Naming Names

Alongside the sandy track that extends Verner Farm Road into the hinterland and becomes a line scratched in the land where other roughly cut trails, oil roads and deer paths criss-cross the chaparral, in an area dotted with oil wells and forlorn houses and where there is a half-acre fenced yard that contains several rv's, and many broken down cars and trucks (in the middle of it all, an oil well), is, right at the moment, a yerba santa bush, its blossoms, under this week's deep, grey marine layer, a startling blue.

There's a lot of blue in the chaparral at the moment. Still dominant are the white mounding ceonothus bushes that cover the hillsides, but every day as the warm winds disperse the petals the snowy white drifts appear to be melting away. Here and there are the California lilacs, blue ceonothus. There's the occasional blue dick, lots of Solanum, blue eyed grass, rarely, Verbena lasiostachys and the blue blossoms of black sage (don't ask).

Few people care about chaparral, even those who espouse a concern for California's wild places. It is an un-loved plant community. Few know its signature plants - I was shocked recently when a board member of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy did not recognize ceonothus or for that matter the only slightly less common fuchsia-flowered gooseberry (Ribes speciosum). But take the trouble to get to know the dozen or so signature plants of the chaparral and the rewards are immense.

One could argue, perhaps, that the names of these plants are irrelevant. That you can enjoy the landscape without knowing what's what. Faithful readers will know that I believe in the power of naming names. That said, I also know that common names can be as effective in staking a connection with a plant as the official genus and species. As a child, I knew many common English plant names long before I was aware of the Linnaean classification system and, in my part of Surrey, a bank, hedgerow, meadow or roadside offered a constellation of recognized plants without a classically derived appellation amongst them. I would acknowledge, for instance, the presence of blackberry, ragged robin, cow parsley, deadly nightshade, yarrow, dead nettles, stinging nettles, docks, burdocks, horseradish, daisies, campion, violets, sorrel, dandelions, groundsel, horsetail and so on amidst the hazel, oak, holly, chestnut, ash, beech, birch and alder trees. Amongst this unremarked upon congregation of plants of the Surrey countryside the special displays of bluebells, primroses, foxgloves, cowslips, poppies, dog roses, snowdrops, jack-in-the-pulpits, red-hot-pokers and forget-me-nots were seasonally noted.

In an age when entertainment is less often derived from the natural environment, and the acquisition of culture almost entirely divorced from natural history, knowing the names of plants is a peccadillo not a pre-requisite of a shared civic curriculum. Gone are the days when Willis Linn Jepson (the great Californian botanist) could reasonably proclaim that "every educated person should know, at least broadly, the native forests, shrubs and flowering plants in his own state". But is it unreasonable that Californians should at least recognize their state flower, the poppy, rather than mistake it, as did a recent visitor to our property, for a buttercup?

California is rich in linguistic history. Thus native plants here have their official Linnaean names, their Spanish name and their multiple Native American names (many of which Harrington has preserved for us) (Yuccapedia). Sometimes, like their British counterparts, they have common names which may provide insight into their characteristics; and only our unfamiliarity with the classical languages in which their names are expressed, obscures the often prosaic meaning of the Linnean nomenclature.

The Spanish knew Eriodictyon crassifolium as yerba santa because the Franciscans recognized its medicinal value. But it has also become known, over the years, by a variety of common names including mountain balm, bishop wort, purple betony, holy herb, bear plant, saint's herb and most intriguingly, Indian chewing gum. A company called Blue Coyote Organics sells the dried herb at ten bucks an ounce and recommends smoking it or making a tea infusion "to calm the soul". The chewed leaves are resinous and bitter. Local Chumash knew it as wishap'.

Chamise, that stalwart of chaparral, with the frothy white flowers but tough as nails sclerophytic leaves and flesh ripping twigs and branches is also known as grease wood - because it is rich in oils, and of all the many chaparral plants that burn well, it reputably burns best. Chamise is derived from Spanish chamisa, from Galician chamiça, dry brush, firewood, from chama, flame, from the Latin flamma. Its Linnaean name is Adenostoma: from the Greek aden, "a gland," and stoma, "a mouth," in reference to the five glands at the mouth of the sepals - a reflection of the botanist's cone of vision which usually focusses on a plant's sex organs. The Chumash, at least the Barbareño, Purisimeño and Ineseño, according to Harrington, simply called it na'.

With a similar economy of syllables, related, perhaps, to the plant's ubiquity, Deerweed was ya'i to the Barbareño, but more elaborately Escoba de Horno (Hearth Broom) to the Spanish and is included in the Lotus (fruit of forgetfulness) genus. Now comes word that this genus is undergoing extensive taxonomic changes, for the Linnaean classification system is subject to constant revision. All thirty species native to California have been recently moved to the genera Acmispon or Hosakia in the second edition of The Jepson Manual. Willis Linn Jepson is California's Carolus Linnaeus, the man who set out to establish a definitive taxonomy of the State's flora.

It was Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) born in Sweden and a taxonomist, botanist and zoologist, who famously lumped apes in the same category as humans and thus paved the way for an acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory. His Systema Naturae (1735), a great inventory of life on earth, was the first work to gather terrestrial phenomena into the now familiar groupings of animal, vegetable and mineral. He published Species Plantarum in 1753 and thus initiated a formal botanical taxonomy. Jepson (1867-1946), like all natural scientists who followed Linnaeus, built on his binomial system and in 1923, U.C. Berkeley published his A Manual of the Flowering Plants of California a 1200-page single volume tome. Commonly known as Jepson's Manual, it has become California's botanical bible. Now Bruce Baldwin, curator of Berkeley’s Jepson Herbarium, has edited The Jepson Manual: Vascular Plants of California, listing over 7,500 California plant species, subspecies and varieties, in a 1600 page volume published by U.C. Press, 2012.

While this systematized simulacrum is an enormously valuable scientific text, and of deep interest to the chaparral warrior (for to enter into the thorny world of the elfin forest is to battle the barbed enmeshments that it throws up in defense of its pristine world), it is but an intellectual exegesis of the  wildlands. Yet, as the definitive namer of names it holds the key to our connection to California's landscapes: where the power of naming leads to a recovery of the sacred bond that exist between humans and plants - the magical connection we experience as children when we first lay claim to a flower, not by cutting and capturing it, but by whispering its name.

Love Comes to Koenigstein

Driving down the PCH the other morning, just past Point Mugu, we pulled over to watch a pod of grey whales steam north after breeding in Magdalena Bay, Baja, Mexico. We watched the leviathans blowing and undulating their way towards their summer feeding grounds in Alaska, in the cold waters of the Bering, Chuckchi and Beaufort Seas. They were close enough to the shore for us to see the mass of barnacles on their backs. Despite massive whale hunting in California in the middle of the nineteenth century the whales have survived with this annual migration pattern intact.

A few days later, I stopped on the old coast highway above Emma Wood State Park and, for old times sake, clambered down the hill and crossed the train tracks headed for the beach where I had spent many a happy hour surfing in the late 1990's. This day, sans board, I looked south and there, about one hundred yards off-shore, I saw another pod headed north. During twenty years of consistent ocean watching from 1980 to 2000 I saw not a single cetacean from the beach. As I headed back up the track from Emma Wood I glimpsed a seal bobbing in the surf line.

In the early 1980's, returning in a light plane from our Honeymoon at the Hana Maui resort Lorrie and I watched an Orca leap from the pellucid ocean below and then put on a spectacular show of elemental power and grace - somewhere in the Kalohi channel between Molokai and Lanai as we flew towards Honolulu. The Orca is sometimes called a killer whale - a misnomer since it is actually in the dolphin family, but they do kill whales. Last week there was a story of a "pack of killer whales tearing a baby gray whale to shreds" off the Central Coast as observer groups were shepherding a wounded fully adult Grey whale towards Monterey Bay.

Our neighbor on Koenigstein, Kit Stolz, reported seeing a young condor feeding on road kill on the 150 between Upper Ojai and Thomas Aquinas College recently. He provided documentary proof in the form of a blurry i-phone picture; the silhouetted antic pinion feathers at the end of each wing, even at this age suggesting a mighty span, certainly seem to support the identification. Even closer to home, while we were away in NorCal, Margot walked a part of our property and found mountain lion scat. Following her two dogs she then found a discarded deer leg. No one has credibly seen the big cat although Lorrie thinks she might have, but it was a fleeting, distant impression rather than a definitive sighting. I walked the area last week where Margot had originally seen the scat and saw lots more - distinctive because of its size and black color, typical of the digested blood of a fresh kill. Mountain lions bury the remains of the carcass after their initial meals of blood engorged organs like the liver, kidney and heart, and return to feed off of it in subsequent days. We have put that area off limits for the time being.

