School's Out

I am thirty months into writing Urban Wildland and, in 150 posts, have amassed close to 200,000 words. I have achieved my goal of demonstrating to myself that I could write a NYT op-ed column length piece, with a highly restricted focus, once or twice a week. In the event, as you may have already calculated, I have averaged five posts a month.

At this point, the most obvious pay-off to this effort has been a greater confidence in my ability to write engagingly. I have tried to write crisply, entertainingly and informatively. My readership has been miniscule, yet I have occasionally received encouragement and compliments on my work. On balance, however, I cannot reasonably claim to have an audience.

Along with my modest goal of exercising my writing muscle, which I have hitherto only flexed as a student, the writing of this blog has been a performative act. By writing it, I have made it so - I have constructed an Urban Wildland out of my musings related to the history, pre-history, geology, and botanical and zoological characteristics of the area. I have parsed Ojai. I have had fun.

So, while Blogging may be 'just saying'.......in this case, saying is doing, or, as Judith Butler puts it, a performative utterance harnesses “…that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” If only I'd known two and a half years ago that I was set on a course to create the reality of Urban Wildland, from the base material of my words, one doggedly selected to follow another until, in some alchemical, linguistic act of genesis, UW staggered into being.

So there was something going on at the kitchen island, as I hunched over my 8 year-old Mac iBook G4 (which only occasionally exhibits Kernel Panic): an act of creation that had everything to do with the outdoors but was actually manifested indoors, on a grimy keyboard. Like some wayward graduate of Hogwarts, I have stumbled into the business of brand magick - Urban Wildland exists: now what?

First, a hiatus: an opportunity to consider what I have wrought. As always, I welcome your comments, see 'About the Author' at the top of page for contact information. At the appropriate moment, I will return.

Mountain Magic

Vincent Scully, the Yale Art and Architecture historian, in The Earth, the Temple and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture, Yale Press, New Haven, 1962, attempted to show that all important Greek sanctuaries grew up around ancient open altars which were sited where they were because the place itself suggested the presence of a divine being. They were surrounded by natural forms that somehow embodied a spiritual presence. The temple, when eventually built to commemorate and expand that presence embodied, in turn, a human conception of the deity. He argues that the elemental presence and the designed, architectural elaboration of that essence, play off of one another.

He goes on to suggest that certain natural shapes have a tendency to sequester the divine presence - that the places that the Greeks considered most holy were often set against a back-drop of mountains where there was a horn shaped cleft or a double peak. These, he seems to claim, are the marks of the divine.

Much later, having established his classical bona-fides, Scully was emboldened to tackle native American spirituality and the architectural responses of the Pueblo People to an all enveloping and scenically dramatic landscape (Too Late) where, " all living things are one....and all are living: snake, mountain, cloud, eagles and men". In Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, 1975, he relates how Taos Mountain,"cleft, horned and terraced" inspired the location of the Taos Pueblo and that its architectural expression, "hand shaped, hand smoothed" is a human-made earth form that relates to the natural morphology.

We sit in the Upper Ojai Valley under the spell of the Topatopas while the lower valley is similarly in the thrall of their presence - blushed pink of an evening - as well as Chief Peak, Sulphur Mountain, Nordhoff Ridge and many, more minor, geological irruptions that enliven the foothills of the major, east-west trending ridges. As Scully might have predicted, this picturesque mountain backdrop has inspired, in many of those who visit Ojai, or who come to live here, intimations of the divine.

Temples of worship and learning have been built: Krotona, Meditation Mount and the twelve-sided Council House at the Ojai Foundation are all built expressions of those seeking a connection with a universal spirit in places where its presence is deemed palpable - well-intentioned but architecturally random attempts to reify the sublime - an achievement which the Greeks, over a period of some eight hundred years, single-mindedly perfected as the post and lintel, stone temple.

A few evenings ago, we sat on a friend's terrace on Vista Hermosa, above Cañada, with the fading light of a summer's eve casting deep shadows across Nordhoff Ridge, the Topatopa Mountains and, for a few moments, washing the spalled face of its ridge, in coral pink. This was a certifiable Pink Moment (RV III). To the side of the house, behind a small deck, was a large canvas backdrop draped over a hedge of jasmine. This backdrop, painted by Anni Siegel, depicted the view of the mountains that was presented to us as we sat on the pool terrace looking eastward. South was the painted backdrop, East was the live model.

To further enrich this layered experience of the real and the representational, excerpts from a theatrical piece, Ojai Spirits, written by Sue-Ellen Case, were presented on the deck with the actors referencing (but not chomping at) the faux scenery behind them. Scene One, and 'slices' of Scene Two, a reading of which was staged as part of the author's 70th birthday celebrations, are concerned, in part, with the relationship of spirit and landscape as manifested through that generation of Theosophists, chosen-ones and celebrity hangers-on that enlivened Ojai in the 1920's and who, as Case notes, continue to haunt this town.

Here then was the musical version (for the actors were unabashed in breaking into snatches of song) of much with which this blog has concerned itself: the alleged 'spirituality' of Ojai; the wacky esoterica of Blavatsky, Besant, Krishnamurti et al (Red Soil), their convoluted personal and professional lives and finally, the profound resonance of Ojai's natural setting. While I have burbled on in this blog, slowly building, over the weeks, some semblance of a reliable history that attempts to stitch these realities together, Sue-Ellen presented a transcendental confection that managed a level of skepticism, bawdiness and skewering of personal weakness that time-shifted the material into a compelling present.

