Strange Land

With just a few weeks to the winter solstice, the fiddlenecks, goosefoot and peonies are in full leaf: I am tireless (and some might say tiresome) in my heralding of gwanwyn, of spring in the chaparral after summer's deathly heat (The Winter's Tale).

This topsy-turvydom is familiar territory to me having lived for over a decade in the antipodes where the strangeness of the fauna and flora, and the seasonal mirroring of the northern hemisphere, was much commented on during the colonial founding of Australia. In my day, many would-be British immigrants, (whingeing poms) never did get used to Christmas on the beach and would return after a few years, in whimpering confusion, back to the poor grey island of their birth. Here in California, despite the overwhelming presence of chaparral in the wildlands, it is quite possible and indeed probable that one's life be lived out in ignorance of the unique characteristics of this eco-system's adaptation to the extreme Mediterranean-type climate which predominates in the southern part of the state. We have arranged, through the artifice of irrigation, to surround ourselves in our cities and suburbs with old-world, exotic flora that faithfully conforms in its habits to the traditional seasonal calendar.

Other evidence of the apparent strangeness of the State has long been recognized. Charles Nordhoff writes, in the opening pages of California for Health Pleasure and Residence, that pean to this Pacific state that did so much to brand it (Hotel California), "California is to most Eastern people still a land of big beets (Muwu) and pumpkins, of rough miners, of pistols, bowie-knives, abundant fruit, queer wines, high prices - full of discomforts, and abounding in dangers to the peaceful traveler". He goes on to suggest that so little known is California that for Easterners it might as well be the flying island of Laputa that floats somewhere above the Pacific in Swift's early 18th century satire, Gulliver's Travels.

I have written of California's history of being identified as (and here compared with) an island (An Island on the Land, Independence Day). While often believed literally over several centuries, this connection has, of course, proven to be mythical. One of the first expressions of this fantasy is contained in Garci Ordonez de Montalvo's  Las Sergas de Esplandian, Seville, 1510, where he locates California "on the right hand of the Indies...very close to the side of Terrestrial Paradise", and where the Californian black Amazons rode into battle on griffins led by their mighty Queen Calafia.

Swift knew of California, in the highly approximate way of the geographers of the 1700's, for he locates the Island of Glubbdubdrib, "somewhere east of Japan and west of California", as a place of sorcerers and magicians. In the skies above, the King of Laputa cruises over his dominions punishing rebellious behavior by his subjects through the simple expedient of parking his island, held aloft by a giant loadstone magnet, over the insurrectionist state, thus denying it rain and sunshine. Swift explains, "the island is made to rise and fall, and move from one place to another. For, with respect to that part of the earth over which the monarch presides, the stone is endued at one of its sides with an attractive power, and at the other with a repulsive." Thus we have transportation by magnetic levitation foretold, as used now in the high speed Maglev rail system.

Glubbdubdrib, we are informed, "is about one third as large as the Isle of Wight, and extremely fruitful: it is governed by the head of a certain tribe, who are all magicians. This tribe marries only among each other, and the eldest in succession is prince or governor". Swift then, by placing this phatasmogoric floating island and the lands beneath it somewhere between Japan and the Californian coast, establishes the region as a never-never land, unknowable and thus infinitely malleable in his literary imagination. Nordhoff references Laputa as a synecdoche for this same frontier of the strange and fantastic - qualities many believe California continues to uphold.

The gold rush miners, immigrants from Europe and the east coast, refugees from the dustbowl and emigrees from all over have, over the last one hundred and fifty years, attempted to make their new home on the west coast out of the vocabularies of the old. Their continued failure to achieve any plausible replication of their homelands and native customs is a tribute to the fun-house mirror that is provincialism. Papering over the local eco-system with exotics has resulted in such bizarre west coast landscapes as Lotusland in Santa Barbara, and, more locally, Taft Gardens (Return to Bear Canyon). These are extremes of a spectrum (and possessed of very different aesthetic impulses) that extends to the planting of eucalypts and beyond to generic palm trees and petunias that is supposed to anchor us in the known but all the while confirms the enduring strangeness of our fantastic land.

Abbot Kinney pioneered the growing of eucalypts in California and was also responsible for the failed attempt to evoke the ancient trading city of Venice by digging ditches through a homely stretch of partially drained coastal wetland in Los Angeles. On both counts, he was transplanting icons from alien cultures, and while his adventures in canal building were merely a folly, his contribution to the introduction of Australian gum trees has caused massive disruption to the state's emblematic eco-systems.

The gum tree was long considered strange by Europeans, for how could such a stately tree offer almost no shade, shed its bark instead of its pendulous leaves and they, in turn, be more blue-gray than green? E. and R. Littel note in the The Living Age, 1884, that for Joseph Banks, the botanist on board the Endeavor on Cook's round-the-world voyage of exploration, discovering the flora and fauna in Botany Bay (now a part of Sydney) in 1770, "must have been like finding one's self for the first time on the surface of a new planet".

No such overt strangeness greeted the first Europeans to explore California. The Spanish monte bajo is very similar to our chaparral (Suquet). Lynx, wolves, bears, foxes, boars, antelope, deer and elk still roamed Europe in the sixteenth century. The only animal in California capable of surprising the Spanish was the mountain lion, but that too was well known by repute for it was a familiar heraldic animal. Cabrillo first came ashore in San Diego on September 28, 1542. Venturing further north, the San Salvador and Victoria put in at the Island of San Miguel. Here indeed was a civilization of magicians and sorcerers (for who can doubt the profoundly astrological and animistic basis of Chumash culture?). On this weird, Glubbdubdribian island Cabrillo broke his leg and later returned to die after storms and heavy seas turned his ships back from Point Reyes. It would not be until 1910, when John Harrington began his study of the local native American culture, that the profound strangeness of Chumashian esotericism was slowly revealed to the modern world.

Sir Francis Drake floated the storm-damaged Golden Hinde into a harbor at Point Reyes (Drake's Bay) in 1579 and was so reminded of the south coast of England that he named the region Nova Albion (Albion). Like Cabrillo, he remained blind to the exotic weirdness close-by. Not so far away, the stange and wonderful giant redwoods would eventually be discovered by Europeans in the 1850's, establishing a kind of botanical freak show that would totally eclipse the mild arboreal eccentricities of the eucalypt (The Democratic Republic of Chaparral).

Surf and Turf

In WTV, I suggested that my 'home turf', for the purposes of this blog, consists of the Ojai and Upper Ojai valleys and portions of their watershed which feed one of two rivers, the Ventura or the Santa Clara which, in turn, wind their way to the ocean and, taken all together, delineate a comprehensible turfdom. If you drive up behind Ventura City Hall, along Brakey Road (named for a successful Ventura house mover, Robert E. Brakey, a City Trustee in 1916-17 and owner of a large portion of the hillside between Oak Street and present-day City Hall) and leave the car where Brakey threatens to run over the escarpment that tumbles down to the flatlands below, and then walk up to the eucalypts at the top of the hill, you should be prepared to comprehend, and be dazzled by, a view of said turf.

Once, somewhere in South Wales on an English fortnight's holiday with my parents, my father read from a guide book and winced when he spoke, "sweeping estuarial vistas lie before you". It was estuarial that got to him. Now his son is guilty of taking all kinds of adjectival liberties and estuarial does not rise (for me) to the level of embarrassingly prim or excruciatingly pretentious: it falls within the broad range of the acceptable. In memory of my father, however, I will desist from using it to describe this view, although, at first blush, it would seem to be mighty apposite.

The fact is, my concern for geographical accuracy offers me an out: for what lies before you, to the north, is a delta, the Ventura River delta. The river feeds the ocean with fresh water, silt and cobbles whilst threading through alluvial debris; this is echoed, to the south, by the Santa Clara delta. Strictly speaking, an estuary is a deep, fan shaped sunken mouth of a river valley whereas a delta is a depositional alluvial mass through which the mouth of the river flows shallowly and unpredictably. An estuary is deep, stable and possesses gravitas; a delta is frivolous and changeable.

There is an easy mnemonic. Delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet and is used, in its upper case form of a triangle, to signify change in mathematics, or physics. What we have before us (since you are along for the ride) are two deltas (of the watery, unstable kind) about three or four miles apart that describe the base-line of a quadrant that, in my mind (I won't burden you with this mental bric-a brac) has its origination point in my back yard.

At the mouth of the Ventura River, as an article in CCBER (see below) notes, wetlands occur seaward of the coastal dunes and berm and here the substrate of the intertidal and subtidal habitats is characterized by sedimentary cobble transported to the river’s delta during major storm events, and sorted by ocean waves, tides and currents. This cobble ranges in size from three inches to three foot boulders, and is derived from a wide variety of inland sedimentary rock formations, from the Pleistocene (geologically recent) to the Eocene, as well as several granitic and metamorphic rock types (The Dance of Time). The cobble substrate, which extends over a mile along the shoreline of the Ventura River Delta (visible from the 101 driving south) is intermixed with fine sediments derived from river flows and the long-shore littoral current. (Mark H. Capelli in UCSB's Cheadle Center for Biological Diversity and Ecological Restoration Newsletter, CCBER, June 2010).

J. Garnett Holmes and Louis Mesmer in their Soil Survey of the Ventura Area, 1901, write that,

"In the remote northern and eastern portions of the county the mountains are of granite and volcanic rock, but the hills and mountains surrounding all the cultivable land are sandstone and shale. Santa Clara River runs from the east and flows in a westerly direction to the ocean. Piru, Sespe and Santa Paula Creeks enter from the north. These tributaries, coming as they do from areas of different geological formations, make the sediment of Santa Clara River of complex character and produce the Oxnard types of soil."