These signature, archtypal creatures, whale, condor and lion each possess, one way or another, dominion over their respective element, and their lives are woven into the tapestry of human existence on a very primal level. This is a reason to live in the urban wildland, it offers an opportunity to engage with the web of life and connect with the collective unconscious, that now deeply unfashionable well of feelings that guided our ancestors and still shadows our contemporary lives.

About a year ago I wrote of two deaths on Koenigstein, and the two hilltop houses that were made vacant because of their owner's passing (Death Comes to Koenigstein). A few weeks ago I noticed a new barbed wire fence being built adjacent to the eastern boundary of our property next to the old Atmore land. I drove up to the recently purchased house and introduced myself to Josh and Meghan who run a back-country guide service in the Sespe with pack mules. The new fence, I learned, was being built to enclose a sloping meadow across the street from their house where the mules will occasionally pasture. They have opened up the house to the north and I suspect they will find it very servicable. In the mail box this Friday was a note announcing their Saturday wedding.

While we are often reminded of a vibrant natural world in this eastern borderland of Upper Ojai, it is good news indeed when the human population hereabouts tilts younger - particularly when the new additions are both locals with a thorough understanding of the local ecosystems. They come recommended by Bill Slaughter, Sheriff of Sisar, who knows them both. Josh grew up on Sulphur Mountain and attended Happy Valley School, he is determinably low tech, eschewing even an e-mail address.

Yesterday they were married at the house and early this morning several pick-up trucks were still casually parked along the corner where Koenigstein heads sharply north at the knoll where their house is perched, indicating that a very good time was had by at least those who elected not to drive back home because of the late hour or inebriation.

Josh and Meghan advertised their wedding and reception with two discreet white balloons at the 150 and a prettily painted arrow sign at Calle de las Osos, the left fork below the Bear Creek crossing which exerts a magnetic attraction to all who wander up this way not really knowing where they are going and, following the siren call of this road named for the erstwhile dude ranch at its end, subsequently get lost amongst the pinnacles and valleys of what is ultimately a gallimaufrey of dead-ends and private driveways. Some, it is said, never do get back on Koenigstein and lose their minds in this crazy land of feral emus, one hole golf-courses and ravening coon hounds.

An archetype expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors. As such, meaning oscillates between the encoded linguistic meaning and its metaphoric interpretation then resolves itself in a third place where these patterns of thought cross cultural boundaries and establish themselves deep within the human psyche - at all times and in all places. Carl Jung explains archetypal images as universal patterns or motifs which come from the collective unconscious, and are the basic content of religions, mythologies, legends and fairy tales.

On Koenigstein, we suffer a surfeit of these archetypal images: the condor and the mountain lion, as well as the viper (substantiated as the rattle snake) and the bear. Our streams run down to the ocean where whale, dolphin and seal disport themselves, while steelhead trout plash in the shallows of Sisar Creek. Now comes the mule driver Josh and his fair Meghan to live in the rickety house on top of the hill. Their mule team grazes in the meadow. Soon the hills will ring with the sound of their children and Koenigstein will be restored to its place somewhere between legend and folklore, never-never land and the faraway country of an eternal dreamtime. As your faithful scribe, dear reader, I will continue to report regularly from this place of magic, this place of archetypal surfeit.

Sitting Ducks

The Mission Period in California has achieved a remarkably benign reputation considering the church's crushing failure to achieve its objectives and its disastrous impact on the resident Native American populations it encountered on its colonial progress through California; even the iconic buildings failed catastrophically more often than not (Faulty Missions).

This Spanish project, which, as elsewhere in the Americas combined the ambitions of church and state, begun in earnest in 1769, aimed to create in Alta California a Christian, feudal dependency. For this to be achieved, however, not only the human capital of the Franciscan Friars and the soldiers who were to protect them would be required. It was also necessary to create a population of peasants who would till the land, tend the animals and provide other manual labor necessary to support the entire enterprise. Unfortunately, the indigenous populations of Southern California, although largely sedentary, had absolutely no agrarian background and proved entirely ill-suited to the Iberian agenda.

It is only with heavy irony that I note that these populations were never consulted as to their willingness to participate in this susbstantially medieval society of which the Spanish dreamt. In California, it remained a dream unrealized. Peonage, serfdom, or to put it plainly, slavery, ill-suits humans in general and particularly those well-fed and at ease with their way of life, as were the native populations before the Mission era.

While the Spanish initially presumed that bowls of steaming boiled barley would provide a sufficient lure to entrap these sitting ducks - their proto-peasantry - they quickly learned that the native peoples had little trouble feeding themselves and preferred the bounty of ocean and chaparral to the weevilly, over-cooked European mash. Thus it was that the Colonial oppressors turned to the lash to encourage the locals to sign up, by way of a perfunctory baptism, as neophytes in the mission system; but once enrolled they proved, from the Spanish perspective, more trouble than they were worth.

As the missions, built of an adobe composed of mud, straw and oxblood, fell about them - shaken to the ground, time and again, by seismic irruptions - the Franciscans also saw their socio-religious-economic agenda quickly fall apart, victim of that old problem of too many Friars and not enough Indians. For while the Spanish ultimately had some success in corralling women and children into the mission pens (for the arrival of new technologies, gods and voracious herbivores, such as cattle, sheep and horses, soon weakened the social, economic and spiritual foundations of native cultures), once there they died with a truly horrific rapidity. Many of the men meekly followed their families into captivity and premature death. While we can debate the extent to which its impacts were understood as they unfolded, missionization of native populations effectively resulted in their systematic extermination.

By the time the Spanish arrived in Southern California they had had over two and a half centuries of colonial experience in the Americas and were successful in extracting huge amounts of wealth from the New World. Their goals for California were comparatively modest - to establish a presence in the region as a discouragement to the other lurking European colonial powers, England and Russia, from further encroachments - and to do so at a cost that was not burdensome to the Spanish treasury (Blowback).

They had every reason to feel confident: as Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo point out in their Indians, Franciscans and Spanish colonization: the impact of the mission system on California Indians, University of New Mexico Press, 1995, "The fundamental success of the Spanish colonial system was the ability to exploit sedentary Indian populations.... the mission, a center of religious indoctrination and acculturation, was the instrument used to forge the new colonial society". The California mission system was not an experiment, it was an extension of a hitherto successful program of wealth extraction. In the event, the Chumash had the misfortune to be at the epicenter when this modest colonial expansion all went horribly wrong.

The Chumash were the most heavily colonized Californian indigenous people. Between 1772 and 1804 a fort (The Santa Barbara Presidio), five missions (San Luis Obispo, San Buenaventura, Santa Barbara, La Purisima, Santa Ynez) and finally, in 1831, the Asistencia de Santa Margarita were built in their territories. As an almost direct corollary, this loose confederation of tribes, known since their naming in 1891 by John Wesley Powell, as Chumash (after the name used by coastal people for their relatives on Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands), had the highest death rate amongst Alta California's native peoples.

The causes of missionized Chumash death were varied, but foremost was a range of European diseases against which they had no immunity. Additionally, a force-fed diet of high carbohydrate grains with few vegetables or animal fat proved ruinously unhealthy to people used to a lean but highly nutritious diet. Sanitation was atrocious and conditions were compounded by the number of the dead and dying. An eye-witness, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, writing in his, Life, Adventures and Travels in California, 1849, was repelled by the charnal house he found at Santa Barbara Mission, where the graveyard was regularly exhumed to make way for newly dead Indians. In the mission courtyard he saw,

"....three or four cart-loads of skulls, ribs, spines, leg-bones, arm-bones, etc., laying in one corner. Beside them stood two hand-hearses with a small cross attached to each. About the walls hung the mould of death!"

The high mortality rates in these communities resulted in the almost continuous recruitment of unacculturated Indians into the mission houses where, on the one hand they strengthened the survival of a relict Indian culture thus fatally impacting the Franciscan goal of indoctrination and on the other they provided highly vulnerable recruits to a system heavy with the stench of death. The Indian populations in the missions were never viable, they did not grow through natural reproduction. Children born in missions rarely survived beyond their second birthday dying, most often, of syphylis, consumption (TB) and dysentary. Survivors were lucky to make it to twenty five years of age.

The Chumash culture, the pinnacle achievement, in terms of complexity and sophistication, of California's indigenous, stone-age peoples proved enormously fragile in the face of this European invasion of new technology, domestic animals, disease and spiritual blandishments. It quickly withered in the missions where its people were serfs in the fields, slaves in the workshops and captives in their fetid quarters. In a little over half a century Chumash culture was effectively destroyed leaving a small, dispossessed Indian population thrown first into the Rancho system of large land holdings where they fared ill as impoverished agricultural workers then worse, into the maw of the aggressive capitalism as practiced in the new American State.