For the issues she raises through her characters remain central to an understanding of Ojai's strange hold on our imaginations (at least, Sue-Ellen's and mine). Her cast, both substantiated and implied - Besant, Leadbetter, The Ascended Masters, The Huxleys, wealthy locals and (memorably) a garrulous oak tree, represent aspects of the enduring Ojai condition: the opportunity of living in a place of power, of living in a landscape which offers the promise of spiritual transcendence and in which the marks of the divine and the impacts of time (both on a human and geological scale) are clearly visible.

But it is a place, like Paestum (on the far fringes of the Greek empire, where a great Doric temple was built in 450 B.C.E. and dedicated to the fertility goddess Hera), that is profoundly provincial. Ojai, where temples can be conjured in the honeyed air, is removed from our cultural and economic centers as it was from those of the Spanish, the Chumash, and of the Oak Grove people before us. We are serial fringe-dwellers, dabbling in spiritual enlightenment but ever eager to welcome ambassadors from the loci of profane power and influence.

Paestum fell, within 50 years of the building of its temple, to local Latin tribes. Later, it collapsed again before the twin scourge of Muslims and mosquitoes. For a thousand years it moldered as a malarial swamp, the bleached carcass of its great temple inviolate in the marshes. Yet, as Scully writes, "the temple of Hera at Paestum is the most thoroughly overwhelming image of divinity in temple form that remains to us".

I would argue that it is the drapery of the chaparral that clothes the deific morphology of our high valleys (The Dance of Time) that represents Ojai's 'overwhelming image of divinity'. Those Theosophists were on to something: but they spent altogether too much time in the citrus and avocado orchards of the East End and sitting beneath other non-native vegetation like the Peruvian pepper tree (Manichean Plant Order).

Mr Chaparral Man

We have been invited to a summer solstice party - a bit early, since it is to be held five days before the astronomical event. When I first got the e-mail invitation, along with a request to wear white, I replied that it was winter in the chaparral (The Winters Tale) and, perhaps I could wear black?

OK - I'll play nice and wear a white shirt and khaki pants and scrounge up a fabulous selection of native flowers to stuff into my shirt pocket. The ladies will be sporting wreaths - I have the idea to pick yucca blossoms, yellow buckwheat and canyon sunflowers to help Lorrie make her's.

I intend be more chromatically indiscriminate in my pocket bouquet selection: elegant Clarkia, California everlasting, tarweed, deerweed, chamise blossoms, the last woolly blue curls of the season, sage, chaparral morning glory, popcorn flower, white eriogonum, poppy, mimulus and heart-leaved penstemon. A wander up Bear Canyon could produce more variety but I'm restricting myself to the easy-pickings. This profusion will already verge on the obnoxiously horticulturally prolix, but how often do I have an opportunity to be The Brand?

It all seems so simple to me, eradicate all non-natives and revel in the glory of the local plant community. In the event, as readers of this blog will have surmised, it takes a great deal of work to restore the broken crust, in areas of recent upheaval, to a pristine chaparral-ness. The perseverance required becomes, perforce, a radical act. The intolerance for the non-native an extreme act of biotic xenophobia.

But,

Hey ! Mr Chaparral Man, play a song for me

I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to

Hey ! Mr Chaparral Man, play a song for me

In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you...


Many have followed Piet Oudolf (whose U.S. work includes the planting scheme along The High Line). He has, in my very truncated understanding of the history of twentieth century landscape design, picked up the mantle from Gertrude Jekyll (April Showers) in designing wild gardens.  Jekyll was a great colorist and typically designed in broad washes of texture and hue. Mindful of the local native plant communities she nevertheless worked with the available, global horticultural palette - much of which had been developed, in the previous couple of centuries, by British plant collectors. Piet, like Gertrude before him, is an avid propagator, always keen to develop varieties of plants that can simulate wildness within the narrow confines of the typical suburban garden.

The intellectual groundswell that drives The Dutch Wave, that loose confederation of landscape designers (formed around the protean Oudolf) characterized by a desire for 'wild' and 'natural' gardens, is the understanding that the wild places of Europe and their unique plant communities are under siege. Roadside verges are increasingly managed chemically and, in any case, are under constant assault from gas and diesel fumes. Urban development has impinged on the waste-lands and commons of the post-war era. Industrialized farming has decimated the small-holdings, the inefficiencies of which made room for wild ditches, ponds, hedgerows, tree circles and copses. Remaining wild places have now become recreational resources and are managed to facilitate human interaction rather than the unruly fecundity of nature.

In Oudolf's Planting the Natural Garden, Timber Press, Portland, OR., 2003, Henk Gerritsen, his co-author, bemoans the rapid disappearance of wild flowers:

"I remember cycling around Utrecht at the beginning of the sixties and seeing ditches filled with marsh lousewort and fields overgrown with sun spurge and scarlet pimpernel. The water meadows of the river Lek were covered with ox-eye daisies, yellow rattle and rough hawk's beard; ten years later all had disappeared."

