Cowboys and Indians

I visited the new Renzo Piano Resnick Pavilion at LACMA recently to see California Design, 1930-1965: "Living in a Modern Way", purportedly the first major study of California midcentury modern design.

The centerpiece is a replica of the steel framed Eames house (originally built in 1949 off of Chautauqua in Santa Monica Canyon) and furnished with Ray and Charles' eclectic, multi-cultural bric-a-brac. Like Gala and Salvador Dali's rambling home frozen in time at Port Lligat, Catalonia (Suquet) the Eames House re-creation is burdened with a static display of a decorative style typified by quick-fire, daily and even hourly changes that the design obsessed make in their immediate surroundings and depend upon for their fragile sense of self. At LACMA we see the lifeless effigy of a living process, a single frame from a movie, displayed in a painted wood sarcophagus. The rest of the exhibit is not much better, with way too many bad chairs (the Eames' excepted) from architects; but there is some interesting clothing, Raymond Loewy's great Studebaker Avanti (lent by Dick Van Dyke) and an impressive 1960's Hi-Fi (one of which is owned locally by Bruce Botnick, the audio engineer and music producer).

Fortunately, right next door was the stunning exhibit, Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, which details the culture wars that ensued after the Spanish military and political conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521 and the Inca Empire in 1532. The French historian Serge Gruzinski, quoted in Daniela Bleichmar's review of the exhibit in The New York Review of Books, February 9, 2012, has described the conquest of Mexico and the imperial regime that followed for the next three hundred years as a "war of images". She goes on to write,

"Cortes and his men marched inland from the Gulf carrying religious bannners, medals, and figures. They whitewashed murals in native temples and destroyed local idols, replacing them with Christian icons....After the conquest, Catholic churches rose in the exact spots of pre-hispanic temples, capitalizing on the sacredness of those locations. Missionaries waged their own war to extinguish native religion, burning ancient sacred books and ritual objects as part of their effort to achieve a spiritual conquest....But despite this campaign of extirpation, there survived, into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, local cultures that were a complex mixture of native, European and colonial elements..."

Within a hegemonic Spanish Colonial state, the losers in the political battle used images as a means for staking out religious, social and cultural claims; but both sides borrowed forms, techniques and iconography from the other and the results are thrillingly displayed in this exhibit. Thus the richness of native art (such as feather paintings), metal work and architecture did not disappear - they were melded into a unique hispanic heritage while the appropriation of Native sacred spaces for Christian churches and cathedrals ensured the survival of these ancient power spots.

In Burn Notice and Woman of the Apocalypse I noted that, in Southern California, although native cultures were entirely subsumed by their colonial conquerors, the survival of the Spanish tradition is not in doubt, despite Spain's early withdrawal and the territory's nineteenth century annexation to the predominately Yankee, Northern European and Protestant political entity we now know as the United States. Here, a rich cultural stew exists, but one absent the spice of Native American culture.

Tom Hines, the Architectural Historian established, in his Mission Bell to Taco Bell lecture at UCLA's History department, (which I attended back in the day) the enduring appeal of Spanish Colonial architecture. This tradition was goosed, in the late nineteenth century, by Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, Ramona and has now become Southern California's signature architectural style (New Moon). While the style runs the spectrum from full blown Colonial Revival to historicist pastiche, there is no hint of native American art and culture - although it was native labor that built the mostly primitive interpretations of the style in the Missions.

These Missions and Asistencias (sub-missions), despite proselytizing goals inimical to local traditions honored them in the breach. Asistencia Santa Paula, was founded on the site of the Portola Expedition Campsite (Independence Day) at the junction of the Arroyo Mupu and Santa Paula Creek, north of the 126 and east of the 150 at the present location of Harding Park, a significant confluence for the Mupu Indians whose main village was sited nearby on what is now the Thomas Aquinas campus. There is some indication that the Californian El Camino Real followed ancient native American trading routes and spirit paths. Certainly the trail established by the Spanish from Mexico City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was overlaid on more ancient trade-routes connecting the Native Americans of the southwest to the Mesoamericans in the old Aztec Empire.

The CSU Monterey Bay archeoastronomer Ruben Mendoza has documented solstice or equinox effects at 14 of California's 21 missions. While he claims that this is a "complex blend of solar geometry and Franciscan cosmology" this is, at the very least, a remarkable intersection of Christian and native American interests and given the latter's local knowledge and key role in the construction process it is disingenuous to dismiss their role in these alignments (Space and Practice II). In 2008, Mendoza finally recorded the winter solstice illumination of the Royal Presidio Chapel of Santa Barbara after many years when cloud or fog obscured the sun. This mission played an intricate part in the lives of the local Chumash and to my eye, at least, the building has more of the rusticity of the native culture than the neo-classical trappings of the European; here surely the Chumash were complicit in the engineering of this solstice event.

Ultimately, of course, these are but the faintest glimpses of a native American past almost entirely buried beneath the over-burden of Spanish and American history. While many ancient sacred sites were co-opted by the Franciscans in the seventeenth century now the military, as the State's largest landlord has, deliberately or not, co-opted still more. California's Native American Heritage Commission (CNAHC) has a massive listing of over 170,000 sacred locations identified as either Worship/Ritual or Sacred/Power sites. Many of these are within military installations including, for instance, March Air Force Base and Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range, Miramar Naval Air Station, North Island Naval Air Station, and Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base.

The Coso Hot Springs located on the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station were used extensively by a number of Indian tribes, primarily the Owens Lake Paiutes and the Desert Shoshones while the Coso Canyons contain perhaps the most significant collection of petroglyphs in North America (Things Fall Apart). The burial sites and village remains from scattered communities of Chumash who lived along the California coast areas are now often buried beneath coastal military installations and runways. Vandenburg Air Force base has a number of power spots sacred to the Chumash and possibly feather and paint pole shrines (Space and Practice). (Vine Deloria).

