his spritual guide, Annie Besant. Warrington was led by the Mahatmas, and on the material plane encouraged by his friends the Rev. Robert Walton and Mary Gray (with whom Krishnamurti and his brother originally stayed on the arrival in California) to visit Ojai in 1924. This precipitated the moving of Krotona to Ojai that same year - a move no doubt hastened by the quickening development of the Hollywood Hills; a year earlier, a giant sign had appeared above the Krotona community announcing HOLLYWOODLAND (later truncated to read HOLLYWOOD).

By 1927, the stars had aligned such that Besant arrived in Ojai, at the urging of K who accompanied her on the trip, and she confirmed that the valley would be the future world center for the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. This was both a spiritual pilgrimage for Annie Besant and an opportunity to consider the acquisition of prime real estate where the Esoteric Section's ultimate goal of nurturing the next step in human evolution, the sixth root race (don't ask) could be founded.

On a winter's day early in 1927, they left K’s home at Arya Vihara (now the Krishnamurti Library on McAndrew Road in the East End) to see the land on the west side of the Krotona property, land that ultimately became the venue for Krishnamurti's annual 'talks' and later, the site for the Oak Grove School (where I taught from 1995-1998). They were unimpressed. K persuaded Besant and the group to look at the Upper Ojai region where there was also a large tract of land for sale. They liked it very much and bought 465 acres, plus the oil rights. This property was later expanded and became The Happy Valley Foundation, putative site for the future of mankind.

Clearly the big-sky country of Upper Ojai appealed to Annie Besant's vision, which to date has been manifested only in a small private high school, founded in the 1940's by Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley, originally dubbed Happy Valley and recently re-named Besant Hill. It remains a magical property and is close by the small Chumash village that gave its name to Ojai (The Land Speaks for Itself). When asked for her reaction to the land, Besant wrote “I find that your valley has an atmosphere of peace, tranquility and spirituality that is most reminiscent of India in these respects than any other part of the globe that I have visited.”

In Languedoc, in the south eastern corner of France, recto versa, on the other side of the page, peace, tranquility and spirituality have been hard won. In the early middle ages the area where we stayed, between Perpignon and Carcassonne, was prized for its cabbages and its saffron. Now it is a kind of Bermuda Triangle (with the third corner being Andorra) - an area depopulated in the thirteenth century by the Albigensian Crusade, again in the fourteenth through successive crop failures and the Black Death, and currently with a population density less than the Sahara. Our adventurer host Anthony Hyde, who spends much of his time in Africa calls it, quite simply, France's Chad. At Grànes, close by Anthony's home, the Moulin à la Bordaisse, there is no bread; there is no cheese; there are no people - other than the English, who jet in from Liverpool on Ryan Air and, should they decide to stay, live in one or another of the picturesque stone villages shadowed by ancient visigoth ruins on the hills, where they find that it is more economical to become alcoholic than at home and, quite possibly, marginally more chic.

The Albigensian Crusade was initiated by Pope Innocence III in 1209 against the heretical Cathars of Languedoc, lands that then spread from Catalonia east to Provence. The Cathars were dualists; their simple, spirit good/flesh bad beliefs, inevitably positioned Jesus, who was of the flesh, on the wrong side of the ledger. Although they denounced procreation as extending the evil of the world they nevertheless became a highly prosperous region of traders, bankers and farmers. Hi-jacked by the royalist north, whose knights did most of the fighting, the Crusade proceeded with devastating brutality and was used as cover to conquer the southern lands where the heresy had spread.

The Treaty of Paris 1229, between Raymond VII of Toulouse and Louis IX of France officially ended the wars with Raymond conceding defeat to Louis IX. Based on the terms of the treaty, Raymond's daughter was married to Louis' brother and Languedoc became a part of France in the kind of national aggregation that eventually occurred in all major European countries (Suquet); but the Cathars were not entirely eliminated during this twenty year holocaust. The Inquisition was developed by the Catholic Church as a tool to render their total elimination during the remainder of the thirteenth century. Malcolm Barber notes in his paper, Albigensian Crusades: Wars Like Any Other?

"........(The wars) marked a qualitative degeneration in behaviour for those involved, for they engendered and strengthened hostile attitudes towards those who were different from the perceived norm and opened the way for the development of an ingrained superiority towards those who did not follow the banner of Christ as interpreted in the Latin West. These enemies find their lineal descent in the demonised peoples of the New World, whose behaviour showed that they were not of the same species as their conquerors and therefore need not be treated as human beings at all."

And so, in the red soil of Grànes, colored, perhaps, by ferrous oxides but in my imagination by the blood of the Cathars, there was again this glimpse from one side of the page to another: from the parochial Cathari holocaust to the almost total destruction of the native populations in the Americas.

A corollary to the Cathari belief that Jesus was fully human is the presumption that the resurrection didn't happen. Instead, it is claimed that the rock closing off the cave where Jesus' body was left for dead was removed in the night and that he and Mary Magdelene along with the chalice shared at the last supper (a.k.a. the Holy Grail), escaped to Europe and through their daughter Sarah, their bloodline continued for 400 years as the Merovingian dynasty of the Franks. Jesus, it is claimed, died an old man in France, where he fled with his family to escape prosecution from Peter and the Apostoles, and was buried at Rennes-le-Château - a three mile run from Le Moulin!

This story was supposedly kept secret for two millennia by the Priory of Sion, a mysterious sect that is said to have also founded the Order of the Templars and is the basis for Dan Brown's popular novel, The DaVinci Code. But wait there's more....The secret was accidentally discovered by Beranger Sauniere who became Rennes-le-Chateau's priest in 1885 and grew unaccountably wealthy. Upon these fantastic stories the hamlet in turn has grown rich; it is reputedly overrun with tourists and they support the local book store, two restaurants and a hotel.

When I ran up through its quaint streets it seemed an uncomfortably hollow place, notable for its views but little else. The Church was locked, the shops closed and the streets empty. It was a little after 6 a.m. It is a strange hill-top village in an area where memories of Celts, Romans, Visigoths and Cathars are imprinted in the limestone crags, fortress ruins, the roiling waters of the Aude, the caves amidst chesnut, oak and ash, and the red soil, but here those memories have been scrubbed clean under the intemperate gaze of a thousand tourists, the wonder of the place vanished into the digital pixilation of their cameras and the delicate mysteries, be there any, coarsened by their rude curiosity.

Suquet

....Sitting in my tin can / far above the world....Hopping from one entrepot of globally branded luxury goods to another, in transition from Southern California's chaparral to the Costa Brava's monte bajo - the stunted olive trees and thorny brush of the hills above Spain's rugged north east coast line. While the major part of this transatlantic recto verso was conducted via a Boeing 777 and an airbus 320, (which occasioned the brush with glossy materialism show-cased at LAX, LHR and BCN) the finer points of locational detailing were achieved, at both ends, via that old stand-by the automobile and, at the finest grain, by shank's pony.

Cap de Creus: where the shoe is on the other foot. The New World species, Agave and Opuntia, colonizing the Old World: the other side of the page. The monte bajo begins to grow in ernest in the rocky, sandy soil in the hills just beyond the old stone towns of Catalonia: it is the urban wildland, the brush where the resinous Estepa negra (Cistus monspeliensis) forms a sticky carpet (in mid-August the tiny spring roses are now browned to a crisp) and gives way at its edges to Euphorbia, fenel (Crithmum maritimum) and Eryngium maritimum. This plant community is pristine, indigenous and intact, and, like chaparral, is disturbed only by man and endemic wild fires. As a Mediterranean adaptation it is as finely attuned to climate, soil and circumstance as our elfin forest; in these hills summer rain is rare but morning mists and swirling clouds - fog-drip - sometimes brings relief to the parched, rocky soil.

The hills that surround Cadaqués, a town on the central meridian of the Cape, are terraced with walls dry-stacked in the local schist: a medium grade metamorphic rock that has been geologically flattened into sheets that split slate-like. The huge earth and stone works that remodeled entire sides of mountains were undertaken to facilitate grape production. Cadaqués was long a wine producing area beginning, perhaps, with the Romans. A Royal decree enabled its port to trade with the Americas in the eighteenth century and its wine found favor in the New World.

Phylloxera, the devastating vinicultural disease that crept down from France in the nineteenth century ultimately destroyed the local Xarello and Garnatxa (Garnache) grapes but not before this part of Spain had the opportunity to supply the north with its wine and enjoy a late-century flush of prosperity. Once the vines succumbed in the early 1900's, the newly impoverished community sent its strong sons to Cuba. Many of these migrants were financially successful in the New World and returned to Cadaqués as wealthy 'Indianos' and expressed their wealth by building grand neo-classical houses that continue to stand in the town amidst the simple stone row-houses of the fishermen.

Monte bajo is as self-effacing as chaparral. Not showy, its parts not necessarily worthy of individual display (viz. the dried, boot button roses), the aesthetic power of the landscape is dependent on its overpowering thematic repetition: its underlying mat of Cistus (Monspeliensis blanca) with rosemary and lavendar (Lavandula stoechas) in motley patches; Daphne gnidium, in bloom and heavy with its ingratiating lily of the valley scent, stands of Erica arborea and higher up, the tiny leaved thyme (Thymus vulgaris). In damp areas, close to spring water seeps, the local oak, Garric (Quercus coccifera) forms groves. Closer to the ocean, pines bend to the wind. Sempreviva borda, the local everlasting (Helichrysum stoechas) was gathered in great bunches by Gala, Dali's wife and strewn throughout their rambling home in Port Lligat, following local tradition. The vineyards above Cadaqués are no more but their terraces endure and Olives (Olea europaea) now flourish in the soil where once grew grapes.

Originally founded by the Greeks - visited by Phoenicians and later the Romans, infiltrated by the barbarian Visigoths and preyed on by Barbary pirates - Cadaqués was long an isolated fishing village, impacted, at the margins, by the politics of Catalonia. The Cape was conquered late by the Arabs and liberated early by Charlemagne and the Franks, then briefly an independent ducal territory. From the XII to the XV century Catalonia and Aragon formed a common kingdom and Catalonia prospered until the Black Death halved its population in the XIV century.

The union of Ferdinand and Isabella (1479-1516) established Spain as a proto-nation uniting Castile and Aragon and ushered in its great period of colonial expansion culminating in the discovery of the New World. It was to Barcelona that Columbus returned from his epic voyage and lay before his royal masters the treasures of the West Indies, including captured native Americans. Ever remote, Cadaqués did not suffer the wild swings of boom and bust driven by Spain's extraction of New World gold and silver. Fish, until the recent over-fishing of the Mediterranean, has proved a more reliable currency for the town. Now tourism pays the bills but Cadaqués' dance with the Americas continues and the permanent population of the town is fully one third South American, primarily from Bolivia and Ecuador.

My Catalonian holiday was an opportunity to absorb something from the other side of the page: to conduct a pas de deux with the Old World. Almost exactly 519 years ago a fleet of three vessels set sail from the small Spanish harbour of Palos on Spain's Atlantic coast. Believing that he had found the Indies, Columbus dubbed the indigenous people Indians - a name that was eventually attached to the aboriginal peoples of the entire American continent and is only now, after half a millennium, fading from use. Columbus' arrival in the Bahamas set in motion events that would lead to the conquest of California in 1769 and to the ultimate destruction of the 'Indian' people on the West Coast, the culmination of a genocidal trail that spanned the continent and endured for four centuries.

In Barcelona, a 200 foot tall monument of Columbus standing atop his column, map in left hand, his right pointing westward, is located at the lower end of La Rambla, the City's famous pedestrian mall now over-run by a new generation of Visigoths: Northern European tourists who arrive on behemoth cruise ships and carouse drunkenly through the medieval streets. Built for the World Expo in 1888, it stands on the spot where Columbus was debriefed by Ferdinand and Isabella and their courtiers after his initial, epic voyage in 1492. A further decade of increasingly troubled transatlantic voyaging lay ahead of him, but the die had been cast after this first fateful journey beyond the edge of the world.