He sees the desire for more nature in the garden as a direct corollary of its diminution outside of it; the need for wild flowers in the garden reflective of their scarcity in the natural setting. He suggests that the old plant selections are over-cultivated, and unnatural in appearance.

Here in the New World, in California in particular, the comparatively short history of agricultural and industrial development has left broad swathes of wildland. Take a plane ride anywhere in the U.S. and the preponderance of wilderness, observed from 30,000 feet, remains daunting (Red Smudge). Thus, atavistic memories of the wild frontier are perhaps still too fresh for most Californians to embrace the wild in their back yard. The divide between civilization and the natural world still represents a wound to be cauterized, the infection of the natural world quarantined: the libidinous wilderness contained and emasculated.

Not so on 20 or 40 acre residential parcels in Upper Ojai, where the chaparral, or oak meadowland inevitably predominate. To fetishize the primacy of the pre-1769 landscape as I have, is merely an extreme position in a community where taming the chaparral except in the immediate vicinity of residential, agricultural or equine development is not really a viable option. Its 'improvement' is an expensive and time consuming task. Left 'un-improved' the natural soil is too poor and dry (most of the year) for anything but its indigenous plant cover and the panoply of invasive weeds that I battle on a regular basis.

Alex departed at the end of May for a summer of stripping roofs in Lansing Michigan, so I now stand alone on the front line of eradicating the thistles, mustards and other european-invasives. Now is their time. While the chaparral snoozes (and the energetic Alex is away) the ancient vernal impulses of the European weeds are in full flood as they rise to celebrate the Summer solstice. The armies of Russian star-thistle are mobilizing while their native enemies sleep: only the vigilance of the biotic xenophobe stands in the way of their ultimate triumph.

The summer solstice is the star-thistle's Tet offensive, a holiday excuse to pulverize the locals into submission. I therefore consider it as a highly inappropriate occasion for celebration. Nevertheless, I will attempt to separate myself from the vegetal doom that this axial zenith portends and try not to cast too long a shadow over this evening's festivities.

Too Late

La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís was ground zero for the Spanish colonization of what is now the United States. Never mind Florida, where St. Augustine was the first permanent Spanish (and thus European) settlement. It was Santa Fe, as it would become known, that spear-headed the northern frontier of New Spain. Despite over half a century of preliminary incursions and false starts in the American west (including Coronado's protracted walkabout) - during which time it became clear that New Mexico was a bad investment - the combination of church and state persevered. In 1610, Pedro de Peralta was appointed governor of the territory and it was he who founded Villa Nueva de Santa Fe to replace the erstwhile capital of San Gabriel which had been established, around 1600, in desolate country north of Abiquiu on the River Chama, a spot richer in opportunities for the fishing of trout than souls.

The Spanish had been beguiled by New Mexico ever since Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca arrived in Mexico City in 1537. He had survived a ship-wreck on the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, en-route to the capital of New Spain after his exploration party of some 600 men was reduced to four intrepid souls in Florida. He subsequently spent ten years variously being imprisoned, starved and ultimately idolized as a faith healer amongst the indigenous people of the south west. (An enslaved moor amongst his party was murdered by jealous Indians for reputedly being too attractive to the local maidens). When he arrived in the capital he told of the great of riches of el norte, although he admitted this was hearsay from "reliable natives". Cabeza de Vaca (literally translated as 'head of a cow', but perhaps more idiomatically rendered as 'meathead') was indisputably the first European to see that wonder of the American plains, the Buffalo, but his other, non-bovine testimony, despite its dubious provenance, proved sufficiently incendiary to ignite Spain's burning desire to save souls and find cities of gold in New Mexico.

From the start, it was evident that nothing much would be achieved without the cooperation of the indigenous peoples. They provided the template for survival in the harsh environment. Thus in architecture and agriculture, the ways of the Pueblo Indians were faithfully adapted by the Spanish settlers; and after the successful Pueblo revolt of 1680 chastened the Franciscans into modifying their campaign to extirpate the native religion, a truly hybrid culture evolved allowing native spirituality, outwardly channeled though the rites and edifices of the catholic church, to retain many of its animistic impulses.

Certainly animism remains the schtick (influenced by post Ghost dance pan-native-American syncretism (Hoop Dreams)) that is publicly promoted amongst the more than one hundred tribes that still inhabit New Mexico, as indicated, at least, by the people of the Santa Clara Pueblo (in Tewa, Kha'po). In a place they now advertise as between 'sun and sky', intermittently occupied by their ancestors for about half a millennium, the current owners of the franchise run tours through the ruins of their ancestral home - cliff dwellings and a summer pueblo on the mesa above - on-the-hour, every hour. The apartments on the mesa were of adobe brick. It was the Spanish who introduced the notion of modularizing the indigenous building material to the locals and the use of brick therefore suggests a construction date no earlier than the mid sixteenth century and, more probably, sometime after 1600.