The wreckage of a culture is hidden beneath roads, buildings, religious, educational and defense facilities and millions of acres of industrial farmland - the infrastructure of twenty-first century California. Its images are not much memorialized in museums (The South West Museum of the American Indian in South Pasadena closed several years ago, its collections bundled off to the Autry National Center, formerly the Gene Autry Cowboy Museum) nor its cultural production recognized as of equal value to the Missions in California's heritage (California Dreamin'). The battle was lost on all fronts. The War of Images a non-starter. The cowboys won.

Sharawaggi

In Gardens of Epicurus, London, 1687, Sir William Temple praises Chinese gardens for their intricate irregularity and coined the term 'Sharawaggi' for areas where "the beauty shall be great, but without any order that shall be easily observed". This was the beginning of the eighteenth century English School of landscape wherein, as Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe write in The Landscape of Man, Viking, New York, 1975, "Nature was no longer subservient to man, but a friendly and equal partner....irregularity was proclaimed as the objective in landscape design".

Change is afoot in the west meadow. When we purchased the property, a little more than four years ago, the area was a rough meadow having been used historically for grazing (Palimpsest) and more recently cleared by Trexon (the developers, Jim Exon and David Trudeau) in order to establish potential house sites. Drifts of woody detritus remained from their rough grubbing where the cut brush was pushed to the margins. The first owner of this new subdivision had maintained the west meadow with the intention of grazing horses. We had no immediate use for it (although we briefly considered growing grapes and then pomegranates) and it became grist for my campaign to turn back the landscape clock to sometime before 1769.

In practice, that meant leaving it to revert to sage brush, which is a stable plant community closer to the coast but here is essentially a chaparral precursor. This sage brush transformation is now well and truly in place, although an area that had lain beneath two hundred tons of rocks excavated from the building site to the east (the rocks were finally moved off-site a couple of years ago) was further disturbed recently when we conducted a percolation test (Pitch Perfect). There is some mathematical formula whereby the arrival of a back hoe on one's property translates into an area of destruction several times larger than the boundaries of its intended work. Thus two test trenches left a broad swath of desolation.

The English estate gardens of the 18th. century developed in part because their owners had sources of income apart from their land holdings. Mercantile trade flourished in this age of the burgeoning British empire. Country estates could be given over to the pursuit of pleasure rather than profit. This was a sea-change in which the encroachment of nature-in-the-raw, formerly resisted in the interest of growing crops or grazing animals was now welcomed as an idealized landscape.

It took a little editing of course, the beauty of wild nature was often manicured to create flowing spaces where groupings of trees unknown in the natural world were used to sculptural effect, but William Kent's (or was it Alexander Pope's?) dictum, that 'all nature is a garden' fundamentally changed the way nature and gardens were understood. The surrounding wilderness was co-opted as an extension of these park like estates - an illusion fostered by the use of a sunken ditch or ha-ha as a boundary marker rather than a wall or hedge.

Having had an open space forced upon us through circumstance, we are now embracing the idea of editing the west meadow. A little before Christmas we hired Alex, a student from Thomas Aquinas College (Woman of the Apocalypse) to help in this endeavor, and other trail making, weeding and clearing tasks. His eight hours of work a week have transformed our ability to make the disturbed areas of the site, those acres either formerly grazed or ravaged by earth moving equipment, into chaparral parkland, where the sage scrub is opened up to incipient meadow and views revealed to the flanking hills of ancient, sclerophytic chaparral. Chamise, ceonothus and mountain mahogany that crowd the oaks alongside the old meadow are being cleared to allow access to their canopy underworld and laurel sumac smothering the native black walnuts is being cut-back to reveal these beautiful, wayward trees.

This is our response to Humphry Repton's admonishment that farmland become parkland. He and Capability Brown carried forward the revolution in landscape aesthetics in the second half of the 18th. century begun by Kent in the first. We have linked oaks to form groves by the simple expedient of linking the clearings beneath them and liberated the humble elderberry to become a tree unfettered by swarming bio-mass. We hope, this spring, to clear a trail to Bear Creek and there create a riparian idyll.

These are not the kind of heroic gestures made by the masters of the English School who thought nothing of moving rivers, creating lakes and if necessary raising water mechanically to make rills and waterfalls - all masquerading as manifestations of wild nature. We are working with a limited palette of 'what's there' - we edit but do not add. We develop meaning out of the apparent chaos generated by the base botanical impulses to infiltrate, populate and strangle the opposition!

Even now, at the very beginnings of this process there are rewards. A wolf oak that overlooks the west meadow's putative house site has been revealed after its protective pallisade of ceonothus was removed and its canopy now provides that wonderful experience of walking into an oaken micro-climate. The leaves at its drip line descend almost to the ground (made soft by years of accumulated litter) and in a breeze make a kind of silken rustle.Yesterday, walking beneath the canopy of another oak a little higher up the hill, and with the kind of breeze blowing that topples empty garbage cans, the experience was less like being protected within an arboreal crinoline and more like being swept up in a frenetic ballroom where pulsating sunlight, sound and wind surround the senses.

We use nature as a foil to our emotions and as a salve to our existential angst. The wild, imaginative, but ultimately humanist landscape we observe in the chaos of nature quiets the soul, and gives meaning to our existence. Perhaps none of this would have been possible without the linkage forged in England in 18th. century between the garden and the wild: these are the big thoughts we sometimes carry with us as we battle the chaparral to better accommodate it.