Junipero Serra, the Franciscan priest who was the driving force in the Spanish conquest and colonization of this culture (and many others), is remembered and revered; his figure is replicated in statues throughout the state (locally, in front of Ventura City hall). For the Chumash, its people gone, the remnants finally lost to the great American melting pot, their name lives on, now appended, in mis-remembrance, to Casino, Highway and some pan-Indian syncretic bastardization that is the public perception of the local native American heritage (Shadowland).

Faulty Missions

While I blithely suggested in Shadowland, that during the roughly thirteen thousand years that indigenous peoples occupied this land, " not much happened" I take great exception to Kevin Starr's presumptuous line, in his California - A History, New York, 2005, that "During the fifty-two years of Spanish rule, little seems to have occurred outside the steady expansion of the mission system and the arrival of a few foreign visitors". Nothing that is, other than the genocidal extirpation of said indigenous peoples. The euro-centrism of California's State Historian is stunning.

Starr goes on, tightening the noose around his neck, "by contrast - from 1833 to its annexation by the United States in 1846 - the canvas is crowded with important events". That canvas might be more humanely employed as a hood for Kevin's head while the hangman for the Tribunal for Fair and Accurate Recording of Human History does his job.

1833 was the year that the Mexican Congress demanded that all missions be secularized. The Governor of California, Jose Figueroa took charge of this process and for a brief moment it seemed as though past wrongs might, to a small degree, be righted for the plan was to return half the Franciscan lands to mission Indians as the missions themselves were secularized over three years from 1834-1836. Figueroa died half way through this process and very few Indians ever came into possession of the land they and their forbears had worked, in appalling conditions, for half a century. By the end of secularization, the land grant rancho became the preferred device for re-allocating purloined land and more than 600 such grants were made during the Mexican era - distributed as political spoils. These vast holdings dominated the economy and led to a new class of Californian dons, living the good life with their extended families, on the rolling pasturelands of the State.

Meanwhile, locally, those Indians who remained wards of Mission San Buenaventura were relocated, in 1834, to worthless pastures along the Ventura River flood plain half a dozen miles inland from the coast. There they settled, built rough shelters (euphemistically called casitas and memorialized in the name of the village, Casitas Springs) and led lives tragically foreclosed by both the loss of their connection to a tribal life and the enforced institutionalization to which they had succumbed during the mission period. Little wonder that aside from the name, no vestige of their inhabitation survives in Casitas Springs, their sad histories apparently washed away in the frequent floods that plague these rank bottom-lands.

The stretch of road (SR 33), where once were dotted these casitas, now passes beneath an avenue of mature eucalypts, and winds between frame cottages sunk low to the ground in attitudes that suggest their owner-builders sought not the structures' longevity but instead, regular disbursements from their flood insurance policies, remains, I suspect, psychically scarred. The commercial highlight of this misbegotten stretch of highway is a bright neon and fluorescent-lit liquor and bait store. Otherwise, there is an antique lighting store with its stock gathering dust and increasing irrelevance as the federal ban on incandescent light bulbs begins to take hold, and a rental equipment yard. On the sharp incline that marks the eastern edge of the settlement, and serves as a dyke during inundations - holding the water in the town not out - once stood the Johnny Cash home; it burned to the ground some five or so years ago a little while after the man in black sold it.

Driving up the coast of California from Ojai, as we did last week, is to play a game of chicken with the San Andreas Fault. North to San Francisco and beyond, your route is twined along the length of the linear collision between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate that grind past one another along a zone of subparallel faults, roughly one hundred kilometers wide, running north south between Eureka and the Salton Trough. For much of its length, the Mission Trail, built with the blood, sweat and tears of the indigenous population, follows this fault zone. Over the years, many of the missions have fallen victim to its temblors.

Mission San Diego de Alcalá was the first mission in Alta California, founded July 16, 1769, by Junípero Serra. Six years later it was burned to the ground by Native Americans and, rebuilt in 1776, was the first mission to fail seismically in the earthquake of 1801.

On December 8, 1812, a quake registering 7.0 occurred on the Mojave segment of the San Andreas fault causing significant damage as far away as San Juan Capistrano, where the foor of the mission collapsed killing 40 Native American worshippers as they celebrated the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Closer to the epicenter, the San Fernando Rey and San Gabriel Arcángel Missions were also damaged.

Later that same month, on the Winter Solstice, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake, centered in the Santa Barbara Channel, struck Santa Barbara, Ventura, and northern Los Angeles Counties. The chapel at Santa Barbara Mission was flattened and the church at La Purisima Concepcion Mission in Lompoc, completed in 1802, was destroyed. Nearby, Mission Buenaventura was felled by a combination of the quake and its resultant tsunami. Santa Inés mission in Solvang was also severely damaged.

Further north, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, built in 1784, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1818. Mission Santa Cruz, completed in 1794, was riven by earthquakes in 1840 and 1857 and collapsed a year later. Finally, in the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Mission San Juan Bautista was severely damaged. By some intercession of divine providence, however, Mission Yerba Buena, founded in 1776, survived both the earthquake and fire and is now the oldest building in San Francisco. In all, at least eleven of the twenty-one missions built between 1769 and 1823 either collapsed or were severely damaged by San Andreas Fault earthquakes.

Sonoma's San Francisco Solano is the last and northernmost outpost in California’s chain of missions. It is the only mission founded after Mexico achieved its independence from Spain - the government reasoning that it would stop the Russians advancing from the north. The church was attacked by Pomo Indians in 1826 after Father Altimíra’s constant beatings and imprisonment (their morale, apparently, having failed to improve) but it too, like Yerba Buena, has thus far escaped serious earthquake damage.

Starr's claim of the "steady expansion of the mission system", collapses under the most cursory of examinations. Between the hands of Native Americans bearing torches and the hand of god manifested in the wrath of San Andreas, the temporal and spiritual conquest of California by the Franciscans and their enablers, the Spanish Army, was resisted every step of the way.

Our trip, to San Francisco, Point Reyes, Sea Ranch, and a return via Sonoma, threaded through both strands of this braided history of Mission and Fault.

Shadowland

For the third weekend in a row, it rained. This time, on Saturday afternoon, it played perfectly into our hands. We had a small gathering for lunch and at 11:30 a.m. I lit the Rais stove and an hour later the first guests arrived to a roaring, albeit highly constrained fire (locked within the glass doored combustion chamber of our prized Danish stove). By the end of the afternoon, after six hours of feeding it oak, the fire had warmed the oven chamber above it to 250 degrees centigrade, hot enough to cook pizza.

We are approaching the end of our first three years in the house. Two wettish winters and this one, the Big Dry (Rikyu Grey, Chiquihuite, Arcady). The fact is, despite four and a half inches in these three weekend storms in March, we are still less than 50% of normal rainfall and a third of last year's total. Just enough moisture though, to revive the thistles and give hope to the mustard. On the weed front, we are not yet, to mix metaphors, out of the woods. Nevertheless, the lack of rain has given us room to tackle work other than weed abatement and the property is looking its best ever.

The first cycle of deerweed that opportunistically geminated on the new, hydro-seeded slopes is now beginning to die back - prompted, perhaps, by the lack of rain. I have pulled it all out of the 'front lawn', the fill slope in front of the house, and now there are just bunch grasses (pendulous with seed) except for where the deerweed shaded the grasses too well - there we have a few moth-eaten fallow areas that are awaiting sun to revive dormant seed. On the cut-slope behind the house, the task of removing the dead deerweed is more daunting since it has entirely colonized the area and the grasses are correspondingly either stunted or absent and it awaits the focussed efforts of myself and Alex over the next week or two, work that must be completed before the start of fire season.

Sunday, following the rains, was a particularly beautiful day as it so often is after a storm. That afternoon, when we were out for a walk, we noted a parade of sightseers driving up and down Koenigstein looking at the magnificent Topatopas on the left and Sulphur mountain to the right on the way up, and the upper valley spread before them on the way down. Those who showed persistence and continued beyond the widened road to the original, narrow County road that snakes up to the Greenberg Ranch were rewarded with fabulous views of the Santa Paula Ridge and the Santa Monica Mountains beyond.

Where, amidst these quietly complacent domestic jottings, are the Chumash? They have been absent from this blog since Chiquihuite and I hear their call. While they may dip in and out of the Urban Wildland discourse, my accumulated ideas about this aggregation of now lost Indian tribes who once lived along the coastal fringe from Malibu to Point Conception and on the Channel Islands north of Catalina, chime sonorous notes in my otherwise cacophonic consciousness. These tribes, and my ideas about them, are the flickering shadows that substantiate my thirty odd years lived in the land where they lived. These are the shadows that stretch backwards in time to the moment when the first people arrived on the coastal islands, nourished by the rich life of kelp beds through which they voyaged from their old land to this new continent (An Island on the Land).