The native guides who chaperone the multitudes, emphasize the environmental acumen of their forbears that supposedly arose from a worshipful love of nature and all the things within it; but it is a sanitized commemoration of lives that were played out not only between sun and sky but also between cycles of drought and starvation, the cumulative effects of which swiftly drove them from the intense infrastructural investment that this place represented. Datura, one of the very few plants that cling to the edges of the cliff paths that link cave dwelling to cave dwelling, was excluded from the guide's accounting of the history of her people - she disavowed all knowledge of the plant and its likely role in their psychotropically enhanced spirit life.

While the Anasazi were descending from the mountains, transitioning from hunting and gathering to a settled life in pueblos on the high plains of New Mexico, Europe was emerging temporally from the Middle Ages and spatially from what were essentially the western reaches of the Asian continent to begin a despoliation of the Americas. For Spain, Santa Fe represented the northern frontier of this process until Alta California was breached in the 18th century. Everywhere the Spanish went, in search of wealth, territory to buffer the incursions of other European powers and spiritual conquest, the colonial societies they created were influenced by the local indigenous peoples and nowhere is this more evident than in New Mexico (in California, not-so-much).

The rich estofado of artifactual, architectural, agronomic and liturgical ingredients - spiced with green chiles or decorated with red - endured for three centuries, surviving the interregnum of the Pueblo Revolt, the machinations of the Inquisition (from which, in general, native Americans were exempt) smallpox outbreaks that decimated Pueblo populations and even Mexican Independence in 1821 which resulted in banishment of the fading Iberian empire: what ultimately destroyed this hard won cultural accommodation was the territory's annexation to the United States after the Mexican American War of 1846-48.

The Santa Fe trail, begun in 1821 as a trading route from Franklin Missouri to the newly independent Mexico served, in 1846, as the invasion route for U.S. cavalry making war on its southern neighbor. Once established as an American territory (New Mexico did not become a state until 1912) this trail, along which merchants and homesteaders had to trespass over the tribal territories of the Kiowa, Apache, Comanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, brought Yankee culture into the mix, and a variety of Victorian architectural styles to Santa Fe. The arrival of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway in 1880, only intensified this assault.

That the City now exhibits a remarkably consistent Sante Fe style characterized by the pueblo-adobe tradition alongside of the Territorial style (which absorbed Greek revival influences into a modest mash-up of double hung windows with divided sashes, French doors and dentil cornices - with the indigenous adobe architecture), is a tribute to the efforts of early twentieth century artists, archaeologists and architects who fought to preserve Sante Fe from the full horrors of late Victorian eclecticism.

While the Spanish colonial cultural gestalt turned on a symbiotic relationship with the native Pueblo-peoples, the Santa fe style ultimately depends on an aesthetic fetishization of the indigenous architectural technology and a marginalization of the people who developed it. John Gaw Meem (1894-1983) was the architect instrumental in fully developing the idiom of the stage-set, and it is his vision that defines the Pueblo Revival architectural style which now defines, in turn, Santa Fe.

It is distressing that this erstwhile hard-scrabble City for whose existence the Spanish fought so hard, and on whose behalf it was deemed worthwhile to stage a mini-Reconquista in the late seventeenth century, has now been frozen in time as an up-scale resort destination quarantined against many of the viruses of modernity, sequestered from the mainstream of historical process and marooned in a lagoon dedicated to the Heritage Industry. Similarly ossified, the outlying Pueblos endlessly recycle, for the benefit of the tourist trade, the myth of their ecological consciousness as beating in harmony with the pulse of the Universe.

I guess I visited about a couple or three hundred years too late.

Jerusalem

In 1966, the best pop song of the year reached number three on the U.K. charts and was applauded as a masterwork. Alan Freeman, a veteran British DJ of impeccable musical taste and presenter of the radio show Pick of the Pops (characteristically welcoming his audience with, "Greetings, Pop-Pickers") rated the song very highly. But in the United States, where it was recorded, it failed to make much of a dent, stalling at #88 on Billboard's top 100. The song's lackluster performance in America led its producer, who considered it his best work, to retreat from the recording studio for two years and begin a long and very public decline that continues today, 46 years later, as he languishes in the Corcoran State Prison in California, serving 19 years to life for the murder of B-movie star, Lana Clarkson.

The song, of course, was River Deep, Mountain High, by Ike and Tina Turner and its producer was Phil Spector, who is suffering through a remarkably long second act characterized by his bizarre behavior, including a predilection for gun play, and an appalling taste in wigs. His early work, however, endures (in mono).

The great song's lyrics are mawkish, but the refrain, set against a towering crescendo, recorded in Spector's characteristic 'wall of sound' mode, and potentiated by a choir of 93 female voices (into which Tina's smokey, soulful scream is stirred) has a remembered power that moves me still. But I now attach it, not as a metaphor to a love that's like a "flower loves the spring...just like Tina loves to sing", but to landscape: as a simple declarative that embraces the reach of the earth's crust - river deep, mountain high - as it flows over the territory currently demarcated as the State of California. A simple declarative rendered with all the grandeur that Spector could muster and that is, I would suggest, adequate to the task of evoking the majesty of the state's terrain.

Locally, we have the 'mountain high' reasonably covered, but it is only on rare occasions that the 'river deep' part resonates. The latter is honored more often in the breach, as it were, than the observance. I was reminded of this last week when I saw that one of the seven creeks and creeklets that I cross on my morning run, and this winter and spring one of the only two that are flowing, had mysteriously dried up.