The social, cultural and biological ecologies of New World and Old have become increasingly co-mingled over the centuries. My life stands as testament to that trend while our chaparral garden in Ojai is ranged in defense against the drift towards global botanical homogeneity. The monte bajo - the Catalonian elfin forest - is similarly threatened by development on its urban wildland borders and anthropogenic wild-fires, yet still retains its integrity as one of the world's five distinct Mediterranean climate plant communities. The view from this side of the page, then, is remarkably similar to the other: in this bouillabaise (in Catalan, suquet), this mash-up of global sameness, some of us are are called to the Crusade: to overthrow the Disneyfication of the planet and retain the unique character of particular places.

Cross Quarter Day

We sometimes see a mackerel sky here, flecks of high cloud that resemble the scales of the fish: it is usually a sign of unsettled weather; but last evening, we saw a salmon sky. Dark dollops of cloud, trailing driblets of their flesh across the sky - the undersides a creamy, golden salmon color, turning richer as the evening progressed and ultimately melding with the dark meat above and disappearing into the night. Then appeared the slimmest possible crescent of the new moon fading in and out of sight as the clouds moved across it. What do these spawning clouds portend? What will the August moon bring?

The first sighting of this crescent moon is the signal for the beginning of Ramadan, the lunar month of fasting in the Muslim world, where it serves as a time of spiritual rejuvenation. it is believed to be an auspicious month for revelations, for it was the time when the first verses of the Qur'an were revealed to Muhammad. It is the Wort Moon, the Wiccan celebration of the first harvest moon, one of the Great Sabbats or pagan moon festivals of the year. It is Lughnasadh or Lammas Eve, Lady Day Eve or Feast of Bread. It is the moon of the Tea House, it is the moon that will flood the upper valley in the warm nights of August - when the fluttering song of the screech owl rises above the ringing thrum of cicadas. It is the Barley moon of wisdom, logic and dreams. It is a time of mooncakes.

It is a time when connections are made to the root world, the Underworld. It is a time, it is said, when Harvest Spirits enter the earth to give their energy to the nourishment of life-giving grain. But if we pull back from the classical and pre-classical worlds, these traditions evaporate. Here, in Southern California, those ancient harvests and their moonshadows are an alien, distant, phenomenon. But there is a link.

In the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, over-gathering and over-hunting during the beginning of the Holocene (+/- 10,000 B.C.E.) resulted in a pre-historic food crisis, driving the human population to move from hunting-gathering to herding-planting. Traditional foods once lightly gathered in meadows were subjected to intensive grazing and quickly subsumed by highly aggressive anti-pastoral species. The prime characteristic of such colonizing plants is thorniness, and a high proportion of these spiny plants developed in the Middle East where the switch to farming originated. They became common contanimants of grain crops. Similarly, alien pathogens took up residence in sedentary agricultural populations which, although more reliably fed, risked sickness from greater co-mingling and poor sanitation in villages.

In the mid 1820's, European alfafa was imported into California containing yellow star thistle (Centaurea solstitialis) seeds. Finding a favorable Mediterranean climate the thistle began its New World colonization and now commands ten to fifteen million acres of California's wildlands. It exists as both a threat to our local ecosystem and a living reminder of the ancient grain cultures of the Mediterranean basin.

Neither the local Chumash, nor their predecessors, made this switch to farming, relying instead, on an astonishing range of naturally occurring foodstuffs. The seemingly benign environment was nonetheless frighteningly unpredictable, with famine a constant threat. Stress levels in Chumash society stemmed from periodic, and often serious, droughts. Brian Fagan notes in Time Detectives, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995,

"Instead of living a relaxed existence in paradise, the Chumash lived conservatively, well aware of the unpredictability of their environment. Canoes, fishing spears, nets, acorn-grinding technology, everything and everybody became geared to the efficient exploitation of seasonal foods. Some villages stored large acorn crops each fall. Others harvested thousands of anchovies, while a few miles away their neighbors hunted sea mammals."

This was highly organized foraging and progressively more sophisticated fish harvesting - not farming. From the earliest times of their island occupation (Hoop Dreams) native groups relied heavily on wild seeds and shellfish, moving from place to place. As island and mainland population densities rose, the Chumash ate more and more fish. When the tomol (canoe) came into use, about 2,000 years ago, allowing people to fish farther offshore, settlements became more sedentary, and the Chumash developed a complex society of fishing villages. Their trade networks extended inland as far as the Southwest and helped ease local food shortages (Fagan).

An increasing dependence on protein-rich fish did not protect the Chumash from the kind of health decline that occurs when hunter-gatherers settled down to farm. Crowding into larger settlements, living in familial groups of up to fifty in their domical grass houses (Primitive Hut) and encountering people and their diseases from many miles away, cost coastal groups the good health they had known for thousands of years as mobile hunter-gatherers.

Inland, Southern Steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) supplemented the diet of the native peoples but did not threaten the acorn as the primary food staple. Chia (Salvia columbariae) seeds were highly favored and nutritious, but the fields of chia in Chumash territory have long been in decline, due in part, "to the introduction of new plant species by European colonists, and from the supression of Chumash grassland burning practices in the late eighteenth century" (Timbrook). Thistles would be high on the list of likely suspects in suppressing the native chia: I saw one rare stand on Shelf road a couple of years ago but have not been back recently to see if it survives (Mining Gravel). Its harvesting season began in late spring and continued through early summer. By August it was done. The Chumash periodically burnt the chia fields to increase productivity. Burning a stand of chia today would result in its extirpation - to be replaced by noxious weeds.

Does August have a purpose in the Chaparral winter (The Winter's Tale)? Many believe that it's a great time to leave the wildland to the withering heat (Cool: Very Cool). It is not a great time for weeding, but I have already eliminated the star thistle from our meadows and consigned them to land-fill where their 30,000 seeds per square meter can do no harm. Bats fill the sky in the evenings. Last night around 2 a.m. I was awakened by the shrill buzz of a lone cicada, it continued its vibrational courting song for some time then, to reference an ancient technology - it was as though the gramophone needle had been abruptly snatched off of the vinyl. A bat had struck. I went back to sleep, arose around five, made a cup of tea and drank it while noting that the pale morning light does not appear until it's almost six. The sun is heading south.

August 1, Lammas Day, now a week ago, a cross quarter day, the halfway point between summer and fall.

Cool: Very Cool

The deerweed is aflame. Not literally - it has assumed the ruddy hues of autumn in late July. Like Joseph, and more locally, poison oak, it has a coat of many colors. A few weeks ago it was a bright green carpet and a little before that it was covered in its yellow blossoms; now it is at its most flamboyant - featuring rust, carmine and orange with a faint green under-glow. As the sun rakes across it, morning and evening, it is extraordinary.

When the crew from Ventura County Fire Department Station 20 arrived to do its inspection of our property, Lorrie explained that the bowl that surrounds the pool terrace at the back of our house was covered in deerweed, a plant used by the Chumash to thatch their sweat lodges because, she emphasized, of its fire-resistant properties (Saxon Hall and Edge Times). They signed us off. When I was researching this piece I Googled 'deerweed' and 'sweat lodge' to confirm a source for this information. Inevitably, in the echo-chamber world of Google, my recent Urban Wildland entries were first up followed by....not very much.

As I mentioned in Owlish Avatar, John Peabody Harrington is the only game in town with respect to ethnographic data on the Chumash, so it was a fair bet that he was the source of the information. In the event, I checked with an ink and paper source, Jan Timbrook's Chumash Ethnobotany, essentially a compendium of Harrington's botanical notes, and there, on page 118 was the quote: "ya'i (the Barbareno word for deerweed) was the only plant the Chumash used for thatching sweat-houses, said Fernando Librado, (a Harrington 'consultant') because it was not flammable."

Fernando Librado, born in 1839, was one of Harrington's oldest consultants and may have spoken with surviving elders of his tribe whose memories went back to the eighteenth century, but it is doubtful that he had personal experience of Chumash sweat lodges. Edward S. Curtis, the ethnographer and photographer of native peoples writes, when referring to the Southern Californian Shoshone, that the distinct culture of the Channel Islands and lands to the north was comprised of "the now all but extinct Chumash family", The North American Indian, Vol. 15, Southern California Shoshoneans et al, Whitman Bennett, NY, 1926. Half of Harrington's consultants were dead by the early 1920's, but he produced, right at the beginning of the twentieth century, a large quantity of ethnographic material (Yuccapedia) from sources which, just a few years later, had faded from the scene. Entirely lacking in data and pictorial material, the energetic and inquisitive Curtis thus makes no room for the Chumash in his encyclopedic review of native peoples.

Apart from holding our new slope together - entirely unbidden, for it volunteered for duty amidst the hydro-seeded grasses - deerweed, Lotus scoparius (broom shaped) provides food for hummingbirds, bees, butterfly larvae, and, of course, deer. It also provides cover for bobcats. While traditionally assumed to take up their hunting position on a low promontory or a rock (and I have seen them behave thus) they employ other strategies. A couple of evenings ago we were treated to a little cat and rabbit entertainment. A mature bobcat, variously taking cover in deerweed or bunchgrasses, stalked a rabbit which sat, for the most part, frozen in the middle of the driveway. The rabbit occasionally responded to flanking maneuvers by the cat with a quick scoot to another driveway position where it would again assume the frozen demeanor of a garden ornament. This went on for half an hour or more with the cat eventually losing interest. I wrote of a similar but shorter and less entertaining predator/prey action in Return to Bear Canyon.

The next morning, turning the corner of the house I glimpsed a young bobcat strolling along the pool coping and then bound into the deerweed towards a clump of rocks where late in the winter we had seen several bobkittens playing (Bobcat Magic). This specimen was likely of that litter now grown to juvenile status. As is common with the breed, it was remarkably brazen once it had established what it considered to be a reasonable social space between us - meeting my gaze eyeball to eyeball.

Like Mountain Lions, Bobcats are territorial and solitary. But because their ranges are so small - they are essentially homebodies - their densities are much greater. Male home range sizes average 4900 acres, about seven square miles and female ranges average 2900 acres or about four square miles. As with the lions, female ranges are smaller than male ranges, so a male has access to two or more females in his range with which he can mate.

Home ranges are elliptical in shape and boundaries often follow roads, streams, or other natural contours. Boundaries, as well as range sizes, shift seasonally. For instance, males tend to expand their boundaries during the breeding season in order to maximize the opportunities to find a mate. When rearing young kittens, females often appear to use less area because of the need to tend to their litter. (Bobcat Ecology)

What are we seeing? Certainly a litter of young bobcats, and perhaps the mother. We have seen at least two different adult bobcats recently. One with very exaggerated jail-bird leg striping and the other with a curl at the end of its tail. What is very clear is that statistically, we are far more likely to see a bobcat than a mountain lion, for they outnumber them something like twenty to one.

Similarly outnumbered (by deerweed), but still a mid-summer star, is Tarweed (Deinandra fasciculata),  usually found, here at least, amongst bunchgrasses and favoring areas of winter moisture. It is also a 'broom' plant and was used as such by the Chumash. It also produces black seeds used in a flour or as a pinole. By Harrington's time, Timbrook tells us, this had gone out of favor and it was only tenuously remembered as a foodstuff by his informants. It is worth repeating that Harrington lived at the ragged edge of a distantly practiced culture: those pupporting to represent Chumash culture today do so not as a remembered tradition but as an invented gestalt of pan-American Indian syncretism.

Tarweed blossoms are intensely yellow, the green foliage small and overpowered, visually, by the brightness of the flowers. The blossoms too, are small and achieve their impact by their profusion on a substantially skeletal plant. Dried, the flowers last through the year and retain almost all of their intensity of hue.

Late July in the chaparral: bleached grasses, rusty orange deerweed and the fluorescent yellow of the tarweed. I asked Laurence Nicklin (Return to Bear Canyon) what his favorite time of the year was - he answered spring and fall. He did not ask the question of me: had he done so I might have suggested high-summer: intense color; intense smells; early morning mists and the powerful drone of cicadas at night; my senses aflame. Hot? No, cool. Very cool.

Contiguous Places

When Hemingway was asked to write a novel in half-a-dozen words, he responded with, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." I now submit, "A mountain lion is on the prowl." O.K. Seven words. These novelettes contain worlds of potential meaning: we may parse them any which way, but both send a shiver down the spine. What Margot texted me (thus prompting this abbreviated work of fiction) was more like 'Field Notes from a Chaparral Ecologist': "Possible mountain lion sighting this morning - young, big head, light tan, long tail, no bobcat colorations. Tail more than the long tailed bobcat :)."