The two rivers then, differ in their depositional character. The northern delta dumps roiling rocks onto the beach (when in spate) for the river is funneled by the narrow Ventura River Valley pinched between the ridge from whence this view unfolds, and the northward upslopes that reach toward Red Mountain where the hillside is, for the most part, riddled with oil development; although a broad swathe of many hundreds of acres has recently been developed as citrus orchards by a local rancher. Thus constricted in its flow, the river, in flood, increases in velocity and shoots seaward spewing its sand, silt and cobble upon the littoral.

The more languid Santa Clara River has, over the ages, created the broad Oxnard Plain, the State's richest agricultural soils. Between them there is the sprawl of Ventura fatally bifurcated by the 101 and the agricultural flats (Camarillo Brio).

US 101 is arguably the most historic highway in California. It follows the route the Spanish explorer Juan Gaspar de Portola established in 1769, which later became El Camino Real, the King's Highway. This historic road connected (more or less) the twenty-one missions of California and served as the main north-south road in California until the 1920s. In 1926, Route 101 was established which faithfully followed El Camino Real and was only slowly up-graded from two-laned blacktop, through the 1940's and 50's, to a mostly four lane highway. 1959 saw the completion of four lanes up and over the Conejo grade and ten years later the two local towns of Camarillo and Ventura were riven asunder by the extension of this divided highway, now dubbed the Ventura Freeway. In 1992, the last traffic signal at Santa Barbara was finally removed and now State Street dips elegantly beneath the freeway thus preserving the towns primary connection to the ocean. Ventura's Main Street runs parallel to the ocean and thus enjoys no such grand terminus at the Pacific.

Major roads (State Highway 33 and the 126 Freeway) run alongside the course of the two great, mostly wild rivers which bookend the City, but development is terraced into the Ventura Hills running in-line with the surf. As I pointed out in An Island on the Land, California, through the Mission period and during its annexation to a newly independent Mexico into the 1840's, was both explored and peopled along a north-south axis, up and down the coast - by sea or land. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did local east-west traffic develop when a stage line was established, to and from Los Angeles, via the Simi, Conejo and Santa Clara Valleys which then travelled out to Ventura through the Ojai Valley and up the coast to Santa Barbara, thus taking advantage of terraces forged by both the local east-west rivers - as would the 33 and 126 in the twentieth century (Saturday Night Special).

I stand here (now) above Koenigstein, my out-stretched arms encompassing about 30 degrees and imagine my finger tips straining to reach the two river deltas somewhere over Sulphur Mountain, over the trackless wildlands (unless, somehow, the meridians briefly align with Canada Lago or Aliso Canyon Roads), over the chaparral, the oil lines, the nameless oil roads and the canyons, streams, arroyos, seismic faults and game trails and proclaim it as my turf, as my home.

Valley of the Blue Moon

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended,
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Wordsworth was having a tough day. He writes, apropos the composition of Intimations of Immortality, "I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust". In his poetry he gets very close to suggesting some kind of reincarnation, or at least the immortality of the soul - "life's Star".

Heaven here is the Magic Kingdom of God, whence we trail "clouds of glory" like so many spangled rainbow beams, into childhood. He wrote this many stanza'ed ode in 1804, long before the terrestrial paradise of the Tibetan Shangri-la had been widely publicized in the West where his intimations of reincarnation might have found a better poetic home. While his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge plundered the East for his Kubla Khan, (Xanadu is the location of Khan's summer palace in Mongolia), Wordsworth's was a classical heaven, influenced by Greece as well as a Christianized Rome and the territory of his poetry remained, for the most part, the windswept landscapes of the Lake District (The Sage Gatherer).

Too bad. Today, Virtual Tibet (the realm created by Western imaginings) has become a kind of free-floating sacred space within the desecrated world of the modern West (Lost Horizon), a magic kingdom that is host to our spiritual longings. Xanadu became a cult movie and a Broadway musical. Intimations of Immortality is stuck in the canon of English Romantic poetry out of which it resolutely does not threaten to break. Location, location, location.

Despite its real-world occupation by China, Virtual Tibet is often seen as the last surviving treasure-house of a primordial wisdom, as the crown-jewel of the Mahayana (the path of seeking complete enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings); as an idyllic land hermetically sealed against all the contaminations and pathologies of modernity. But historically, as Harry Oldmeadow notes in his paper, The Quest for Secret Tibet, it has often been viewed as "a feudal and Oriental despotism pervaded by a degenerate Lamaism in which base superstition, devil-dances and (yak) butter statues, mummery and black magic" are endemic; and yet, since the earliest European incursions in the 17th century, Tibet has become a focus of European desire and fantasy.

The earliest sustained visit to Tibet was undertaken in 1716 by the Jesuit Ippolito Desideri who walked from Delhi to Ladakh and across western Tibet to Lhasa, where he remained for five years. A hundred years later, Csoma de Koros, a Magyar nobleman and philologist in search of the roots of the Hungarian language, arrived in Ladakh. Under appalling conditions, he devoted himself to the study of the Tibetan language. He made the first English-Tibetian Dictionary while living at Zangla Monastery in Zanskar which was published in 1824 (Wikipedia). In 2001, as part of a Where There be Dragons trip, in often only slightly less demanding conditions, my then 16 year old son spent six weeks trekking in this same area. Between times, Blavatsky who claimed to have visited Tibet, Alexandra David-Néel who certainly did (mostly on-foot), and the German expatriate, Lama Govinda, author of The Way of the White Clouds (1966) - all contributed to the Western fascination with the area.

Ironically, several of the most influential writers to contribute to the fantasy of the magic kingdom based their work entirely on secondary sources rather than first hand knowledge. Oldmeadow claims that, "...despite the legend which she and her hagiographers propagated, Blavatsky never stepped on Tibetan soil...... Whilst Isis Unveiled (1877) was based on heterogeneous Occidental sources, her second major work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), includes elements that clearly derive from the Vajyarana" (Buddhist Tantras which claim to be the teachings of the supreme personification of the state of enlightenment). He suggests that Blavatsky possessed both considerable intellect and an omnivorous mind, such that the task of deconstructing the work she fabricated out of a synthesis of western occultism and 'Oriental wisdom' has consistently confounded her critics.

The best-selling books on Tibet in the 20th century were T. Lobsang Rampa's "autobiographical" trilogy: The Third Eye (1956), Doctor from Lhasa (1959), and The Rampa Story (1960). Lobsang Rampa was, in fact, the pen-name of Cyril H. Hoskin, the lightly educated son of a British plumber. He claimed, however, that he was born into an aristocratic Lhasa family closely associated with the thirteenth Dalai Lama, and that at the age of eight was given an arcane surgical procedure to create "the third eye", thus releasing various clairvoyant powers and the ability to discern auras. His books continued to sell well into the late 1960's and I assisted in that process whilst employed as a sales clerk at The Bookmark - then Edmonton's finest independent bookstore. The 'Spritual Literature' section was second only to the 'Canadiana' shelves in popularity and I established myself as both the go-to-guy for the former and unmatched in my ignorance of the latter.

The greatest popularizer of the Tibet mystique was, arguably, James Hilton. His 1933 book, Lost Horizon, turned into a movie by Frank Capra four years later, promoted the idea of Shangri-la as the quintessential mystical, pre-modern mountain valley. Hilton never claimed to have visited the Himalayan kingdom and took most of his information directly from Joseph F. Rock an ethnographer, linguist and botanist who operated in North West China and Tibet in ways comparable to John Harrington's obsessive recordation of the lingering traces of Chumash culture and the plant material which played such a large part in their shelter, clothing food and medicine (Yuccapedia). Rock published nine articles for National Geographic Magazine from 1922 to 1935, illustrated by his own photographs, and from these Hilton created his Shangri-la.

While the precise location of this mythical valley based, in turn, on the older, Buddhist mythology of Shamabala is unclear, an area in northwestern Yunnan province, where Rock conducted much of his Tibetan borderland exploration and research, re-named itself as Shangri-la in 2001 in order to promote tourism - an act of blatant opportunism reminiscent of the naming of our mountain valley as Nordhoff in 1874 (Hotel California).

As I pointed out in Lost Horizon, Tibet, and more generally the Himalayas (The Dance of Time) have played a key role in the development of esotericism in Ojai and the town's reputation as a spiritual hot-spot. That Shangri-la is an entirely fictional confection and the mystique of Tibet often founded in self-serving romanticism does not fully negate their power. Our visions of Shangri-La ultimately originate in the Buddhist Tantra of Kalacakra and if we choose to ignore the shadow of destruction that hangs over the idyllic community of Shamabala, (to be substantiated in the year 2425 through a massive assault by demonic, barbarian armies) then we can reasonably equate it with Ojai, similarly filled with glittering (green) palaces, and populated by beautiful and healthy dwellers whose age, like Hilton's romantic lead, a seemingly young Manchu woman, Lo-Tsen, is a mystery (until the novel's epilogue).

If Wordsworth had been privy to the Tantric Buddhist notion of Living Nature where there is...

 "no independent or separately existing external world; where the inner and outer worlds are the warp and woof of the same fabric in which the threads of all forces and of all events, of all forms of consciousness and of their objects, are woven into an inseparable net of endless, mutually conditioned relations" (Oldmeadow) 

...then perhaps this understanding would have entirely transcended his need to write poetry. We would have been denied the sad romance of his struggle with what Thomas would later call the 'dying of the light' and the rare nobility of his fierce determination to find in nature the glowing embers of "the vision splendid".