It was Will Rogers who famously remarked that he had fallen into a California river and had to dust himself off. That remark fits with the always popular trope celebrating California's weirdness, but in Ojai it is not a particularly apposite observation. As my two out of seven indicates, the lack of water is spot on but nine times out of ten, wet or dry, you'll hit rocks as you fall (that's a statistical extrapolation from the three of four times I have actually tumbled). Running, walking or falling, the rocks, the chaparral debris and the mugwort will keep you in a continual state of inelegance as you pick your way across an Ojai creek or river. Dust tends not to be an issue, but depends, I suppose on your tolerance for sartorial blemishes: mine is set high and Will Rogers himself affected a casual western attire customarily enhanced with a little range dust.

The next day, the dried-up creek was running again, recovered from a temporary damming up-stream of unknown causation.

By Memorial Day it is usually safe to assume that we are done with the rainy season. We can now close the account on the 2011-2012 season with a low-to-middling 12.33"; 2002 and 2007, for instance, were considerably drier with totals between seven and eight inches and 2005 was the most recent 'big-wet' with close to 44". 1998 was wetter still, with an all-time record of 49". These are totals for the Upper Ojai Summit fire station where recording began in 1906. The driest year was 1924, with a little over six inches. So, we can safely establish the 100 year limits as 6 on the low side and 49 on the high with, as local farmers can attest, an infuriating inconsistency between.

Wide, shallow, riparian morphology with fast moving waters seem to work better in this semi-arid, mediterranean climate type than the deep and slow rivers of more consistently wet, temperate environments. (See Estuaries and Deltas). If one believed in geographical destiny, then a case could be made that many Southern Californians exhibit the indigenous riverine characteristics of fast, fickle and shallow, a more appropriate adaptation, I would suggest, to the twenty first century world than the antithetical characteristics of ponderous, steadfast and profound.

Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry who wrote River Deep, Mountain High in Tin Pan Alley's Brill Building, were mining a biblical vein (forged within the southern gospel tradition) in arriving at their evocative phrase - a marked lurch towards naturalism after, for instance, their run with the abstract lyricism of Da Doo Ron Ron and Do Wah Diddy Diddy earlier in the decade.

William Blake begins Jerusalem, his famous hymn, with "And did those feet in ancient times, Walk upon England's mountains green?" and goes on to ask, "...was the "holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen.." and, "did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills...?"

The short answer to all these queries is, probably not. Although the plot of Jesus - the Missing Years, has yet to be fully revealed, it is unlikely to have included a visit of the protagonist to the obscure island of Albion. Nevertheless, Blake hints at a strongly felt spiritual landscape: only its genesis was misread. It more likely originated in more ancient, pagan times when Celtic culture lay heavy o'er the grassy mantle.

Blake hopes to place Jerusalem, plucked from the Judaean desert and mythologized as a sanctuary of Peace and Love, in England's "green and pleasant land". His purpose is to provide a Christian gloss on lands inhabited by far older gods, on a spiritual landscape that owed everything to Celtic polytheism and almost nothing to the monotheism of the Middle East.

While I may imagine the phrase, "River Deep, Mountain High" as aptly describing California's sometimes green, sometimes brown land where the waters flow between the Sierra mountains and riparian gorges, Greenwich and Barry's lyrical purpose is, perhaps, to frame a deeply felt, but ultimately profane love in a spiritual landscape.

In California, as in England, the mark of the gods is on the land. The spiritual imprint is deep within the folds of the wild terrain. Our sanctuary of Peace and Love, our Jerusalem, is embedded in these deific geographies where,

"...... it grows stronger, like a river flows
And it gets bigger baby, and heaven knows..."

Aphrodite

"In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh Boy. Oh disembodied eyeball. Oh particle of God. Where does one begin? I've had a few go-rounds, in this blog, on 'Romanticism' and 'Man and Nature'. In considerations of this last dyad, no one does it better than Raymond Williams (Cosmic Wordplay). But first, I should back up and explain the latest set of circumstances that have led me, once again, into this morass.

Last Saturday we attended, with a couple of friends, a performance by Hugh Lupton and Helen Chadwick at The Getty Villa Theater. Their piece, Hymns to Aphrodite, was work-shopped during a two week residence to which Hugh and Helen had been invited, arranged to coincide with the Getty exhibition of Aphrodite and the Gods of Love that had originated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hugh told us tales of the Goddess, primarily sourced from Ovid's Metamorphoses, while Helen backed him up, a cappella, with songs of a lucid and haunting tonality. All well and good.

Hugh is an old friend of our Ojai chum Nicki, who first worked with him while he was nurturing his piece on the Odyssey at the Bath Literature Festival, in 2000. A few weekends ago, Lorrie drove Hugh and Helen up from the Getty to spend a couple of days in Ojai with Nicki and Will. Hugh is a professional story teller but a couple of years ago he published his first novel, The Ballad of John Clare, which tells the story of a year in the life of the young poet.