Consider this formal acknowledgment of the source work. I cannot get those seven words out of my head. I have memorized my novel. I could probably recite it backwards. It has the awful ring of truth. By the pricking of my thumbs, something predatory this way comes.

Lorrie and I did our own field notes the other day. They were not as neatly typed as Margot's. They were not as scientifically precise. They involved pyjamas (Return to Bear Canyon). But they revolved around the same issue: big bobcats (Lynx rufus) and small mountain lions (Puma concolor). You have to go down the check list. Striped pyjamas, by the way are almost certainly an indicator of a bobcat. Length of tail is critical: the animal we saw had a tail of maybe twelve inches long, it was one of Margot's "long tailed bobcat(s)". So, with some confusion over the tail and its ears not definitively tufted - it all came down to the markings.

When we visited the Natural History Museum recently in Santa Barbara (Hotel California), we wandered through the California diorama hall, partly prompted by a friend who had visited us recently and mentioned that one of his first jobs out of college was working on these displays. I love dioramas. There's actually a good one in the Ojai Museum of the Sespe wilderness environment with local animals, including, I seem to remember, a mountain lion (confirmation needed). The dioramas in Santa Barbara date back to the 1930's and many feature fine plein air paintings by Roy Strong, (1905-2006). They have separate settings for the bobcat and mountain lion. The mountain lion is small and has some mottled dark markings. What's that word when two species converge? (Wikipedia responds: "Similarity in species of different ancestry that is the result of convergent evolution is called homoplasy").

So, even frozen in the taxidermist's art, the bobcat and the mountain lion are easily confused. We are quite clear however, that as of this writing, we have not seen a mountain lion on our property, but there are regular bobcat sightings. As I have mentioned in Cats and Dogs, my definitive mountain lion sighting was in the Berkshires when a large specimen ran across my running trail, briefly and shockingly visible as it emerged from the tall grass cover through which the trail threaded.

I texted Margot in return: "Where Exactly", and received the reply, "Northeast corner of my place heading down to the creek". In other words, moving towards our place, perhaps, although if the lion kept to the creek and its banks we would not see it. Bear Creek is deeply shrouded in riparian woodland as it winds along the western edge of our land and is further separated from the house by the central rocky spine that shelters the west meadow from our view.

The previous evening we had had a small dinner party, and although we were told when we arrived in Ojai that the subject of gophers inevitably got an airing at all such events we managed to avoid it; I do believe, however, that the talk briefly turned to mountain lions and bears. With a native wildland restoration ecologist and a landscape architect at the table a brief review of the table decoration (tar-weed and Acourtia) also ensued. I was accustomed to calling Acourtia by its old name, Perezia, as indicated in the late Uncle Milt's Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, but now I understand that Acourtia is named in honor of the amateur English botanist Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Catherine Gibbes A'Court 1792-1878. I think I have the new genus name firmly handled: there is, in the showy mauve flowers that transmute into puffs of white seed after picking, some redolence in my mind, of Ms. A'Court, in full Victorian expeditionary attire.

We spent this Friday evening in the company of about two hundred and fifty others celebrating the acquisition, by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy, of the Hollingsworth Ranch, which includes about a mile of Ventura River frontage and most importantly, a natural holding pond for steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), (Nymphs and Naiads). As part of the show and tell we had the opportunity of viewing a 24" steelhead and a smaller twelve inch fish in this pond which functions as a refuge for the trout in even the driest of years- which this most certainly isn't - the body of the river was still flowing briskly in the center of its broad bed. Two state agencies, Fish and Game and the Coastal Conservancy kicked in the majority of the acquisition funds but the arduous task of maintaining the property and developing its educational potential is left to the OVLC. The Ranch represents prime habitat for a wide range of native fauna, mountain lions and bobcats almost certainly amongst them.

OVLC director, Greg Gamble stressed the value of cultural preservation and my mind turned to the possibility that there was a native American village site on the 70 acres. But no, he was referring to preservation of the 1930's cottage with its charming stone walls and steel mullioned windows and original, green tiled showers and green bathroom fixtures. Lorrie made a cogent point: can you still get green plastic toilet seats? Perhaps Liz at Liz's Antiques on La Brea could help out. While preservation of the stone cottage may be sentimentally desirable, and even financially and beaurocratically beneficial, let's get real: a cultural monument it ain't.

The stone ranch house does, however, take us back to a time, before the 1950's, when 5,000 or more steelhead trout spawned in the Ventura River. That number is down, recently, to less than 100. Similarly, mountain lions were once numerous enough in Upper Ojai, we can presume, for the local Chumash to name an area at the west end of Upper Ojai situkem, in the Ojai dialect of Ventureno, for the animal. This name is now memorialized in Lion Creek which runs through Black Mountain Ranch.

The Chumash hunted mountain lions and there is pictographic evidence that they were a part of their mythyology - the story telling in which animals play their roles in explanation of the cosmos. Soksouh, an evil spirit in the shape of a mountain lion with the sun in its mouth, is depicted in the painted cave on the Tule Indian Reservation in the San Yoaquin Valley - Yokuts territory. The Chumash, however, formed a significant diaspora during and immediately after missionization and they headed north and east - into territory where they already had trading relations and here their culture survived well into the nineteenth century and was reliably remembered into the twentieth. Although the mountain lion has an extraordinary range, from northern Canada to the southern tip of Chile, it is not found in California's Central Valley - thus adding support to the notion that the soksouh pictograph is of Chumash origin.

Like the steelhead trout, mountain lions have been decimated in Southern California - primarily due to habitat loss and fragmentation of their range, - which for males extends to 150 square miles and females forty - by roads and urban development. Additionally, they are threatened by secondary poisoning from feeding on animals like coyotes that have consumed poisoned rodents, although their primary diet consists of mule deer.

Mountain Lions' extended perambulations are likely to have more to do with finding a mate than hunting prey because the reduction in their numbers, and a truncated hunting season, have resulted in a superfluity of deer. Genetically, lions in the Santa Monica and Topa Topa-San Rafael mountain ranges are at the southern end of a larger population that extends northward to Big Sur. Their long-term survival depends on their ability to move between regions via wildlife corridors to maintain genetic diversity. "A mountain lion is on the prowl." is not a horror story (unless you are a young mule deer) but a romance - for when mountain lions go on the prowl they are looking for love in contiguous places.

Bodies of Water

My remembered life began by a pond. A small lake. Comprehensible in size, even to a very small boy, but large enough to contain places of mystery - the south end where it petered out in reedy marsh and the tiny island to the north where my sister abandoned me to my fate one spring morning before my howling brought rescue from my father.

Originally created as a stew pond, Frensham Little Pond was was built in 1246 (Nymphs and Naiads). It was used to supply fish to the Bishop of Winchester's court when visiting the nearby Farnham Castle. Drained during World War II to obliterate a potential sign-post for the Luftwaffe en-route to London, it had been re-filled a couple of years before we arrived - my father, in a mid-life career crisis, to build the dinghies that were to be rented to visitors and my mother to serve teas in the cafeteria. A small bungalow, boat-house and dock were part of this, from my perspective, very sweet deal. Scale: I remember I wasn't much taller than the seats of the dining chairs; a Little Pond; in a small country; with a large history.

I first saw the Mediterranean when I was twenty. It was the sea of my dreams. Blue. Warm. Continental. Crystalline. The wellspring of Civilization. Another pond perhaps, comprehensible in scale to a young man, but large enough to contain almost all of the History that I thought mattered - Mesogeios, the inland water of Ancient Greece, Mediterraneum Mare, the Roman Sea. I made a bee-line for Nice in the South of France, a site, I now know, of one of the oldest human habitations in Europe. Here was a narrow beach with torpid water lazily lapping at the sea's northern edge. It wasn't until I threaded my way around the coast (relying, as a hitchhiker, on the kindness of strangers) and arrived in Yugoslavia, somewhere along the Dalmatian coast between Split and Dubrovnik, that the shimmering blues and greens refracted out of crystal clear water confirmed the reality of my Mediterranean vision.

I continued east and south and eventually broached a world that owed nothing to the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean but a great deal to the British Isles. Begun in the mid-nineteenth century the Indian, but British engineered and financed, railway system reached its apogee in 1929 and by the late 1960's was still sufficiently intact to allow impecunious travelers to journey the length of the country, from Lahore to Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, by staying one step (or railway car) ahead of the ticket inspectors. At the southern tip of the sub-continent, a ferry could be taken to Mannar, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the traditional port of arrival for Indian Tamils upon whom the Ceylonese have relied for labor for at least four thousand years.

A long train journey to Colombo followed - the track, it seemed, forever in danger of being swallowed by the mangrove swamps as it skirted along the coast. In Colombo, plans were made to visit Kandy, the ancient religious capital in the center of the island but the real purpose was to secure work on a merchant ship, and this I achieved in my first few days in town and was signed up as Engine Room Boy on the Ferndale, an ancient 10,000 ton Norwegian tramp-freighter bound for the United States. The trip to Kandy remains, forty four years later, still on-hold.

I was in Colombo long enough to experience surf. At night. Not quite understanding what I was hearing. The Indian Ocean: here at last was a sea that roared, crashed, breathed and spewed wild spray into the night air. I made a mental note.

Two years later, I arrived in Sydney, having committed, in return for my paid ticket, to stay in the Land of Oz for two years. In the event, I paid taxes for eight then relied on the generosity of the government once again to attend Sydney University to study Architecture. By the time I left to come to UCLA, my real Pacific purpose had been achieved - a significant part of each of those eleven years was spent surfing and I had become intimate with that great body of water.

Sometime in the early 1970's I would watch surf movies at the cinema in Avalon, a small surfing town along Sydney's north shore. These were the days before Endless Summer, a 'crossover' surf movie that found an audience beyond hard core devotees - when surf movies were raw, plotless, with wave after wave presented against a sound track of pounding psychedelic, jam-band rock. I remember one, out of the endless many, that was shot at Rincon: (The Sage-Gatherer) back-lit waves in the evening glass-off, a moment when the wind dropped and the waves assumed a pure unruffled, velvety power. This was Rincon filmed at eight to ten feet, one of the world's great waves. Many years later, In 1998, that wettest of winters, when storm after storm barreled through Southern California from January to May, I watched Rincon one mid-winter evening, while a handful of professional grade surfers shredded ten foot waves that seemed to arrive with a machine-like regularity. Around the corner from placid Bates Beach, a straight shot from Ojai on the 150, is a Pacific beach, that when provoked, can create majestic surf. I need to know this.

Otherwise, perhaps, I would have to find solace in Lake Casitas, and dear reader, is that even remotely plausible? Could I, would I, find a soul to respond to? It is undeniably, a body of water. I remember, when we lived in town during construction of our house on Koenigstein, that I would run the trail north of Shelf road, off of Gridley, variously called Cozy Ojai Road or Forest Route SN34, and as I approached Foothill Road, I would catch a glimpse, or a glisten of the great reservoir, and it gladdened my heart. Because it was all downhill from there? Please. A close reading of this blog will reveal, in any case, that I actually prefer to run up-hill. No. It represents a moment of topsy turvy. The sky reflected by the earth. The earth become sky. Created in 1958, and stocked with bass, catfish and rainbow trout it is a stew pond that rivals Frensham Little Pond in every category except age: not until 2663, will Lake Casitas be as venerable as that Surrey Pond was when I lived there.

Perhaps by then, it will have acquired a patina, it will have mellowed into the chaparral and earned its place in my pantheon of ponds. A body of water to be reckoned with. But by then, will anybody care?

Cosmic Wordplay

When I suggested that the ruling trope of the universe is irony (Beep-Beep) I should really explain that I interpret the evidential minutiae of the cosmic operating system in ways that support my predeliction for oppositional duality - in other words this is me responding to the apparent machinations of the universe not the other way around. Although we like to believe, especially in Upper Ojai, that we ask and the Universe responds, the magic of intention, I suspect, works within the confines of our own will rather than by beaming our purpose to a breathless cosmos waiting, in the void, to respond to our every whim. Our conversation with the Universe, I'm suggesting, is limited to a microbial influence at the farthest margins of the swirling infinity of an ever expanding cosmos. Our impact: not so much. Our solace, perhaps, is that there are worlds enough within our immediate experience with which we can meaningfully engage. These worlds can stand in for the larger, omniscient, reality - not as a poor copies but as truths in their own right.