The Dance of Time

The Upper Ojai Valley, fringed by the Santa Ynez - Topatopa mountain range (still uplifting at the rate of human finger-nail growth) and defined as an upper valley by the seismic shift impelled by the Santa Ana fault - which runs around the base of Black Mountain at the bottom of The Grade - is a gently rising plateau that exists in the quiet center of a rambunctious geomorphic stage.

The over-folded Topatopas, in which, like Bugarach (Coyote Dream), the oldest rock has risen to the top, are old: Eocene old, their antiquity expressed in the crinkles of enfoldment, the fissures of stress and the spalling of rock faces taken to the point of fracture by the shifting pressures of subterranean continents - plate tectonics. During the Eocene, 56 to 34 MYA, the global system of plates underwent a general reorganisation. The shape of the west coast of the continent we now call North America was forged by this subterranean realignment. The Sespe formation consists predominantly of sandstones and conglomerates laid down in a riverine, shoreline, and floodplain environment between the upper Eocene (around 40 MYA) to the end of the Oligocene Epoch (around 24 MYA) (Wikipedia). Within its anticlines (or simple folds) we now seek oil.

Sulphur Mountain, that other piece of the valley's geomorphic furniture, is a Sespe formation anticline, with its newest rock on top and the oil producing strata within, sometimes accessible by a horizontal tunnel as Josiah Stanford discovered in 1861. Using mostly Chinese labor, tunnels were dug throughout the 1860’s, and crude oil was hauled by horse-drawn wagon to Ventura and shipped to San Francisco for distillation into lamp and lubricating oils. Cloaked in oak meadowland, Sulphur Mountain plays yin to the Topatopas yang where the rugged ridges rise above the relict bigcone Douglas firs (Pseudotsuga macrocarpa) and chaparral below and feature sandstones unevenly weathered and fractured in creams, reddish-browns, maroon, and grey-greens.

On the upper valley floor: alluvial fan deposits (Holocene - the current geological era) from mountain canyon streams, with depositions via debris flows, mud-flows or braided stream flows, of poorly bedded sandy clay and gravel. In the foothills: alluvial fan deposits of semi-consolidated, poorly sorted gravel, boulder, sand, silt and clay and this organized in drifts around the pre-existing Coldwater sandstone (late Eocene) composed of akosic sandstone (consisting of grains of feldspar and quartz cemented by a mixture of quartz and clay minerals) with siltstone and shale interbeds. To some this may seem academic. Here in Upper Ojai, we live the reality - geology impacting the location of our houses, septic systems and the nature of the landscape that surrounds us.

After a day of blustery off-shore winds, driving down the north south canyons (astride one of which our house sits) the sun began (as I sat scribbling these thoughts) its descent into the region of wispy cloud blossom massed to the west. Here the sun's intensity is diffused by the water vapor and the dust that is suspended in our shallow atmosphere. It becomes  weak and watery, an elegy for the dying day and the passing of seasons and a presage of winter storms, one of which is promised for the weekend. Later, the evening dissolved into halloween crimsons and oranges as the westering sun hit the red, kodachrome spectrum.

The colors of chaparral are muted at this time of year. The rocks are often sombered too, by the overcast. Looking at Sulphur Mountain through a veil of rain, as I do now, one could be excused for describing the landscape as drab. It occupies a range of greys and greens that sometimes, depending on the luminosity of the skybowl, is barely beyond monochrome. Whatever its hue, it is never less than elemental. Indeed, its somber cloak under leaden skies is particularly effective in transmitting the writhing energy of the lithic mantle. The hills really are alive: but their movements are traced on a geologic timescale.

These notions of the elemental, the chromatic, and the deep, tectonic choreography that instructs the geomorphic furniture that surrounds us are gathered together in a spirit that, I hope, suffuse this blog: of a creative gestalt; or, expressed in the idiom of the day (or is it yesterday?) a mash-up. This is, of course, one of the informing principles of twentieth century art - the aggregation of forms and media. So, as I drag this segue kicking and screaming across the page, it is time to mention Pina Bausch.

While Lorrie and I were in Brooklyn recently, Wim Wender's new film, Pina was showing, for two sold-out performance, at BAM. We missed it, but the film, as devoted fans of both artists, was now firmly on our radar. Serendipitously, we were invited, last week, to the L.A. premiere. It was an opportunity to see fragments of four of her works, 'Sacre du Printemps', 'Cafe Mueller', 'Vollmond' and 'Kontakthof'. Each, as presented by Wim, showcases the Bausch obsessions with color, movement and the elemental.

I see much of the world through the scrim of my favorite ecosystem; through my experience in the urban wildland, and through the formal taxonomies of shape, texture, color and movement. Lacking formal botanical, geological or zoological training I see the world first through my senses and in making 'sense' of these impressions I validate them (or not) with an intellectual structure. Pina Bausch raises this sort of methodology to the level of great art. Her chosen medium is theatrical dance - a medium intrinsically temporal and ultimately evanescent. Wim has enshrined her work in an invigorating 100 minutes of 3-D film which has become, following her death at the start of production, a memorial to her intemperate talent.

Is there a connection between dance and landscape? Absolutely - in its appreciation. As I suggested above, they share many characteristics if approached through the senses. What of narrative you ask? Theater represents a compression of time in which themes are explored that, beyond the proscenium, unfold in a broader temporal landscape (so to speak). The natural world takes its own (sweet) time, but the stories are there, and your humble scribe attempts to reveal these narratives in the compressed format of a 1250 word blog piece - trivial work compared to Pina's one new dance piece a year, but both ultimately spring from the same human urge to elucidate the sublime.

Lost Horizon

In Red Soil and WTV I contemplated the sources of Ojai's mystical reputation. I spent some time delineating the impact of Theosophists on the valley and that of Alice Bailey, firmly in the same tradition, but cast out of the Theosophy camp by her great rival Annie Besant. On Saturday, I attended a talk by UCSB Professor of Geology Edward Keller, sponsored by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy and held at Matilija auditorium, on the geology of our area. Almost the first thing he said was that Ojai was undergoing a rate of geologic uplift that was only rivaled by the Himalyayas. Ohmmmmm, I thought.

While I was in New Suffolk on Long Island's North Fork attending Kate and Rob's wedding (Waterland) we met some of her cousins and cousins-in-law who hailed from Halifax. There may be other reasons for Americans to relocate to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, but the primary one is the maritime community of Buddhists who travelled there as a sort of diaspora after the world of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, his Regents and successors blew apart in Boulder and Ojai as an HIV sex scandal besmirched the authority of the guru. And so, I learnt as I talked to them, it was.

Enlightenment dawned. Almost all of the spiritual traditions upon which Ojai's reputation as a mystical hot spot are based can be traced back to the Himalayas, and to the esoteric Buddhism of Tibet. Might Ojai's unique appeal to Tibet's mahatmas and their envoys possibly be this connection between the geologic morphology of our valley and the Himalayas?

There have been several waves of Buddhist influence to wash over Ojai's shores. The first can be dated to The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky's 1892 seminal text in which she recounted her travels in Tibet and her initiation into the most arcane practices of the Lamas. This book formed the basis for the Theosophist Society which eventually made its way to Ojai in the shape of the Krotona Institute in 1924, closely followed by Besant and the boy-god, Krishnamurti, in 1927. In the sixties and seventies came exiled Rinpoche direct from the Lamasaries of Tibet. In between there was Frank Capra's 1937 movie, Lost Horizon.

This somewhat creaky flic has now been supplanted as the most famous Ojai movie, for the moment, at least, by Easy A, but for a long time, the idea of this fictional Shangri-la was inextricably conjoined with the valley, certainly well into the time that I first became aware of Ojai in the 1980's. Having watched a restored version recently, I can affirm that very little of the movie as it survives today appears to have been shot in Ojai, and the film's sweeping shots of an edenic high valley in no way resemble Ojai's majestic mountain panoramas. Nonetheless, the mere association of the film and the valley had, for a long time, turned the latter into my personal pictorial backdrop to memories of James Hilton's 1933 book, which I had read as a schoolboy.

Sue-Ellen Case, an Ojai friend who briefly covers this material both more expertly and elegantly in her book, Performing Science and the Virtual, Routledge, NY, 2006, notes that,

"In the nineteenth century Mme. Blavatsky created a paradigm of imaging Tibet, or the region of the Himalayas, as the seat of avatars and esoteric learning.....Recalling the nineteenth century investment in the Himalayas as a spiritual region, the twentieth century moved Tibet into virtual versions of it, from Hollywood films to the diasporic settlement of its spiritual practices."

Once thus transformed into a virtual spiritual place, Tibet was free to land - anywhere. But having relinquished the real it appears as though the masters and mistresses of its virtual reality were drawn ineluctably to a simulacrum of its actual geologic home (but with a more hospitable climate).

Crazy Wisdom, premiered at Santa Barbara Film Festival earlier in the year, and which opens soon to wide release, follows the story of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. Much of his Dharmic stream now resides in Ojai having flowed through his Vjara regent (the troublesome Ösel Tendzin, born Thomas Rich in Passaic, NJ) to Patrick Sweeney, now resident in Ojai and president of Satdharma—dedicated to the transmission of Trungpa's teachings. Hagiography, from all reports, it ain't. Tendzin's wife, The Lady Lila Rich and Sweeney have attempted to heal the rifts caused by her husband's irresponsible behaviour and Trungpa's tacit acceptance of it: nevertheless, former students of Trungpa, 'the bad boy of Buddhism', are spread to the four winds of Ojai, Boulder and Halifax, Novia Scotia and beyond and pursue their practice in the shadow of his troubled legacy. Can't wait!