These phantasms of a primal people rarely intrude, I suspect, into the awareness of most who now live where they lived and tread the ground they trod; but they may occasionally be awoken by events such as the Chumash Day Pow Wow, the fourteenth annual episode of which is to be held this year on Malibu Bluffs Park on April 14th and 15th., a visit to the Chumash Casino in Santa Ynez, or a drive along the Chumash Highway which links Santa Barbara and Los Alamos. Unless, that is, you live in Ojai, whose citizens cling dearly to all things mystical and hold close to their collective soul any scrap of association with the spiritual sanctity of the indigenous population. Such connections are merrily stirred along by our professional Chumash muse Julie Tumamait and, on a slightly more cynical note, yours truly.

This split between a romantic conception of this continent's indigenous people and a realist, cynical or 'truthful' appraisal has a long history and is illustrated, at either end of the nineteenth century by James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain.

In an essay published in The Galaxy, 1870, Mark Twain riffs to devastating effect on the romantic view of the Native American as propounded in The Last of the Mohicans, 1826, and offers, in the title, The Noble Red Man, a profoundly ironic view of his character. Cooper establishes the target thus,

"His hair is glossy, and as black as the raven's wing; out of its massed richness springs a sheaf of brilliant feathers; in his ears and nose are silver ornaments; on his arms and wrists and ankles are broad silver bands and bracelets; his buckskin hunting suit is gallantly fringed, and the belt and the moccasins wonderfully flowered with colored beads; and when, rainbowed with his war-paint, he stands at full height, with his crimson blanket wrapped about him, his quiver at his back, his bow and tomahawk projecting upward from his folded arms, and his eagle eye gazing at specks against the far horizon which even the paleface's field-glass could scarcely reach, he is a being to fall down and worship....."

and Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) swings massively at it with his pen dipped in the same well of vitriol with which he would later dispatch the coyote in Roughing It, 1886, (Coyote Dream),

"He is little, and scrawny, and black, and dirty; and, judged by even the most charitable of our canons of human excellence, is thoroughly pitiful and contemptible. There is nothing in his eye or his nose that is attractive, and if there is anything in his hair that--however, that is a feature which will not bear too close examination . . . He wears no bracelets on his arms or ankles; his hunting suit is gallantly fringed, but not intentionally; when he does not wear his disgusting rabbit-skin robe, his hunting suit consists wholly of the half of a horse blanket brought over in the Pinta or the Mayflower, and frayed out and fringed by inveterate use. He is not rich enough to possess a belt; he never owned a moccasin or wore a shoe in his life; and truly he is nothing but a poor, filthy, naked scurvy vagabond, whom to exterminate were a charity to the Creator's worthier insects and reptiles which he oppresses."

The years that separate these conflicting visions are telling. Cooper (1789-1851) relied for his vision of the noble savage on his father's recollections of Native Americans, effectively pushing his dateline back forty years to the Revolutionary era when memories may have still existed of such noble beings residing in intact cultures unsullied by contact with pale-faces.

The experience of the shadow is separate, more profound and may exist outside of the romantic-cynical spectrum. In any case, the temporal penumbra that I perceive in this land is not cast by those who currently claim a hereditary link to the local tribes, like Julie Tumamait, but is shadowed by lost legions of Paleoindian, Millingstone Horizon (Oak Grove), Proto-Chumash and Chumash peoples who lived here from 13,000 B.P., up to the time of European contact.

Theirs is the long tail of pre-history when, arguably, not much happened, but whose combined shadow still falls, obliquely, across the land. It is their legend that has lodged in my mind and it is their spectral presence that still hovers over, and inflects my view of this landscape.

Arcady

Predictably, my characterization of this winter as the Big Dry (Chiquihuite, Rikyu Grey) has taken a hit over the past two weekends. Last Saturday we got a solid three inches while today, as I write this on Sunday morning, a steady rain has produced over half an inch and the storm system bodes to dump another couple of inches.

Last Sunday, after Saturday's storm, Lorrie, neighbor Margot and I drove up through the oak meadow-lands of Sulphur Mountain and were met, at the top of the hill, by valet parkers shuffling cars, guests and shuttle buses to the 'Friends of Steve Bennett' fund raiser. It was at Larry Hagman's place on Sulphur Mountain, just east of the Doppler Radar tower (the 100 foot tall silver ball that sits ominously on the ridge and tracks storm systems for the National Weather Service). For some unaccountable reason, we were ushered past the valet parking lots and self-parked the LR3 just below, and in full sight of, the house.

The Hagman place has lived long in my imagination. The opulence and scale of the house is matched, in local legend, by the prodigious solar arrays that power it, and, if the tales are to be believed, potentially much of Upper Ojai. His annual power bill prior to his first photovoltaic installation was 38,000 dollars - the following year it dropped to less than twenty. He owns the largest residential solar-power system in the United States and now he reaps an income from the clean power he feeds back to Edison. His 100 kW (DC) system generates 150,000 kilowatt-hours per year, 10,000 kWh more than he needs to keep all the lights blazing and the air-conditioning cranked in his mountain top estate. Our thin-film array is rated at 5 kW and generates 10,000 kWh annually. (For those tracking this apparent production discrepancy, perhaps Hagman's site is wreathed more often in cloud than our lower, south facing slope and his DC-AC inversion less efficient).

I know Larry Hagman as the charming Major Anthony Nelson, his character in I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970) which I watched in re-runs, in black and white, in Australia. By the time he came to play J.R. Ewing on the prime-time soap, Dallas, that ran throughout the eighties, from 1978 -1991, I had pretty much sworn off TV, but for Hagman, this later show provided much of his wealth as an actor. It also gifted him an enduring persona, which he affects to this day, wearing an iconic Resistol Texan cowboy hat at all public appearances.

His house is a Mediterranean style pile, with Tuscan grace notes set on a knoll commanding its 43 acre site with panoramic views of Ventura County and beyond. On much of its west and south sides, the house is edged by a swimming pool and bridges take the visitor over the water as they (OK, we three) search for the entry. We found the split-level Grand Room which faces the southern view, and a guest kindly opened a sliding glass door to let us in. This room accommodates a 40' long lap pool with a retractable roof above, a grotto spa and a lonely mirrored disco ball on the upper level.

In its 18,000 square foot, the house has nine bedrooms and fourteen bathrooms. Larry has hosted many fund-raising events but last weekend's was possibly the last. Long for sale, it is rumored that he may at last have found a buyer.

In Surf and Turf, I fantasized about the space described between my outstretched arms as I stand on our Koenigstein property signalling south-westward over Sulphur Mountain. Those trackless wildlands thus indicated beyond the mountain ridge were just off to the right as I stood in Larry's belvedere where a yellow bed swung from the vaulted ceiling allowing for a view that reached to Santa Rosa and Anacapa Islands, the Oxnard plain and beyond to the Simi Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains. Further to the left was the Santa Clara River and rising above it, the SP sign on South Mountain. All was revealed. For a moment, I was King of the Hill.

It was about as exciting, after that first rush of wonder, as the view through the porthole of an airliner (Red Smudge). There was a disengagement with the landscape, a realization that a vista, from this great vantage point, represents a sort of horizontal picture plane receding in orderly fashion towards the mists of the horizon. Where was the sharawaggi I longed for? The wild engagement with the rugged landscape? (Sharawaggi)

For the last half millenium or more our western aesthetic world has been more or less split into two - the Classical and the Gothic; the Formal and the Picturesque; or, closer to home, the Arcadian and the Savage. The Arcadian world is populated by shepherds and their flocks, and in classical Greece these sheep turned wildlands into pastoral idylls. Something similar happened to the classical landscapes of California, where grazing destroyed the chaparral and now wolf oaks dot the rolling pasturelands and mustard paints the hills (or will in an few weeks) their eponymous gold. I digress; but only slightly. Larry's architects and landscape designers followed the classical approach - where man is comfortably ensconced in a humanized landscape and the sharawaggi is kept at bay.

Urban Wildland is dedicated to the frisson generated by the juxtaposition of the built environment and a savage landscape, where the balance that allows for human habitation may be disturbed; where fire or flood (and perhaps rampaging poison oak) may, at any moment, make the tenuous occupation of the wild edge untennable.

The Hagman estate is dedicated to the civilizing, classical impulse where wild is transmuted into an idealized vision in which the lawns mimic the sheep nibbled plains of Arcady; the exotic landscaping echoes the paradisiacal gardens of the old world; and the chlorinated, serpentine pools that moat the house ape the River Lethe.

The house - sticks and stucco cloaked in Tuscan garb - mindful of the past but disengaged from present danger, mutely awaits the next wild fire to sweep over the ridge.