The Way

Last Sunday afternoon, Lorrie and I attended a sold-out performance of The Way at the Ojai Playhouse. This venerable movie house, in more or less continuous operation since 1914, opened, in what was then Nordhoff, as The Isis; presciently, its first screening was The Valley of the Moon based on the Jack London novel. Three years later, in a paroxysm of xenophobia as World War One drew to a close, the City Fathers (with the collusion of the U.S. Senate) changed the name of their town to Ojai, a colonial phonetic spelling of the Chumash word for the moon (New Moon).

Sometime in the Spring of 1981, the theater was showing The Great Santini, and by then was called The Glasgow Playhouse in honor of its owner Wayne Glasgow. I attended a showing of this melodrama, based on Pat Conroy's novel and starring Robert Duvall during my first evening in Ojai (Where Native Meadows Come From). By the time we arrived in town many years later to live on Blanche Street (while our house was being built in Upper Ojai) the theater was owned by Mark and Kathy Hartley who had purchased it from Glasgow's successor, Khaled Al-Awar; but overextended after the real estate crash in 2008, and after they had financed a major renovation, the Hartley's recently handed ownership back to Al-Awar.

The Way, directed by Emilio Estevez is a family affair starring Emilio's father Martin Sheen. It tells the story of four peregrinos who undertake the walk from Saint Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santaigo de Compostela in Northern Spain along Saint James' Way, a traditional Christian pilgrimage route for at least a thousand years. Lorrie had visited Galicia forty years ago and was anxious to see the film while I was interested because the destination of the pilgrimage is a part of a visionary geography - the name Compostela being derived from the Latin Campus Stellae, field of stars. Saint James' Way spoke to me not as a Christian pilgrimage route but as a far older, spirit path.

Compostela owes its fame to a reputed apparition and the consequent discovery of the remains of St. James. With the Virgin Mary's blessing, the apostle James left Jerusalem after the death of Jesus, crossed the Mediterranean, and arrived at Tarragona on the east coast of Spain, just west of Barcelona. He is believed to have failed as an evangelist, but in 39 AD the Virgin Mary, although still alive in Jerusalem, appeared to Saint James in Zaragoza, in the first recorded Marion apparition. Four years later, James returned to the Holy land and was summarily be-headed by King Agrippa I. (Acts 12:1-2)

His corpse is said to have been brought to Galicia on a rudderless boat by his disciples (with an angel of the Lord as their pilot) and, after many mishaps, miraculous escapes, the help of a pagan, she-wolf Queen (La Reina Lupa), the taming of wild oxen, the killing of a fire-breathing dragon and at least one guiding star, the body was finally laid to rest in a field alongside the Queen's fortress.

There the body moldered, forgotten for almost eight hundred years, until a hermit saw angels who announced the coming discovery of the tomb. Some days later shepherds noticed an area of pasture illuminated by a strange glow. At that spot a marble chest containing a headless skeleton was discovered and identified as the remains of St. James and it was here that a small community of monks was established who formed the nucleus of the future settlement of Compostela.

None of this made it into the movie but these legends are braided into the folk history of Galicia and form the back-story to Santiago de Compostela's rise as the most significant pilgrimage destination in Europe. There is likely a far older, pre-Christian source for the spiritual resonance experienced along Saint James' Way, Santiago de Compostela and the rocky coast of Finisterre to the west. The pilgrimage route follows a far more ancient ritual road, along a spirit path tracing the arc of the sun, traveling east to west, and ending at the Atlantic on what the Galicians call the Costa del Muerte (Coast of Death), long considered to be a gateway to the afterlife - L. Finis Terrae, the end of the world.

Saint James was resurrected to serve as a locus of Christian identity around which the Iberian tribes could coalesce in their resistance to the Moorish conquest of their homelands early in the eighth century; ironically, the outlying Galicians remained largely untouched by islam, cherishing their Celtic ancestry and its nature based spirituality lightly overlain by a still Pagan-influenced Christianity. Now these traditions are all melded in the vastly popular pilgrim experience of traveling The Way.

In the Celtic tradition, witches and warlocks controlled the shamanic practice of gathering information from the spirit world and using it for good or ill in the temporal realm. Both the witch and the shaman were said to traverse the bridges of Otherworlds. They celebrated the seasonal changes of equinox and solstice in stone circles or in calibrated cave openings (Space and Practice II). But despite the universal underpinnings of shamanic practice and its survival in many parts of the world, the brutal extirpation of the Chumash peoples by the Franciscans and their Spanish military enablers, has entirely destroyed the local traditions of ley lines, vortices (power places) and spirit paths that might have created a more profoundly geo-centric cultural and spiritual gestalt in this region of California (Burn Notice).

We have forgotten the power of place. Unlike the Celtic cultures of Europe, the tribes of North America rarely constructed temples. To them the land was the sacred temple. They sourced etheric hotspots on the land, and their locations were passed on through oral tradition or perhaps were indicated by cryptic petroglyph markings. There is little record of California's sacred sites, spirit paths or places of power. In Chumash territory, Harrington is our last connection to a remembered, sacred past.

Those who currently identify as neo-traditional Chumash have no living-link with their shamanic history, but the ethnographic record establishes that Point Conception served as a portal to the Chumash after-life, Mount Pinos was the center of the Chumash world and that locally, Kahus (Black Mountain) is of geomantic significance. We know that there was a sprit path heading north straight through the hills behind Muwu (Point Mugu) and that there was a ritual and trade route up through the mountains to the Carrizzo Plain.