Sometimes these worlds collide, they compete in their ability to represent our notions of how our reality is constructed; one global metaphor against the other. The Country and the City, by Raymond Williams, Chatto & Windus, London, 1973, is a book that has haunted me for a quarter of a century - and I have yet to fully read it. But at Sydney University in the late seventies, I knew about it - understood that it talked about how the bifurcated environmental reality as I had come to experience it represented two world views; one the dark mirror of the other. Which represented light depended upon your temporal and geographical location and your position in the social hierarchy. Here was an explanation of all: good and evil; heaven and hell; each existed on earth in the simulacrum (as Beaudrillard would put it) of the Urban and the Rural. These were the classic dualities of western thought, the yin and yang of the east.

A central Deconstructive argument holds that, in all the dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged over the other. Derrida argues, in Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published in English in 1976) a moldering copy of which still sits on my bookshelf, that, in each such case, the first term is classically conceived as original, authentic, and superior, while the second is thought of as secondary, derivative, or even "parasitic." His examples include:

* speech over writing

* presence over absence

* identity over difference

* fullness over emptiness

* meaning over meaninglessness

* mastery over submission

* life over death

I am indebted to Orientalia for providing a no-nonsense summary of Deconstruction. Orientalia is a vast web site that looks to have been abandoned around 2005, it now exists in the ether, slowly disintegrating as random glitches begin to metastasize in the soft-ware and its empire of meaning frays like a cheap carpet from the Tehran souk (open everyday but Friday). Orientalia is now, it seems, forever closed, its cadres of contributing academics working, perhaps, on their Wikipedia entries.

The philosophers of Deconstruction often held the most tenuous grip on meaning over meaninglessness; their work veered into the inaccessible and eccentric, but it was built on the solid foundations of Levi Strauss' Structuralism; and for Levi-Strauss, the contradictory dyad was also central to cultural understanding. The great structural-anthropologist believed that the device of binary opposition was found in all cultures (not just in Western culture) and that it was fundamental to meaning. The notion was even celebrated in the title of one of his many books, Le Cru et Le Cuit, (The Raw and the Cooked), Plon, Paris,1964. Somewhere, he suggests, between the contradictory impulses of binary opposites lies the central dynamic of a given culture - in the tension between contrary notions exists the generative flux of social exchange: in the Country and the City or, wait for it......the Urban and the Wildland.

I have chosen to live in a place of paradoxical conflation, of inherent irony and binary opposition: the Urban Wildland. Is it a cosmic joke, or a willed resolution of a long-standing internal conflict, the Country versus the City? The fact is, I have spent most of my adult life in two major Cities and short periods in two or three more; but I was born in the country (in darkest Surrey which, while not quite a place where giant oaks, "their branches intertwined, seem to form but a single mass, an immense and indestructible edifice, under whose vaults reigns an eternal darkness" (American Genesis) was still a place where dapple predominated). The City was first represented by London. Not the London of today, but a darker, blitzed Metropolis whose rows of Georgian and Victorian buildings stood as blackened teeth, begrimed in coal dust, their ranks punctuated by the empty spaces of fallen comrades - the rubble still piled on weedy lots. Into its maw I would occasionally travel as a child to visit maiden aunts to sight-see or to shop.

As a Post-World War II, Dickensian ruin, London had a certain appeal. It echoed the root world of river bank willow and gnarled oak in the illustrations of Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). Dark, buttressed underpasses, ancient niches where beggars lurked and the great railway halls, like Waterloo, where sooty panes of steel mullioned glass shed a sepia tint on the teeming masses of travelers below made a world where sorcerers might dwell as plausibly as within "the navel of this hideous wood,
Immur'd in cypress shades". I was working on conflation from an early age: the grim urban underworld and the dark Surrey understory, beneath oak, chestnut, beech and ash offered parallel worlds of stygian gloom.

It was not until I visited Vancouver, at the conclusion of a year or two of traveling, in the late 1960's, that I understood that there could be Cities of Light, at water's edge, that exist as crystalline rejoinders to the tenebrous woods (here represented by the soaring redwoods of Stanley Park). After brief sojourns in Edmonton, Toronto and then back in England, I began forty years on the metropolitan shores of the Pacific, in Sydney and Los Angeles; where broad swathes of wildland crouch at the edges of the urban infrastructure and where there truly are margins of Urban Wildland but whose urban centers are bathed in the full light of day and the aqueous sparkle of the ocean is never far distant.

As my readers will recognize, I have come to privilege the wild over the urban, the country over the city and, ultimately, the dark over the light. I have retreated from the sheen of Los Angeles, Valley of Smoke, where dawn and dusk are so swiftly banished by either the bright white haze of day or the tracery of artificial light that lies over the endless city grid, to the very edges of the civilized world. Here darkness provides succor to the animals of the wild and we humans can be swiftly immured in chaparral's shadow and slip into reveries of cosmic wordplay.

American Genesis

Here, on the Urban Wildland frontier, we play at Civilization versus the Wild. Daily, we recreate the circumstances of the birth of America - for it happened at the fringe of a feral continent, the first cabin a European statement of urbanity, a reproof to the unfettered fecundity of the natural world. Inside, the human frailties of the pilgrims were contained in the flimsy trappings of European civilization and religious conviction.

The Urban Wildland represents the collision of this continent's aboriginal state of grace with European industrial capitalism and religious expansionism. This is not Hotel California. This is American Genesis. Urban Wildland is its simulacrum. Here is its precinct, and in it we have created a minimalist barn in which we conduct our twenty-first century, secular lives - but when we look out of capacious windows we see the wild where was birthed America.

These are the kinds of paragraphs you write after you read Beaudrillard. It's a disease. A bad case of the sideration blues. Star-blasted America; planet-struck California. For Jean Beaudrillard was, as Geoff Dyer writes in his introduction to  'America', New York, 2010 (originally published in Paris, 1986), "a superstar of the simulacrum, a shaman of the virtual, an evangelist of the hyperreal". Beaudrillard's take on chaparral? Well, he's a visitor, so in California he only sees urban sprawl, the desert and the sea. The interstitial wildland eludes him. California's signature eco-system passes him by. Los Angeles, he sees as a mobile desert - like Death Valley, where, he writes, "Fire, heat, light: all the elements of sacrifice are here". In Los Angeles he sees "no monuments and no history", only a kind of ritual death.

The single most stunning statement ever made about Los Angeles is contained, I believe, in its aboriginal name which translates as Valley of Smoke - variously attributed to either the Gabrielino Shoshone or the Malibu Chumash. When I first read it - in the lobby of the Transamerica building in an exhibition of Los Angeles Pre-history in the mid-nineteen eighties - I immediately beheld a vision of camp fires across the basin as a kind of pre-echo of the twinkling lights one experiences when flying in at night to this most crepuscular city; and rising from those fires the resinous smoke of burning chaparral - for such was the available firewood.

Here was evidence of the continuity of a human presence - and the inversion layer - backwards in time, stretching back far enough to link up with the ravening mega fauna now closeted in the La Brea tar pits, that other pre-historical factoid that made up a part of my Los Angeles amulet (the rune stones that connected me to the deep aquifers of humanity and nature that run through this strangest of cities). Only one human skull was ever recovered from the tar-pits amidst the bobcats, sloths and sabre-toothed tigers; but there was an existential human connection - in that primeval smog of a thousand camp fires was the smoke from some very large barbecue.

For those attuned to these layered complexities of the State, the crashing presence of its nodality is overwhelming. But for Beaudillard, "The mythical power of California consists of extreme disconnection and vertiginous mobility captured in the setting, the hyperreal scenario of deserts, freeways, ocean and sun. Nowhere else does there exist such a stunning fusion of radical lack of culture and natural beauty...." Jean Beaudrillard (and earlier, Gertrude Stein) fail to find the facticity of California, the thereness of it all - or as D.H. Lawrence writes of Taos, N.M., "When you get there you feel something final. There is an arrival."

There is a sense that the spirit has long dwelled here; but to experience that you have to kick a few rocks, get tangled in some chaparral and watch the waters of a stream, flush with snow melt, bubble over rocks and catch in the low hanging branches of bay, willow, cottonwood, sycamore and oak. Or, even more directly, perhaps, see the petroglyphs and pictograms on rocks strewn along the littoral, where the Kern river forsakes its usual gorge and flattens and spreads over a flood plain, slows to a meander, and afforded the native Kaweah people an opportunity to live with its placid waters (Song of Life).

Locked in his rented, convertible Mustang - Beaudrillard recreated on his windshield the California he understood from the movies - framed in hard plastic and edged at the top with pressed painted metal, this was his filmic simulacrum of America.

De Tocqueville never got much further west than Detroit, but in 'Two weeks in the Wilderness', 1831, he 'gets it' in a way that completely eludes Beaudrillard.

"A majestic order reigns above us, when the midday sun bathes the forest in its light, one often hears from its depths a long moan, a plaintive cry that carries a long way. This is the last gasp of the dying wind. Everything around you then subsides into a silence so deep, a stillness so complete, that the soul is gripped by a sort of religious terror. The traveler stops; he looks around. The trees, pressed one against the other, their branches intertwined, seem to form but a single mass, an immense and indestructible edifice, under whose vaults reigns an eternal darkness."

De Tocqueville has the advantage of actually meeting with native peoples and is acutely aware of their imminent demise. he writes,

"An ancient people, the first and legitimate master of the American continent, is melting away with each passing day like snow in the sun, vanishing from the face of the earth. In the same location, taking its place, another race is growing with even more astonishing rapidity. Through its handiwork, forests fall and swamps are drained while lakes as big as oceans and immense rivers vainly oppose its triumphant march. Wildernesses turn into villages and villages into cities. Americans, who witness these miracles daily, are not surprised by any of them. To them, this incredible destruction and still more surprising growth seems as if it were the immutable order of nature."

One hundred and fifty years before Beaudrillard drove his rental car across California, De Tocqueville broached the Urban Wildland at the frontier of America. We are now that frontier. Heirs to that home-grown expansionism, that 'immutable order of nature' that we have taken so to heart: wreakers of destruction by the simple fact of our being here.

In this one hundredth posting at Urban Wildland, I continue to play at Civilization versus the Wild. This Valley of the Moon is my sanctuary: the reification of a dialog; the blog an exploration of the conflation that is its masthead.

Return to Bear Canyon

"There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say...'Welcome to the Hotel California'".

I am aware that the writers of these lyrics (Felder, Fray and Henley), were referencing the Camarillo State Mental Hospital (Camarillo Brio) where a friend, reputably, had been incarcerated for drug related manias ("....'Relax,' said the night man, 'We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!'..."). This information merely shuffles the elements of the State's iconography that I proposed in Hotel California.

Meanwhile, in the back country, we are busy building the Urban wildland myth - determining what exactly makes up the essence of urbanwildlandishness. Wow. It doesn't take much: take last night. A bobcat, two rabbits and the blue sfumato of mountain ridges becoming progressively paler in the increasing depths of atmospheric haze; the whole topped with a ruddy smear of sunset smog. Target locked.

I walked out the front door last evening and saw the two rabbits frozen, marooned in the no-rabbit's land of our gravel driveway. A moment later I saw a youngish bobcat with striped pyjama legs crouching on the verge amongst the deer weed. It was confused: the rabbits had disappeared - by freezing their movement they no longer registered on the bobcat's visual apparatus. Both rabbits escaped and the cat slunk off in the elegantly disdainful way they have - even the young and inexperienced. Rabbits are everywhere this year because the coyotes have gone missing. Two wet years have seen a spike in the tick population and perhaps the coyotes have succumbed to the many tick-borne diseases to which they are prey (just saying).

That morning I had run up Bear Canyon and the trail was regularly spotted with berry laden bear scat. In the coolth of the canyon, spring was still in the air. Prickly phlox in pink, foothill penstemon (rose violet), the blue of larkspur, yerba santa and ceonothus, yellow of mimulus, coast wallflower and buckwheat, the whites of sage blossoms, yarrow and the towering florescence of chaparral yucca made up the exquisite early summer floral palette. The bright spring greens of bay, cottonwood, big leaf maple, sycamores, oak, and sheltering beneath, the discreetly flowering coffee berry, shadowed the path. The return trip, down Bear Creek, from below the spring outlet, featured blackberry vines, mugwort, giant rye, Indian tree tobacco, and poison oak beneath the canopy. The sound of the creek fills the bottom of the canyon - until it doesn't. The creek dips underground for half a mile or more and leaves the birds and the insects in full control of the aural accompaniment. Here the rocky creek bottom is white with mineral sediment from the winter run-off. (White-Out).