I have identified the various institutional centers of Ojai's connection to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as The Krotona Institute, The Krishnamurti Center on Mc Andrew Road, Meditation Mount and the Happy Valley property in Upper Ojai and it is here that The Ojai Foundation was established in 1975 by Liam Gallagher and dedicated to exploring the interface between science and spirituality. In 1979 in fulfillment of a prophecy she had been vouchsafed while working with Joseph Campbell, Joan Halifax assumed the position of director. As an anthropologist and a practicing Buddhist she took the foundation in a new direction and in 1986 held the infamous symposium, Awaken The Dream: The Way of the Warrior, Ancient Tradition and New Thought from Six Continents. This controversial program included not only a native American syncretist medicine man, martial artist and Zen Buddhist, Harley SwiftDeer Reagan, an Australian aboriginal leader, Guboo Ted Thomas but, inevitably, a Tibetan Buddhist Lama named Chukua Tulku Rinpoche.

The ambitious Halifax has since moved on and was replaced by Jack Zimmerman who introduced the practice of council and took The Ojai Foundation in a gentler, ecological direction. A couple of years ago William Perkins Tift took over, but the current economic downturn has led to deep cuts in funding and staff and now the organization is led by an interim executive director, Barrie Segall whose primary strength is in financial rather than spiritual leadership.

In 1979, Joan Halifax swept into the valley with the belief that both she and Ojai had been chosen, as fate made manifest, to receive the message of prophecy, initiation and millenium. This eerily reflects the megalomania of another very short-lived resident, Annie Besant, who conferred upon Ojai the responsibility of nurturing a future world civilization.

Trungpa and his Vjara regent Ösel Tendzin taught that an absence of ego and a glimpse of the abhidharma could reveal an eternal wisdom: but while seeking these timeless truths their personal failings were very much a reflection of the immediate, temporal environment in which they lived and in which ignorance flourished.

Trungpa felt the call of Ojai's geologic uplift, the wild energy of its geomorphological creation with its echoes of the lost horizons of Tibet, and his crazy story played out, in part, in the shadows of the Santa Ynez mountain range. Perhaps Besant and Halifax were similarly tempted to overplay their hands in the great geomythic theater that is Ojai. (Legend)

Waterland

I have been visiting the Urban Waterland of the East Coast. Not all of it. Three islands: Long Island, Manhattan and Shelter Island. Lorrie and I stayed with friends or family and joined others, during our ten days away, for meals and a chat - trading news from the left coast, and our experiences in the Urban Wildland, for their stories of living in the Urban Waterland. That's my spin. Those are my characterizations. Here's my rationalization.

I was musing lexically, in a discursive kind of way, riffling through some words that might encapsulate our east coast trip when I turned up 'waterland'. When I pre-fixed it with 'urban' it was a mild epiphany, a lower case omg moment. It happened in Manhattan.

The story of our picayune travels (primarily undertaken to attend a wedding in New Suffolk, North Fork, Long Island) was then subjected to this procrustean schema - forced to hang, comfortably or not, on the three island waterlands of our itinerary.

My first landfall in the United States was at Staten Island, in 1967, back before containerization, when it was host to the tramp freighters of the world, including the Ferndale, an ancient 10,000 ton Norwegian ship headed to new owners in Florida and upon which I served as engine-room boy (Bodies of Water). From Staten Island it was a ferry ride to Manhattan and my first experience of the watery edge of the United States (although our entry into the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, resplendent on her own little islet, should have prepared me). I have been back many times, but this fall trip was the first time my travels were overlaid by this newly minted apercu, useful or not, of 'Urban Waterland'.

How does this change things? First of all, I get to blog about New York in a way that connects it to my experience of the Urban Wildland. If we allow the applicability of the prefix 'urban' to both places (it is a distinction of magnitude not kind) then we are down to the disparity between water and wild. Both constitute edge conditions, they operate as limits, and, to some extent as the 'other'. It is unthinkable that the urban can exist in the wild - they can abut one another but not co-mingle. Similarly, waterland speaks, to my mind, of a chimerical, evanescent, shifting world where the primacy of water and land are in conflict. The tidelands. The shifting sands of beach and river bank are inimical to urban development, they are unsure edges that give on to the further insecurities of the ocean. Even shored up - transformed into embankments, piers and wharves - the edge remains between the solid and the watery.

In 1984, Graham Swift's novel Waterland was published in New York by Poseidon Press. Half a dozen years later, I read the paperback and I suppose it was at that time that the title lodged in my brain. There it hibernated until awoken by the watery bastion of end-of-days capitalism that is Manhattan. This island is a rock riven from the mainland by the Hudson that rises at the melodramatically named Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks and flows on to create the cultural, geographic and bureaucratic gulf between New Jersey and New York.The East River is actually a tidal estuary but performs a similar role in fending off Long Island. It is then the Harlem River to the north that transforms, what at first blush looks like a peninsular jutting into the Upper Bay, into an honest-to-god island.

'Waterland' was, I thought, all mine - until I googled it. On re-aquainting myself with the book I realized I had filched more than its name. Its narrator is a history teacher living in the Fens (that reclaimed marsh around England's Wash, a broad bay that defines the northern edge of the rump of low lying eastern Counties configured to the south by the serpentine Thames Estuary). This marsh or fenland, holds a watery history of locks, rivers, and eels all scoured by the malignant east wind from "its birth in the Arctic Ocean, north of Siberia.... round the northerly tip of the Urals'' and which in turn, holds the secrets of a long-ago murder that is at the heart of the novel. Swift lingers over dense thickets of arcane natural history that become warp to his narrative weft. (Words to blog by).

I have acknowledged my debt (White-Out) to W.G. Sebald who, in his novel, The Rings of Saturn, 1998, covers similar ground to Swift as he documents a walking tour of the eastern coast of England; but in Sebald's world a strange dreamlike quality inures and makes possible a series of learned, but bizarre excursuses. Both men opened up a space for the notion of sampling or pastiching fragments of reality in essays and novels - now made dangerously easy by the advent of Google. (Mea culpa).

We left Manhattan in a cab and then rented a car at JFK for our journey to Long Island's North Fork. New Suffolk sits on Great Peconic Bay and forms the western arm of Cutchogue harbour. We dropped in on the incipient bride and groom before motoring on to Greenport and taking a ferry to our quarters on Shelter Island which appears as a morsel about to be consumed by Long Island's crocodile jaws, the North Fork the upper jaw and the South Fork the more muscular mandible. (Lengthy excursus on the Crocodile, the ultimate beast of the waterland, has been redacted - ed.)

The wedding (a part of the somewhat threadbare narrative weft of this piece) was held at the 'Galley Ho', a hundred year old scallop-packing shed, latterly converted to a restaurant (long-failed) and currently owned by a local non-profit preservation group. Amidst a century's turmoil, its various owners had neglected to provide either heating or insulation but its prime water-front location was sufficient compensation. It was a beautiful ceremony which I watched while keeping a weather eye on the rising ocean which seemingly threatened to engulf the fragile building; and what began as rain lashing the single paned windows that lined the seaward side of the structure changed texture right about the time that vows were exchanged (did I really hear 'for warmer or colder'?) and assumed the soft granulations of wet snow. But the seas failed in their efforts, as they have for five score years, to wash away the scallop shed; the snow abated and wedding guests slowly warmed the space with the glow of their good wishes and the bride and groom hastened off, at some point, for the cosy 19th century New Suffolk cottage they will share together.

We, in turn, ferried across to the storm tossed island called Shelter. Here were the gentle undulations of one-time sand dunes now host to pine barrens, post glacial, pre-lapsarian (the fall here considered as the drop of the woodsman's axe) hardwood forests of maple, beech, and red, black and white oak. In the center of it all, the seventeenth century manor house of its first European settler, Nathaniel Sylvester (1610-1680) still stands. He it was who acquired the land from the indigenous Manhanset Indians and used it as an entrepot for the shipping of West Indian tobacco, sugar and rum back to England (the same destination, incidentally, of many of those brined and barrelled New Suffolk scallops).

While fully one-third of the island has been preserved by the Nature Conservancy - over which we rambled for a couple of hours one day - and functions at its edges of bog and tidal creek as a primordial waterland, the other 65% is an outpost of the City, where the 1% have summer houses and those that serve them have their more modest, middle of island, residences.

But the island transcends its socio-economic numerics and in places (and not just on the Mashomack preserve) it is as if the last four hundred years never happened: Urban never happened. On a early morning run I looked over West Neck Bay, just down the road from where we were staying, and saw several snowy egrets swoop down through the mist and alight on the dawn grey waterland. The (almost imperceptibly) Urban Waterland.

Legend

The Arthurian legends and their precursors, the ancient Celtic tales of Ireland and Wales, have been a central part of Western mythology for at least two millennia. Avalon, the magical apple isle where Arthur may have lived and been buried is generally thought to mean Glastonbury, a name derived from the Saxon glastn (green like glass); but California, greening up nicely after the early October rains, and definitively believed to be an island before the mid-18th century (An Island on the Land), might also rank as a contender.

A soft fringe of grasses pushing through the hard pan heralds spring. The chaparral spring that is (The Winters Tale). How glassy is the sky? It is a crystalline infinity smoked with milky clouds coddled, towards evening, by the warm autumnal glow of a saffron sun. This could be Avalon, and yonder the limestone bluffs of Cadbury Hill (Camelot), rising out of the schlerophytic mantle like Excalibur reflecting the rose tints of the dying day (RV III).