The tradition of building 'rainbow bridges' between sacred places is as old as myth, but looking for these lost paths in a rivened land where freeways follow economic and political exigencies rather than meridians of etheric energy poses extraordinary challenges. We do not know enough to understand exactly where these paths were trod and under what etheric influence they were pioneered. There are doubtless many 'Ways' in Southern California, but they have faded into the chaparral or been buried under asphalt and concrete.

We are pilgrims lost in a profane world, where the shards of sacred sites, and ancient geomantic, astronomical, and ritualistic alignments are hidden in a broken landscape.

The Great Predator

Five or more young bucks (Odocoileus hemionus Californicus) are gathered in the chaparral: on my approach they scatter to the four winds. Two come crashing through the bush towards me, reach the path I am on then stot off into the chamise on the far side of the trail. In this neck of the woods we rarely see deer running. They jump into the air off of all four legs, land and repeat. Stotting not running, moving through a landscape of deerweed, artemesia, chamise, laurel sumac, coyote bush, sage and rock, the sort of bastardized chaparral/sage scrub that covers the land after it has been bulldozed for fire clearance or mangled by forays of residential development.

I most often see deer when they are already aware of my presence as a potential predator. So I get to see them stot, prong or pronk, but rarely walk or run along game trails, pause to graze in meadows and pick their way through oaks, cottonwoods and willows as they find their way to Bear Creek to drink - all of which I know they must do when they are in their own world undisturbed by coyotes, bob cats, mountain lions or humans.

What we see depends on more than the reaction of the observed. It depends on who and how we are, and ultimately, when we are - our place in the temporal stream of our lives where Time lurks, as we drink in experiences, as the great predator.

Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol were still alive when I arrived in Los Angeles (Ghostburb). They represented the guilty pleasures of American art. Easy to look at, enormously appealing, but, it seemed then, vacuous. In 1970 I had used my wife's red nail varnish to turn each of the 4 x 4 white tiles that lined our kitchen in Whale Beach, on Sydney's north shore, into a picture of a Cambell's soup can as an homage to one of the works (32 Cans) that ushered in the pop-art movement and which was first exhibited in Los Angeles in 1962. Warhol remained of some interest to me through the 1980's while O'Keeffe came to represent tawdry populism.

Almost ten years ago there was the Warhol retrospective at MOCA. Organized by Heiner Bastian for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the exhibition then traveled to the Tate Modern in London before arriving in Los Angeles. Seeing the full breadth of his work for the first time confirmed to me that he was a major figure. This impression was only slightly tainted by the experience of visiting, in 2010, Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum where much of his not-so-great work is stuffed into a four story building and where his deliberate melding of art and commerce seems to have been taken as curatorial license to turn the museum into a series of multi-media entertainments where the art disappears into noisy spectacle.

No such pandering at New York's Metropolitan where the recent exhibit Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe, showed O'Keeffe's work in the context of his stable of early twentieth century modernist painters. Now that I am here in Ojai, I have begun to understand O'Keeffe's obsession with place. In her case, a primeval place in New Mexico called Abiquiu, where, as Christopher Benfey notes, she brought "dead things to life, both herself and the objects that came her way... like skulls and other desert detritus" (The Far-Apart Artists, New York Review of Books, January, 2012).

On New Year's Eve, at a dinner, I sat next to a woman from Golden, New Mexico, less than a hundred miles south of Abiquiu, where she and her husband raise Wagyu beef on 27,000 acres of high desert. They have recently completed a Rick Joy house which features large glass areas, charcoal stained cedar siding and a hovering corrugated roof. The parched landscape appears to flow through the center section of the building where open decks extend the living room floor beyond the glass enclosure. The siding echoes the Japanese tradition of shou-sugi-ban where cedar is charred to increase its resistance to insects and fire. The house, set on a slight rise in the midst of a thousand acre pasture where pure bred Japanese cattle forage, is a powerful presence in an austere landscape and is, she told me, under attack from flocks of crows - the insect screens are besmeared with the blood of their talons and streaked white with their shit.

Annie Proulx built her house at the bottom of a cliff in Wyoming and called the book that told the story of its building Bird Cloud. Her house was designed with bird watching in mind, and included deliberately conceived roosting spots. The vortices of avian life that swirl between the thermals of the cliff face, the river at the cliff bottom and her building remain benign in their impact upon her intrusion into this vast western landscape (Warm Breeze). Bob and Mary have been less fortunate in respect to the local bird life.

Their property contains ancient Pueblo ruins only now being excavated, and through this work they have come to know the local Pueblo Indians (or now, more correctly, Pueblo people). Short of planting plastic owls on the corners of their magnificent house, I suggested contacting a local shaman and having him conduct appropriate ceremonies of propitiation towards the crows.

Members of the corvid family have a significant place in myth and magic. On July 4, 1963 Carlos Castaneda claims he was transformed into a crow and flew, facilitated by application of a Datura salve known as 'Flying Ointment'. Those of you who have read the Castaneda books will remember that he was forever looking over his left shoulder fearing that a crow might fly over it as a harbinger of death and destruction. A crow flying over the right shoulder was an altogether more propitious occurrence.

For the last 35 years of his life, Castaneda was haunted by his experience of a crow's vision.

"I asked Don Juan what were the things that I had seen. He said that because this was the first time I was seeing as a crow the images were not clear...I brought up the issue of the difference I had detected in the movement of light. "Things that are alive", he said, "move inside and a crow can easily see when something is dead or about to die because the movement has stopped...." Castaneda asks, "Do rocks move inside?", and Matus responds, "No, not rocks, or dead animals or dead trees. But they are beautiful to look at. They like to look at them. No light moves inside them". The teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui way of knowledge, Carlos Castaneda, UC Berkeley, 1968.