That's chaparral mixed with a little riparian woodland. What more could you want? If you're John Taft then it's necessary to have three ecologies in one thirty acre garden with the potential to study the comparative evolution of three mediterranean climate communities - California, South Africa and Australia. The garden has been charmingly laid out by Laurence Nicklin, a South African expert in protea who was tapped by John Taft, while still living in his homeland, for the task. He has since married the boss's daughter, Jenny Taft, and has been an Ojai resident, for at least part of the year, for some twenty five years.

The remainder of the 300 acre spread off of Baldwin Road a little way past Rancho Matilija, is essentially given over to the fire protection of the garden - with results that are more pleasing than one might imagine. Laurence and his gang of four full time gardeners have grubbed out acres of chaparral - leaving the oaks - and sown native stipa and fescue grasses (from S&S Seeds (Where Native Meadows Come From)), essentially creating oak-meadowland which forms a low-fuel fire buffer. He has cut the bunch grasses short and the hills, even this late in the season remain green. He battles the same invasives that plague the meadowlands up on Koenigstein and like us is not totally averse to the sparing use of chemical agents in his attempts to roll back the clock (Manichean Plant Order).

We picnickers, for it was an alfresco, early afternoon meal that was the occasion for our visit to the Taft Gardens, strolled over the Californian hillsides with Laurence and visited his favorite knolls. The landscape is blessed with many springs and ponds that sit in hollows fringed with native rushes, reeds and grasses. Only a very few eucalypts mar the edenic, native aspect of this back two hundred and seventy acres which stretches to distant ridgelines and beyond to unseen canyons. Away from the gardens, the landscape is intelligently managed and, from my perspective, evinces the appropriate politics. Only the very naive believe that gardening can be anything other than a political act, but Laurence wears his politics lightly and lets his work persuade.

In the Gardens, his work celebrates the circumstances of California's climate and, with minimal irrigation, pushes the geographical boundaries of its endemic plant communities to include a range of redwoods from Northern California and, of course communities from the antipodes and the southern tip of Africa. To this extent, he is a non-isolationist, believing that we will benefit from this creative mixing of plants from other Mediterranean climates in his own and other gardens. I'm O.K. with that: just keep them out of the hinterland.

My first experience of beating back the exotics came in Australia in the late 1970's when I was involved in clearing an area of Sydney's native bush of lantana (Lantana camara) - an erstwhile harmless Victorian house plant that was devouring acres of native habitat. Ironically one of the gnarliest invasives in Australia is Oppuntia, the native Californian sage brush cactus. The commonality of climate across Mediterranean species is no guarantee of respectful behaviour once a species is loosed on another continent.

By far the safest strategy is one of isolation - but, as I am often reminded, that horse has already left the stable. Laurence has little tolerance for the kind of historicist exotica that plague so many residential and public gardens. His plant choices demonstrate the range of adaptation in this climate type, broadly characterized by warm dry summers and wet winters, and offers visitors an in-your-face botanical experience with some mild educational benefits.

The pleasures of unadulterated chaparral are not so easily appreciated: they are revealed best, it seems, to those with a nativist committment, and a desire to learn the local plant vocabulary. That the discreet charms of California's signature plant community be better understood is essential to its preservation: are Taft Gardens a distraction or an ally in the pursuit of this goal?

Hotel California

A few evenings ago, we walked down State Street in Santa Barbara, an often questionable activity. In the last twenty odd years the street has been comprehensively malled. Rents have increased, turnover has had to respond and now retail formulae that work in youth-oriented markets dominate - their brands escutcheoned at the cornice line declaring their engagement of the glabrous hordes. The locals avoid the street like the plague.

But this night was different; it was the evening of the Summer Solstice festival. There was a sense in the air that the lords and mistresses of misrule had been let loose - that the machinations of globally branded capitalism had, for the moment, been swept away in a return to the pastoral debaucheries of - well, less than two hundred and fifty years ago. For then the Chumash village of Syuxtun would erupt, at summer's solstice, into a night of promiscuity as the usual proscription against adultery was relaxed and males were free to mate with a willing female of their choice.

Yes, the Uber conservative streets of Santa Barbara are, for one-night only, given up to the licentiousness of the mob, or so it seemed as face-painted carousers careened down State Street. And there, in a doorway, a woman of dark, Indian features was packing away her box of remaining cascarones, confetti-filled eggshells that are traditionally broken over the head of a boy or girl the egg-breaker wishes to favor. The streets were strewn with the tiny pieces of colored paper - business had been good.

We headed east one block to a bar where we had a drink before walking over to the Presidio (Independence Day), where we had dinner reservations at Julienne on the corner of Santa Barbara and Canon Perdido Streets. From the restaurant's windows could be seen the exposed adobe of one wing of the presidio quadrangle unceremoniously sacrificed on the alter of an orthagonal street grid. A little west of the restaurant the other quadrangle limb has been similarly truncated. I deplore this act of amputation, but applaud the decision to reveal to the world the nature of both the adobe construction and the deed by leaving the wounds uncauterized, for the cut through the sandy brown building material remains unpainted and thus stands out against the white-wash of the surficial adobe.

It was for Lorrie's birthday that I had planned this weekend of urban delight, where we could walk to our chosen entertainments. We stayed at The Upham Hotel which proclaims itself to be the oldest continuously operating hotel in California having been established in 1871. Shortly after it opened, the celebrated writer and commentator Charles Nordhoff took a room while exploring the region in 1872. We stayed in the original Italianate building in a room on the second level with the stairway to the signature belvedere immediately outside the door. The conceit grew in my mind that Nordhoff might have chosen this same end room with windows to the south and west because, before the program of irrigation that has now forested the town, it would have offered a view of the ocean.

However, Nordhoff, it seems, was no great fan of ocean breezes. Despite (or because of) spending his youth at sea, he writes of Santa Barbara, "there is a good hotel there (The Upham, then called Lincoln House, for the builder was a cousin of the President), and another is a building, but neither of them stands in a pleasant situation, and both are near the shore, where the air is less dry than in the higher parts of town." Even at higher altitudes (and he suggests Montecito), the air is now uniformly more moist than in Nordhoff's day, a product of exotic arboreal transpiration and rampant sprinklering.

Nordhoff published his seminal work, California: For Health, Pleasure and Residence in 1874, and spoke glowingly of the State: in a very real sense he invented twentieth century California. The book promoted the State at a time when it was increasingly accessible to easterners via the transcontinental railway finally realized, a few years previously, in 1869.

In an act of brazen opportunism, the village that would become Ojai (New Moon) was named Nordhoff in 1874 - the year that his guide was published. A close perusal of the work reveals not a word about Ojai, although a later edition does mention it, the writer being lured, perhaps, to his eponymous town by an understandable vanity.

Meanwhile, and by this I am referencing the intervening 137 years, Nordhoff's stock has declined to the point that he is frequently confused with his grandson Charles Bernard Nordhoff, co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty with James Hall, published in 1932. The Upham Hotel shills not Nordhoff but Aldous Huxley as its most famous guest (he spent the winter of 1960 in residence). To add insult to injury, the town of Nordhoff abandoned its Prussian name in 1917 for Ojai, a moniker filched from the valley of the moon, ?Awha'y (The Land Speaks for Itself) a community some eight miles to the east now known as Upper Ojai.

In a week that saw Monaco initiate its royal wedding festivities on Thursday night with a free concert given by The Eagles, earning them a jolt of rejuvenating publicity on every celebrity web site on the planet, I wonder what it would take to rehabilitate Charles Nordhoff, the inventor of California Dreaming. The latter is long dead - but I sense an emerging synergy: the Eagles, Nordhoff and that Italianate Hotel in Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara, a paradise that lies at the foot of a torqued mountain range, uniquely canted west, so that the town faces due south thus avoiding the "harsh and foggy north and north west winds, which make the coast north of Point Conception disagreeable..."(Space and Practice) is the essence of Nordhoff's California. It is part of a dreamscape initiated in 1874 by his guide and to which every resident of California is now heir.

Room 14 at The Upham: June 26, 2011. Was it real or just my imagination... "There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say, 'Welcome to the Hotel California'...."

Skotos

The ultimate luxury is natural darkness.

What would it take to achieve it?

Obviously, we'd have to move: from the urban wildland to the wildland. Urban is the enemy of the dark, it is the faint glow that vitiates the vast night sky and blows away the incandescent cobwebs of a billion years of pre-history; it is the pernicious miasma of photons that eats away at the pin-holes in the firmament that reveal the heavenly light; it is, quite simply, the destroyer of the star map - that most ancient guide to the fortunes of humankind.

What's up with the dark in Upper Ojai?

The lights of Santa Paula creep up over the Sulphur Mountain ridge washing the valley in a pale luminescence that turns the bejeweled black velvet of the night into a worn, grey, dish towel. From the west come the glaring security lights of the Black Mountain Ranch barn compound, and closer yet, the ridiculously over-lit, overwrought and, yes, over-the-top, gated entry to the otherwise mostly charming community that lies to the south of the 150 just a few hundred yards to the west of Koenigstein. Beyond, there's the smudge of light that filters up over the grade from the town of Ojai and creates a faint halo around Kahus, Bear Mountain. Don't talk to me about practice and game nights at Nordhoff High School - Friday Night Lights are destroying small town night skies all over the country.

Belatedly, and still not quite yet, Ojai City Council has a new Dark Sky Ordinance. It is sitting on the City Attorney's desk. Unfortunately, in the usual disfunctional manner of the Council, said attorney just upped and retired leaving the document, still awaiting his approval, in his in-tray. Gail Topping has worked on the ordinance for six years and finally presented it to the Council for adoption this March. If approved by the (new) City Attorney, it will replace a ten year old code.

A lot has happened to raise awareness of light pollution in that decade and the issue is now front and center in any city intent on preserving natural amenities: our ability to appreciate the night sky has been deteriorating, in plain sight, for far too long. Gail crafted the ordinance by referencing the work of cities such as Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, Santa Ynez, Berkeley, Tucson, Boulder, and Ketchum.

We live in an unincorporated area of Ventura County which has no effective Dark Sky Ordinance. However, our closest neighbor, Margot, is rigorous in limiting light pollution: she has no landscape lighting and minimal, fully shielded deck lights. We are also paragons of virtue in this regard relying on just two,13w, fully shielded lights on the garage and, when we remember to turn it on, a single compact fluoro down light in our entry eave soffit. We have also eschewed landscape lighting.  Ken and Charlotte who live up the hill, have two lights at their entry gate visible from our back yard, and they were persuaded to drastically reduce the lamps' wattage. We have, therefore, been effective in keeping our patch of south-facing valley on the dark side. Unfortunately, we look out to the south onto a hillside studded with extraneous lighting.

Although one could argue that humankind has spent the last few thousand years quite deliberately emerging from the gloom, I believe a more compelling narrative can be developed that suggests that we are skototropic - we seek out the dark. It is only in the last two centuries that the west has developed the kind of technology that convincingly holds the night at bay and we are beginning to understand the deleterious effects of that effort on our health, our imaginations and our spiritual well-being.

An absence of light causes S.A.D. (seasonal affect disorder), I would argue that a far more prevalent ailment is C.A.D.D. (chronic absence of darkness disorder). The two are clearly connected. Our ancient lizard brains are attuned to a circadian rhythm - to the chiaroscuro of light and shade, of night and day.

Denied the daily reset of the void, with its fierce, yet impossibly remote starlight, our urban world has degenerated into the light and the not so light. It has been a long while a-coming. There are reports of street lighting as early as the ninth century, and by the 1400's when the Mayor of London ordered that "lanterns with lights to be hanged out on the winter evenings between Hallowtide and Candlemasse" (Wikipedia) it received its first beaurocratic mandate. Benjamin Franklin invented a storm-proof candle-lantern and is credited with introducing street lighting to Philadelphia; by the early nineteenth century, parts of London were being lit by gas-lamps. In 1880, Wabash, Ohio became the "First Electrically Lighted City in the World" using Edison's recently perfected incandescent light. Today we are on the cusp of consigning his invention to the long dark night of History but light pollution remains perhaps the fastest growing and most pervasive form of environmental pollution (Missing the Dark: Health Effects of Light Pollution, R. Chepesiuk, 2009).