The puddle of mist that seeps into Upper Ojai these fall mornings laps at the base of Bear Mountain (Kahus) which stands (as an echo of the tor of Glastonbury) at the western end of the valley. The mists melt away by mid morning, just as the ?antap (Chumash astrologer/astronomers) traditions of story, song and stars vanished before the onrush of the Spanish conquest. In an earlier age, the fog that gathered on the low-lying marshes of Avalon similarly dissolved as the pagan world of fairy and Druid was upended by a Christianized Britain under sway of the passion relics gathered in a wattle sanctuary built on Glastenbury tor in the first century.

In both cases, we are left with scant fragments of myth, history and archeological artifact. Locally, we have been cast adrift from the mother lode of mysticism that, through slow accretion, was laid down as a metaphysical strata in the land of the Chumash. We are disassociated it from it, rent from the traditions of the land, and denied a glimpse of its visionary geography.

In Europe, the story of Arthur has metastasized into the enduring strangeness of the Grail mysteries (Red Soil); the defining Arthurian mythology of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot, enshrined in our imaginations in the pre-Raphaelite imagary of its illustrators; into T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone - grist for impressionable, pre-Harry Potter minds and of course, Disney's mill; The Mists of Avalon; the Druidic Mordred, Arthur and Merlin and beyond - way beyond, to the boundaries of para-normal speculation practiced by (for instance) Richard Leviton (RV III) who believes that Glastonbury, like the area around Rennes le Chateau hosts a landscape zodiac, mirror to the celestial universe and embodying the hermetic principle of As Above, So Below.

The 16th century Elizabethan astrologer, scholar, and occultist Dr. John Dee, wrote of what he called 'Merlin's Secret' around Glastonbury,

“The starres which agree with their reproductions, on the ground do lye on the celestial path of the Sonne, moon and planets...thus is astrologie and astronomie carefullie and exactley married and measured in a scientific reconstruction of the heavens which shews that the ancients understode all which today the lerned know to be factes.”

Leviton, and others, suggest that this zodiac is laid out upon a thirty mile diameter circular portion of Somerset with Glastonbury (possibly the physical site of the fabled Celtic Avalon) at its center and is evidenced by such prosaic landscape features as rock formations, ancient roads, streams and field boundaries. Its genesis, he believes, and that of the many other landscape zodiacs that have been 'discovered', exists in the geomorphological creation and consolidation of the Earth. These zodiacal effigies are components of the planetary grid matrix which includes the Oroboros (dragon energy) lines, and other pathways of etheric energy - operating like terrestrial chakras. 

Druids, the Grail Knights and other geomantically attuned individuals can, Leviton suggests, use the 'Somerset star temple' as "a geomythic theater for the purification and transmutation of the individual under the aegis of a mythopoetic symbolic system and mediated by the energetics of a landscape astrological matrix". Is that clear? This would, perhaps, be of limited interest to me had I not come across  a curious parallel in the writings of one Millenium Twain, who wrote, in the The Ojai Post, of January 16, 2011, 

"The whole greater Matilija-Ojai Valley region is a StoneHenge, ‘Hanging-down-from-the-Sky’ sacred site, home to tens of thousands of subtly, and not so subtly, Giant Carved Stones, and mountains. faces, effigies, profiles, figure-sculptures, ranging from a few feet in length to hundreds of meters in length. Much of the pantheon of Todas Las Cosas, all our relations, including the Sky Deities, Pacific Ocean life, and more, is found here. On top, or underneath, that are tens or hundreds of millions of smaller effigy and sacred stones, once held in the pouches of astronomer/astrologer/healer/rainmaker shamans, grandmothers, leaders, and all peoples … or kept in front of their homes, or at sacred sites, or kept on necklaces, or buried with them in ceremony. The Stone People speak, sing the tens of thousands of years of Stone Age oral tradition, and art, culture, and ‘architecture’, and are here as an infinite outdoor museum and university of the sacred wisdom ways of humans-kind, the harmonies of all spiritual traditions, of all times …".

Never mind that the Chumash are not known to have carved giant stones, nor created geo-glyphs. The wisdom in this passage is not in the details but in the general sense that there existed, and perhaps still exists, a psychogeography, a localized geomantic mapping of consiousness and its connections to an eternal sacred wisdom and that the exegesis of this knowledge occurs through the medium of terrestrial star maps (or zodiacs). This region, he (she?) suggests, transmits  the wisdom of the ages through its geomorphic StoneHenge, and its potentized rocks (Owlish Avatar). 

Merlin was Arthur's master astrologer, Qabalist, and 'Star Worker' and was the Druidic mastermind of the Round Table and Grail Quest. Merlin, Leviton writes, dispatched the Grail Knights to, 

"specific (terrestrial) star centers where their silent meditations and intuitive access might illuminate both their individual nature and aspects of the cosmos as well. Their visits were often coincident with important astronomical events such as eclipses, equinoxes, solstices, full and new moons. Merlin’s intent was to help each knight cast off the impediment of planetary, zodiacal, and elemental influences so that their consciousness could live freely and operate without obstruction. The cultivation of this unimpeded human consciousness was the Grail Quest itself".

Leviton concedes that this notion presents some epistemological problems, namely that most people do not credit Arthur, Merlin, and the Grail Quest with any historical authenticity. Here in Ojai, however, we have an academically authenticated parallel in the activity of the ?antap for whom the importance of the astronomical coincidence of the Shaman's vision quests is amply inferred by the archeological record (Space and Practice II). Unimpeded human consciousness - acquired through a transmutative process - was at the heart of Native American shamanistic practice. While this clarity of consciousness was sought through running, psychotropics (locally, Datura) and the sweat lodge, perhaps all these means were but a prelude to the profound engagement of the landscape - the shaman's ultimate goal, perhaps, to merge the spiritual with the geomantic, to find enlightenment in the geomorphic mimesis of the universe.

The ?antap were astral magicians who guided Chumash vision questers in the timing of their incursions amidst the earthly, geomorphic representations of the celestial sphere laid, a priori, over this magically treacherous land where self is sacrificed in the quest for enlightenment and where the individual disappears into the mythic grandeur of the universe.

This Ojai pulses with etheric energy and is imprinted with lithic impressions of the celestial canopy. This heavenly Ojai, our Avalon.

Warm Breeze

At six o'clock one morning early in the week the waning gibbous moon was bright and still high in the western sky. Venus, like a faithful acolyte, was subtended below. To the east, the sun had yet to climb over the rim of the world but was already brushing the clouds that hung above the silhouetted ridge a deep apricot....

The October full-moon has been an powerful presence. At night, the gravel pool terrace is washed a pale grey and the moon lights the chaparral trails on my morning run. The days have been hot; Tuesday it was 108 degrees farenheit mid-afternoon - the warmest day of the year. Already the sun has made a great deal of progress on its journey south and these autumnal heat-waves make a mockery of the passive solar strategy we incorporated into the house: sun ventures into the southern windows three or four feet by the middle of the day and then streams in obliquely as it moves west later in the afternoon.

If we were in Wyoming, that heat would be welcome, here in Southern California it just adds to the cooling load for our HVAC system which kicks in around 2:30 and stays on until 5. Wyoming? you say. I've just read Annie Proulx's new book, Bird Cloud, about the adventure of building a house at the foot of a 150 foot cliff in the Wyoming rangelands. Based on an early revue, I wrote about it in Pitch Perfect. Over a couple of days this week, I consumed the whole thing.

We have long complained that Ojai has no new book store. Back in the day (the mid nineties) there were two: Elio Zamati's 'Local Hero Bookstore and Cafe' (In Search of a Shaman's Lair) and Mitnee Duque's 'Ojai Table of Contents', from whom I would order books while teaching at Oak Grove High School. To fill the void, Bart's, the well-known, and famously outdoor used book store, has now opened a new book section (in one of the enclosed rooms). It was there Lorrie saw and purchased Proulx's new book.

Proulx's major environmental challenge was the cold. Her architect, Harry Teague, a widely acclaimed and environmentally sensitive Colorado professional working in an up-dated vernacular style is customarily a very 'safe pair of hands'. The house he designed for Ms. Proulx, however, is a leaden lump which looks in my imagination and with some accounting for scale, like a pile of the maimed and crumpled buffalo which were, in centuries gone by, driven over the precipice by the local Ute Indians. Perhaps that was the intention, but the house also suffered from his lack of attention and was cobbled together by a local band of closely related builders and landscapers Proulx dubs the James gang. The interiors can best be described as highly redolent of the 1970's.

Teague does provide the requisite south-facing windows and specified hot water radiant heat in the concrete slab. The client does not complain that the house is cold, although the temperature can drop into the minus thirties in Wyoming, but she does mention it being sometimes uncomfortably warm in the summer. There is no mechanical cooling. In Wyoming all that south facing glass pays dividends from late August on, and the radiant slab seems to do the job. As I have noted (Cool Morning, Full Metal Jacket), the long lag times inherent in radiant heating make it a poor match for Ojai's very changeable winter temperatures.

Her story of the building of the house and its shortcomings take central place in the book but Proulx is, above all else, a writer informed by the rhythms of the natural world and her observations of the bird life on her 637 acre ranch provide a constant coda to the primary narrative. Prairie falcons, bald-headed and golden eagles, ravens, vultures and pelicans are some of the larger birds that she watches wheel and glide in the thermals of the cliff-face. Our lives at Rock Fall are similarly enriched by the cross stitch of birds that weave in and out of the chaparral and the hawks, vultures, crows and ravens that trace looping threads across the sky.