Personal Property

(Continued from Pulp Fiction below).......In short, she smiled. Her name is Kathleen Cressler and we know her from the days when she was office manager for Jerry and Shar Michaels at Coldwell Banker; now she's an agent with Keller Williams, this morning subbing for Sharon MaHarry who is off finding someone's pink moment for them (an Ojai-only reference). A couple of other agents were milling around, one the wife of the owner of the local pool store, and with whom I had discussed acid levels, chlorine generators and the like only last summer, and the other the mother of Otis Bradley, a contractor who built a purportedly 'green' house on Signal Street several years ago. Jonas was a potential buyer as was another gentleman in a green sweatshirt. Lorrie and I were Jonas' posse. I was also looking for a story, and I found one.

Kathleen sketched the outline. The house (coyly absent from the KW listing, since it is an egregiously illegal residence) was moved from Camarillo at the time of that town's being split asunder in the 1950's (Camarillo Brio) by the 101. It is a 1920's wood frame, single story shingle cottage typical of the thirty or so that found their way to Ojai. The house sits on eighteen inch high stacks of one foot square concrete block caps (or pavers).

Despite the presence of several faults, no significant earthquakes have struck Ojai in the historic period. However long this 1200 square foot 2-bedroom 1-bath cottage has been sitting up at around 2500 feet, some 3500 feet below the eastern end of the Topatopa bluffs, it does not seem to have been significantly seismically shaken. It sits calmly amidst the accumulated agricultural, mechanical, earth-moving, electrical generating and hydrological junk of an owner, who it seems, has a passion to muddle, mend and tinker with, but never discard the past and present equipment that he has contrived to support his off-the-grid lifestyle.

His ten acres are just to the west of La Broche Canyon. Somewhere, in a steep canyon to the north of the house, is a spring towards which Jonas and I climbed, following the white 2" pvc pipe that fed his newish-looking 5,000 gallon corrugated water tank. We climbed high enough to appreciate a view, across the city of Santa Paula and Oxnard Plain, that revealed a glimpse of ocean beyond the wetlands and dunes at Point Mugu, but turned back before finding the water source.

Below us was the house, the aforementioned water tank, the windmill that once pumped the water (work now undertaken by an electric motor and a small photo-voltaic array), a holding pond stocked with fish, a large equipment shed housing a Case excavator and a backhoe, a few acres of avocados and several firs and eucalypts. These were the owner's 'Green Acres', haphazardly irrigated by the hidden spring and the traceries of pipe that lay over and under the land.

Not much changed with Chevy trucks after the so-called 'Second Series' came out in 1947 until the mid-fifties. The bloopy fenders, rounded cab roof and split screen windshield all became iconic signifiers of America's favorite half-ton truck with Chevrolet's yearly up dates focused on only minor cosmetic changes (in 1952, for instance, the window-winder knobs were changed from black to maroon plastic!), but in 1953 the standard body color of the vehicle was changed from Forrester green to a slightly lighter shade, Juniper green.

Hidden beneath a tarpaulin in a make-shift lean-to garage just down wind of the property's septic tank and leech line was a 1953 Chevy truck in its original, first model year Juniper green livery. Here was the old man's labor of love, last registered in 2009 but looking 'ready to work', as they say. This truck is a sweetener thrown into the deal - for the land sale includes all personal property (including the 'ghost' house whose existence, remember, is not acknowledged on the listing) with the exception of a rolled late-model Nissan. This latter, I suspect, is part of a pending insurance settlement.

Jonas had a mind to turn the whole mess into an up-scale health resort. It seemed to me that the cottage represented a perfect educational opportunity to study the realities of living off-the-grid. The beautiful hand wrought steel barrel-shaped wood burning stove serves as the building's only heating. The fridge, cooking-stove and lights run on propane. Water service at night is dependent on battery storage of the solar array's power production. The old man made it all work and when it didn't work he fixed it. A salutary lesson available, perhaps, for 'green' pretenders.

The owner had, Kathleen told us, lived up here to get away from his family. Now in his 80's the family had successfully persuaded him to put his retreat on the market. More likely, thinks I, this is a carefully weighed calculus that has granddad selling the property and neatly self-financing his final decade of adult-care under the sensitive ministrations of minimum-wage minders: payback for his daring to hide-out in his suburban-cottage-turned-hunting-cabin to live amidst the scenic splendor of the Topatopa foothills for the past thirty odd years.

Better, I muse, for him to die with his boots on, his stiffened body pawed over by the bears that he now scares away with single shots from his Smith and Wesson Model 10, .38 caliber revolver (Kathleen tells us), only the holster of which was available for the showing, casually placed on a work table amidst old maps, books and magazines. The old man then, away for the open house, was presumably packing heat as he waited out the remains of the day. Disgruntled, resentful, already missing the twittering of chapparal birds, deer tip-toeing down the canyon and the marauding bears, his un-holstered revolver was, no doubt, a comforting presence: its dead weight pulling down one side of his Patagonia fleece jacket.

Pulp Fiction

I was talking to Buddy Wilds this afternoon while I was getting my hair cut and we got to talking about Edgar Rice Burroughs and his fictional creation, John Carter. Now, despite the fact that I pride myself on being comparatively 'media free' I do occasionally move about in urban environments and I sometimes come in visual contact with billboards. John Carter has been taking up a lot of said billboard space lately. As it happens, Buddy is a big John Carter fan. By which I mean that he has read all the books. By Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I asked Buddy to tell me his story. I was after the ERB story ( we had already checked in on the Tarzana connection) and Buddy began to spin the yarn. He was a Civil War vet, he tells me, who ended up in California prospecting for gold. O.K. thinks I, this sounds plausible - a kind of Jack London scenario. Then he (and in my mind this was ERB) stumbles into a cave while prospecting and is overcame by a noxious gas. Mmmmm....I muse, what kind of gas could that have been? But I am too polite to interrupt and, in any case, the clippers are mighty close to an arterial vein. Buddy continues...and the gas paralyzes him, he tells me. Alright, I temporize, a man of action is cut down in his prime and, paralyzed, turns to a life of churning out pulp fiction. I think I am ahead of the game. But no. Buddy's tale takes a twist. The paralyzed man's buddy (small b) goes for help, but despite his limited range of movement, said brand-spanking-new quadraplegic manages to watch as his friend is set upon by Native Americans and killed.

I am still caught up in the narrative, still imagining this as a great nineteenth century tale of a career changer. But then things get weird. Edgar, as I think of him, left totally helpless, has an out-of-body experience. He looks down on his naked paralyzed body. Now I have lived in Ojai long enough to consider this water off a duck's back. I am there. Ok, thinks I, another god damn out-of body experience and he hears the call to write fiction - could happen to anyone! After all, paralyzed in a cave by poisonous gas and being summoned to scribble pulp fiction is no more difficult to swallow than our friend Krishnamurti, sitting under a Peruvian pepper tree in a loin-cloth, suffering an epileptic fit (as intimated by Mary Lutyens) and deciding to turn down the job offer of god (Black Magic).

Pan for gold, write fiction, which activity best suits a paralyzed man? The narrative is hanging together. So, I am imagining Edgar floating above his useless body and hearing the stentorian command, echoing in the cave: go write, young man; but Buddy throws a curve ball: then, he says, he wakes up on Mars. It is at this point that I realize that perhaps we are talking about the fictional creation, JC, rather than his creator ERB. Buddy then sketches the natural history of Mars (according to Burroughs) and my mind flashes to those billboards; a tiny, well muscled and handsome man being threatened by gigantic beasts towering above him. Kind of an extra-terrestrial Tarzan. In these few minutes, as my locks are shorn, we have learnt nothing about Edgar Rice Burroughs except that he was, perhaps, a literary one-trick-pony.

ERB, born in 1875, was well educated on the east coast (Phillips Academy, Andover), failed the West Point entry examination and then drifted west. He began selling mechanical pencil sharpeners in Chicago and in his spare time, or so the story goes, began reading pulp fiction. He had the revelation that, " ...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten". He sold his first story in 1912 and then proceeded to make good on his threat, producing more than seventy novels, including the hugely successful Tarzan and John Carter series. He ended his days on his Encino Ranch, which he named Tarzana. He died in 1950.

His early life paralleled Jack London's - both were born to civil war veterans, just a year apart, but London's early life was more flamboyant and his literary star waxed brighter. London died of kidney failure or an accidental morphine overdose, on his Sonoma ranch in 1916. Burroughs continued writing until the mid 1940's when his final book, Tarzan and the Foreign Legion appeared in 1944. London's early demise was, as we might say now, the wiser career move.

Both London and Burroughs were in the business of spinning tales, and both cut their story-telling teeth in the west. Now I came across the makings of a yarn just last week, in the back country beyond Koenigstein. I might wonder what ERB or Jack might have made of it, but at this point it's mostly down to me.