Georgia O'Keeffe saw like a crow. She saw the beauty in rocks, skulls and the laminal earth forms of her beloved New Mexico, and she shared her vision with us. She brought dead things to life. But what do the flocks of crows attacking Mary's house see? Is it beauty? Is it death, or simply their reflections?

Warhol sought a kind of truth in the slick surfaces of urban celebrity and the detritus of American culture. O'Keeffe often sought beauty in the quietude of the inanimate. When they were alive I barely understood. Now these artists' work represents the pleasures of becoming fully acculturated to this strange land. I understand. I see. It takes time.

The crows, however, remain an enigma.

Miwok Meadow

There hangs about Yosemite a strangely Victorian air. Perhaps it is just me, but is there not something of Balmoral in the valley, especially in the week between Christmas and New Year's? The royal holiday pilgrimage to the Highlands where the corgis can be let loose and chance meetings with stags may be interpreted as numinous experiences (The Queen, Stephen Frears, Dir., 2006), is echoed in the albeit more democratic visits to this National Park, where twenty bucks gets you in-and-out over seven days and the lobby, restaurants and restrooms (complete with uniformed attendant) of the stately Ahwahnee Hotel can be freely accessed by the hoi-poloi. The private rooms are 400-500 dollars extra a night.

Was there not a whiff of Scotland, if not a dim echo of the skirl of bagpipes, in the performance of the whistling waiter who rendered Frances Scott Keyes' 1812 anthem promptly at nine a.m. in the dining room of the Wawona, while guests breakfasted and the stars and stripes was unfurled on the front lawn? Neither the Ahwahnee nor Wawona Hotel is rendered in Scots Baronial like Balmoral (completed in 1856 and designed by William Smith with assistance from Prince Albert, Victoria's consort) but the 1876 Wawona is a classic of Victorian resort architecture and one of the oldest mountain hotels in California (Hotel California) while the 1927 Ahwahnee is a rustic pile rendered in what has become known as Parkitechture. Like Balmoral, themes from other times and other places have been incorporated into the housing of guests primarily bewitched by the grandeur of the surrounding landscape.

The best architecture I saw at Yosemite was in the redwood bark tepees provided as play-houses in the grounds of the Evergreen Lodge where we spent Christmas night through the 28th. December. This hotel has firmly plebeian roots having been developed as a work camp for the construction workers at Hetch Hetchy dam. The play houses are perfect miniatures of the winter cabins of the Miwok, who inhabited the valley floor before the arrival of Europeans in the 1830's; the native inhabitants numbered less than 500, now nearly four million people visit the park every year: none of them stays in a bark tepee.

These visitors celebrate the essential picturesque characteristics of the Valley landscape which was famously anthropomorphized by John Muir who proclaimed,

"Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike.... Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidingly against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light.... as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her".

The picturesque, along with the formally symmetrical landscapes of the Renaissance form the yin and yang of European landscape appreciation - there is no room in this old-world canon for the random and undifferentiated which constitutes the vast majority of Californian landscapes, including, of course, most chaparral but also its desertscapes and coastal scrublands. Yosemite is revered for its atypicality and its transcendence of the norm. Its uniqueness is, by happenstance, synchronous with European ideals of composition, intimations of godliness and formal magnificence. None were more assiduous in making these connections than that intellectual-fashion-victim of his age, John Muir.

Strikingly, it seems a significant proportion of park visitors are now Chinese or South Asian. This impression is based on my climbing of the path up to Nevada Falls - a sort of poor-mans Inca trail - where the steeper portions are stepped in crudely shaped granite blocks, and informally surveying the hordes who clambered over the lower reaches, up to Vernal Falls, known as the Mist Trail. Possessed of strikingly different aesthetic traditions, what do they make of this temple to the most heroic and romantic traditions of nature worship?

Yosemite's overblown granitic imagery is of a power to register on even the most jaded consumer of today's amped-up media barrage which, by and large, follows a globalized, but primarily North American and European sourced, formal architecture (small a). Yosemite then, key in forging a Californian and American identity (The Democratic Republic of Chaparral) now entertains a world audience as a quasi-Natural experience capable of impacting our global neurasthenia. It is, of course, a Theme Park. The Theme, forshadowed by Muir, is necessarily bombastic, rather than quietly contemplative.

Yet there is about it (Yosemite National Park) a quaintness that bespeaks of an earlier age (hence those intimations of the Victorian). Despite the Marmot, Patagonia and North Face-clad multi-cultural youth who clambered over them, the craggy walls of the valley retain some of the mustiness of an earlier age when their discovery and of the giant trees that grow in their shadow, was truly earth-shattering. It is still a little Jules Verne-ish. A Voyage to the Bottom of the Valley. An air of Bugarach hung over us. (RV III, Coyote Dream)

Within the Park, we Californians are made to feel a little like the Marginales of Europe, the dispossessed. Keepers of Museum Grade wonders, custodians of the Mighty West, we must now bow before the global imperatives of the Market in Experiential Frisson, where Nature is but a poor and rickety thing capable of producing shock and awe only in its most egregiously Baroque manifestations.

Christmas Sage

Somebody brought a Cymbidium to the house yesterday. I said to Lorrie, I hope its screams don't keep us awake at night.

We are doing a Chaparral themed Holiday season again (Yuccapedia), so we are not decorating one of the 30 million victims of arboreal infanticide sold annually in the U.S. as Christmas trees. Instead, the dried husk of a chaparral yucca (Yucca whipplei) stands in the corner of the living room adorned, on its lower branches where its seed pods have already fallen, with frosted white and clear 1 1/2" glass balls from China (Sinology). Elsewhere in the house we have used sages, Baccharis pilularis, toyon and Ribes californicum in various arrangements. This level of holiday cheer is quite sufficient for us merriment minimalists.