Clare is the working class antidote to that surfeit of mostly upper crust twits who form the backbone of England's Romance poets (Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley). As such, he better fits a modern sensibility and his work is now scoured for its evidence of a proto-green sensibility. His relevance to our current environmental angst is why, perhaps, Lupton chose to novelize a year of his life. Clare's status as an agricultural laborer put him on the wrong side of Britain's eighteenth century enclosure movement which converted common lands to private ownership - a massive transference of agricultural wealth from peasant to squire. The newly impoverished under class became fodder for England's dark satanic mills and the face of Britain's countryside was transformed - the sky, as Clare documents it, was falling. He writes,

“Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease”

As we now understand it, t'was but a step along the road towards industrialized farming.

Got me thinking: romantics are, by definition, lovers of the past, of the old ways. But Clare's rural lament has the noble imprimatur of a worker-on-the-land. 'They', the sinister forces of mercantilism, not only messed with the aesthetics of his beloved countryside, but also his livelihood. Wordsworth et al float above it all and their engagement is spiritual rather than material. So Clare, by his involvement in the land as an economic as well as a visual construct expands our ecological understanding. He elaborated the natural world beyond the limits of the customary poetic imagination, which saw it as an aesthetic system serving as God's subaltern. Em - transparent eyeball - erson represents the nadir of such narrow posturing.

And so I have begun. Off to the races. Raymond Williams in his essay, Ideas of Nature in Materialism and Culture, Verso, London, 1980, cuts to the chase. We do not, he suggests, have a static view of Nature: it is an evolving conception shaped by history, culture and, Lord help us, consciousness. The first issue he sees is this: is mankind in or out? Are we inherent in Nature or is it a thing apart? The fact that the word 'nature' also indicates a single essence or principle around which a multiplicity of things might be mentally organized is, Williams argues, indicative of a change of consciousness: from a pagan world of multiple spirits embodying various aspects of the natural world to a singular 'nature' ministering to a singular, monotheistic god.

But the critical question remains: does Nature include Man? In the medieval conception, Man was definitely included as part of the terrestrial hierarchy - unique only in that she was the one creature to which a relationship to god might be vouchsafed. But Nature, by the seventeenth century, was seen as separate from humans so that it could be studied, scientifically, as a thing apart. At the height of this scientific analysis and an 'improving' of the natural world, in the nineteenth century, there emerged another meaning: a Nature that was fundamentally unknowable, divorced from mankind, inimical to her material nurture - a place of alienation and spiritual power, the Wilderness.

In a more general sense, Nature was seen as 'out there', separate both from humanity and the 'smoke and spoil' which signaled those areas where its resources were harvested. At the same time, Wilderness is seen as a place of healing and solace (Cue: Emerson and his pals), while down the road, sometimes quite literally, it is being eviscerated for its mineral wealth. As the exploitation of Nature continued on a vast scale, the people who extracted the most wealth from it were often those who returned, at the weekends, to their estates and country houses in 'unspoilt' Nature. Wilderness became a place of retreat both from the jungle of the City, the wastelands of industrialized mineral extraction (and later, industrialized farming).

This separation between humankind and Nature continues to be a characteristic of our predominantly urban and post-industrial society. But Williams notes that this false division between the two abstractions belies the extent to which our fates are intertwined, the irrevocable mixing of our labor with the earth, and the enmeshment of our forces with its forces. Out of these interactions we have made both a 'human nature' and an altered natural order: we have forged societies. But, Williams warns, if we alienate the living processes of which we are a part, we end by alienating ourselves. He concludes by calling for the coming together of the disciplines of Economics and Ecology in recognition of their fateful entwinement.

Back in the day, when the world was new made, the gods and the goddesses sorted everything out. Through his inspired storytelling, Hugh Lupton is bringing their mythologies back to life. His vision is adamantine: "Everything I enjoyed reading led me to the belief that all nature is supernatural, and that there’s something unseen that charges the visible world". How close is that to suggesting that our fate, ultimately and forever, is directed by other mythic actors and we are but bit players in their cosmic imaginings? Meanwhile, in this prosaic world, Raymond Williams elucidates for us the fevered philosophies of our kind, rationalizing, forever rationalizing, our tantalizingly irrational existence.

Little Foxes

They appeared just west of the clump of oaks and rocks behind the house. Nuzzling each other atop a rock, viewing the scene, looking at the house, looking, perhaps at Lorrie and me seated at a table eating supper. It was that hour before twilight, when the full brightness of the afternoon has departed - the sun having fled the scene - but there's still enough light bouncing around the empyrean for it to be considered day. The magic hour. Supper time.

Two little foxes: but first, the thought that they were feral cats, one of which I had seen earlier in the day. Then, bobcats? Until they sidled apart and displayed their tails. Tails! Baby mountain lions? By the time they sauntered off the rock, behind the toyon, brushing past the poison oak and began wandering up the path, their full, glorious vulpine nature emerged - the foxy little faces, pricked and pointy ears and silver bushy tails edged in black that seemed to float in the air behind them.

It has been a while since we have seen anything much in the way of wildlife on the property, but a couple of weeks ago I heard a very distinctive bird call one morning. A piercing run through the register, beginning with the top notes. A downhill glissando. And loud. Once heard, never forgotten. A couple of days later Margot mentioned that she had seen and heard a canyon wren....meant nothing to me, Margot sees all kinds of birds of which I am oblivious. Last week I heard the call again and saw the singer sitting on the huge boulder just to the west of our front door, a lithic mass that I sometimes think of as our 'Ayers Rock' - that red Australian monolith that features so prominently in the dreamscape of the Anangu.