ERB begins his first novel thus,

"I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale. "

My introduction to the strange tale of a forgotten ten acre rectangle of land that lies within a larger 160 acre in-holding and backs up, on its northern side, to the Sespe Wilderness, was from one Jonas McPhail, an arborist of Scottish and Scandinavian ancestry. He rode up to our property on his Honda XR650; he was dressed in his leather jacket, black singlet, jeans and riding boots, looking like the rock band roadie that he once was. Sartorially, he remains stuck in a dark, post-punk nether-world. But he greeted us cheerfully enough and he, Lorrie and I got into our white Land Rover LR3 and headed up Koenigstein.

We were already far beyond the realm of mail deliveries and Harrison's garbage pick up when we drove towards an open oil pipe gate that in all my years of running in that neck of the woods had stood resolutely pad-locked. The gate is festooned with rusted, 1/8" metal plates upon which a welding torch has been used to write imprecations intended to rain down on all those who attempt to gain access. Now, I had once had the temerity to broach this portal on one of my exploratory bike rides in search of trail running routes, and rode for several miles along the canyon rim beyond it, but in failing to find a continuous route down to Thomas Aquinas I have never since hopped the gate. This morning, it was swung wide open, and as we approached, a jolly rancher sailed by in a late-model pick-up truck, having presumably both opened and exited it, and, with a cheery wave gave us instructions to just leave it open.....

Off to our right, as we drove through the gate, was a free standing steel sign with a skull ideogram burnt through it and a curious grouping of silhouetted steel ravens artfully designed to appear as though they were sitting atop the plate.

We drove along the canyon rim on a rough dirt road cut into the side of the hill, through a couple of washes (dry at this moment) and past rocks that precariously studded the slopes above the road. We traveled on, past a turnoff that threaded down the canyon and was marked, at the junction with the high road, by a gas flare shooting its flame into the sky bravely competing with the candle power of a brightly risen sun.

When I approach the gates of heaven or hell, I fully expect to be greeted by a real estate agent. And so it was this morning, in a ghastly pre-echo of that fated meeting. Around one final bend we saw before us a little oasis of palms, an ancient windmill and a dilapidated house from the 1920's. Beside this tableaux, at the side of the driveway, stood a real estate agent.

This devil, wearing Prada knock-offs - trim coal-black pants and a deep red satin top - appeared before us with her jet eyes beaming in a preternaturally young, milky complexioned face. A slash of red beneath her pert nose opened to reveal the excellence of her orthodonture and to signify a welcome........ (To be Continued)

A Valentine

If the Academy Awards are an indicator of the zeitgeist, then we are in an age of nostalgia - at least for the beginnings of cinema. The age of movies more or less coincided with the American century and, for most of that time, they were thoroughly intertwined. The Artist, which was awarded Best Picture, is a French production, entirely shot in Los Angeles. It serves as a valentine to the motion picture industry and, perhaps, to America; set in the 1920's and 1930's, it documents the traumatic transition between silent films and the 'talkies'.

The film's black and white cinematography is the almost perfect medium with which to record the sun-bleached monochrome of LA: a city where the hazy whites, creams and pale ochres of the built environment play against the grey and blues of sea, sky and hills. The Artist conjures a town of classical-revival and deco architecture where the homes of movie stars and the theaters in which their work is shown are set in the great treeless basin that was Los Angeles in the twenties. The wonder is that this Los Angeles dream time was shot primarily using surviving buildings from the era with only a nominal assist from the Warner Brothers backlot.

Hugo, Martin Scorcese's deeply flawed but stunningly designed 3-D flick commemorates the pre-world-war-one fantasist, inventor and cineaste Georges Melies who created over 300 short films between 1896 and 1913. His career was over by the beginning of the war and by the 1920's he was reduced to selling candy and toys at the Montparnasse railway station in Paris. Given the perfunctory characterization of the protagonists, the station becomes the unlikely star of the film. Designed by Victor Lenoir and the engineer Eugène Flachat and completed in 1840, it was severely damaged by a famous runaway train in 1895. In 1969, it was completely rebuilt in the anonymous style of the time. The original station, with its Beaux Arts wrapper and industrial baroque interior was lovingly recreated by Production Designer Dante Ferretti at London's Shepperton Studios; his wife, Francesca Lo Schiavo, set-decorated. Together, they were awarded the Oscar for best Art Direction.

Both movies celebrate old ways of making movies, but they also serve as nostalgic memorials to particular urban environments. Ironically, the one set in Paris, a city that has slavishly preserved its past, and is arguably the least modern of all European capitals, required the re-creation of its nineteenth century Montparnasse station in suburban London; and, while an American film crew tasked with creating 1920's Los Angeles would have almost certainly fled to Vancouver to do so, the French film crew on The Artist found in Los Angeles, a city dedicated to its own constant renewal, sufficient echoes of the past to create a winning illusion. We fetishize nostalgic environments, not least in the movies, and as these half-remembered pasts slip out of our grasp at an ever increasing rate, they metastasize into something like a heritage industry.

Nowhere is this more evident than in England, where the perceived glories of its architectural, social and environmental past are preserved in areas where change is bureaucratically restricted, or are re-packaged as entertainments such as Downton Abbey. I was born in the small Surrey wool-town of Godalming, at a time when its economic past endured in the form of two large knitwear factories both of which closed towards the end of the last century; but much of the town's Medieval, Georgian, and Victorian architectural past endures. Its high street, however, is now commercially irrelevant, its quaint store fronts beneath half-timbered second stories mostly vacant or leased by 'charity shops' - outflanked and under-priced by nearby, big box 'super stores'.

Godalming's unique architectural gem is Lutyen's first work, Munstead Wood (1896), the house he designed as a home for Gertrude Jekyll (April Showers). The house is considered eccentric and even weird. Its design is influenced by Philip Webb (1831-1915), William Morris, and Richard Norman Shaw, stalwarts of the English Arts and Crafts Movement - but individual elements of Lutyens creative gestalt at Munstead can also be traced back to Surrey half timbering and those black, agricultural barns. His later work eschewed whimsy for the powerful, largely undecorated massing of proto-modernism (Black Magic).

Within this mostly spurious heritage industry  landscape is awarded value: some environments are privileged over others. As a life-long champion of the under-dog I have dog-gedly defended the unloved native landscapes of both New South Wales, Australia and now California. What we preserve constitutes our cultural heritage, what we ignore become the wastelands of history. The difference between the two is down to taste, historical circumstance and the limits of our ecological vision.

Jay Appleton is a very old man. At 93, he is Emeritus Professor of the University of Hull where he taught geography from 1950 to 1985. His speciality is Landscape Aesthetics. By coincidence, it was to Hull University that I applied in the late 1960's based purely on the fact that Philip Larkin was the librarian there. I was politely turned down: their loss perhaps, but also a missed opportunity for me to have met a man who was and is a key figure in a field to which I have been gravitating ever since.

Had I met him, perhaps I would have been convinced of his then emerging Prospect-Refuge Theory. In The Experience of Landscape, London: John Wiley, 1975, he wrote,

"aesthetic satisfaction, experienced in the contemplation of landscape, stems from the spontaneous perception of landscape features which, in their shapes, colours, spatial arrangements and other visible attributes, act as sign-stimuli indicative of environmental conditions favourable to survival, whether they really are favourable or not......at both human and sub-human level the ability to see and the ability to hide are both important in calculating a creature's survival prospects . . . . Where he has an unimpeded opportunity to see we can call it a prospect. Where he has an opportunity to hide, a refuge..."

He illustrates this theory with a classical landscape that has all the three-dimensional cues that I have attributed to a Renaissance inspired notion of seeing (Rikyu Grey). It is a theory, that if true, dooms the appreciation of the kind of planar two-dimensional landscapes that I go on about. Chaparral offers neither prospect or refuge, nor does it offer those three-dimensional sculptural objects (like trees that rise above grasslands) that 'organize' our experience of the vista.

Chaparral is existential. It just is. it exists almost outside of time - it has endured for 30,000 years. It does not fit into our Western legacy of landscape aesthetics. It is the Elfin forest. It does not, nor perhaps ever will, inspire nostalgia. It does not get awards. It is background. I love it.

Rikyu Grey

A Spring night’s
Floating bridge of dreams
Is broken -
Split by the peaks,
The long clouds trail across the sky.

Fujiwara No Teika (1162-1241)

Early mornings, and the color is not yet in the land: it is a monochrome illuminated by the first hints of dawn. When the light comes in more fully there is a yellow or pink cast to the landscape, depending on the particular atmospheric circumstances of the new day. Early in the week there was a wondrously blushed sky - rose tints splashed across long clouds - that, in moments, replaced the grey tones of pre-dawn which had limned the shapes of bush and ridge but did not reveal their hue. By about 6:15 a.m. the land was flooded with warm light and the sky flamed orange and red. It lasted less than ten minutes, soon bleached out by the lemony light of the risen sun.