The Cymbidium, poster child for the forced propogation of exotic flora into premature display of their sex organs, is sadly out of place and will probably end up in the guest room. We should, I suppose, be thankful that it was probably grown in California, perhaps in Ventura or Santa Barbara County, not shipped in from Thailand, the world's largest grower of Cymbidium.

The history of orchid growing in California goes back to the 1930s, when owners of large estates in Hope Ranch and Montecito began to raise them because they flourished in the Mediterranean climate. Back in those days, orchids took their own sweet time to flower - often as long as seven years after planting. Now, in the hot houses of Thailand, Holland, Australia and, increasingly, China, the plants have been hybridized to flower with 36 months of germinating and temperature and light controls are used to induce inflorescence at commercially opportune moments such as Easter, Mother's Day and Christmas. Other flower stimulating technologies, such as the application of cytokinin (6-benzyl-aminopurine), nitrogen starvation, extreme root excision and the forced feeding of phosphorous are being introduced to improve flowering synchronicity with market demand.

A couple of years ago we attended a talk by Dorothy Maclean, one of the four founders of Findhorn (Back-yard Romance) at Meditation Mount. She was introduced by Roger Collis, then executive director of the Mount. (Lost Horizon). Roger originally met Dorothy some forty years ago at Findhorn (where he also met and married his wife, Kathleen). So Dorothy, now in her nineties, was very relaxed in Roger's company and gave a charming talk on her work with plant spirits or devas. Towards the end of her presentation someone wheeled in a trolley with a large Cymbidium in a five gallon plastic pot, and Dorothy invited us to commune with the plant and then report on our findings.

A member of the audience had worked at an orchid 'forcing' green house and made trenchant comments about the floral gulag that exists in Carpinteria. It was an unfortunate moment. Dorothy was undone; perhaps she had been expecting a fresh, native Californian plant tenderly removed from the chaparral rather than the signature product of the global orchid industry; in any case, the magic of the event evaporated in the presence of this hybridized Orchidaceae.

Dorothy now counts as one of the three or four people I know of who communicate with plants (Dowsing). That's not including Prince Charles who, speaking of his 900 acre organically farmed Gloucestershire estate in 2010, noted that, "I happily talk to the plants and trees, and listen to them. I think it's absolutely crucial....Everything I've done here, it's like almost with your children. Every tree has a meaning for me." The key point here is the listening part: Margot confirms that, although scientifically trained, she still has much to learn directly from the plants within her ambit as a chaparral restoration ecologist.

Did the Chumash talk to plants? What of the other end of the spectrum - did they brutalize or hybridize plants in pursuit of aesthetic, culinary or healing goals? Were plants considered sentient beings in their cosmos? Did they practice, according to their codes, ethical treatment of the vegetal world? Only John Peabody Harrington knows for sure (alive to us today through his moldering notes, stored throughout the country and yet to be fully catalogued, in which lies the sum of his knowledge about the Chumash - for he wrote no syntheses of his notes, nary a short monograph on his life's work).

However, we can presume, that while probably not reaching the level of beatific communion with nature commonly ascribed to native Americans, the Chumash possessed a level of sensitivity to plant life that we can only imagine. For while we live in a world of written, pictorial and numeric information, they lived in a numinous universe of lithic, botanic, animal and meterological spirits where plants were revered for their multi-faceted contributions to the individual's and the tribe's well being.

Take sage. I took sage. For our Christmas decorations. I like to think that I am aware of all the local, accessible giant white sage (Salvia apiana) populations. Some are on our property, others a little further afield, but all were harvested in a careful and respectful way. James D. Adams, Jr, Associate Professor of Molecular Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Southern California, and Cecilia Garcia (a self-styled Chumash healer) suggest that, "White sage, like any plant, should be collected with prayer. Only the amount needed should be collected. A small branch or a single leaf can be broken off for each use. Each leaf contains vital medicine for the health of the spirit." Fernando Librado (one of JPH's key informants) said that if a hunter placed white sage in his mouth he would be invisible to deer (Jan Timbrook).

This afternoon an Australian architect, Andrew Macklin, visited our house with a mutual friend and just as he was leaving we saw, through the open kitchen window, our local Monarch of the Glen (Sir Edwin Landseer, 1851), a magnificent three point stag wandering along the meadow protecting its fawn who grazed across the driveway. Our house is bedecked with sage, the four of us were at the open window, is it too fanciful to imagine that this architectural maw substituted for the mouth of the hunter? Certainly we remained invisible to the mule deer until doors were opened and gravel be-trodden.

Maria Solares (another of JPH's Chumash posse) recommended putting fresh leaves of white sage on one's head as a treatment for headache. It was also used as a purgative. More recently, those identifying as Chumash use sage for smudging - the ritual burning of compressed bundles of leaves as celebration and an act of spiritual refreshment (The Sage Gatherer). This is a plant, like so many others, that was woven into the fabric of Chumash life - offering a cloak of invisibility, various medicinal uses and spiritual cleansing. It may also have lifted the spirits of native people (as it does mine) who saw it displaying its large chalky grey-green leaves rising above an ocean of black and purple sage, competing with yerba santa, or on the edges of oak-shade - as a ghost sage wrapped in its new spring leaf - just in time for the winter solstice.

The stacks of Cymbidium piled outside of Trader Joe's are a similar sign of the mid-winter festivities but they leave my heart heavy and my spirit enervated for their waxy flowers betray the anguish of this forced display.

Shamanize or Die

Last night I dreamt of a bobcat.