Our rock is sandstone and is composed of buff tones; the little song bird belting out that glissando was a dark rust color that better matches the ruddy tones of what is now called Uluru as it glows in the evening light of the Australian outback. The bird was, of course, a canyon wren (Catherpes mexicanus) and the  description of its voice, "gushing cadence of clear, curved notes tripping down scale: tee tee tee tee tew tew tew tew" confirmed the visual identity, "rusty, with dark rufous belly..." (Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Western North America).

I deputized Lorrie to be our in-house ornithologist a while ago, and she has fitfully accepted the challenge. She uses the Audubon Field Guide to North American Birds - Western Region and riffles through its pages at breakfast. Last week she identified the annoying little birds (formerly known as LBB's - little brown birds) who flutter about our eaves, as house finches. The male of the species boasts a little red on crown, breast and rump, the distaff side is a dreary, plebeian creature.

Just last Friday we attended Allen Bertke's presentation of his photographs of local birds at the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy offices. Allen is a true birder, although of fairly recent vintage, and takes remarkable photos of the local species. We, meanwhile, are flat out trying to remember the names of the basic, background avian presence of thrashers, towhees, hawks, quail and (now, we know) house finches. Occasionally, we delight ourselves by spotting comparative rarities such as the black pheobe and the white tailed kite.

Last night I woke to the sound of three owls (it seemed) triangulating across the chaparral hills - short, single hoots across the dark expanse, sonic signalling amidst the chthonic wildlands. Barn owls perhaps? We know the call of the great horned and the tremulous burble of the screech owls, these haunting calls were neither. A little while ago, returning from a meal in town, at the foot of the grade just past Boccalli's, a ghostly B-1 bomber of a bird buzzed the Land Rover and through window and then the sun-roof, we saw the white undercarriage of a barn owl gleam against the dark sky and overhanging oaks. They are out there: and last night a coterie was encamped somewhere within owl call.

Our resident family of deer are gone, spooked by the mountain lion who claimed one, at least, of their number (Love Comes to Koenigstein). The coyotes have not returned, either in my dreams or in the local chaparral (Coyote Dream). The bobcats (Bobcat Magic) have gone walkabout and even snakes are thin on the ground. We have seen a couple of racers and a baby gopher snake and last Monday while I was working in the office and Alex was weed-wacking in the back yard I received a text from him: " Five foot snake outside your bedroom, under a rock now". That got my attention.

It turned out that the rock in question was at the foot of the oak knoll as it drops down to the gravel pool terrace, placed against the slope with an excavator some three and a half years ago. While the family of gopher snakes that lives beneath these oaks was much disturbed by the building of the house adjacent to their home, the spaces beneath these additional rocks piled against the knoll have provided them with generous room additions. The snake, this recent afternoon, had indeed retreated from view by the time I got on the scene, and once I was reassured that it was not a rattler, Alex and I resumed our respective tasks.

Our lives are wreathed in bird life, framed by the chaparral and enlivened by the presence of wild animals. Our location in the urban wildland and our intention have made it thus. We replaced a home set in the suburban, beach-side idyll of Santa Monica Canyon with a rural loft - a barn-like house in the Topatopa foothills. This is a setting which I have, perhaps, fetishized. I have also made rules. Making a home here has been a design exercise and design, both architectural and landscape, is, as I understand it, enriched by the creation of bounds.

In this environment, the development of a framework in which to make aesthetic decisions, has taken on a kind of pantheist imperative. I have introduced no non-native plants onto the property and have expended time and treasure in trying to remove those non-natives that are already here. We try to make room for the wildlife, and are tolerant of it all - even rattlesnakes and marauding mountain lions. We are trying to have our wildlife experience while avoiding the traumas that this environment can inflict on callow homesteaders such as ourselves.

We are taking a Franciscan position of 'suffer the little foxes unto me', rather than the Solomonic stand of "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes...". I always thought of foxes as carnivores, but apparently they enjoy snacking on grape leaves, or at least did when the Song of Solomon was written about 1000 B.C.E.

Our raised vegetable and herb bed - a world unto itself and thus given a pass on the non-natives directive - has no vines (or lettuces). We have learnt through hard-won experience to plant only spicy greens and pungent herbs. We Urbanites are slowly learning to coexist with the Wildland.

World of Swirl

National Geographic reports that, "Researchers have discovered astronomical calculations on the wall of an ancient Mayan site that suggest dates thousands of years beyond 2012". The find came at the Mayan ruins known as Xultun in Guatemala, where archeologists discovered a small room used by 9th-century record-keepers. In RV III, I wrote of the European marginales awaiting shelter from the end of the world (indicated in some interpretations of the Maya calendar) in the civilization they imagine beneath Bugarach mountain. Meanwhile, the fey Elizabeth van Buren is readying herself to access the underground city complex of Agartha, a portal to which she believes she has located in her landscape zodiac around Renne-le-Chateau. Now, in light of this calendric reappraisal, Science reports that, "We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset." Its official: the end of the world (at least in the year of our Lord, 2012) has been cancelled.