Yesterday was the Summer Solstice. Our thoughts are on long-summer days, perhaps, rather than short dark nights. Yet, the density, the viscosity of the night, however short, preserves the wonder of the 'rosy-fingered dawn' and completes the circadian dyad of night and day. The purpose of the Ojai Ordinance is "to protect and reclaim the ability to view the night sky and thereby help preserve the quality of life and the tourist experience of this desirable visual resource". But this rather meek objective does not plumb the existential question: if a fully dark night is our balance, what becomes of us if we relinquish this essential prop to our humanity and to our health? We exist in a world that serves as a living experiment: where our twilight nights constitute an ongoing exploration of the impact of darkness deprivation.

Paolo Sassone-Corsi, a U.C. Irvine pharmacologist writes,

"The.....circadian clock affects physiologic processes in almost all organisms. These processes include brain wave patterns, hormone production, cell regulation, and other biologic activities. Disruption of the circadian clock is linked to several medical disorders in humans, including depression, insomnia, cardiovascular disease, and cancer....Studies show that the circadian cycle controls from ten to fifteen percent of our genes, so its disruption can cause a lot of health problems.” (Missing the Dark)

Ironically, the one dark place remaining in Ventura County is Mt. Pinos, which the Chumash understood as the center of their world and the source of its balance. It represents the tallest peak in the County and is a favored location for amateur astronomers and star-gazers. In Upper Ojai, or              ?Awha'y, valley of the moon, the stars of fourth magnitude brightness are no longer visible. These illustrations of the 'alchuklash fables have disappeared from human view (Space and Practice II). The layered complexity of the night sky has been replaced by a parody where only the brightest stars remain visible like the last sequins hanging on a threadbare magician's cloak.

Our eyes seek the starlight experience of infinite depth, of infinite complexity and overwhelming awe in the trite electronic entertainments of our age. We have, as Robert Frost writes, " ....taken artificial light, Against the ancient sovereignty of night".

What's up with the Dark? It has become dark-lite. We are denied the solace of the Night Sky, where that old Romantic and renegade Transcendentalist, Walt Whitman, finds a regenerative transformation:

 ".... tired, and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,  Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."

Beep-Beep

One of the attractions of Christian theology is that it slices, dices and peels. The three-in-one concept of the Holy Trinity dispenses (you'd think) with arguments about the distinctions between the man behind the curtain, his terrestrial emissary and the universal soul - the spirit immanent in the world - that kept the Transcendentalists up at night (Albion); but I'm going to leave it at that. A final metaphysical thought before plunging on with the real narrative force of this blog: weeding.

The last few days have been perfect weeding weather. A thick blanket of cloud sits over the valley: we are locked into June Gloom. I began my latest assault on the exogenous bio-mass that exists at the fringes of our chaparral garden last Wednesday afternoon. The sun was out. The weekend of the Ojai Music Festival (The Song of Life) had been cold and cloudy, but right on schedule, given that Irony has the planet in its grip, Monday dawned clear and sunny. It was that way for the first few days of the week before the iron-cold gloom descended once more.

I was weeding the edges of the gravel terrace that bridges between the house and the pool. The pool backs into the bowl that rises up beyond the house and wraps around to the east, where sits an oak-strewn rocky knoll, before falling away to accommodate a seasonal stream. The land then rises in an upfold to become the dominating eastern ridge that shelters the site. In a world of synclines and anticlines the terrace is an oasis of flatness, a ledge cut into the dominant slope. Here was my work.

Mostly it's deerweed (Lotus scoparius) (Manichean Plant Order) creating a dwarfish canopy for bromes, thistles, mustard, clover and erodium at terrace edge. The ground is no longer soft, but most of the offending material comes out with some of its root structure attached - the ne plus ultra of the weeding experience. The terrace is bounded in rocks and coarse native gravels sieved from the spoils of small scale excavations necessitated by post-occupancy site work - a terrain which makes for difficult weeding. Seeds are more likely to germinate at a rock's edge because they benefit from the local intensification of moisture that the rock face affords; and having begun life in a cranny the roots then spread beneath the rocks and have some measure of protection from the weeder's grasp.

In Southern California, however, the act of turning over a rock does not let loose a slimy bestiary as is experienced in many damper parts of the world. The occasional stink beetle scuttles off into the brush and if there is any residual dampness there will be earwigs, but mostly it is a barren wasteland; once I found a dark grey, almost ebony, wasp nest stuck to the underside of a rock. It was pitted like a golf ball, and about the same size but more bullet shaped - the disturbed wasps crawled in and out but none took wing: I quickly replaced it in the nether-world, nest down. So there was a fair amount of scrabbling beneath rocks searching for the basal stems of plants on which to tug.

Once, I disturbed a mouse. The slope, particularly as it edges towards the rock knoll, is riddled with holes. Not all of them belong to gophers. We see ground squirrels, chipmunks and very occasionally a wood rat. Gopher snakes live amongst the big rocks beneath the oaks. On Wednesday afternoon, after going in the house to take a tea-break, I wandered over the gravel terrace to take up my place at its edge and continue weeding. Just as I was about to kneel down I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I focused in its direction and saw a beautiful juvenile rattlesnake practicing his or her undulatory locomotion up the hill away from where I had been about to kneel. It made swift progress for a couple of yards and then stopped long enough for me to admire its markings, its incipient rattle and diamond shaped head.

In a few moments it continued up slope. Then, four or five yards from where I was working it arched half of its twenty four inch length up into the deerweed above it as though it was picking some exotic Lotus fruit. Instead, it manoeuvred its body over a deerweed stem and lay there, draped in the bush about eight inches off the ground, for some considerable time. Perhaps it planned to drop out of the bush onto an unsuspecting mammal; in any case, I continued working and next time I looked it was gone.

We have seen several Roadrunners about the house recently; sometimes alone or in pairs (the Geococcyx californianus, that is). One I saw early morning in a dry creek bed beneath an oak, rooting around, it seemed, in the leaf litter. W.S. Head notes in his slim volume, The California Chaparral, Naturegraph Publishers, 1972, that they are a characteristic bird of the chaparral although Quinn and Keeley's much more recent California Chaparral, UC Press, Los Angeles, 2006, does not mention it.

Head notes that the early pioneers called these birds Chaparral cocks and would tame them to stay around their cabins catching rats, lizards and snakes. He writes about seeing a fight between one of these birds and a rattlesnake and although this probable death struggle was disturbed by a passing car he is convinced that the bird would have been victorious; its opponent was close to three feet long.

The adolescent snake perched in the deerweed would have been be easy pickings for this gawky cartooned avian, its comedic carapace masking a stealthy killing machine. Perhaps it's time to remake those old Warner Brother's cartoons with an edgier, darker tone.

The Song of Life

Two white-tailed kites quartered the sky to the south of the house. I watched from the kitchen window while they carved up the firmament - a twinned quest that had as its goal the humble diurnal rodents of the chaparral. One stopped in a characteristic hover, high above our wolf oak (Wolf Oak) whilst its mate flew to the east and alighted on a mountain mahogany bough, just long enough for me grab my father's old Carl Zeiss Jena binoculars and focus on the bird, before they both flew off over the ridge in search of their afternoon snack.

A couple of weeks ago, on a rock art trip near Lake Isabella in Kern County (Owlish Avatar) we stopped just off Hwy. 178 and clambered along the banks of the Kern River to get close to a cliff-side rock art site that is actually visible from highway. I was the first to arrive midway up the cliff as it rose above the river; gashes of white guano were splashed down the rock face amidst the red, yellow and white pictographs. My eyes travelled up these vertical white lines to a rock shelter just beneath the cliff top, perhaps thirty feet above where I was standing. A pair of ravens were nesting there, the untidy structure of their nest spilling beyond the ledge and stained white like the rock below. I was more intent on them than the pictographs and was extremely wary of disturbing the birds. Here, it seemed to me, was a rock shelter almost certainly used by shamans to journey on their datura fueled vision quests before recording them on the rocks below: now occupied by a family of ravens - a favorite spirit guide of the Yokuts - it was not a great leap to imagine that these animal familiars were acting as guardians of the rock's ancient secrets. At this point I would have been content to retire quietly and leave the art and the birds alone on the cliff.

I do not use a camera to record rock art. I rely on my senses to process the experience and trust that the salient information will be "recollected in tranquility"; better that, I believe, than to confine a digital impression to the depths of my hard drive and rely on it as surrogate memory. I am, of course, almost entirely alone in this pecadillo. When my colleagues caught up with me, many clambered further up the cliff to get closer shots of the pictographs. In the process they spooked the birds and first one raven and then its mate launched itself off the cliff face into the warm thermals and, with a few flaps of their wings, crossed the narrow river then the wide highway towards Bodfish Canyon. Moments later a third bird, a juvenile, followed in pursuit of its parents.

Birds animate the landscape. Like rabbits on their darting runs that sew a crude blanket stitch across my chaparral running path - my eyes following them from side to side - raptors piece together the landscape in their graceful arcs. Hawks, with their panoptic vision embracing vast swathes of country - hungrily surveying their larder - provide us earthbound creatures with a vicarious glimpse into the sublime: following their flight momentarily removes us from the thrall of gravity and allows us to enter into their almost weightless caress of the air. Closer to the ground, tiny wren tits of the large chaparral army of LBBs (little brown birds) flutter through the bushes, weaving from twig to twig. Birds are instrumental in our romantic embrace of landscape: didn't Emerson say something of that sort?

Dear reader, you must have known I wouldn't leave Emerson and his Over-soul alone. How could I ? Over-soul, large-as-life, raised its beatific head at the 65th. Ojai Music Festival last weekend. On Saturday morning, the Australian Chamber Orchestra played Peter Sculthorpe's piece, Irkanda, ('aboriginal' we are told, disingenuously, in the program notes, for 'faraway'; it was presumably phoneticized from one of the almost 150 surviving native languages). No matter, the music was transformative - taking me back to the Australian bush. Sculthorpe offers the explanation,

"I love Australia passionately and I love our landscape so it's influenced most of my work. Almost everything I've written is about the landscape - trying to find the sacred and spiritual in it."

Emerson saw Nature as the source of Spirit, of the Over-soul, the divine energy that pervades the universe. He had that mid-nineteenth century spiritual certainty that today we find so intensely annoying. In 1849 he wrote,

"(Nature) always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us......the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it."

Peter, you are, it seems, on the right tokara (an aboriginal word for track).

On Sunday afternoon, Maria Schneider, an American composer, brought her chosen instrument to the Libbey Bowl, a twenty piece big-band. Her compositions are heavily influenced by her interactions with nature. She is a birder, and many of her pieces make specific reference to bird calls, migration patterns and flight. Her music is suffused with intimations of the universal spirit.

That evening, Dawn Upshaw, the Australian soprano, sang songs Maria Schneider had composed from a collection of Ted Kooser's poems. Here Maria's lush jazz was joined to the slightly more astringent view of the poet. Both visions are steeped in a romanticism ultimately based in a belief that the natural world is imbued with an energy that speaks to the human condition. Sometimes I hear screech owls at night - they make more of a burbling trill than a screech - but it is a sound capable of immediately connecting me with the deeply resonant natural world.

If I could sing about it, perhaps I would: but these prosaic blog pieces are my songs of praise - lumpy eulogies scratched from my hard-scrabble word patch - that pale in comparison to the seemingly effortless music that is so similarly inspired.

Albion

In the mid-1990's, I studied with the great Mortimer Chambers (Harvard and Oxford) at UCLA. His area of speciality is Classical Greece and the historian Thucydides (460 – 395 BCE). In his class, Herodotus (484 - 425 BCE), although approximately contemporaneous with the slightly younger historian, got short shrift; despite the fact that Herodotus predates Thucydides and is acclaimed as the first historian, the quasi-mythical sources for Herodotus' The Histories allow champions of Thucydides (and Chambers is one) to claim the latter as the first modern historian.

It should be noted, however, that Herodutus also has his champions in the modernity stakes and in addition to his paternal role in the birth of history he is also acclaimed as the father of comparative anthropology and ethnography. You pay your money and you take your choice: but what all this has meant for me is that I missed the bit in Herodutus about the Tin Islands, the first mention of Britain in the classical world.