The evening and night skies in Upper Ojai are populated by night raptors, but they are largely hidden from us. Dawn and dusk provide the best opportunities to see them. Earlier in the week, as the light was beginning to fade and the evening had taken on that ashen monochrome that hints at the coming darkness, three owls squabbled in the sky directly above me. Two great horned owls called to each other as they flew in close formation harrassing the third, which I took for a screech owl. The smaller owl tumbled away finally recovering its equilibrium close to the ground where it fluttered off towards tree cover.

The next evening, arriving home in the dark and stopping the car low down on the driveway to close the gate for the night, I heard the whooping of a great horned owl and saw that it was perched atop the last power pole on our property before the supply goes underground. There is no love lost between owl species; perhaps the great horneds are muscling in on their fellow strigiform, the screech owl, to whose nocturnal warbling we have become accustomed.

Proulx sees mountain lions, elk and bear on a regular basis, and has located her house on a site rich in archaeological evidence of Native Americans: the foundation slab excavation uncovered charcoal evidence of an ancient fire-pit and by presumption a pit-house. In my primordial dreams.

There is no indication of ancient settlement on Rock Fall. The closest known Chumash settlements are Sis'a, located along Santa Paula Creek, in the area now occupied by Thomas Aquinas College (Woman of the Apocalypse); ?Awha'y, on the lower north facing slopes of Sulphur Mountain in Upper Ojai (The Land Speaks for Itself) and Sitoptopo (literally, the carrizo (giant rye) patch) - somewhere north east of Ojai, and presumably in the Topatopa foothills. There are no lithic scatters on our chaparral patch, no debitage, and no points, hand-axes, metate or manos.

But this morning I saw a herd of a mule deer, ten or more, take flight over the old honor farm pasture, a noble stag silhouetted against the dawn sky. Yesterday, in downtown Los Angeles, I ate lunch at Mas Malo, a Mexican cantina in a glorious domed space which formerly housed Clifton's Silver Spoon Cafeteria. In the interests of architectural research, I went up to the mezzanine where Seven Grand, a hip whiskey bar, is outfitted in huntsman plaid and features a score of stag's heads on the wall.

They look better on the hoof. At dawn. With a warm breeze blowing across the mesa infiltrating the morning's chill, and a still bright moon high in the sky.

Muwu

Despite the presence of two competing stores across from one another on the main street of Santa Paula advertising Ropa Vaquera, the age of the hispanic cowboy is long gone. While one in three cowboys in the mid nineteenth century was Mexican, and more locally (where, of course, it was Mexico until 1848) the droughts of the 1860's decimated the great Southern California cattle herds and destroyed the viability of the vast Ranchos; now faux vaqueros are more likely to be seen, in their Sunday cowboy-best walking to church or, of course, driving a truck or car. While the ergonomics of riding the once emblematic horse undoubtedly played some role in developing the basics of cowboy clothing - denim jeans a checkered long sleeved snap-buttoned shirt and a brimmed felt or raffia straw hat - these icons of western wear have now also become the uniform of the field workers on the Oxnard Plain.

The area that is now Oxnard was originally developed by the Spanish in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s as the bread basket to feed the local Mission personnel, their Military support and the newly missionized Chumash at San Buenaventura. The bulk of these Native Americans came from the Mugu lagoon area which was the site of at least three Ventureno Chumash villages (Muwu, first amongst them). For the indigenous people, the lagoon represented the richest and most diverse food resource in the region. Avoiding the lagoon, the Spanish introduced the European cultivation of wheat and cattle ranching in the bordering grasslands.

In 1899, Henry Oxnard, owner of the The American Beet Sugar Company, began growing beet in the area and opened a processing plant. Demand for laborers followed the factory’s establishment and drew 1,000 Japanese farm workers to harvest the sugar beets and live in a tent-city near the fields. Poor working conditions, low wages, and exploitation by the contractors, led to a historic strike of the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA) in 1903. It was the first large multi-ethnic agricultural labor strike in California. At the time, the JMLA comprised 500 Japanese and 200 Mexican workers and was representative of the ethnic mix of the field workers in the first decades of the twentieth century. There was a thriving Japantown along what is now Oxnard Boulevard.

The sugar beet harvest was seasonal work, Japanese laborers, referred to as buranke katsugi (blanket carriers) for moving camp to camp with their blankets, were contracted to other areas to pick fruit, dig potatoes, and harvest a variety of crops for the balance of the year. By the mid-1930s, Issei immigrants in Oxnard began their own vegetable production that was shipped to the Los Angeles market. By 1940, there were approximately 40 Japanese farms with 1,500 acres yielding a variety of produce, such as cauliflower, cabbage, celery, cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, peas, and carrots (California Japantowns).  A similar mix of agricultural production continues across the plain now augmented by strawberries, of which Oxnard is the world's largest producer.

The Japanese easily out numbered Mexicans in the early years of sugar beet production, but the Mexican revolution of 1910 prompted many Latinos to migrate north to California both to escape the violence and improve their economic situation. By the 1920s, Mexicans had become the predominant farm laborers in the region and remain so to this day. After 1942, when the Japanese were interned during WWII, Asians more or less disappeared from the fields replaced by Mexicans who also took their place as merchants along Oxnard Boulevard. Thus within a generation, the labor, business and cultural presence of the Japanese was almost obliterated in the area (Downtown Oxnard Historic Resources Survey Final Report).

Although there remains a small Japanese community in Oxnard, a Buddhist temple, several Japanese restaurants and still, one or two Japanese gardeners, there is no more Japantown. Just off Oxnard Boulevard, however, on A Street, John McMullen, the Japanese antiquarian, who lives in Ojai and for years did business out of Los Angeles, has located his remarkable store and warehouse of Japanese antiques. We have bought a number of pieces from him over the years.

Along with the removal of the Japanese, and with Pearl Harbor as the same root cause, the Oxnard area saw the development of the Naval Construction Battalion Center, Port Hueneme, the first of a series of military installations along the Ventura coast. The CBC was established to train, stage and supply the newly created Naval Construction Force "Seabees" responsible for shipping supplies and equipment and more than 200,000 men in support of the war effort. More construction supplies and equipment were shipped from Port Hueneme than from any other port in the United States. This base is now augmented by the 146th Airlift Wing of the California Air National Guard located adjacent to the Point Mugu Naval Air Station. Their logistical mission is to provide global military airlift capability (primarily the Lockheed Martin turbo-prop C-130 Hercules) to a full spectrum of state and federal agencies.

This brief historical sketch goes some way in explaining several primary characteristics of early twenty first century Ventura: a plurality of Latino field, construction and service workers; a dominant agricultural sector and a skein of military installations, testing and and communications facilities knitted along the coast and coastal hills. When I set out to write this piece the main thing on my mind was to describe this latter phenomenon as a follow up to the investigation of civilian airliner overflight in Red Smudge. But scratch the surface around here and most likely you will end up with Cabrillo landing at Pt. Mugu in 1542, or the arrival of the Kelp Road voyagers who landed on Santa Rosa Island thirteen thousand years ago and became the first Californians (Hoop Dreams). In this case, it was the Japanese fish camp at Pt. Mugu (see Cabrillo, above) which started the unravelling. For it was the destruction of the camp that was the precursor to the military taking charge of both sides of Calleugas creek where once was, and may still be, some of the best fishing along the coast.

As early as 1884, portions of Calleguas Creek, which drains directly into the Mugu Lagoon from the Oxnard Plain, were channelized to accommodate farmers, who wanted to limit damage from the creek’s floodwaters. As such, the area around the lagoon became a sump for the surrounding agricultural lands (Wild and Free, Bowls). In the 1920’s the Pacific Coast Highway was extended north far enough for hunting and fishing enthusiasts to reach the Mugu Lagoon and many hunting clubs and fish camps  sprang up in the area.

In 1930, the Mugu Fish Camp was established as a collection of huts located on the sand spit between the lagoon and the Pacific Ocean, and included a bridge across the lagoon and roadway through the marsh connecting to the Pacific Coast Highway. By the mid-1930’s a small Japanese fishing community was also located near the bridge. Early in 1942, the open area around the lagoon became the focus for Seabee training, and slowly the military removed or built over the Fish Camp. By 1950, all civilian activity in the area ceased. ( From Spanish Land Grants to World War II : an overview of historic resources at the Naval Air Weapons Station, Point Mugu, California, Mark T. Swanson, Tucson, Ariz. : Statistical Research, 1994)

Today, when you stop to look over the wetlands at Mugu, there is a fence barring entry to this one last wild place on the Ventura coast sandwiched between the SeaBee firing range to the south and Port Hueneme to the north. Yesterday, driving back from Montecito (don't ask) we stopped at Carpinteria and threading our way through the town to avoid the street closures precipitated by the California Avocado Festival, parked close to the town beach. I was curious to explore the other patch of wetlands close to Ojai, the Carpinteria Salt Marsh, restored between 2004 and 2008 to "provide better wildlife habitat, opportunities for scientific research, and ways for the people to visit and learn about the coastal environment" according to the Land Trust for Santa Barbara, under whose auspices the restoration was undertaken.

While laudable, and certainly preferable to its being drained and developed, the fate of most of California's wetlands, it represented to me another step towards the commodification of the wildland. Certainly our experience of it was less than exhilerating: I still await the opportunity to enact a recurring daydream - to jump the fence at Mugu, and swim through the shallow estuary towards the sea and then lie exhausted on the dunes in primordial reverie.