OK, the elephant in that sweaty little room, with faded murals and scratched calculations, is called Cosmogony. The Mayan world view was supported by multi-layered, cosmic calendrics. These were being parsed to establish the beginning of a new cycle of time. It was past due: by around 900 A.D., the classical Mayan world was crumbling, their jungle mega-cities, confronted with their inherent unsustainability as the diminishing returns of slash-and-burn reduced the maize yield, were collapsing back into the steamy grip of tropical rain forest.

The Mayan version of the 'hopey-changey thing' was based on prognostications of temporal renewal, of a resetting of the great cycle of time. In the event, their faith in cyclical renewal was misplaced, for their civilization, already dwarfed, was in terminal decline, defeated by environmental calamity and the intra-city conflict so engendered. Their great cities, their temples, ziggurats, canals, highway system and this little time-keepers office were swallowed up by the fecundity of the Central American bio-mass and disappeared into the leaf litter and the chlorophyllic tendrils of the endemic plant community. Theirs was an urban wildland returned to the wild, their civilization engulfed by biota.

The Irish-Spanish adventurer Juan Galindo originally stumbled upon the Mayan ruins early in the nineteenth century while fighting for Central America's independence from Spain. He led the charge against the Caribbean fortress of Omoa, the last Spanish stronghold in that part of the world, and was rewarded with the governorship of a large swathe of Guatemala. He went on to write descriptive accounts of the ruins at Palenque and Copán. John Lloyd Stephens, an American travel writer and explorer and Frederick Catherwood, an English artist and architect, popularized this re-discovery of the lost civilization in their books, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, 1841 and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1843. Stephens, incidentally, was sponsored in his explorations by Martin van Buren, the eighth president and Elizabeth's ancestor, and was made the United States Ambassador to Central America.

After a century and a half of intense archeological exploration (and looting), there still remain mysteries to be discovered and treasures to be revealed. A team led by William Saturno from Boston University unearthed the intricate calendar calculations on the crumbling walls of the day-keeper's room in Xultun just this month where computations about the moon, the sun and possibly Venus and Mars involve dates stretching some 7,000 years into the future. Interviewed by Bruce Gellerman, on Its Living on Earth, Saturno claims,

"The Maya calendar has no end. The Maya calendar was a series of circles. And, like a circle, one could say ‘where is the beginning of the circle, where is the end of the circle?’ Well, the whole point of the circle is that it has neither beginning nor end, and it just goes around and around and around. And for the ancient Maya, that’s how their calendar worked....."

For some cultures, and this list would include Australian aboriginal, Mayan and Chumash, time and space are woven together in a kind of Einsteinian four dimensional continuum. So it was, that for the Chumash, time does not move forward from past to future but is, instead, recursive. The 'antap were cosmic time-keepers (Space and Practice II) for the purpose of scheduling ritual and ceremony, markers within a multi-layered universe in which its inhabitants sought stasis, the steady state of an eternal now. Calendrical notation existed in this Southern California stone age world, at least for solstice observances, and this cosmic knowledge lent prestige to its recorders, who acquired their power based on the ability to prognosticate and schedule significant rituals in accord with astronomical events.

The Chumash world was a place where characters, events and spirits, that existed outside of the quotidian world, could be accessed by culturally prescribed rituals and dreams and, on a more ad hoc basis, by shaman who utilized datura to speed their journeys to this parallel dream world. But these worlds were not conceived of as separate: they were parts of a whole, enfolded, like time and space, in a ubiquitous present. Nevertheless, as Michael K. Ward notes in his Timoloqinash: Interpreting Chumash History, OCB Tracker, Glendora, Ca., Fall 1998 thru Summer 1999, the local tribes were cognizant of an origin mythology, but this genesis was understood to be a recurring phenomenon - their continued existence was perceived to be dependent on a recreation of these circumstances. "Such events occur and forever afterwards exist, on a continuous plane of subjective understanding, both for each individual person and collectively for the entire community of language speakers" (Ward).

Clearly, when considering these cosmogonies, we're not in Kansas anymore. Rituals existed, in the Chumash world, as markers measured out in a kind of paleolithic sidereal time, where the Earth is a fixed point in the universe, the stars journey overhead, and the sun continues to revolve around the planet in symbiosis only with the correct performance of ritual. Like the Maya, the Chumash were not looking for change, and certainly not an ending, unless caused by their carelessness in acts of propitiation; continuity was the ever present ingredient in a timeless world.

While the Mayan decline is marked by their increasing architectural ineptitude (viz. Tulum), and thus their civilization's collapse was very publicly recorded (albeit successfully hidden deep in tropical jungle for several centuries), the Chumash culture was evanescent rather than monumental and their decline afforded no such parallel record. A flurry of archeological artifact gathering (and looting) in the late nineteenth century has resulted only in a slim representation of their meagre material culture moldering, for the most part, in museum storerooms.

Their cultural destruction can be measured out, instead, in Spanish missions - architectural markers placed along El Camino Real - each signaling a step along a death march towards oblivion. Towards a pathetic end to a vibrant, pre-colonial, native American World of Swirl. The end date of this world has been precisely recorded. It was 1769.

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.