Herodotus located the Tin Islands, or Casterides, beyond the Pillars of Hercules (now the Straits of Gibralter) and was referring specifically to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. A hundred years after Herodotus, Aristotle, writing in De Mundo, notes that "the ocean flows round the earth, and in it are two very large islands called Albion (Britain) and Ierne (Ireland)".

Albion, you may remember, for a brief historical moment (1579), was destined to be the name of what we now call California (An Island on the Land). More precisely, it was to be named Nueva Albion - long before a portion of the continent's Atlantic coast was dubbed New England (1620).

But in the name Albion there is also a connection to a vision of Britain that pre-dates the Roman occupation and the establishment of Christian monotheism where the land is peopled with fairies, Druids and other dabblers in occult pantheism. This is a living tradition, burnished from time to time by fey Romantics. It is the tradition that accounts for this writer's accretion of ancient references and cosmic intimations: I am a prisoner of my coming of age in England in the 1960's - now California is the land upon which I cast the shadow of Casterides, of the Tin Islands, of Albion, the faerie kingdom.

It is not that this country doesn't have its share of Romantics. I'll get to that in a moment. It's just that living in Surrey in my late adolescence I developed a communion with the local countryside that still colors my view of the natural world: it was the age of paisley - need I say more?

Well yes, there was also that fascination with the occult that began with the pulp-fiction of Dennis Wheatley and progressed to a study of Aleister Crowley. There was a copy of the The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, James George Frazer, London, 1890, in my high school library and 'the good bits' - those dealing with the dark arts - were well thumbed.

Enchantment with the occult is, after all, a mutant form of romanticism, and many of the great Romantic artists have come under its spell, from Coleridge, William Morris and W.B.Yeats to that great post-romantic, William S. Burroughs. The eighteenth and nineteenth century English nature-worshiping verse of Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Clare, Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley has its roots in a spiritual connection with the universal spirit - which emanates from the natural world. The Transcendalists, most famously, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, among many others, used the ungainly, rebarbative word 'Over-soul', which no one could mistake for fey romanticism, in explaining the mechanism by which God pervades nature (and man); yet the pantheistic demiurge remained fully intact.

Emerson was emphatic in his insistence that God is revealed through Nature, but his was a transcendant God - he was a theist rather than a pantheist. Whitman was of the belief that Nature is God, not just his handiwork; not just a medium for revelation as it was for Emerson. The Transcendentalists all believed themselves to be inspired by the Divine soul - Emerson's Over-soul - but its source remained a point of debate: was it immanent in the world (the Pantheist position) or was it transcendant, theistic - the deity behind the curtain of the material world?

The Romantic position has usually hewed close to the doctrine of Pantheism where the world is numinous - possessed of an all encompassing spirit existing in a sacred Universe. Whitman was confident that there was no personal, anthropomorphic or creator god: Nature was all. But the Transcendentalists were an eclectic bunch - they drew on Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity as well as Greek thought: Xenophanes and Heraclitus vie as the first Pantheist philosophers and predate our battling Historians by a century or more.

This eclecticism endeared Emerson to the Theosophists. Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant (Wolf Oak) quoted him with approval and regarded him as a kindred spirit: they recognized a fellow seeker. Quite what Emerson would have made of Blavatsky's Masters of the Ancient Wisdom or Mahatmas is another matter. But Theosophists and Transcendentalists share a similar conception of God: Emerson's Over-soul is not so different from Blavatsky's Universal Divine Principle. However, the time and space travel undertaken by Besant, Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner to meet with the Masters across the astral plane, tips Theosophy well into the realm of the occult.

Although Ojai houses one of the greatest occult libraries in the world, the Krotona Institute, and erstwhile Ojai stalwarts Krishnamurti and Annie Besant provide a direct link back to Madame Blavatsky, a simple Romantic love of Nature is probably more characteristic of the town's residents than an adherence to this occult tradition. While I might be tempted to make the case that the Chumash 'antap (Space and Practice II) were but a New World manifestation of the Druidic priestly class that held sway over Celtic Britain, the joy I take in nature is, most often, similarly unclouded by thoughts of the esoteric.

For example: there really is nothing like a shadowy oak grove of a sudden splashed with sunlight - the added frisson of a spiritual connection with some sort of universal energy (as we now tend to characterize Over-Soul) can make it a sublime experience. These revelations are one of the reasons I hang around in the chaparral and the oak meadowlands of Upper Ojai - it is my attempt at communion with nature in Nueva Albion.

Owlish Avatar

All writing is autobiographical: and so it is that as much as this blog purports to be about Landscape, Shelter and Community at the Wildland/Urban interface, it is mostly about me - but not an un-mediated me. I choose to write about my interactions with the environment in ways that begin to build an idealized avatar: the me I wish to present to the world.

But a reader of even the most modest powers of perception can quickly discern the shadowy bundle of neuroses and idee fixe that lie beneath this buffed up, intellectually penetrating persona that, week after week, I attempt to manifest on this blog; and when my avatar receives praise from my friends and acquaintances for another penetrating or informative piece, it is the real, more fractured me who accepts it. On Friday night at the one year anniversary of Chris and Debbie's marriage (Wedding Weeds) held at Theater 150 on Matilija, when Kit Stolz says to me: I've been reading your blog, you know so much about the Chumash, I assume the demeanor of the successfully flattered and demur - but not too forcefully.

The reality is that the anthropology and archaeology community at large knows almost nothing about the Chumash and I know about a hundreth of what little they know. But even at 1%, I feel strangely comfortable extemporizing on this lost civilization.

It is this comfort that Kit registers - my confidence on the high-wire of history. This derives from a long habit of reading histories with a critical, and truth be told, mostly left perspective. I learnt much at the feet of the great Marxist historian C.J. Hobsbawm, author of a magisterial, three volume work on modern European history which I read closely before reducing to a sort of Cliff Notes for my prep school students at a snooty private high school, on the west side of Los Angeles. Economic history interests me so Braudel's books on the development of capitalism are a key influence.

When I came to study American history I gravitated to the work of Eric Foner and taught my eleventh grade class at Oak Grove here in Ojai using Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States. All of these historians focus on the prosaic and the plebian as well as the extraordinary and the aristocratic; and they present the economy as the milieu in which people are most evidently touched by the unfolding of power relationships - or politics.

Thus whatever understanding I have of native cultures derives from sifting the ethnographic and archaeological record through a historiographic scrim that sees politics as the apportionment of power and power as deriving from the ability to dispense basic economic benefits. As I mentioned in Space & Practice II, the 'antap were able to exert a kind of aristocratic control over the Chumash through their mastery of ritual which provided for the health, wealth and spiritual safety of their subjects. There are obvious parallels with other times and other histories.

The Chumash relationship with the land was intrinsically economic. Jan Timbrook's Ethnobotany spells it out: every plant they encountered became part of a complex culinary, pharmaecological and fiber store-house. 'Ownership' of particularly useful minerals such as obsidian derived from the simple fact of adjacency; shells, chert, flint and ground pigments, as well as prized foodstuffs like chia moved around coastal and southern central California across trade routes lubricated by the shell money produced at the Channel Island mint.

Lacking a written language, elements in the natural world took on a symbolic role in explicating the Chumash cosmology. The shadow, spirit world was also understood in terms of plants, animals and artifacts and here we have a graphic record in the form of rock art. While much meaning can potentially be derived from the Native American practice of the layering of glyphs over their terrain, (even if some of the symbolic significance of animal representations, for instance, is lost to us), the introduction of the specificity of place adds a fourth dimension to this schema that renders the whole ultimately and profoundly unknowable.

For the local tribes unerringly found the fairies at the bottom of their garden, or, as David Whitley puts it,

"The shaman's rock art site was a sacred place that served as his portal into the supernatural: during his altered state of consciousness the cracks in the walls of the site were believed to open allowing him to enter the sacred realm." (The Art of the Shaman, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2000)

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when I joined John Bretney's final Rock Art Trip of the season in Kaweah territory along the Kern River. This area at the southern edge of the Sierra foothills and to the east of San Joaquin valley is at the southeast perimeter of the Yokuts' homeland. The Yokuts represent  congeries of tribes sharing a common language stock (Penutian) and significant cultural similarities. Like the Chumash, they were creators of pictographs; and the rocks upon which these motifs were daubed still resonate with an elemental spiritual connectivity: they were and are power spots.

I was introduced to the notion of power spots by the works of Carlos Castenada. He describes his Yacqui Indian protagonist, Don Juan, as maneovering to seat himself in a room or when at rest in the desert in a location in which he can channel the energy of the place. In Western thought we use the term genius locii. Here in the western United States it seems appropriate to use the term offered up by Castaneda.

As an architect one is deeply constrained by one's clients, bureaucratic strictures and programatic requirements, but once or twice, particularly in landscape projects, I have located power spots within my work. Dumb luck. The new summer house dba has created for our neighbor Margot seems to be favored with an energy vortex more or less in the center of the space.

The medieval masons who laid out the great Gothic cathedrals were geomancers of the first order, understanding that lines of force as they naturally occur on the land can be concentrated through architectural alignments. Something similar occurred in neolithic cultures that erected vast stone geometries. Native American shaman lacked the technology to modularize rock and artfully reassemble it, or even, so far as we know, move large rocks, but they certainly marked rocks with paint or through percussive incision and thereby potentiated them. Shaman endowed the landscape with power and would ritually return to particular places and use that power for good or ill.

As a resource, the geomantic energy of potentized rock exists in the world and was subject, in the Native American world, to a process of politics and economics; and the sacred and profane, the spiritual and temporal are together, proper subjects for both history and that mash-up of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology that concerns itself with societies that have left no written record.

Owlish avatar, sort of a post-middle-age Harry Potter, has no issues with processing the entire mess.

Space and Practice II

In the space that was the Chumash Homeland, there existed the practice of 'antap manifested by a shamanic society of Chumash astronomers and magicians who cured the sick, attempted to control the weather and believed that their rituals maintained the cosmic balance.

At Burro Flats, a Chumash rock art site in Simi Valley, there is a shallow cavern that functions as an astronomical device. A few moments after the first light of winter solstice falls on a rock painting within the cave, a small luminous triangle fills out to become a finger of sunlight pointing at the center of a motif that features five concentric rings. This is the work of 'antap. (Echoes of the Ancient Skies, E.C. Krupp, Dover, N.Y., 2003).

Like the rock art sites at Vandenberg, and most notably the Coso Rock Art Monument at China Lake (Things fall Apart), Burro Flats is preserved within the web of defense installations that cover the state. At the Simi Valley site, the 'antap pictograph has been protected by Rocketdyne who built test beds within a few hundred yards of the rock art and upon which the space-shuttle engines were originally tested some three decades ago. As at Vandenberg, (where there are curious parallels between the ascension of Chumash souls at Point Conception and the secular, heaven-bound activities of the Air Force), these may be instances of the defense industry locating their facilities in vortices of power similarly identified and marked by Native Americans.

For the 'antap were all about power. They were a shamanic cult with its members spread across the villages of a political province exercising an overlay of control, primarily through their direction of ritual and the making of astronomical predictions, that transcended the independent powers of village headmen.

Membership in the 'antap was hereditary and based on a family's economic and political power. This aristocratic caste stabilized the otherwise nucleated power structure of Chumash society. While the members of individual villages did not think of themselves as belonging to a shared culture, the 'antap did, in fact, establish a coherent cosmology throughout the area we now think of as Chumash. It is thus more compelling to speak of a Chumash astronomy than of a Chumash people.

The 'alchuklash, the dedicated astronomers of the 'antap cult, believed that their ritual magic ensured the orderly progression of the celestial bodies they observed traversing the deep ebony velvet that was the pre-modern night sky. Discrepancies in this synchronization were portents of cataclysmic events. One such anomaly, a solar eclipse on November 24, 1677 became enshrined in the Painted Cave in the Hills beyond Santa Barbara (Bingo) where a black disk represents the sun and the two red disks below indicate Mars and Antares.