There is another factor in the color of these hills. The Big Dry (Chiquihuite) has cast its pall over the chaparral. There is an almost indefinable grey-green cast, a winter drab that shrouds the landscape. I see it off on the flanks of the Topa Topa foothills, in the creases between slopes where usually are running, at this time of year, seasonal streams. It is the color of vegetation hunkering down for the duration, reaching deep into its schlerophytic character to ride out these arid times. It is green, it is dun brown, it is almost monochromatic - it is Rikyu grey.

The Japanese historian and critic, Masayoshi Nishida (b. 1931) explains Rikyu grey as a "colorless, non-sensual hue produced by combining various colors until they cancel each other out." In terms of chroma, Rikyu grey (Rikyu-nezumi) is grey with a hint of green, and it is a hue which gained enormous popularity in Japan.

Its inventor, or perhaps more accurately, its popularizer was Sen no Rikyu (1521 - 1591), the hugely influential tea-master who, after being summoned to the court of the samurai lord, Hideyoshi, to be his teacher of tea, established his wabi (rustic) style as de rigeur for tout le japon. All ceremonial tea came to follow his style which was a reaction against the ornate or gorgeous and signified an embrace of rustic simplicity. "Change your collar cloth," he demanded, "wear a fresh sash of grey cotton (sumizome) cloth and a new pair of socks, carry a new fan. To entertain your guests at dinner, lentil soup and shrimp in vinegar sauce is quite enough to serve." To cater for the demand for this simple grey twill over the next two centuries or more it was imported from China. Both the cloth and the color retained their popularity throughout the entire Edo period (1603-1867).

To this day, Rikyu - the style maven, remains a seminal cultural figure.The great Japanese metabolist architect from the 1970's Kisho Kurosawa suggested by that by using his signature enigmatic grey, Sen no Rikyu was deliberately attempting to create a two-dimensional, plane world temporarily frozen in time and space. A world that Kurosawa recognizes in the grey of twilight, when, he suggests, the spatial qualities of Kyoto, for instance, dissolve into a monochrome and seem to lose all perspective and three-dimensionality. He claims that this dramatic effect, in which a three-dimensional world shifts into a two dimensional, plane world, is impossible to experience in any city in Western Europe. As readers of this blog know, however, it is a condition emblematic of both chaparral, the Australian bush and, under certain conditions, the surf line-up at Topanga Beach (White-Out).

From a Renaissance viewpoint, chaparral is visually chaotic. As Kurosawa points out, the newly understood principle of perspective in the Renaissance period brought a heightened awareness of three-dimensionality to cities, architecture and landscape. Towers, monuments and public squares form fixed points of perspective and became important elements of city spaces in Western Europe. In a system of visual understanding where space is experienced from a single point of view, these landmarks are indispensable for understanding that space. Western cities, he suggests look best under the strong, bright sun which highlights their three-dimensional qualities.

In landscape, this is a visual arrangement that we Westerners continue to privilege (with sculptural elements, tree groupings and notions of 'view' where foreground. middle ground and distant backdrop are all in place) but back in the day, in old Japan, the two dimensional jumble was cool. In China too, the energy of the 2-D chaos of the natural world was admired and this was enshrined in the idea of Sharawaggi, a word that has its roots in Japan, where it means irregular or asymmetrical. The word was adopted by European languages in the 17th century and here it took on a particular meaning in landscape, where it described a natural, wild or overgrown garden (Sharawaggi).

There is a direct link between Teika, Rikyu and Basho (Phantom Dwelling): inevitably you could best experience the Wabi-cha aesthetic, in a rustic setting. Rikyu scolded,

"You must practice and master tea ceremony in a small hut, first and foremost, according to the teachings of Buddhism. The comfort of a home and the taste of meals are merely worldly concerns, and a house which shelters you from the elements and food sufficient to prevent you from starvation are all you need. This is the teaching of the Buddha and the intent of the tea ceremony. Bring water, gather firewood, boil water, and make tea. Offer the first cup to Buddha, then to others, lastly partake yourself. Arrange some flowers and burn incense. In all, follow the way of the Buddha. Further details may be found in my humble writings."

Fujiwara Teika establishes a pre-echo of wabi-cha in his poem,

As I look about,
What need is there for cherry flowers
Or crimson leaves?
The inlet with its grass-thatched huts
Clustered in the growing autumn dusk.

It is a timeless aesthetic, and inordinately valuable in the appreciation of chaparral. Here, the drought stressed scrub oaks, greyed ceonothus and chamise and inflamed laurel sumac are enfolded in a two-dimensional, blurred synthesis, a green-grey carpet draped over the land where dimensionality is banished. This landscape is best understood, perhaps, as an elegantly spare, simple act of endurance.

Chiquihuite

Squawbush grows in the dry, braided creek beds that run between Sisar and Verner Farm Road. These are the reserve channels that await their call while the main stream runs sluggishly to the west. After only a couple of brief winter rains we are at about 20% of normal rainfall. It's the middle of February and we are in the Big Dry. The flanks of Santa Paula mountain, usually masquarading as the Emerald Isle at this time of the year, are a scruffy sage green/brown reminiscent of the sub-saharan bushveld. It looks as though the Squawbush will remain high and dry for the winter's duration.

I am re-aquainting myself with plants I first got to know three or four years ago and now I am singing them back to life again by remembering their names or, if not, returning from runs and walks with specimens to match against Uncle Milts photographs and drawings (Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, Milt McAuley, Canoga Park, 1996) or, giving the merest hint of a description to Margot and have her zero in on the genus, species and particular local characteristics.

So it was with the Squawbush - its defining characteristic, at this time of the year, catkins of a reddish hue, a sufficient hint. It's a close relative of poison oak, but there's no confusing the two. Both have three-lobed leaves, but basket bush (Rhus trilobata), commonly known by the aforementioned, but politically incorrect moniker is less deceptive than poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum). Although both plants originally belonged to the Rhus family, poison oak is now exiled under the genus Toxicodendron. P.O. is capable of chameleon-like changes in character that keep you guessing; but I like to believe that I can now see through most of its ruses (insert pun here), bright green, dull green, red, in leaf or not, climber or bush - I can usually nail it.

Both plants were of great use to the Chumash. As its name implies, Squawbush was harvested by women. They employed it in the manufacture of baskets, a long process (sometimes many years) but vital to the domestic economy in the chaparral, for the Chumash did not make pots and thus relied on baskets for storage, gathering, winnowing and cooking. They did possess carved steatite (soapstone) ollas and these cooking vessels were some of the first objects from the culture that were treasured and collected by Anglo-Californians in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Freshly cut poison oak stems exude a sticky, terpene oleoresin that oxidizes and polymerizes into a shiny black lacquer. This sap is also produced, although less copiously, in roots, leaves and flowers. Pomo Indians are known to have used the natural lacquer of poison oak to dye their baskets and this may also have been a Chumash practice. The resin contains urushiol, an allergen that causes dermatitis. The Japanese lacquer tree is a close relative, Toxicodendron vernicifluum and the name urushiol is derived from that tree's indigenous name, urushi ki.

I am currently reasonably immune to the allergen and thus it was that I cleared a truck load of poison oak bushes from beneath an oak on our west meadow, leaving Alex free to remove the ceonothus, chamise and sages that crowded its canopy (Sharawaggi). I did wake in the middle of the night a couple of days later with two painful lesions on my left arm, but the combined blister trail was barely a quarter inch long. Nevertheless, I treat it with respect and have only once, early on in my tenure in the urban wildland, attempted to clear it with a chain saw - atomizing urishiol over much of my exposed skin!

The Chumash were apparently completely immune to its toxin and, Harrington tells us, via Jan Timbrook's Chumash Ethnobotany, Santa Barbara, 2007 that they used the leaves as a poultice to heal wounds. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. The juice from freshly cut spring stems was used as a cure for warts, skin cancers and sores and a concoction of boiled P.O. root was ingested by those suffering from severe dysentery. She points out that those who claimed Chumash descent in the 1950's "no longer made any medicinal use of poison oak but eagerly sought remedies for its effects". Mugwort (available from any year-round creek near you) is now generally regarded as a specific for the skin lesions.

Timbrook writes, "Most Indian people today prefer the English names sumac, sourberry, or basket bush instead of the once-popular term squawbush". I would point out that most Indian people today prefer to be called Native American. (It is difficult to be always politically correct all of the time). Squawbush has a charming Spanish name, chiquihuite, and Harrington's informants used that word to describe various baskets, whisks and seed-beaters made from its woody stems. Tightly woven and tarred, the plant could be used for water bottles. It could also be woven into hats, toasting trays, buckets and served as the armature in ceremonial headdresses (Timbrook). Like the prized chia (the seeds of which were collected with chiquihuite seed beaters) squawbush was a burn-managed crop. I have not seen chiquihuite on our property but it may grow closer to Bear Creek, certainly poison-oak thrives on the east facing bank and generally both plants like a little moisture in the soil and are, in fact, a useful indicator of damp conditions.