At first light, I saw bent grasses where deer had lain turned a cerulean blue by the heavy frost; the long tongue-like leaves of yerba santa (Eriodictyon Californica) were rimed with white and nearby the intense pink flowers of wand buckwheat, apparently untouched by the cold, pierced the grey, green and white of this chaparral winter morning.

Yesterday evening I was reading about the influence of shamanism on the poetry of Ted Hughes (1930-1998), while Lorrie sat beside me in front of an oak fire watching Werner Hertzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams on her lap top. We talked about the film, in the (cave-like) dark when we awoke, just before dawn. Later, but in the still early morning, I watched the second half of Six Generations, Paul Goldsmith's film on a Santa Barbara Chumash family. This is how my imaginative life is made - of which this blog attempts a flickering reflection. Reflections, it must be said, that become, recursively, part of my life.

I had not thought about Ted Hughes since sometime in 1964 (except in the moments that he was linked, journalistically, to Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) whose suicide-enhanced celebrity shelf-life has thus far eclipsed her husband's) until I wrote the words "in a white, 1960's 3.8 Jag Mk. II" (Ghostburb) which put me in mind of the Hughes' poem  O, White Elite Lotus.

In 1964, at Farnham Grammar School (founded in 1560 during the reign of Elizabeth 1), there was a rare moment when the upper sixth car and motorcycle junkies came together with the English lit. aesthetes to celebrate both the car and the poem. I was, not quite uniquely, a member of both cliques, and for a few weeks, Ted Hughes was The Man, a great contemporary poet with an eye for winsome American girls and beautiful, racy, English cars.

During our final two years of high-school, with most of our fellow students having left at age sixteen, we specialized in three or four subjects and each of us had different schedules - only coming together in the upper-sixth study when the day began and ended. In this small room, with space for about fifteen desks we chatted, across disciplines as it were, about our shared passions. While I studied English Literature, History and Studio Art, I also joined with my fellows, and the lower sixth, several afternoons a week when we ran, jumped and threw javelin, discus and shot-put and chased, propelled and sometimes caught balls of different size, color and shape through the seasons (but in my memory, almost always in muddy fields).

Away from our studies and games, in those few weeks, when most of the world was focused on Vietnam, the Beatles or Martin Luther King being awarded the Nobel Peace prize, we spent time in our study, or the library, and continued our parsing of,

"Steel, glass-ghost
Of a predator's mid-air body conjured
Into a sort of bottle.
Flimsy-light, like a squid's funeral bone,
Or a surgical model
Of the uterus of The Great Mother of The Gods."

and so on......

Yes, we thought, that was about as good an explanation as we were going to get of the strange affinity between pressed sheet metal and the great mysteries of sex, the divine and the natural world - connections which we instinctively understood but were anxious to have confirmed. Thus we young Romantics and tender gearheads could, for a moment, gather around a single icon - Colin Chapman's completely unattainable and totally desirable little Lotus Elite.

A couple of months ago, in a room of similar size to the upper sixth's study, but in an institution of higher learning - UCLA - I met the film-maker Paul Goldsmith after a lapse of some twenty five years. He and his wife Peta had been our first architectural clients after Lorrie and I graduated from Architecture School. Scrunched into a basement room in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, where I was gathered with Dr. Jo Anne Van Tilburg and a half dozen other Rock Art volunteers involved in the publication of The Rock Art of Little Lake, An Ancient Crossroads in the California Desert,  Paul arrived to discuss the possibility of including our work in his upcoming film on Alan Garfinkel's research in the Cosos. He left us with a DVD of his last film, Six Generations, shown recently on KCET, a copy of which sits in my iBook G4.

Six Generations is a singularly touching record of a contemporary Santa Barbaran woman, Ernestine De Soto, whose family history reaches back to the time of first contact between Europeans and Native Californians. She has chosen to assume a contemporary Chumash identity and in her telling, privileges the Native American fragments of her history; in a similar manner I could trace my roots back to that ancient Briton, Boadiccea. Nevertheless, this is a genuine and heartfelt channeling of lives who, from cradle to grave, fill the historical space of the colonial occupation and genocide and her story is sensitively presented by Paul.

His new work with Garfinkel will tell another story. In the world of Californian archaeology Garfinkel is a reactionary, yet he has staked out the biggest archaeological prize in the State, the Coso Rock Art Monument at China Lake (Things fall Apart). Paul, knowingly or not, is now a party to the promotion of the Garfinkel ideology.

My introduction to California rock art was through David S. Whitley's The Art of the Shaman, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2000 - a title that tells you all you need to know about Whitley's understanding of the provenance of rock art production. Garfinkel has returned to an older, largely discredited theory that maintains that the production of big horn sheep imagery is an example of an 'increase ritual' whereby good fortune in hunting is assured through the serial production of the prey's graven image. As Garfinkel coyly notes in his Paradigm Shifts, Rock Art Studies, and the “Coso Sheep Cult” of Eastern California, in North American Archaeologist, Spring 2007, "These glyphs have played a prominent role in attempts to understand forager religious iconography". He goes on to admit this 'hunting magic' hypothesis has become marginalized by the now prevailing view that sees most rock art as an expression of individual shamanistic endeavor, then goes on to attempt the older theory's resuscitation.

We at Little Lake have largely signed on to the prevailing wisdom and while there is no preponderance of big-horn sheep imagery around the lake, there are literally hundreds of atlatl motifs (images of weighted, spear throwing sticks) pecked into the basalt cliff that rises in the south east corner of the lake - motifs that are almost certainly connected with coming of age rituals overseen by the priestly class, the shamans. We have not, therefore, fully embraced Whitley's notion that these glyphs are uniquely a product of shamanic vision quests - lithic jottings as astral plane reportage; but equally, we have not regressed to Garfinkel's quaint position. We take a nuanced, wide-ranging view that admits the complex motivations for rock art production over the last ten thousand years or more.