While the 'alchuklash regularly identified stars of fourth magnitude brightness (for their names were recorded by Harrington) and these minor celestial objects were woven into stories and a kind of astrological system used for divination and the naming of children, the moon - the dominant object in the night sky - was treated as a familiar, and in their legends functioned as a referee of the celestial battles in which animals stood in for asterisms and constellations. (December's Child, Thomas C. Blackburn, U.C. Press, 1975)

I was reminded, in this week of the Taurus full moon, of how essentially terrestrial is this natural satellite. The 'alchuklash certainly seem to have intuited that the moon was of a different order to other objects in the celestial sphere that formed the tapestry of their night. It was intimately associated, Harrington's informants tell us, with people's health and was considered to be, like the Earth, female: mother moon, mother earth.

A world away, in the Wesak Valley high in the Tibetan Himalayas a celebration of the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha accompanies the eight minute apogee of this month's full moon. Sometimes called the Buddha moon, or Wesak Moon, it is considered the most auspicious day in the Buddhist calendar. Like the 'antap winter solstice ceremony or Kakumupmawa, it is a day to celebrate continuity, humankind's union with nature and the cosmos and an acknowledgment of our place in the cycle of life.

The moon is a pale, watery reflection of the great solar driving force of our planet. It is a domestication of the fearsome sun; the earth's satellite a lantern and a clock. For the 'antap it was both of the earth and of the heavens, an intermediary and an agent of intercession; and a referee of the cosmic gambling game of peyon (Living the Sky, Ray A. Williamson, University of Oklahoma Press, 1984)

In our world, shaped as it is by the energy derived from fossil fuels, petro-chemicals and the technologies and politics surrounding them, it is easy to dismiss the ethereal sources of power pursued by pre-modern peoples; but Chumash culture, as Harrington's record of the 'antap illustrates, was highly politicized precisely because of the reality of these sources of power - the effectiveness of the supernatural was manifested in the network of control the 'antap imposed on a fragmented people.

The cosmic, astrological and space/time vortices of power these 'antap shaman accessed, are, I believe, an enduring aspect of our world. Sometimes, (and this week as the Buddha moon shone in to the bedroom window was one such), I believe that this supernatural energy can still be harnessed to our human purposes.

Space and Practice

Early last week as dusk fell, the new moon was revealed dipping low over the western horizon. As the week progressed the moon grew fatter and, rising later, was still high in the sky by dark; I imagined it, by about midnight, sliding behind the San Rafael coastal range and entering the sea somewhere around Point Conception.

The Southern California Bight (SCB) describes the inshore turn taken by the coastline from Point Conception to just south of San Diego and east of the Santa Rosa-Cortez Ridge, an 1800 m high, 180 km long underwater range that lies 90 km off the coast directly south of the northern Channel Islands.

Point Conception is the westernmost headland of the SCB. It is the point at which south trending storms peter out in the ocean - which accounts, in part, for the wetter, colder land north of the point and the drier south. It is also, according to Chumash legend, the site of The Western Gate, proclaimed as a point of embarkation into the Milky Way for the spirits of the dead.

I touched on this briefly in Death Comes to Koenigstein mentioning only that the Chumash dead experienced soul-wanderings over the earth and ocean in preparation for their heavenly journey to paradise. I was unaware, at the time of writing, of the controversy swirling around the Point Conception terminal for 'soul wandering' that has developed, over the years, into a debate on the existential status of the Chumash - both in the present and in the historical record.

Before blundering into this controversy, I had indicated in past posts such as Saxon Hall, Hoop Dreams and Bobcat Magic et al, that the Chumash were not a people, but an agglomeration of individual Native American bands created for the taxonomic convenience of nineteenth and twentieth century anthropologists. Influenced by E.J. Hobsbawm's critique of nationalist mythology and his notion of invented ethnic 'traditions'; my work with the UCLA's Cotsen Center for Archaeology Rock Art Archive under the direction of Dr. Jo-Anne Van Tilberg, and a long-standing interest in historiography, it was perhaps inevitable that I would take this position: I am profoundly sceptical of histories that serve contemporary interests at the expense of detailing the messy realities of the past.

Thus I was a willing convert to the position of Haley and Wilcoxon who argue, in their paper, Anthropology and the Making of Chumash Tradition, Current Anthropology, Vol. 38, #5, December, 1997, that Chumash practice, as delineated by self-styled Tradionalists, is an amalgam of New-Age ideology, the Hopi Traditionalist movement, popular primitivist imagery and the ethos of non-Indian counterculturists. I noted in Peace Walk, that such faux pan-Indian syncretism does little to uphold the enormous variety of Native American culture and much to demean the profundity of local tradition. Similarly, Jo-Anne van Tilberg has deplored the travesty of Southern Californians of Native American descent dressing up in the buckskins and bonnets of the Plains Indians to celebrate Chumash Days in Malibu.

Haley and Wilcoxon suggest that "ultimately, the entire category of Chumash is modern and neither its members nor its cultural content is unambiguously indigenous". Having established the cultural discontinuity of the Chumash Traditionalists with their possible Native American forbears (and much doubt is cast on this relationship) they go on to suggest that The Western Gate may have had only limited significance to the local Purisimeno Indians as suggested by J. P. Harrington in the early twentieth century.

The proposed development of a Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) terminal at Point Conception in the late seventies initially galvanized the local community of ranchers, surfers, environmentalists, archaeologists and the Sierra Club; they banded together with Chumash Traditionalists in establishing the sacred nature of the place. From Haley and Wilcoxon's perspective this consortium ultimately oversold the significance of the site by suggesting it to be the only place at which the souls of the Chumash could depart for the land of the dead. In the spirit of the times, and following the example of similar occupations at Alcatraz and at Wounded Knee, Chumash Traditionalists occupied the site and proclaimed themselves to be 'Keepers of the Western Gate'. While there was clear evidence of a Chumash village at the Point (Humqaq), 'The Western Gate' appears to have been an entirely new-age act of naming.

Harrington's Chumash sources indicate that the souls of the dead do indeed ascend to Shimilaqsha, the western land of the dead; but this seems to have occurred at a great many hilltops where feathered and painted pole shrines were placed to guide the souls of the departed. It is probable that such shrines were erected at Point Conception, but highly unlikely that they were any more significant than others of their kind.

Haley and Wilcoxon evaluated the site in the early nineties to gauge the impact of a proposed development at the Vandenbergh Air Force base, twelve miles away from the Point. They concluded that while Point Conception was a traditional cultural property according to the Department of the Interior's guidelines, the same could not be claimed for the coast line as it extended north towards the base - despite the claims of some who saw the need for preserving the shore as an archaeological park.

Vandenberg Air Force Base is one of two primary rocket-launch sites in the United States. Satellites are launched into a north-south orbit over the poles so it is advantageous to launch to the south over water so that if the rocket blows up, the pieces will fall relatively harmlessly.

By the mid 1960's the Air Force had already constructed six launch sites at the base; in the 1970's they decided to use NASA’s Space Shuttle to launch its satellites into polar orbit. After over a decade of work and several billion dollars the Air Force halted the use of the shuttle for launching satellites because of the Challenger accident in early 1986 and their 'Spaceport' was mothballed. In 1995, Lockheed chose the location to launch its Athena rockets but after three expensive failures discontinued the program.

Some have suggested that this miserable record suggests that there is a curse on the facility connected with the disturbance of The Western Gate's psychic air-space. Likelier, is the more prosaic explanation that most close reviews of military expenditures would reveal similar tales of waste and failure.

This January, a Delta IV Heavy, Boeing's most powerful rocket, was launched from Vandenberg, carrying a spy satellite. Preparing for the launch had taken three years and $100 million in infrastructure upgrades at the launch site. The rumble of the liftoff was heard across a fifty mile radius of Chumash territory.

Haley and Wilcoxon's decision to use their deconstruction of The Western Gate mythology to question the broader authenticity of the Chumash community has not gone unchallenged. Jon Erlandson (An Island on the Land), for one, suggests that their thesis denying the validity of the Chumash grouping ignores the pragmatic reality of a contiguous geographical cluster of bands who spoke related dialects of a common language group and shared a suite of cultural traits and traditions.

For what its worth, as a blogger and independent scholar, while I have argued that the Chumash are, regrettably, an extinct culture (Bingo) I see no reason to abandon this historical, taxonomic conflation of space and practice. As for The Western Gate, I believe it may have functioned for the souls of departed Chumash as a non-exclusive portal into the heavens. Remarkably, a few miles to the north, in a radically different culture, the Air Force and its sub-contactors continue to have similar aspirations for this lonely headland.

Manichean Plant Order

The Good:

Now is the time for some of the most beautiful sage-scrub and chaparral plant groupings. I'm thinking of young buck-wheat, both the yellow and pink varieties with Artemesia, Brickellia and Salvias; the creamy topped chamise, mimulus and bush poppies; sprays of California everlasting and Solanum xanti (purple nightshade) amidst antic deerweed. The native morning glory and goosefoot and larkspur nestling together on the very edge of the chaparral; rarely, a stand of woolly blue curls amidst chamise - but popping up all over, the native hiacynth known as blue dicks . Amidst the weeds (see below): lupine and caterpillar phacelia, blue eyed grass and this year's not-so-much (last year's prolific) purple owl's head clover.

The Bad:

Clover, Erodium and mustard - all assiduous colonizers of broken ground. Thistles, of many varieties but most notoriously, the yellow star thistle, Centaurea solstitialis - so noxious it is consigned to land fill rather than compost. Grasses: so many introduced after 1769, their seeds in animal hair, packing materials, ship's ballast or in soil surrounding fruit tree cuttings (Grasses in California, Beecher Crampton, UC Press, 1974) - now spreading across the disturbed ground and turning it into a hideous caricature of European meadowland. So much else that I recognize from my youth in England and all so wrong in California.

The Argument:

There are some who argue that all plant life is precious. My friend Sarah Munster, the Landscape Designer, argues for the value of the Peruvian pepper (Schinus molle) - often erroneously called California pepper - in the chaparral landscape; I consider them abominations. Margot, in her wisdom, has planted oak seedlings beneath each of the peppers and jacarandas (installed by the original owners of her property) and once they are to six feet or so she will remove the offending exotics.

Trees, we can presume, if not sentient, certainly have a spirit-life and this is confirmed, perhaps, by the experiences of such as Jiddu Krishnamurti who received enlightenment under the pepper tree in the East End of Ojai and Siddhartha Gautama who sat in meditation beneath a Bodhi tree, resolving not to move until he had attained nirvana. At a minimum, trees function as conduits for unseen energies and those sensitive to such currents are understandably reluctant to remove the antennae.

But while it's never easy taking the life of a mature tree, if we allow exotics full rein then the individual character of unique plant communities will eventually be destroyed and the world's vegetation will slowly be homogenized into a collection of the planet's most aggressive colonizers - chaparral, for instance, crowded out by arrundo, peppers and eucalypts - and the variety of the world's fauna decimated by the destruction of unique habitat.

T.C.Boyle addresses one aspect of this conundrum when he writes in his lastest eco-thriller, When the Killing Stops, Viking, 2011, of the National Park Service's campaign to eradicate wild pigs and sheep from Santa Cruz Island and the counter-campaign of animal rights activists who believe all animal life, whatever the ecological consequences of their living situation, is sacred. The shock troops of this war on feral pigs came from New Zealand, a land that has its own history of fighting introduced species, and an antipodean friend tells me that they were awarded the contract based on price - they cut the pigs throats rather than shooting them - saving the cost of bullets and firearms.

Readers of this blog will be well aware of where my sympathies lie: I have undertaken the quixotic mission of rolling back the time-clock on my patch of chaparral and sage-scrub to before 1769. The Channel Islands have been dubbed California’s Galapagos, for the unique variety of flora and fauna that developed there in isolation from the mainland. Chaparral is hardly less precious but under equal threat.

Ursula K. Le Guin, creator of the fictional universe, Earthsea, writes in her review of Boyle's recent book, (The Guardian, Saturday 19 March 2011),

"California was an island in the earliest, fanciful maps. Ecologically, the maps were right. Isolated by the ocean, the Sierra and the great deserts, dozens of species unknown elsewhere flourished in the benign climate, until the white men came. Then, under the impact of a thousand imported exotics, native species began to decline or perish.

There are Californians today who, far from planting lawns around their desert condos, would like to uproot all the golden Spanish wild oats to let the bunch grasses of Indian days cover the hillsides again."

I am one such Californian attempting to hold the line.