The Big Dry as I am provisionally calling the 2011-2012 wet season, has impacted the deerweed population and I just carted two truck loads of dead specimens to our west-meadow dump/compost pile. Undaunted by the lack of rain, soap plant (Chlorogalum pomeridianum) is pushing out of the trail that leads there and the plants low crinkly lily leaves seem to survive the occasional crushing they receive from the fat tires of our 1977 Chevy S-10. Their roots were used by the Chumash for a soap and a fish poison - toxic enough to stun trout but not enough to impact its healthful consumption.

Other field notes: the Marah macrocarpus is gamely entwining whatever is within its reach, but the hillsides are not draped with it as they are in a wet year. The elderberry is flowering, their creamy, frothy flower clusters a reminder of my promise to make elderflower wine (but not this year) (Mining Gravel) but the lack of rain will not be to their liking. The white ceonothus is blooming but not quite profusely enough (yet) to perfume the day and the sycamores are re-leafing. We have identified a number of scrub oaks along the banks of the seasonal stream in addition to the two we found when clearing last spring. They are in various stages of generating tiny yellowish catkins. I had a bit of a wobble when first I saw them, but by a process of elimination I was fairly certain of the species, then cross-checked with the two confirmed trees.

The Chaparral doesn't need for me to know the names scientists have given its various plants or for me to be reminded of the uses that the native people of the area found for this unique biotic community - I, however, need to know. It is a small gesture of solidarity, of acknowledgment, of confirmation that as an observer, I matter. My memory of those names, characteristics and uses, bolstered by my local knowledge, is necessary for any slight possibility of true communion with this mostly silent, brooding and now thirsty plant world that is my home.

Black Magic

I was talking to Jerry Dunne the other day who was up at the house interviewing Lorrie and me for an article in the upcoming Ojai Quarterly. He asked me what kind of house I grew up in. I told him of the small brick semi-detached with the red-tile Norman roof - the typical austerity residence of the day - to which my family moved in 1952. These newly constructed houses were cheap, fast and, if not good, at least had indoor plumbing and, with their three coal fire places and one 'coal bunker', a rudimentary means of producing both heat and hot water (Apercu). Hastily thrown-up ribbon developments of this new two-story single family housing archetype were the British equivalent of the Levittown developments in the U.S. and served a similar population of recently returned servicemen and women eager to begin families.

In the South of England, this new housing was often created in the country where families had been relocated during the Second World War to escape the German air attacks on London which began with the 'Blitz' in 1940. Thus it was that I grew up deep in the Surrey country side, in an area that had not changed significantly since the Norman invasion of 1066, an event to which this new rash of red-brick semi-detacheds paid homage with their steeply peaked red-tile roofs - a thousand year old architectural form native to the northern lands of these French invaders.

In the US, new post-WW2 housing tracts were built in a highly favorable economic environment since this country, alone amongst the major powers, emerged from that conflict with its coffers reasonably intact and its industrial infrastructure entirely undamaged. Britain was enfeebled financially by the war, its industrial infrastructure critically wounded and it continued to labor under its unforgiven debts to the United States treasury. In England it was a grim, grey era of hardship and privation, particularly so in contrast to America's golden age to which the Brits were increasingly exposed via Television and the Movies.

While England had to wait until the sixties for a new architectural vision, with the work of the Archigram (1961 -1974), the US was producing, in the immediate post-war period, landmark works of modern architecture by a group of German and Austrian modernist architect-émigrés and its followers. While I wandered around the countryside looking for environmental inspiration in the woods, fields, ancient barns and Elizabethan cottages of rural Surrey, Lorrie was looking at the Eames house in the Pacific Palisades as detailed in a copy of Life magazine. As a child she jumped straight into the modernist stream. I lurked in the backwaters of vernacular agricultural and residential buildings of ages past.

Seventy five years earlier, from his home in Thursley, a village a few miles from where I grew up, Edwin Lutyens had similarly sought inspiration in Surrey's old buildings, and like me, was particularly struck by the black, weatherboard timber-frame barns typical of the area. Lutyens went on to become the preeminent country house architect of the late Victorian and Edwardian era. In his early works, he assimilated the traditional forms of rustic Surrey buildings, but his work changed dramatically when he met the landscape gardener, Gertrude Jekyll, who taught him ‘simplicity of intention and directness of purpose’ and he went on to become one of the great proto-modernists (April Showers).

Late in his career, he designed the Imperial capital of New Delhi (the most significant non-indigenous architecture in the sub-continent until Corbu's monumental efforts in Chandigarh and Louis Khan's parliament buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh). In India all the Raj administrators from the viceroy down agreed that the new capital of India should look vaguely Indian: it was a matter of political tact; but Lutyens famously punned, "They want me to do Hindu. Hindon't, I say."

His majestic Indian buildings are a long way from the primeval black barns of Surrey, and while he left their influence behind, I remain fascinated by dark, inky buildings rising out of the land like the Rick Joy house whose owner I chatted with on New Years Eve and which features charcoal stained cedar siding in the Japanese tradition of shou-sugi-ban where cedar is charred to increase its resistance to insects and fire (The Great Predator). The Japanese create wonderful noir architecture, while starchitects David Adjaye, Stephen Holl and Philippe Starck have all recently designed murdered-out (black) buildings.

When I first met Lorrie she owned a dark graphite grey clapboard cottage, a former mule barn, in Echo Park. I knew then, we could work together. Prospect Cottage, film maker Derek Jarman's retreat in Dungeness has become, in the many photos of this tiny house from the early 1990's, an iconic image of the black-painted and here black roofed house. Lorrie murdered-out her house in 1980 - and in flat paint. Her curse, to be always ahead of the curve!

Lorrie and I have dabbled on the fringes of architecture for thirty years or more, never threatening to reach a critical mass of either work or critical approbation. Lutyens was both a unique and precocious talent and found immediate success and our only point of connection is our admiration for his work, the happenstance of my being born close to his birth-place and he and I both admiring Surrey's vernacular architecture, and.....Ojai. Let me explain.

Lynn Barber in her New Statesman review of The Architect and his Wife: a life of Edwin Lutyens, Jane Ridley Chatto & Windus, London, 2002, sets the scene:

"Emily Lytton was an aristocrat, daughter of a viceroy, brought up at Knebworth, and a self-admitted snob. But it was her dream to be married to a genius, and almost as soon as she met Lutyens in 1896, she knew he was her man. After they had had five children, she took up Theosophy, and started mooning over Krishnamurti and reciting: "I am a link in a golden chain of love which stretches round the world.""

She is the Lutyens link to Ojai. Although Lady Emily, as she became, never visited Southern California, preferring to moon over K in Holland, India, London and Sydney as he steamed around the world giving talks, they were in almost constant contact until her death in 1964, and to the end he called her mum. Her daughter Mary, fell in love with K's brother Nitya when she was a teenager, and later transferred her affection to K and went on to become Krishnamurti's foremost biographer. She felt honor bound to respond to Rhada Rajagopal Sloss's Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti, London, 1991, which Mary perceived to be a scurrilous attack on the great man.

Mary Lutyens' meticulously researched Krishnamurti and the Rajagopals, KFA, Ojai, CA., 1996, details D. Rajagopal (Raja)'s discovery by C.W. Leadbetter (occult leader of the Theosophical Society) as a back-up to his previous selection of Krishnamurti as World Teacher. Raja went on to become K's advance man and money manager. Eventually ensconced in Ojai with K, his wife Rosalind became K's lover in an arrangement that Mary suggests was engineered to give the Rajagopals a hold over the Indian mystic. Their only child is Rhada Rajagopal Sloss.

Raja robbed K blind, hi-jacked the transcripts of all K's talks (according to Mary) and in the process became a very wealthy man, necessitating at least one Swiss bank account. She tells the story of a thwarted crown prince, ever ready to step into Krishnaji's handcrafted English shoes, run amok. Lutyens goes on to describe the double attempted murder of K by Rosalind and suggests that Raja may have practiced Black Magic. Finally, she details the long drawn out legal process by which Krishnamurti, just before his death in 1986, finally regained control of his archives and finances which led to the setting up of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America.

Raja died in in 1993. Rosalind, long divorced from her husband, died in 1996. Mary Lutyens died in 1999. Rhada Sloss continues as joint chair, with her husband Jimmy Sloss, of the Happy Valley Foundation, set up by Annie Besant in 1927. The KFA continues its work as designated by K and his legal team and Ojai continues to be entwined in this strange story of spirituality, the occult and old fashioned avarice.

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.