Red Smudge

Wilderness areas are defined, to some extent, by their lack of roads. But the United States Forest Service makes a clear distinction between what it calls 'Inventoried Roadless Areas' and 'Wilderness' and affords a lesser level of protection of the former. Off-road vehicles, for instance, are permitted in roadless areas but not in designated wildernesses.

Provided they fly above 20,000 feet, there are no limitations on commercial airlines overflying either area. We back up to the Sespe Wilderness, while off to the west, as I look across the valley, there is a vast tract of roadless territory to the east of the 33 signaled by Nordhoff Peak and the ridge from which it springs. Commercial airlines, flying north to south, barrel straight on through. Sometimes there is the distant roll of thunder as the sound waves from their engines radiate down to earth: perhaps leaves tremor, the chipmunk's heart beats a little faster than its customary 400 beats per minute and the coyotes' ears prick, but I register it as nothing more than a faint heavenly rumble. Having grown up with the drone of benign aircraft overhead in the back yard I regard the sound as almost comforting in a 'God 's in His heaven—All 's right with the world!' kind of way. My parent's had different memories, and were adept, they told me, at distinguishing the drone of English Spitfire and Hurricane from German Stuka and Messerschmitt while the Battle of Britain raged overhead in summer skies.

Nevertheless, the intrusion of commercial aircraft into the Sky Bowl that sits above the rear of the property, particular in the evenings when the air traffic above the Topatopas seems particularly busy, is of some slight annoyance to me. This is a petulant complaint and just as I assuage my chagrin at heavy traffic on the 101 by reassuring myself that it is a sign of life in what otherwise seems like a pretty dreary economy, so the flashes of red off of a passing plane tail (Southwest airlines perhaps) indicates a busyness that, at year's end, may be reflected in the nation's GDP.

Were I a lone bear-hunter or oil-prospector in the mid nineteenth century, in a clearing hereabouts, and chanced to see a trail of dust kicked up by a passing stage as it reached the top of the long haul up from the Santa Clara floodplain and prepared to pull in at the station at the Summit, I might have pulled out my pocket watch from my leather vest and in a palaver of whisker tugging and mouth wiping pronounced to an un-hearing world on the punctuality or otherwise of said stage; but passing planes offer no such satisfaction to the present day me.

And while, in a rare breathless early morning, as I lay in bed as a child, I might hear the distant rattle of the 'milk-train' as it whistled through the still dark, and could thus count on another hour's sleep, the passing of anonymous, pressurized cigar-tubes at a height of six miles and a distance perhaps of ten or twenty miles tells me nothing about my condition or theirs. They are an exogenous phenomenon. We do not appear to impact one another. They travel on a schedule completely unknown to me, their passengers and crew secure in the belief that the jet engines and the aluminum monocoque structure that envelops them will defy the laws of gravity for at least one more flight, hosted by Alaska Airlines, Air Canada, American Airlines, Allegiant, or other carriers lower down the abecedarian food-chain who ply this route.

Any or all of these passengers, were they to look down from the starboard side of the aircraft, might glimpse the wilderness below and, in a meadow of deerweed and grasses, see the westerly sun glint off of a metal roof and shimmer off of a pool. That, for many of them, will be as close as they ever get to wilderness, although the real thing is actually showing on the other side of the plane, on the port side - where the Sespe wilderness gives way to the Cuyama Badlands, then to scrub punctuated by Soda Lake, shards of Bakersfield suburbia (like Weedpatch, Valley Acres and Oildale), and then dissolves into the distance, at horizons edge, into the vastness of the Mojave. In other words, the kind of mostly trackless (or roadless) landscape you see out the window on almost any flight in the United States - where some kind of US Forest service categorized wilderness or lands lightly administered by the sink-hole that is The Bureau of Land Management consume the ground plane below you.

For me, on my first few flights across the country, that view from the airliner window was a defining experience of this country, and it is why I sleep at night beneath that metal roof and swim in that pool and live in the thrall of the urban wildland. I wanted to be a lonely smudge of infra-red in the heat sensing goggles that surveyed the endless darkness of 'Night-Flight USA', or imagine myself intrepid and sufficient in the tree shadowed, sunlit exuberance of bio-mass that fills in between the sparse, etiolated and mostly coastal or Mississippian conurbations of this great land.

Now, amongst the containered passengers that troop across the upper portion of our north facing window glass, in smidgins of silver that move remorselessly north west to south east across the strip of sky that sits above the Topatopas, or at night, glide amidst the lower reaches of the stars, distinguishable from them only by their dauntless commitment to move from A to B, and, let it be said, an equal commitment to staying aloft that this movement helps ensure, there may be others who dream of being red smudges or intrepid pioneers in the wilderness.

We, for now I am corralling those others who share the dream, are contrarians; for the great global story of our age is one of urbanization, of flight from the countryside, of an abandonment of the bio-mass for the non-organic massif of the city. As an edge dweller, with a foot in both camps, I have not entirely abandoned the City, nor fully embraced the wilderness. I am looking out the starboard window, where the wilderness is afflicted with a kind of psoriasis where patches of residential development appear, and then over the Sulphur Mountain ridge the towns of Santa Paula, Oxnard and Ventura signal the beginning of a suburban trail that flows along the 101 and meets that great floodplain of urbanization, Los Angeles.

WTV

Is it too early for me to declare Imperial, New York: Viking, 2009, as a truly great work of California History? I should explain, I'm only 200 or so pages into a 1300 page tome. I have had some truck with its prolific author, William T. Vollman, by which I mean I belong to that fairly exclusive club that actually consumes his work. He writes faster than most people can read. At 50, he is almost crippled with carpel tunnel syndrome and can no longer use a keyboard. But the true logorrheic will find a way: I imagine him tapping away with his thumbs on his i-phone, as indeed was I as I waited outside Courtroom number 47 in Ventura County's Hall of Justice (an appellation that strikes me as slightly Stalinist). This is what I thumbed, (as I waited for Jury selection to commence).

'Tennis Leg continues. So, I walked my short run this morning. There was a marmalade sky to the east and dark thunder clouds to the west, it was preternaturally warm. At around four a.m., still in bed, I had heard coyotes - two or three perhaps - engaged in a desultory harmony. A few nights ago, I thought I had heard the strangled howl of a lone coyote, its voice cascading down as though funneled into some chaparral sink-hole or rabbit warren. That was it. I lay very still trying to sort out the noises that rose above the thick blanket of insect thrum that covered the land. I heard a bark or two - but these were, I suspected, domestic animals responding to their feral cousin. Is Coyote back? (Coyote Dream)

No wildlife sightings on the walk this morning, but at this slower pace, I was able to review the scat arrayed before me on the path. Berry seeds, pits and tightly bound animal hair told a story, no doubt, but not one I can understand, handicapped as I am by ignorance of, well, the word that comes to mind is scatology. A word, in the form of scatological, to whose neural location the English speaking world more usually beats a path when confronted with such dubious sallies such as, 'my neighbors dogs' produce more shovel-ready-jobs than Obama ever has', a small, coprological gem from last night's Republican Party debate.

Coyotes, mountain lions and foxes are the primary chaparral faunal carnivores, while the black bear is omnivorous, and judging by its scat at least, more likely to eat berries than meat. So yes, I know my bear scat - great mounds of berry seed pudding - but cannot distinguish the poop of the other, more similarly sized meat eaters. The coyote is flexible in its dietary habits, as befits a scavenger, but given the superfluity of rabbits at the moment I cannot imagine they are packing away many manzanita seeds.'

Back to the computer, and at the speed I type, at little risk of carpel tunnel syndrome. Yesterday I met with Roger Collis, erstwhile executive director at Meditation Mount, at his recently purchased land deep in the hills behind Montecito, ground zero in the Tea Fire of two years ago. The land is still deeply scarred by the fire and now further disturbed by the relentless pace of new construction. Santa Barbara County is liberal in its allocation of permits to re-build 'like for like', and the evidence is all around - a very motley collection of residential buildings all essaying various nods in the direction of fire-safety. The chaparral in these hills was already highly compromised by close to a century's history of planting exotics and the ferocity of the Tea Fire was almost certainly exacerbated by the number of mature Australian natives that towered over what little remained of the elfin forest. Now faced with the need to protect themselves from their neighbors gaze, long used to a jungle-like density of highly irrigated and ill-chosen plants, homeowners in their newly built homes will, no doubt, make similar wrong-headed choices and move apace to recreate the fire hazard from which they so recently escaped (although over two hundred houses were destroyed, there were no fatalities).

Roger gave me an abbreviated history of Meditation Mount and I realized, as he talked, that I was remiss in not including it in my concise history of the Theosophical Society's (TS) influence in Ojai in Red Soil. On the World Service Intergroup website, 'An International Network of Ageless Wisdom Groups', there is the following blurb which seems to encapsulate Roger's precis:

“The impulse that guides and sustains Meditation Mount had its beginnings back in the 1950s when Roberto Assagioli (the Founder of Psychosynthesis) accepted the challenge given by Master DK to his students, to establish a “united world group given to unanimous and simultaneous meditation upon the work of preparing the world for the new order and for the jurisdiction of the Christ [and] to establish the knowledge of and the functioning of those laws and principles which will control the coming era, the new civilization and the future world culture…”

The pieces of context the critical reader needs to know are these: Master DK is a Mahatma - an ascended Tibetan Master by the name of Djwhal Khul and it is he who dictated the two dozen books of esoteric teachings to Alice Bailey who in turn, in part from the profits from these works, was able to set up the Lucis Trust which financed the development of Meditation Mount. Madame Blavatsky had channeled Master Koot Hoomi in her writings at the end of the nineteenth century, and the TS is confidently awaiting another amanuensis to complete the trilogy of wisdom passed down from the ascended Masters from their ashram somewhere on the spiritual plane. Alice A. Bailey (AAB) was expelled from the TS because she attempted an end-run around her nemesis, Annie Besant (AB), by re-focusing the Society on the teachings of Madame Blavatsky (HPB) with whom she felt a direct lineage as a chosen conduit for the teachings of the Masters.