It is, of course, the shamanic tradition that is at the root of my interest in petroglyphs. These wizards and magicians (Strange Land) are the human sinew that connect the material and spiritual planes. A role, perhaps, that poets now play. Ted Hughes explicitly links the poetic and shamanic experience and regards both as being nurtured by the romantic temperament. The shaman is usually called to duty by dreaming of an animal, often an eagle, that then becomes a 'familiar' acting as the dreamer's liason with the spirit world (Eliade). The crisis Hughes believed shaman-poets had to deal with was, as he called his essay on Eliot, The Convulsive Desacralization of the West. Once the shaman (or poet) hears the call, Hughes writes, he must "shamanize or die".

I am mindful of  Hughes' admonition: but the odd appearance of a bobcat in a dream does not, I believe, rise to the level of a call.

Ghostburb

I arrived in Los Angeles in September 1980, carrying two old fiberboard suitcases and wearing a shiny grey jacket - the top half of what was known, mid-century, as a sharkskin suit - which I had purchased (like the suitcases) from a 'tat' shop - and my bike, a 'fixie' (then known as a track bike). My luggage contained clothes, a few bound copies of my recently completed Sydney University Honors thesis, 'The White Unwritten Atmosphere',  my bible (a new edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary) and Barry Humphries' 1979 book, Treasury of Australian Kitsch. This latter had been pressed into my hand by a wild colonial girl, (a half-Maouri New Zealander) who had delivered me to Sydney airport, along with a couple of other friends, in a white, 1960's 3.8 Jag Mk. II.

I knew a few things about Los Angeles: the address of the Tropicana Motel in West Hollywood, at the time a home-away-from-home for second-tier rock musicians; the name and phone number of a professional surfer in Malibu (given to me by John Witzig, publisher of Tracks, the seminal Australian surf magazine) and the name and number of the director of admissions at UCLA's Graduate School of Architecture, with whom I had negotiated, while completing my thesis (and working by day on an artist-in-residence conversion of an old pickle factory), over the antipodean winter.

As it turned out, that was enough. Within a few days I owned a 1971 Buick Riviera and shared a house on Waveview, at the very top of Topanga, above the marine layer that often floated below, over the beach that was to become my surf spot. The professional surfer had disparaged my choice of car; I realized that Australia was but a poor provincial out post of the world of kitsch into the ground zero of which I had so recently arrived, and I discovered too, that despite smoking a (soft) pack of Marlboro reds a day, I was still fit enough to ride my bike to UCLA from Topanga and back - late at night, with just a one-inch red reflector hanging beneath my seat, through the steep, dark and rocky canyon, the chaparral glistening in the reflected glow of Los Angeles lamp light.

Much later I discovered that notwithstanding Carey McWilliams' estimable An Island on the Land, 1946, Reyner Banham's very English gloss on Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971, and Charles' Jencks' embrace of L.A.'s architectural kitsch in Daydream Houses of Los Angeles, Rizzoli, NY, 1978, (compared to which, Australia's triple fronted brick vanillas were but enfeebled cousins) the book I really needed to read had yet to be published. A book that might begin something like this,

"Dimly on the horizon are the giant sheds of Air Force Plant 42 where stealth bombers (each costing 10,000 public housing units) and other still top secret, hot rods of the apocalypse are assembled. Closer at hand, across a few miles of creosote and burro bush, and the occasional grove of that astonishing yucca, the Joshua tree, is the advance guard of approaching suburbia, tract homes on point."

A book that looked at Los Angeles through the prism of utopian communities, hucksters, debunkers, religious revivalists, political powerbrokers, trade-unions, the L.A.P.D., the Defense and Aerospace Industry, the prison-industrial complex, gangs, drugs, gated communities, the Catholic church, literature and the movies.

That book appeared in 1990: it was Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Verso, NY.

And yes, it opens with a view from the Antelope Valley, from the blank urban wildland desertscape of the Llano del Rio Colony, a socialist utopian community founded On May 1, 1914, shortly abandoned, and then, in the late 1980's, the area was "prepared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis; hundreds of square miles engridded to accept the future millions..." In 2011, Llano del Rio still awaits those wedding nuptuals and has become a dessicated old maid, confirmed in her status as a ghostburb. We have survived exurbia, we have outgrown our infatuation with suburbia and we now await that urban intensification which may produce, as a sincerely to be hoped for corollary, the sanctification of the wildland (Gaia Nation). Twenty years on, the world has turned and we are confronted, once again, with the fleeting truths of predictive journalism.

Sixty years ago, Los Angeles was the City of the Future. Thirty years ago, it was the city of my future. Today, it is a still sprawling conurbation become a great Latin city struggling, as a child of the twentieth century, with its vision for the twenty-first. For me, it has retreated into the landscape of the past. I see it now from the outlands, from Upper Ojai, possessed like the Antelope Valley, of its own utopian flotsam (here the wreckage that has drifted ashore from Annie Besant's sea of dreams), where it provides a perspective from the wild towards the now ebbing urban frontier.

From this urban wildland ecotone, this edge-place (Edge Times), I see mostly the chaparral in front of my nose. My guides are Uncle Milt's Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, 1996; Qinn and Keeley's Introduction to California Chapparal, 2006 and still, 'Red' Head's The Elfin Forest, 1972. It is at once a smaller world, but one that also promises access to the infinitude of the Universe through communion with the wildland. As I peer through the thickets of chamise to the valleys beyond, I realize that I am writing, post by post, the guide book; this blog a Baedeker to the Ojai spiritlands.

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.