Roberto Assaglioli was sponsored in his work in California by Laura Huxley, wife to Aldous and writer of the This Timeless Moment, London : Chatto & Windus,1969, in which she documents her husband's death and her part in administering massive doses of LSD at the end. Huxley was a co-founder of the Happy Valley School with Krishnamurti (Red Soil). When the Happy Valley School was considering new names, my son was very supportive of 'Huxley High'. In the event, it was called 'Besant Hill' but in true TS acronymic style, it might better have been call AB School.

Roger is aware that elements of the Meditation Mount back-story are, in his words, a little woo-woo. Many institutions in Ojai have been touched by the TS brand, and while each of them shares core notions of the innate inter-relationship of humankind and the cosmos that transcend the esoteric tradition, it is the latter that inevitably attracts both messianic devotion and a fair amount of ridicule. It is worth remembering that the Theosophical Society grew out of Spritualism, the late nineteenth century movement that promised communication with the dead but that has subsequently been shown to have been riddled with fakery and deceit (in some of which, it has been suggested, HPB took part).

I have never felt particularly comfortable on the Mount (Peace Walk). My unease does not rise to the level of that which I experienced at Rennes le Chateau (Red Soil), but the land, it seems to me, has been ravaged in a way that is not conducive to meditative thought. Building atop a knoll, of course, is never a good idea. It destroys the earth form and at the Mount, this offense is compounded by the scraping of the hilltop to establish a parking lot and the gardens associated with the center. This year almost fifty rattle snakes were removed from the property by the local fire department. The snakes are there because of the rampant irrigation that is necessary to preserve the mish-mash of exotic landscaping that sprawls inelegantly across the site. Lured from their native chaparral habitat by the presence of water, the snakes are then bagged and dumped, who knows where, but inevitably they are separated from kith and kin. It has become a snake pit with unhappy viperous outcomes. Bad karma.

Imperial attempts the personal, poetical and historical evocation of the eponymous county that sits in the south eastern corner of California and on the Mexican border. The land is given life by the Colorado river. Vollman has cast this bio-region in the role of historical protagonist - the land and its soul have an enduring persona that impacts all who come within its thrall. You know where this is going. I began Urban Wildland from the perspective of my own backyard but my horizons have stretched over the months, and now years, to include most of the Ventura County watershed - to take one more or less coherent description of my bio-regional purview. My home turf consists of the Ojai and Upper Ojai valleys each of which feeds one of the two rivers (the Ventura and the Santa Clara) that, reaching the ocean, describe a comprehensible wedge of land. Within it, I have identified various fringes of Urban Wildland, psycho-spiritual hot-spots and areas of human, historical, archaeological, anthropological, botanical and zoological interest.

It is reputed to be the novelist Madison Smartt Bell, writing (anonymously) in a New York Magazine review, who berates Vollman for his, "clumsy sentences, the digressive digressions, the gratuitously creepy metaphors, the never-ending sarcastic exclamation marks. I found myself wishing that he would redirect some of the massive energy.... to the less obviously heroic, more social challenges of writing: synthesizing, pruning, polishing."

I am a dim, flickering blogging bulb compared to the extraordinary wattage of Vollman's literary beacon. (There is, indeed, some subterranean whispering of a Nobel). He is an extraordinary force of nature.

It is my honor to share some of his faults.

Coyote Dream

It's become a game. Between the two of us. Looming mound, hill or mountain elicits the response....ahhh Bugarach. Driving up the PCH the other evening Santa Cruz was back lit by the setting sun. We saw it at Zuma, on the horizon in an orange strip of clear sky between ocean and cloud. Ahh....Bugarach Island. Up on the old County Property at the top of Koenigstein there was Santa Paula Peak ....ah, you get the idea.

At 4,040 feet, the volcanic Bugarach peak is the highest summit in the Corbières mountains. It is also reputed to contain an entrance to the underground world of Agartha - or a UFO garage, depending upon whom you believe (RV III). At 8,847 feet, Mount Pinos is almost exactly twice as high, and was considered by the Chumash to be the center of their world, or Liyikshup - the point where everything is in balance.

Santa Paula Peak stands at 4,911 feet. David Stillman is a local who goes where I write about - and takes pictures. He  describes his hike up the local Bugarach thus,

"the trail winds steeply up a ridge via a series of burley switch-backs. It leads over, around and through grassy hills, chossy crags, and dense chapparal. It ends in a scramble up a forty degree field of scree. The summit is small, with sheer cliffs on two sides. The view to the west is remarkable, staring down on upper Ojai Valley. To the northeast lies Bear Haven. To the north is Devil's Gate, the Sespe, Topatopa, and Santa Paula Gorge."

To save you Googling, I will tell you that 'chossy' means a climb/cliff/mountain/crag composed almost entirely of choss, and therefore only suitable for climbing if you are (a) insane, (b) suicidal or ... and that choss refers to loose rocks. It's a specific piece of rock-climbing argot equivalent to the less specific 'sketchy' and has some kinship to the urban inflected 'ghetto', as in 'pretty ghetto'. David climbs rocks, and has the vocabulary to prove it. I run, an activity a little light on specialized vocabulary, although I will tell you that right now I have a strained gastrocnemius which is annoyingly called 'tennis leg'. Thus my experience of Santa Paula peak, this morning, was from the seat of a bicycle. It was generally clear, but the mountain was garlanded with a light haze that had an almost spectral aspect. As David points out, it has a small summit and steep sides and can masquerade effectively as an extinct volcano.

On the old County Property, which I believe was an honor farm back in the day, but is now privately owned, there is a track that leads to the Silver Thread oil leases. On its west side is a meadow that runs most of the way to Koenigstein and upon which cattle sometimes graze. At the moment it is given over to tar weed and turkey mullein (Eremocarpus setigerus) - neither, I'd guess, of much bovine nutritional value. On the east side, it is chaparral with views of the Santa Paula ridge and peak; immediately beyond the fence there are the occasional oaks tangled with the usual under-scrub and it was there that I saw two bushy tails snaking through the leaf litter, fallen branches and poison oak.

A few weeks ago, driving down the 150 early one morning I saw very fresh road kill in the middle of the road and flashing by, I thought for a moment it might be a bobcat. The next morning I rode down on my bike. Someone had had the decency to pull the mangled animal off to the shoulder and I was able to identify it as a grey fox. Its innards were exposed and they were attracting flies and wasps, but its mangy tail, reddish ears and short snout were clues enough. The two tails I spotted this morning belonged to altogether livelier specimens. I got off the bike and walked back quietly to where I had seen them and, sure enough, they hadn't gone far: I was rewarded with a beautiful vulpine silhouette as one of the pair trotted along parallel to the path, beyond the oak, with the rising sun behind it.

I dreamt last night of a coyote being attacked by an evil looking hyena not much bigger than it. I haven't seen a coyote since last spring. I miss their howling, I miss their guilty faces as they lurk along the side of Koenigstein. I even miss their ill-mannered squabbling over freshly killed rabbits. To dream of coyotes, apparently, means there is a part of your soul that feels desolate, fearful, and lacking support; (or it could just mean that you miss seeing coyotes). Mark Twain famously described the coyote as a "long, slim and sick-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakeness and misery, an evil eye and a long sharp face..." The grey fox, that for the moment must stand in for the missing coyote, is certainly less needy looking, is more wraith-like and crepuscular than the canine, and has the enormous charm of a fluffy tail.

I think of the coyote as a fringe-dweller, it is the true spirit animal of the Urban Wildland and has generally prospered as residential areas have pushed into chaparral hillsides and canyons. The Chumash, like many native American tribes, saw the animal as a trickster: a shape-shifter, living between order and chaos, in liminal space, between the human-world and the wild. As tricksters, capable of metamorphosis (without losing their essential character or soul), they are un-killable, both mythic survivors and perpetuators of their own myth. They'll be back. This year is just a down year. It occurs to me now that they are, perhaps, the faunal equivalent of laurel sumac (Skimmer).

If we (Lorrie and I) see Bugarach in every passing hillock, tumulus and knoll it is because we recognize its essential character or 'soul' in local earthforms. We have absorbed its mythic portent and in the kind of intellectual 'making-do' or bricolage that Levi Strauss ascribes to mythical thought, we see Bugarach re-created in the lumpy landscapes of Ventura County. Maybe.

Like Gary Snyder, the poet, essayist and environmental activist, who has studied native American coyote mythology, I can only read the coyote myth as a white Californian male. I make no pretense at a visceral connection with a Chumash understanding of their sprit animals. Snyder claims that coyote is a symbol of the American west and reflects an interaction between myth and a sense of place. Now that is my kind of intellectual leap out of the soup of primordial mythology.

 In the name of Claude Levi Strauss, in the spirit of bricolage, of making do, of appropriation, I am claiming coyote for the Urban Wildland, as a creative spirit rooted in the love of the land - but currently it would seem, at least in his material incarnation, he is on sabbatical.

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?